1. OLOP|YA
The Fuel of Love
 God wanted this eternal plan of love and communion to be so plain and obvious to us that he stamped an
image of it right in our very bodies.
 3b. “The Church cannot therefore be understood… unless we keep in mind the ‘great mystery’… expressed
in the ‘one flesh’ [union] of marriage and the family” (LF, n. 19).
 3d. “John Paul’s portrait of sexual love as an icon of the interior life of God” is “one of the boldest
reconfigurations of Catholic theology, preaching, and religious education. When it does, it will compel a
dramatic development of thinking about virtually every major theme in the Creed” (WH, 336, 853)
 When sex becomes twisted and distorted it points us in the wrong direction. It does not point us to Heaven,
but, in fact, it is what can often merit, for us, the fires of Hell.
 quot;God gave us sexual desire as fuel for a rocket that is meant to launch us into the stars, and beyond, to the
Eternal Embrace.quot;
Legalism vs. Liberty
 Legalism is the typical approach that humans take to sexual morality.
 The first question the legalist asks is quot;How far can I go, before I break the rules?quot;
 The first question that we should as is quot;What is the truth about sex that will set me free to love?quot;
 Legalism prevents us from knowing how to love rightly.
 Men are tempted to look at a woman's body as a thing for their own selfish pleasure.
 Women are also tempted to look at a man as a thing for their own pleasure, though it takes a different
form.
 In the beginning, it was not so.
Freedom
 What does our culture mean by quot;sexual freedomquot;?
 Have sex whenever you want, with whomever you want, however you want, without ever saying no.
 1a. “Freedom is the power…to act or not to act, to do this or that and so to perform deliberate actions on
one’s own responsibility.” (CCC, n. 1731)
 If you can not control yourself, you will inevitably seek to control someone else. If you can not control your
own sexual desires, you will simply seek to control someone else in order to gratify your desires.
 1b. “Human dignity requires man to act through conscious and free choice, as motivated and prompted
personally from within, and not through blind internal impulse or merely external pres
sure.” (GS, n. 17)
 quot;License says: do whatever you want without regard for what is good or what is loving. It promotes choice
without distinguishing between good and bad choices.quot;
 Be not afraid! Christ came into the world to restore us to the Love of God. He has set us free.