The fact that society “accepts” something by no means signifies that that something is “acceptable”. A brief and even superficial glance at history reminds us of the ephemeral nature of public opinion. Simply put, the acceptance of pornography is not a neutral occurrence. Certain individuals made a decision, an evaluation, and diffused this evaluation on society.
As Christians, as men and women who consider themselves to be “in the world, but not of it,” we are urgently invited to put into question what our culture offers us. We have the responsibility to understand it and to judge it in the light of the Gospel. For this, we would like to post another excellent video produced by the “Fight the New Drug” initiative. Today’s video takes a look at the history and impact of porn in our society.
The group describes the video as follows:
As a final comment, I would like to remind you that as Christians we are not called to be judges, but apostles. This means that it is absolutely unacceptable to merely critique our culture without any sincere and generous effort to evangelize it. In our present case, this means we can’t simply critique pornography, we need to understand what is really going on. We must ask ourselves: what are the men and women of our times looking for? What desires are swirling in their interiors?
It is evident that pornography is a distortion; still, it nevertheless does reveal a desire for love, for contact, for beauty, for communion, for intimacy. Let us, then, ask ourselves how we can help others to discover true instances of love, of contact, of beauty, of communion, of intimacy. This, of course, is only possible if we ourselves have discovered and lived these instances in our own personal lives. As always, only those who have encountered love can become authentic witnesses of love. Or, in other words, only saints can change the world.