Pope at Audience: Beware of the vice of lust, embrace pure love

By Deborah Castellano Lubov

Beware of lust which enchains rather than embraces, and live the purity of love.

Pope Francis gave this admonishment during his Wednesday General Audience held in the Vatican's Paul VI Hall.

Continuing his catechesis series on virtues and vices, the Pope focused this week on the sin of lust.

Pure love, not polluted by vice

The Holy Father recalled that Christian doctrine does not condemn the sexual instinct, saying that falling in love is one of the most beautiful and tender experiences.

"If it is not polluted by vice, falling in love is one of the purest feelings," he said.

The Holy Father said that "if you ask a person in love why they love, they will not find an answer: in so many ways, their love in unconditional, beyond reason."

We must have patience, said the Pope, if our love, which is so powerful, may also be a little naive at first. "Lovers do not really know the face of the other; they tend to idealise their beloved; they are ready to make promises whose weight they do not immediately grasp."

"This ‘garden’ where wonders are multiplied," warned Pope Francis, "is not safe from evil. It can be defiled by the demon of lust, and this vice is particularly odious, for at least two reasons."

Two reasons lust so dangerous

The two reasons, the Pope said, are that lust destroys relationships between people and that it can rob individuals of their freedom.

Lust, the Pope noted, makes a mockery of, and plunders, all the beauty of pure, innocent love.

"It involves all the senses; it dwells both in the body and in the psyche; if not disciplined with patience, if not inscribed in a relationship and in a story where two individuals transform it into a loving dance, it turns into a chain that deprives human beings of freedom."

Lust, he observed, is opposed to the beauty of the love which God has implanted in our hearts and called us to cultivate in our relations with others, especially through the responsible use of our sexuality.

This powerful vice, the Holy Father warned, poisons the purity of love by turning it from a chaste, patient, and generous acceptance of another person in all the mysterious richness of his or her being, into an egotistic desire for possession and immediate satisfaction.

Yet, God’s gift of sexuality, which finds sublime expression in conjugal love, is at the service of human fulfilment and authentic freedom.

God's love story for His people

Winning the battle against lust, the Pope acknowledged, can be a lifelong endeavour.

"But the prize of this battle is the most important of all, because it is preserving that beauty that God wrote into His creation when He imagined love between man and woman," he said. "That beauty that makes us believe that building a story together is better than going on adventures; cultivating tenderness is better than bowing to the demon of possession; serving is better than conquering."

"Because if there is no love, life is lonely," he said.

Pope Francis concluded by praying, "May our hearts always treasure the beauty of love, which shares in the mystery of God’s own unconditional love for us."

One can read the Pope's full remarks at the General Audience on the Vatican website.