Pope Francis: Sexual pleasure is a gift from God, but avoid lust and porn

Pope Francis, fresh off approving blessings for same-sex couples, said this week that sexual pleasure is a gift from God but that lust and pornography are to be avoided.

He made the remarks Wednesday at his weekly general audience at the Vatican. He is giving a series of talks on various vices and virtues. The latest comes amid conservative criticism of the pope and calls for the Roman Catholic Church to address gender issues — which it plans to do.

“Sexual pleasure, which is a gift from God, is undermined by pornography — satisfaction without relationship that can generate forms of addiction,” he said, according to the Catholic News Service.

“We must defend love, love of the heart, mind, and body, loving by giving oneself to another — this is the beauty of a sexual relationship,” he continued.

“In Christianity, there is no condemnation of the sexual instinct,” he noted, adding that “this beautiful dimension of our humanity, the sexual dimension, the dimension of love, is not without its dangers.”

Love “is defiled by the demon of lust,” he said, and lust can create “a chain that deprives human beings of freedom.”

“To love is to respect the other, to seek his or her happiness, to cultivate empathy for his or her feelings,” Francis said, while lust leads to “possession of the other, lacking respect and a sense of limits.”

“Winning the battle against lust, against objectifying the other, can be a lifelong endeavor,” the pope added. “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.”

Related: Pope Francis' (Mostly) Complete LGBTQ+ Record: the Good and the Bad

The Catholic Church has always opposed sexual love between man and man or woman and woman, considering it a sin, but it took a step away from this in December, when Pope Francis approved blessings for same-sex couples. However, the blessings cannot resemble a marriage ceremony and must be conducted outside of regular church services. The move drew praise from LGBTQ+ Catholics and their allies but condemnation from church conservatives.

Francis’s talk on human sexuality may have been a response to criticism by conservatives, The Guardianreports. Recently, several media outlets, particularly right-wing blogs, reported on a sexually explicit book written by Víctor Manuel Fernández, who is now aa cardinal and the Vatican’s head of doctrine, in 1998, titled The Mystical Passion: Spirituality and Sensuality. It includes an explanation of the differences between men’s and women’s orgasms.

His “explicitness in discussing orgasm, bordering on caricature at times, suggests at least a familiarity with sex that seems uncommon for a celibate priest,” the Associated Press reports. Fernández had been a priest for 12 years at the time and said he researched the topic through discussions with married couples.

It was already known that he had written another sexually oriented book, Heal Me With Your Mouth: The Art of Kissing, published in 1995. Both were initially published in Spanish.

The Mystical Passion did not appear on a list ofFernández’s works released by the Vatican when he assumed his current post last year. But he said Pope Francis knew of the book and that it was not something he would write now.

Fernández is now preparing a Vatican document on gender issues. The church has long held that gender is fixed at birth and immutable, but Francis has met privately with transgender people who have found him compassionate, and he recently said trans people can be baptized as Catholics and serve as godparents. The church also sees very different roles for men and women — women cannot be ordained as priests — and opposes contraception, abortion, and assisted reproductive arrangements such as surrogacy. The document will address all these matters, as some have urged the church to do, Fernández told Spanish news service EFE.

“We are preparing a very important document on human dignity that not only includes social issues, but also a strong critique of moral issues such as sex change, surrogacy, gender ideologies, and so on,” Fernández said. “In this sense, the most worried people will be able to rest.”