 34th General Audience, August 6, 1980
Whoever looks at a woman to desire her [lustfully] has already committed adultery in his heart (Mt. 5:20). Because of the hardness of your heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so (Mt. 19:8). “hardness of the heart” Greek, sklerokardia; Hebrew, “uncricumcision of heart” -- “paganism or shamelessness and distance from the covenant of God.” Associated with paganism because of this opposition to the Holy Spirit. Old Testament ethos gave rise to a practise contrary to the original plan. The deformation of the law in Genesis is when Moses made the allowance. Sermon on the Mount: proclamation of the new ethos -- Gospel. The image of man of concupiscence that Christ brings out in St. Matthew concerns the innermost being. Out of the heart that we have evil intentions, and these evil intentions make the person unclean (Mt. 15:19-20) After original sin the heart has been effected by 3-fold concupiscence: flesh, eyes, pride of life (1Jn. 2:16-17).
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 28th General Audience, May 28, 1980
The shame found in humanity itself, both immanent and relative - manifests itself in human interiority and the other, respectively. SEXUAL SHAME Suggests that “man of concupiscence” in the act of the knowledge of good and evil experienced that he had simply ceased, also through his body and his sex, to remain above the world of living beings. As if he had experienced a specific fracture of the personal integrity of his own body, particularly in that which determines its sexuality and which is directly linked with the call to that unity in which man and woman will be one flesh (Gn. 2:24). Birth of human concupiscence. Human heart possesses both desire and shame. The birth of shame, when man is closed to what comes from the Father, and opens himself to what comes from the world. CORRUPTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS -- LOSS OF UNITIVE MEANING OF THE BODY. 29th General Audience, June 4, 1980 The original power of communicating themselves to each other had been shattered. Radical change in the original meaning of nakedness, a negative change in the whole personal interpersonal relation between man and woman. The purity and simplicity disappears from their original experience, which had helped to bring about a singular fullness of mutual self-communication After original sin, man had lost the sense of the image of God in himself, a loss manifested by shame. That shame, invading the man-woman relation as a whole, was manifested through the imbalance of the body as a specific “substratum of the communion of persons. This communion was given up for the mere sensation of sexuality with regard to the other, as if sexuality became an obstacle in man’s personal relationship with woman. |
AuthorFr. David Bellusci, O.P. List of Titles
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