Growing up, I didn’t go to Catholic school, but I did get religious instruction once a week when we left school early to go to the local parish.
The religious instruction followed the Baltimore Catechism with its three categories: the creed, the commandments, and the sacraments and prayer. The methodology was mostly memorization of questions and answers.
The ones about the sixth commandment didn’t seem to be especially important until puberty hit me—then they became almost terrifying, since some of what they described seemed to be happening to me whether I choose it or not.
Here are those questions and answers:
Q. What is the sixth commandment of God? A. The sixth commandment of God is: Thou shalt not commit adultery. (Exodus 20:14)
Q. What are we commanded by the sixth commandment? A. By the sixth commandment we are commanded to be pure and modest in our behavior. I exhort you therefore, brethren, by the mercy of God, to present your bodies as a sacrifice, living, holy, pleasing to God. (Romans 12:1)
Q. What does the sixth commandment forbid? A. The sixth commandment forbids all impurity and immodesty in words, looks, and actions, whether alone or with others. But immorality and every uncleanness or covetousness, let it not even be named among you, as becomes saints. (Ephesians 5:3)
Q. What are the chief dangers to the virtue of chastity? A. The chief dangers to the virtue of chastity are: idleness, sinful curiosity, bad companions, drinking, immodest dress, and indecent books, plays, and motion pictures.
Q, What are the chief means of preserving the virtue of chastity? A. The chief means of preserving the virtue of chastity are to avoid carefully all unnecessary dangers, to seek God’s help through prayer, frequent confession, Holy Communion, and assistance at Holy Mass, and to have a special devotion to the Blessed Virgin. Be sober, be watchful! For your adversary, the devil, as a roaring lion, goes about seeking someone to devour. (I Peter 5:8)
Adultery refers to sexual acts between a married person and someone who is not that person’s spouse.
The wrongness of it would seem to be primarily that it is a violation of the marriage covenant, the breaking of a vow. Once upon a time it could have been be construed as a violation of a husband’s property rights.
However, it literally is not about impurity and immodesty in words, looks, and actions nor is it an exhortation to the virtue of chastity. The sixth commandment is not the “sexth” commandment.
Where did all that come from? It is rooted in a great variety of cultural mores and historical traditions, even theologies, which sometimes have been “sanctified” in the sense of being associated with divine revelation and the preaching of the gospel.
God made us as we are. “In him we live and move and have our being.” We’re not composite persons with a better, higher nature (the soul) somehow imprisoned in worse, lower nature (the body). Each of us is a work of God’s design—and, when God looks upon his creation, he finds it good!
11 August 2019