I often present on "Stolen Innocence" with Thomas Hampson, a crime investigator who worked undercover to expose both child sex trafficking and child porn operations. One day he said to me, "Jack, this is way too big to ever arrest ourselves out of. The best chance we have to make a dent in the injustices done to our children is to wake up as many people as possible."
Stolen Innocence are a series of parent and community awareness events that expose the dangers posed in schools, libraries, social media, Hollywood, and the culture at large that seek to distort the hearts of our children by robbing them of their innocence.
After a presentation, common questions often come from parents who are dealing with their self-identifying LGBTQIASS+ children who do not believe in God or in the Bible's teachings, especially as it pertains to sexuality and gender. A George Barna study revealed that 30% of American Millennials and 39% of Gen. Z now identify as LGBTQ. These statistics correlate with a recent poll by Barna and Gallup that reveal that 43% of Millennials stated that they do not believe in God.
This is a significant and complex problem, and parents are seeking tools and vocabulary to empower them to discuss sexual morality with their teens and younger children in a world seemingly ruled by what Pope Benedict XVI called the Dictatorship of Moral Relativism.
Perhaps the most destructive aspect of moral relativism is the relativization of love. Love has been reduced to mere feeling and/or sexual activity, disconnected from its true meaning and purpose.
Parents will find that many of the foundational questions that children have about love and human sexuality are answered in Pope Saint John Paul II's Love and Responsibility. He begins by proposing that there is an "echo" within us of a larger story, a timeless story, an echo of "something more" that burns within human beings. He remarks that this echo, if properly understood, seeks authentic love, a love that is beautiful, a love that is infinite.
People talk about finding "true love," but what does that mean? Pope St. John Paul II explains that "love is not merely a feeling; it is an act of the will that consists of preferring, in a constant manner, the good of others to the good of oneself."
If true love is what we seek, we must find a basis for love other than feelings and attractions. We must move beyond what John Paul II referred to as utilitarianism. He explains: "The person is the kind of good which does not admit of use and cannot be treated as an object of use and as such the means to an end. In its positive form the personalistic norm confirms this: the person is a good towards which the only proper and adequate attitude is love."
A 2021 Pew Research Report states that about half of U.S. adults (48%) say that most things in society can be clearly divided into good and evil, while the other half (50%) say that most things in society are too complicated to be categorized this way. A troubling statistic is that about half of Catholics (49%) said that "most things in society are too complicated to be divided into good or evil." This prevents Americans from articulating truth and reinforces the power of moral relativism's dictatorship.
Wojtyla (Pope St. John Paul II) calls out our own tendency towards sin, our concupiscence, while at the same time affirming our goodness: "Concupiscence refers to a latent inclination of human beings to invert the objective order of values. For the correct way to see and 'desire' a person is through the medium of his or her value as a person."
From the beginning, God declared man and woman "very good." Therefore, we ought to believe in and act according to our own dignity, upholding it in the way we see and treat every person.
When we are unable to recognize our own goodness, then we also misunderstand our experience of shame. The first experience of shame by Adam and Eve was the response to the loss of original innocence. But the remedy for concupiscence concerning sexual sins is not to reject or condemn our sexual natures and inclinations! Instead, we ought to understand the goodness inherent to our design and choose to order our desires properly.
Addressing the proper ordering of sexual love, Pope St. John Paul II teaches: "We should not think of this manner of seeing and desiring as 'a-sexual,' as blind to the value of 'the body and sex;' it is simply that this value must be correctly integrated with the love of the person—love in the proper and full sense of the word."
The solution to the problem of lust is an integrated, virtuous love that subsumes sexual desire into a life directed to the good—chastity! It does not reject or condemn sexual love itself. Instead, it shows how chastity accepts, upholds, and integrates sexual desire into the full authentic love of the other.
To better understand the virtue of chastity, let us look to JPII's Love and Responsibility: "The essence of chastity consists in quickness to affirm the value of the person in every situation, and in raising to the personal level all reactions to the value of 'the body and sex.' This requires a special interior, spiritual effort, for affirmation of the value of the person can only be the product of the spirit."
The practice of chastity is an action requiring spiritual effort to affirm the dignity of the other, to recognize their value, and to uphold their good.
So, love is not mere feeling—this understanding is a reduction of our spiritual efforts and of the virtuous forming that takes place with its practice. Love is also not mere sexual activity. Love is a virtuous recognition of the good of the other. To practice it well, we must recognize and accept our own goodness, acknowledge our sinful tendencies, and work towards the blessed integration towards which chastity leads us.
Let us reclaim this culture and its vocabulary. Let love be love because it is a participation in and an echo of the divine nature. Let love be true, selfless, integrated, and good, and let us be healed by this understanding.