“Healthy and Holy Sexuality”

Bob Donius is honored and excited to be invited into a conversation with you about what it means to faithfully live a healthy and holy sexuality.

“When students have asked me through the years what the Church teaches about sex, I tell them that the Church wants them to have a wild and wonderful sex life…at the right time, with the right person.”

In Familiaris Consortio (1981), John Paul II reminds us that “the human person is an incarnate spirit called to love in his/her unified totality.” This unified totality includes the human body, and thus the body is made a sharer in spiritual love.  Created in the image of God, who is Love, this should not come as news.  But given our Church’s longer history of suspicion and even disdain for our bodies and our sexuality, it is good to hear the good news:  our bodies and our sexuality are holy.  In his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (2005), Benedict XVI writes about the intrinsic connection of eros and agape: “Yet eros and agape—ascending love and descending love—can never be completely separated.” Yes! The passionate energy of our human desire is connected to God’s compassionate love.  This is a far cry from “the scourge of concupiscence!”  James and Evelyn Whitehead have written a wonderful exploration of this embrace of our sexual energy in their book, Holy Eros. Ronald Rolheiser likewise celebrates sexual energy in his contemporary classic, The Holy Longing. The body is sacramental and so is sex.  Like any sacrament, they must be lived and celebrated with respect and joy.

PDCC Date: March 21, 2013

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