Thanks, Father. But what is one to do with the urges, especially when they stem from nonsexual sources?
Part of being human is being in control of our desires. Fleshy, physical desires are transient and distract us from true happiness. We can relent to our desire for sexual gratification, for cake, for avoiding the dentist, but the gratification gained from such indulgence is short lived and distracts us from that which is best for us (i.e. God).
To say that this is an urge we are unable to control leaves us in a position no more than other animals.
In sacred Scripture, God teaches us that sexual pleasure is a wonderful thing which should be shared between a husband and a wife. It is a gift that makes us better lovers and needs to be directed to giving a gift of pleasure to our spouses. Indulging in masturbation affects the way we make love. It changes our attitude from one of complete self donation, to one of selfish gratification. This attitude is part of the inviolable bond between procreative and unitive ends of intercourse which the Church has always maintained, along with almost everyone else, up until recently.
It ties in with the fact that the Church rejects the introduction of artificial methods of birth control which destroy the inviolable bond between the procreative and unitive ends of sexual intercourse and in this it is joined by such thinkers as Mahatma Ghandi, who wrote: “It is an insult to the fair sex to put up her case in support of birth control by artificial methods, as it is, man has sufficiently degraded her for his lust, and artificial methods, no matter how well meaning the advocates may be, will still degrade her further. I urge the advocates of artificial methods to consider the consequences. Any large use of the methods is likely to result in the dissolution of the marriage bond and in free love. Birth control to me is a dismal abyss.” And the founder of modern psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, certainly no friend of the Church, but worth referencing in order to demonstrate how the gap between secular thought and the Church’s position has widened just very recently, with devastating results for society. Freud who viewed birth control as the prime enabler of sexual perversion, wrote: “it is a characteristic common to all the perversions that in them reproduction as an aim is put aside. This is actually the criterion by which we judge whether a sexual activity is perverse—if it departs from reproduction in its aims and pursues the attainment of gratification independently…Everything that…serves the pursuit of gratification alone is called by the unhonored title of ‘perversion’ and as such is despised.”, Freud, S., A General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis, translated by Joan Riviere (New York: Liverwright, 1935), p. 277.
The reason for this is that when you divorce sexual pleasure from its undoubted purpose, (i.e. procreation) you divorce the act from the responsibility it naturally demands. Sex then becomes about self-gratification and the truth, always upheld by the Church, is that it is something pure, holy, and wonderful.
