Sexual pleasure is a “gift from God” but lust and pornography are dangerous, Pope Francis told crowds at the Vatican on Wednesday.
The pontiff’s forthright observations were delivered as part of a week-long discussion on each of the seven deadly sins, also known as the cardinal sins.
Having dealt last week with gluttony, this week he turned to lust.
The 87-year-old Pope said that for couples who fall in love, having sex is a beautiful experience.
“Sexual pleasure…is a gift from God,” he said. The Pope then drew a distinction between that and lust, which he described as “a dangerous vice” and a “demon”.
Lust was “odious”, he said, because it often leads to toxic relationships in which one partner tries to “possess”, use and objectify the other.
“Lust plunders, it robs, it consumes in haste, it does not want to listen to the other but only to its own need and pleasure; lust judges every courtship a bore, it does not seek that synthesis between reason, drive and feeling that would help us to conduct existence wisely,” he said.
The Pope’s frank discussion of sexuality comes after it emerged last week that his head of doctrine, an Argentinian cardinal, wrote a book in which he described orgasms in graphic terms and characterised women as “insatiable”.
The book, entitled The Mystical Passion: Spirituality and Sensuality, was written by Victor Manuel Fernandez, the head of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican department that oversees doctrinal issues.
He wrote the book in 1998 and it is now out-of-print, but its reemergence infuriated some conservative Catholics, who called for him to be sacked.
The Pope’s remarks on sexual pleasure may have been intended as an oblique defence of Cardinal Fernandez’s book, which traditionalists branded “truly scandalous”.
The head of the Roman Catholic Church also spoke at his weekly general audience about the dangers of pornography, saying that it can “generate forms of addiction.”
It is not the first time he has discussed porn.
In October 2022, in an unusual admonishment of Catholic clergy, he said that even nuns and priests watch porn.
The Pope told an assembly of priests and seminarians in Rome that indulging in porn is a danger to the soul and a way of succumbing to the malign influence of “the devil”.
“It’s a vice that many people have – many lay people but also priests and nuns. The devil enters from there,” he told the gathering at the Vatican. “If you can cancel it from your phone, then cancel it, then you won’t have temptation in your hand.”