Jesus came not to abolish the law and the prophets but to fulfill them (Matt 5:17).  Through His teaching and example, the Lord has called us, His disciples, to a level of sanctity that goes beyond what the Old Law prescribed:  “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 5:20).  External conformity to the demands of the moral law is not sufficient.  Jesus desires not only our exterior obedience, but even more, our interior conversion of heart.

In his Theology of the Body, Pope St. John Paul II explored this call to conversion of heart in light of the New Law of the Gospel and the perennial attraction between the sexes.  In particular, he took as his starting point Matthew 5:27-28 in which we read, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” 

Adultery was a very important concept in the Old Testament.  Not only was it explicitly forbidden in the Ten Commandments, adultery was also a frequent image used to describe Israel’s unfaithfulness to the Old Covenant.  In many of the prophetic books of the Old Testament (e.g., Hosea, Ezekiel 15, etc.), Israel is portrayed as an unfaithful bride who repeatedly turns aside from her husband (Yahweh), giving herself over to other spouses through adultery and even prostitution.  These adulterous lovers are the various idols and pagan religious practices that crept into the life of the Israelites at different points in their history as well as their lack of consistency in following the obligations of the Mosaic Law. 

Despite this prophetic tradition, the Israelites made certain accommodations when it came to how they understood marriage such as the possibility of divorce and limited acceptance of polygamy.  Jesus challenged their “hardness of heart” (Matt 19:8), indicating that these concessions were not part of God’s original plan nor are they part of the Kingdom of God He came to establish.  Jesus further renewed belief in the indissolubility and exclusivity of marriage and supernaturally fulfilled them through His spousal gift of self to the Church.  Subsequently, the sixth commandment (“you shall not commit adultery,” Ex 20:14, Deut 5:18) came to be understood as protecting the sanctity of marriage by proscribing all sinful uses of the sexual faculty. 

According to Pope St. John Paul II, “Adultery indicates the act by which a man and a woman who are not husband and wife form ‘one flesh’” (TOB 37:6).  When we engage in sexual acts outside of a marriage covenant, we violate the purpose of our sexual faculty to form, through bodily self-giving, a visible sign of the communion of persons in marriage.  Our sexual faculty is intimately connected with the spousal meaning of the body, which reveals that our bodies are apt to express a total gift of self, and the only appropriate “place” for this total gift of self is in a (permanent, exclusive) marriage between a man and a woman. 

Our Lord not only affirms the immorality of using the sexual faculty outside of marriage, but as Pope St. John Paul II emphasized, shifts the “center of gravity” in his moral teaching to the level of our hearts.  Exterior acts of adultery are clearly immoral according to both the Old Law and the New Law of the Gospel, but our call to holiness goes further.  Jesus speaks in Matthew 5 of adultery of the heart.  How are we to understand this adultery committed in the heart, and what does it have to do with lustful looking?

In TOB, Pope St. John Paul II went on to engage in a penetrating analysis of the human heart to enlighten our understanding of these matters.  In the next few installments in this series, we will mine his insights so that we can more accurately discern the movements of our hearts as we strive to follow Jesus faithfully. 

Continue Reading: Adultery of the Heart: Part 2

Dr. Sodergren’s Introduction to Theology of the Body: A Collection of Articles from the Catholic Telegraph

Written by, Dr. Andrew Sodergren, M.T.S., Psy.D.,
Director of Ruah Woods Psychological Services

(Article originally published in The Catholic Telegraph, December 2023 Issue, the official magazine of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati)

IThe New Law of the Gospel given to us by Christ calls us to conversion of heart. External conformity to the moral law is not sufficient. God desires the whole person to be transformed such that good moral acts flow naturally from a heart made new by the Holy Spirit.

As discussed in the previous reflection, Pope St. John Paul II saw the human heart, wounded by sin, as a “battlefield between love and concupiscence” (TOB 32:3). Concupiscence (i.e., disordered desire) moves us to see others’ bodies as mere objects for our personal satisfaction. Rather than seeing the body as the outward expression of a person who possesses dignity and freedom and ought never be reduced to a mere object, concupiscence moves us to see the body in terms of what it can do for me. As John Paul II said, “The more concupiscence dominates the heart, the less the heart experiences the spousal meaning of the body, and the less sensitive it becomes to the gift of the person” (TOB 32:3).  Instead of seeing one another as gifts to honor and receive in holiness, concupiscence moves us to see one another “as an object to appropriate” (TOB 33:1).

Adultery occurs when “a man and a woman who are not husband and wife form ‘one flesh’” (TOB 37:6). These overt acts are condemned both in the Old and New Law.  What about adultery in the heart?  Jesus teaches us, “Every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Mt 5:28).  According to Pope St. John Paul II, “the look expresses what is in the heart” (TOB 39:4, italics in original).  In other words, the way we look at one another reflects the state of our hearts and, even more, our intentions. What Jesus is calling us to repent of is a kind of “intentional reduction” of the person in the way we think about and behold one another (TOB 40:3).

If, in my heart, other people cease to be persons made in God’s image whose immeasurable dignity I am called to honor and uphold, then the way I look at them will be motivated by selfish, disordered desire (concupiscence).  When sexuality is involved, we call this concupiscent desire “lust.”  This lustful, concupiscent sexual desire “tramples on the ruins of the spousal meaning of the body… [and] aims directly toward one and only one end as its precise object: to satisfy only the body’s sexual urge” (TOB 40:4, italics in original).  Rather than being oriented to an exclusive, permanent gift of self through marriage, this distorted (lustful) sexual desire becomes merely about giving me pleasant feelings.  For the person dominated by lust, the body of another becomes “above all an object for the possible satisfaction of his own sexual ‘urge’” (TOB 43:3).

When I tolerate, allow, or to any degree intentionally permit myself to look at others in this reductionistic way as objects to satisfy my lust, then I commit the sin of adultery in the heart. Like all sin, this particular sin wounds myself, others, and the whole Body of Christ.  It continues and compounds the effects of The Fall by increasing the disharmony between man and God, within man himself, and between human persons.  It offends against our human dignity, the spousal meaning of the body, the sanctity of marriage, and the purity of heart to which all are called.  

Understood in this way, we can begin to see that the marital status of the people involved matters very little in regard to adultery in the heart since it pertains to our basic attitude and intentions toward other people — our way of looking at our brothers and sisters.  Thus, it should be no surprise that John Paul II taught that this sin can even occur within marriage:  “A man can commit such adultery ‘in the heart’ even with his own wife, if he treats her only as an object for the satisfaction of drives” (TOB 43:3). While this aspect of the saintly pope’s teaching shocked some of his original audience, if we allow Christ to continue to purify our hearts, we will receive it with gratitude and increasingly see it as an essential protection and guide to authentic spousal love and sexual desire itself. 

Note:  This article is part of a series of reflections on Pope St. John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body.”

Continue Reading: The Body and Purity of Heart

Dr. Sodergren’s Introduction to Theology of the Body: A Collection of Articles from the Catholic Telegraph

Written by, Dr. Andrew Sodergren, M.T.S., Psy.D.,
Director of Ruah Woods Psychological Services

(Article originally published in The Catholic Telegraph, September 2021 Issue, the official magazine of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati)