Citing the pervasive nature of pornography, Arlington Bishop
Paul S. Loverde recently issued a new edition of his pastoral
letter “Bought with a Price,” in which he reminds people that
the church teaches that pornography “perverts the conjugal
act, the intimate giving of spouses to each other.”
Below, three married individuals talk about how they
descended into pornography, how it affected their lives and
where they are now.
Addicted to lust
For Joseph (the names in this article have been changed) the
issue was lust. Pornography was his “gateway drug” that led
him to other types of adulterous affairs. He tried stopping
for years, but the behavior kept creeping back.
“As Bishop (Loverde) said, you can’t do it alone,” Joseph
said. “We need God and other people, means outside of
ourselves.”
After battling for years to keep his addiction at bay, Joseph
discovered Sexaholics Anonymous, a recovery group for men and
women that uses the principles and 12 steps of Alcoholics
Anonymous. Following the steps, having a support system and
strengthening his relationship with the
sacraments has helped him to stay “on the wagon” for almost
10 years.
“I had to do something drastic,” he said. “Going to SA
(before), I had the misconceptions that many Catholics had,
wondering ‘Am I an addict?’ How many times do you need to go
to confession with a mortal sin to know you have a problem
with lust?”
His problems with purity and sexuality started with a
traumatic experience. When he was 5 years old, Joseph
witnessed an act of incest at his friend’s house, which
warped his sense of sexuality.
Once he saw pornography as a teenager, the images were burned
in his mind for 30 years. He saw sex as bad but also
exhilarating until he realized that “lust leads to a culture
of death.”
“You begin to think of it as natural,” he said. He added that
even if a person tries to stop looking at pornography,
feeding lust in other ways makes it a constant risk.
He was part of a large, strict, traditional Catholic family
and would feel guilty when using pornography, which, he said,
led to another addiction.
“I started drinking in high school,” he said. “In college, it
became a regular pattern that I would go to confession and it
would always start with ‘I went out and had a few too many
drinks and then I did … .'”
He would hop from one priest to the next because he didn’t
want to go back with the same sins. After college, he
realized he had a problem and admitted being powerless.
“I wept; I got angry at God,” he said. “I told Him, ‘Who am I
fooling, coming here to say I’m sorry when we both know that
next week I’ll bring the same exact sin.’ I quit, I said, ‘If
You want me to be good, You have to help.'”
He met his wife that night, somebody who held the values of
purity he believed in but could not practice. He tried
stopping his addiction during their courtship but relapsed
when they fought. Joseph thought that getting married would
solve his problem with lust and pornography, but he was
disappointed.
“No wonder I was let down,” he said. “(Intimate relations in
marriage) were something good and holy and I was not looking
for good and holy.”
He said he did not learn about sexuality through his parents
but through pornography.
Financial problems made him drink and struggle with purity
when traveling on business. After going to a strip club for
the first time, he became afraid that he would lose his
marriage and the love of his daughters. He sobered up after
that trip but fell back into watching pornography three years
later.
His spiritual director suggested a total consecration to
Jesus through Mary and attending Sexaholics Anonymous. At the
meetings, Joseph was repulsed by some of the other
participants.
“I felt ‘holier-than-thou’. I judged them,” he said. “I
thought, ‘These guys are perverts, I am a normal pervert.'”
He went back to his Alcoholic Anonymous group and decided to
deal with his other addictions there. After his total
consecration to Jesus and Mary, he was doing well but then
had his biggest fall during a trip to London.
“I was trying to find a strip club … a massage
parlor,” he said. “I was in a trance, like a zombie. There
was no alcohol to blame, it was all premeditated.
“I hit my bottom,” he said. “After I woke up, I felt
devastated. I had crossed another boundary. … I was
scared that the addiction took over.”
After he came home, Joseph went to another SA meeting and
hugged the people he did not want to touch before
– the lepers in his life had become his brothers.
Through the support group, he got a sponsor, went to daily
meetings and asked God to take care of his marriage. He said
he tried avoiding lust triggers. He received the sacraments
often, and his estranged relationship with his wife started
to change.
“I was really receiving the gift of seeing her as a person
more and felt the closeness in our relationship,” he said.
A year later, Joseph realized that he was having a spiritual
conversion when he was 33 years old. “I was afraid to lose my
marriage and family and what I found was Jesus.”
He is now a sponsor at Sexaholics Anonymous and has a good
relationship with his wife and children. He renews his
consecration to Mary every year and now goes to daily Mass,
prays the rosary and meditates daily in front of the
Eucharist.
“It’s beautiful, the way God worked in my marriage and my
family and the gifts I have now,” Joseph said. “I can be
happy, joyous and free.”
Watching porn to save a marriage almost destroyed
it
The consequences of pornography can affect all members of the
family. In a blog post called “Porn almost destroyed my
marriage,” a woman talks about how her husband convinced her
to watch pornography.
The woman, “Ruth,” shared her experiences anonymously on the
website
conversationwithwomen.org, an online forum for women to
talk about their faith journeys.
Ruth felt she needed to talk about the problem of pornography
and wanted women to be better equipped to defend themselves
against pornography than she was.
Soon after she married, Ruth’s husband took her to the adult
section of a video store. She left feeling repulsed, but her
husband started renting movies regularly and pressuring her
to watch them with him.
“I would tell him that they were wrong and I wasn’t
interested. He would tell me that I was frigid and a prude
and there was nothing wrong because we were married,” she
wrote. “I didn’t know how to articulate it, but in the depth
of my being I knew these movies were wrong. … I was
Catholic, but I didn’t know my faith, didn’t even know what a
catechism was.”
She felt isolated and discouraged and his persistence wore
her down.
“I started to believe him,” she said. “Maybe there was
something wrong with me. … Why did I feel like he had
been with another woman when he was only watching a movie?”
She began watching the movies with him, “feeling death
inside” most of the time. Some days, though, she felt
curious, ashamed and confused; the movie-watching was
creating more tension in her marriage.
“The darkness wasn’t over when the movie ended either; it
lingered,” she recalled. “What irony! I watched pornography
to try to improve my marriage.”
She said that several blessings changed her life Their next
neighborhood did not have an adult movie store and they
started going to a local Catholic church around the time
Internet porn started to become popular.
“One Sunday, our pastor preached about the evils of
pornography,” she wrote. Then she understood that “sex is
something filled with beauty and dignity, and watching others
do it degrades it.”
Through confession, she received absolution and forgave
herself for watching pornography; it took counseling to
forgive her husband.
“Marriage is a journey to Christ, and our detour into
pornography was both damaging and dangerous,” she said. “But
the beauty of Catholicism is that all things can be redeemed
through the sacraments and Christ.”
Local men support each other in the battle for
purity
Soon after reading Bishop Loverde’s first letter on the
scourge of pornography in 2006, “Dan” started an
accountability group for men who struggle with pornography
called Augustine Brothers.
Like Joseph, he said that breaking out of isolation is
necessary to recuperate from a porn addiction or purity
struggle.
“You need the support of a group or individual to be
accountable to,” he said. “You are not going to get anywhere
by keeping it a secret.”
At their weekly meetings, the Augustine Brothers pray the
rosary, read books related to addiction and healing, hear
from priests, and share their difficulties, successes and
failures from the week. Members challenge each other to go to
confession or an extra Mass each week, put filters on their
computers, seek counseling, and call other people in the
group and check in with them.
“You are not only helping yourself but the other person; you
are in the battle with them,” he said.
Dan went to a porn shop for the first time when he was 21
years old.
“This became my way of escaping what I had found too
difficult to face,” he said.
He had been sexually abused as a child and into his late
teens, and he tried to medicate his deeply embedded wounds
through pornography. He, too, thought marriage would “take
all this away,” but it didn’t.
“I was living two different lives – a husband and father and
as an addict,” he recalled. “It changes you, there is no
freedom.”
His addiction continued for 40 years, and it wasn’t until he
found an accountability group in another state that he felt
like he could defeat this and be honest with his wife.
“Knowing that I was not crazy, that other men struggle the
same way that I did, made me think I could break free,” he
said. “I needed the support of a group to really find the
strength.”
He said that, like many other men, his addiction was not
about sex but wounds, insecurities and fears.
“We go there to escape the pain of our lives,” he said.
“Sometime as children, when you are un-fathered and told that
you don’t have what it takes to be a man, you try to find
your masculinity in other ways.”
His recovery process began in his 60s when he realized that
he could not bury the problem anymore. He tried to go to a
group in a Baptist church in New Jersey, but he was drawn to
the sacrament of reconciliation. He also went to counseling.
He said that growing up in an age when this was not talked
about made things difficult until he found the support group.
The group has two weekly meetings: Mondays at St. Anthony of
Padua Church in Falls Church from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. and
Thursdays at St. Veronica Church in Chantilly from 7 to 9
p.m. There are about 100 participants, and recently, people
have come from Pennsylvania every week to recreate the
meeting’s format in the Philadelphia Archdiocese. Dan also is
hoping to start another group in the Manassas area this fall.
He specified that the group is not only for porn addicts but
also for any men who find it difficult to be pure. According
to Dan, many men have achieved great progress, and some have
stopped looking at pornography.
“We talk about things that create in us a spirit of courage
and the determination that we can do this,” he said. “We will
be able to break these chains.”
Negro can be reached at [email protected] or on
Twitter @MNegroACH.
Find out more
To learn about Sexaholics Anonymous, go to sa.org.
To learn more about the Augustine Brothers purity group, go
to arlingtondiocese.org/purity/addiction.aspx
or call 727/207-2856.
To read “Bought with a Price,” go to arlingtondiocese.org/purity/pastoral_letter.aspx.
