The Liber Christo Method: A Field Manual for Spiritual Combat

by Dan Schneider

A recent Pew Research survey, for example, reveals the modern diminution of marriage through the widespread acceptance of artificial means of contraception among Catholics. In this study, only 8 percent of Catholics, and 13 percent who attend Mass every Sunday, say that contraception is morally wrong. Additionally, 41 percent think it is morally acceptable and 45 percent do not even think it is a moral issue at all.315 Part of the sacrificial nature of marriage, however, is the cross of living the Church’s moral teaching on sexuality, to include the openness to life. The demon’s plan is working in this decisive battle in part due to sexual immorality. Saint Alphonsus Liguori refers to impurity and sexual sins as “hell’s widest gate” because “it is by this gate that the greater number of the damned enter.” His words are sobering: Some will say that it is a trifling sin. Is it a trifling sin? It is a mortal sin. St. Antoninus writes that such is the nauseousness of this sin that the devils themselves cannot endure it. Moreover, the Doctors of the Church say that certain demons, who have been superior to the rest, remembering their ancient dignity, disdain tempting to so loathsome a sin. Consider then how disgusting he must be to God, [when the impure person], like a dog, is ever returning to his vomit, or wallowing like a pig in the stinking mire of this accursed vice (2 Pet 2.22). Recalling that the great flood was the result of the sexual immorality of Sodom and Gomorrah (...