Augusto Sarmiento

La libertad de la castidad, condición para la humanización del amor y la sexualidad

This study analyses the lines which shape the truth of love and sexuality. These lines are essential in the process of maturing of the person and for the personalizing realization of sexuality. As an aspect of the corporeal-spiritual being of man, the human realization of sexuality requires the use of freedom with respect for ethical values. The profound truth of human sexuality is intimately and existentially ordered to interpersonal communion, the fullest expression of which is, in marriage, physical self-giving. The whole sense of sexual differentiation is linked to procreation as well as to communication, to the extent that openness to procreation is the conditions and guarantee of the genuineness of the physical self-giving proper to sexuality. At the same time, interpersonal relations and giving in love are anthropological demands of sexual communications itself. Although sexuality is good in itself, it shares in the disorder produced in man by original sin. In order to overcome this and introduce harmony and right order in sexuality, one relies on chastity, a virtue directed to love and freedom, since with it man is able to relate -in the matter of sexuality- to others in a due way: to love them for themselves.