What the Church Teaches
Here are several quotes from the Catechism of the Catholic Church about pornography and sexual integrity. Living these teachings can feel challenging at first, but Catholic teachings on sex and marriage lead to much more happiness and fulfillment in life! There is much more positive and inspiring information about why the Catholic Church has these teachings on sexuality from resources such as ChastityProject.com and Theology of the Body for Beginners. Seriously, God really does love us, and he wants us to have deep and lasting happiness in our lives!
Pornography
2354 Pornography consists in removing real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners, in order to display them deliberately to third parties. It offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to each other. It does grave injury to the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public), since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others. It immerses all who are involved in the illusion of a fantasy world. It is a grave offense. Civil authorities should prevent the production and distribution of pornographic materials. (from the Catechism of the Catholic Church)
Sexual Integrity / Chastity
2339 Chastity includes an apprenticeship in self-mastery which is a training in human freedom. The alternative is clear: either man governs his passions and finds peace, or he lets himself be dominated by them and becomes unhappy.126 “Man’s dignity therefore requires him to act out of conscious and free choice, as moved and drawn in a personal way from within, and not by blind impulses in himself or by mere external constraint. Man gains such dignity when, ridding himself of all slavery to the passions, he presses forward to his goal by freely choosing what is good and, by his diligence and skill, effectively secures for himself the means suited to this end.”127 (from the Catechism of the Catholic Church)
Masturbation
2352 By masturbation is to be understood the deliberate stimulation of the genital organs in order to derive sexual pleasure. “Both the Magisterium of the Church, in the course of a constant tradition, and the moral sense of the faithful have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.”137 “The deliberate use of the sexual faculty, for whatever reason, outside of marriage is essentially contrary to its purpose.” For here sexual pleasure is sought outside of “the sexual relationship which is demanded by the moral order and in which the total meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love is achieved.”138 To form an equitable judgment about the subjects’ moral responsibility and to guide pastoral action, one must take into account the affective immaturity, force of acquired habit, conditions of anxiety, or other psychological or social factors that lessen or even extenuate moral culpability. (from the Catechism of the Catholic Church)
– For more information about the above Catechism quotes, feel free to speak with the priest at your parish and/or a priest that you receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation from.