St. Augustine and Conjugal Love

Monsignor Cormac Burke demonstrates how St. Augustine strove "to keep a Catholic balance between the extremes of Manicheism, on the one hand, and Pelagianism, on the other." To quote Monsignor:

Continuous pressure is being exercised on young people today to behave as if it were immodesty, and not mod­esty, which is natural; as if a man or a woman, a boy or a girl, felt no natural reproach—from within—at certain ways of talk­ing or dressing or acting; as if passion were never selfish and grasping and in need of being so judged and resisted. All of this can lead, through a progressive dulling of the moral sense, to the unnatural and inhuman situation where the atmosphere reigning between the sexes becomes one of suspicion, distrust, or fear, and where lack of respect acts as a powerful inhibitory factor on the effective growth and maturing of love.

As Fr. Angelo says:

St. Augustine is identified by many...as the bogeyman of Catholic puritanism because of his negative views of sexuality based on his over-emphasis of original sin. Monsignor Burke shows that this interpretation of the great western doctor is not accurate.

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