Letters From Teens About Pornography

BY BISHOP PAUL S. LOVERDE
July 8-14, 2007 Issue Posted 7/3/07 at 1:35 PM
Recently I have been hearing a lot about pornography.
The mail I have received on this issue from Catholics and others around the country gives me hope, even as it confirms the gravity of the threat this scourge poses to us all.
Here is what one high school senior wrote in response to my recent pastoral letter, “Bought With a Price: Pornography and the Attack on the Living Temple of God”: “This degradation of society has been so gradual that I had become numb to the immorality that currently surrounds the teenage person. The letter allowed me to realize that I had already grown so accustomed to the material that I no longer viewed it as pornography.”
Dozens of letters like this — responding to the subtle yet aggressive rise in our culture’s permissiveness with regard to pornography — have arrived from around the country since I wrote “Bought With a Price.” Some letters have brought me to tears; others have filled me with anger at the pornography industry and sorrow at our own human condition, so prone to sin, with the result that we unfortunately even tolerate this evil....