Is that why Jerome and others said the HOLY Spirit is so appalled by marital relations that he has to leave the house when that goes on? Or that the ONLY reason God allowed married sex is to make more virgins for the church?
Well... you know, the thing about Catholicism or being Catholic is that its like America or being American. You can always find some Americans saying some things. Although Catholicism was never the movement called Puritanism that arose in England, Catholicism always had puritans within its ranks.
Protestantism arose in Europe, in Western Christianity out of Catholicism not in the East or out of Eastern Christianity, that would have been Islam. Both Protestantism and Islam were conservative movements (not liberal). Both were iconoclastic but Protestantism unlike Islam had an intense problem with what it viewed as sin and sexual sin rampant and tolerated in the Catholic world. This toleration of sexual sin was particularly evident in Italy and the City of Rome itself.
I would say the Ecstasy of St. Teresa portrays the Catholic view of sexual pleasure in relation to the final destination of heaven or the "Beatific Vision" pretty well.
But you can't figure out whether the Church promotes large families and therefore repeated marital sex or whether the Church opposes it by trying to radically decrease Church numbers by pressuring everyone into becoming vowed celibates rather than marrying. So, it depends on what the critique wants to complain about as to which he puts up as the long, old, enduring model of the Church. If its to berate Catholicism for opposing condom use then the Church only wants a few virgins and pushes married people to inhumanly have lots of sexual intercourse. If it's to accuse Catholicism of promoting virginity then Catholicism into the vehicle which tries to stop married people from having sex and true to get all their offspring to become nuns and priests with Catholic families shrinking until they're almost unheard of.
The actual reality has more layers to it and Catholicism promotes marriage within the Church and lots of marital sex for larger families. It hopes one or two of the children born in those families goes on to take religious vows as nuns and priests. But if one opts for matrimony--which comes with sexual benefits, romantic benefits, parental and eventually grandparent benefits--that being a priest and nun presumably don't have, then Catholicism says there are rules and limitations to those things. Monogamy being one. And sex geared toward reproduction of the species being another.
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