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Javier Escrivá Ivars
Institute of Family Sciences
University of Navarra

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Parents are their children's first and most natural teachers. This is specially true in the context of sexuality. But it is hard for parents to teach something they don't know, something they themselves don't adhere to, or something they don't live every day in the intimacy of their own home. Parents have the responsibility to learn to do this. No one was born knowing. Not all the ideas on the market about sexuality are true. But the love which father and mothers have for their children will help them to see what is good and what is bad for their children.

Education in love as self-giving is also the indispensable premise for parents called to give their children a clear and delicate sex education. Faced with a culture that largely reduces human sexuality to the level of something commonplace, since it interprets and lives it in a reductive and impoverished way by linking it solely with the body and with selfish pleasure, the educational service of parents must aim firmly at a training in the area of sex that is truly and fully personal: for sexuality is an enrichment of the whole person-body, emotions and soul - and it manifests its inmost meaning in leading the person to the gift of self in love.

John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio, 22 November 1981, no. 37.

Commentary

For the value of sexuality to attain fulfillment, we must educate in chastity. Chastity is a virtue which develops the genuine maturity of the person and makes him or her capable of respecting and promoting the "spousal meaning" of the body.

Chastity consists of self-mastery, the ability to guide the sexual instinct in the service of love, and to integrate it in the development of the person. Through our collaboration with God's grace, chastity will harmonize the different elements which make up the person, and help him or her to overcome the weakness of human nature, which is scarred by sin. In this way, every person will be able to follow the vocation to which he or she is called.