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The pleasure we get from enjoying food and sex is “divine”, says Pope Francis.
These pleasures have unjustly fallen victim to “overzealousness” on the part of the Church in the past which is “a wrong interpretation of the Christian message,” he says in a newly-published book of interviews with Carlo Petrini, an Italian culinary writer.
Francis explains: “Pleasure arrives directly from God, it is neither Catholic, nor Christian, nor anything else, it is simply divine.”
“The pleasure of eating is there to keep you healthy by eating, just like sexual pleasure is there to make love more beautiful and guarantee the perpetuation of the species.”
Opposing views “have caused enormous harm, which can still be felt strongly today in some cases,” he says.
“The most intense joys in life arise when we are able to elicit joy in others, as a foretaste of heaven,” Francis wrote in “Amoris Laetitia,” his 2016 apostolic exhortation.
Francis explains the 1987 Danish film called “Babette’s Feast” reflects his message on pleasure.
The 19th century story focuses on a lottery-winning chef who invites a group of ultra-puritan Protestant worshippers to a sumptuous banquet.
The film is “a hymn to Christian charity, to love,” the pope said.
Petrini, the founder of the global “slow food” movement created in the 1980s in opposition to “fast food”, has entitled the new book “TerraFutura, conversations with Pope Francis on integral ecology”.
The title reflects the focus of the interview series, which looks at the pope’s vision of environmentalism with a social face, outlined in his 2015 encyclical “Laudato Si”.
In his critique of the new book, writer and Catholic critic Peter Williams says:
In calling the human, simple, moral pleasure we get from enjoying food and sex divine, “the Holy Father is rightly pointing out that pleasure comes from God.”
Source
- France24
- New York Post
- Huffpost
- Image: YouTube
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