Psychology, Communication, Love, Communion, and Sacrament (Not Necessarily in that Order)

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P. A. Ritzer, Volume 28

Please see all twelve parts of “The Big Lie of Overpopulation and the Fear that Drives It:” Part One: “One Big Family;” Part Two: “Truth Pierces the Veil of Propaganda;” Part Three: “Elon Musk, Bill Maher, Mark Steyn, Ronald Reagan, and Paul VI on Demography, Life, and Murder;” Part Four: “Nature, Control, and Sin;” Part Five: “Psychology, Communication, Love, Communion, and Sacrament (Not Necessarily in that Order);” Part Six: “Sexual Morality, Hope, and Healing;” Part Seven: “Compelling Observations about Human Procreation from Roseanne Barr, Tucker Carlson, and Calley and Casey Means;” Part Eight: “The Deep, Broad Root of the Culture of Death;” Part Nine: “In Vitro Fertilization and Transhumanism as Illuminated by Nicole Shanahan and Mattias Desmet;” Part Ten: “‘A Truly Human Civilization’ vs. the F-Word Culture;” Part Eleven: “Fear, Control, and Death;” and Part Twelve: “Making Room and the Courage to Love;” and please see also “The War on Women and Population Control.”

I cannot help but make an interesting digression here into what I perceive is a psychological witness to this “rupture of the original communion between man and woman,” which, of course, extends to all human relationships, as all descend from that one. In The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Professor Mattias Desmet does not explicitly treat of original sin or its consequences, but he does describe an aspect of the human condition in which believers can recognize effects of the fall of man. Professor Desmet identifies “the primal desire for blending with the Other.”^¹ Sounds a bit like communion. However, human beings cannot fully accomplish this blending due to an inherent deficiency in communication and understanding:

Human communication is full of ambiguities, misunderstandings, and doubts. . . . The signs—or more correctly, the symbols—of human language can refer to an infinite number of things, depending on context. . . . For this reason, language as a rational system—as a system in which words acquire meaning axiomatically—has an intrinsic, irreparable lack. . . .

We, as human beings, can never convey our message unambiguously, and the other can never determine its definitive meaning. It goes even further: We don’t even really know our own message. We never know exactly what we want to say, simply because our thoughts also work with words and so there is always a word lacking on that level, too.²

This deficiency in communication is integral to deficiency in communion.

Professor Desmet points out that, from the very beginning, due to an “indefiniteness of the human world of symbols,” and a corresponding “lack of knowledge,” a child’s relationship with its mother is one of “uncertainty,” “insecurity,” and a search for meaning about how to be the “it for the Other,” beginning with the mother but extending to others, which leads to narcissism. If that narcissism goes to “the extreme,” it is isolating, and it is destructive of the Other and the self, and it dehumanizes the individual and leaves him bereft of empathy. “Excessive narcissism comes at the expense of empathy. To the extent that it diminishes a person’s ability to resonate with others and with the world, it renders that person lonely and isolated.”³

Lonely and isolated. There is primordial precedent as expressed in the figurative language of Genesis: “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons. . . . and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God.” The naked intimacy between man and woman; among humanity; between humanity and creation; and fundamentally, between humanity and God, upon which all other relationships depend, was broken. Denying responsibility and blaming would follow as would the consequences of their actions.⁴

Sacred Scripture provides more specific witness to the role of communication in the rupture of communion after the fall of man in the story of the tower of Babel. “Now the whole earth had one language and few words.” That does not sound like the ambiguous, indefinite, complex, and confusing language that Professor Desmet describes as the basis of relational pathology in human beings. But it does not stay that way. As a consequence of man further raising himself up in an act of pride, God goes down to earth to “there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech” and further raise themselves up according to their own plans without deference to the plan of God.⁵

Nevertheless, fallen man is not abandoned in his isolation, narcissism, and destructiveness. There is hope for perfect knowledge, clarity, understanding, communication, and thus, communion. In St. Paul’s celebrated elucidation of love in 1 Corinthians 13, he writes:

Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love. (italics added)⁶

And once fully understanding and fully understood, the Object of faith and hope will be attained, so they too will pass away leaving only abiding love. Toward that end, in order to release fallen man from the bondage of sin, God sent his only Son, who entered into humanity in the Incarnation in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, with her consent by the power of the Holy Spirit, and became man with natures both human and divine. He lived out his human life in perfect obedience and laid down his life so that humanity could be reconciled to God through his sacrificial death:

Have this in mind among yourselves, which was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.⁷

Jesus Christ later rose from the dead and ascended into heaven taking his humanity and all that went with it into the Godhead. God then sent the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and founded his Church upon St. Peter (as promised in Matthew 16:17-19) and the apostles and endowed the Church with the seven sacraments, one of which, Baptism, washes away original sin. Still, concupiscence, “an inclination to sin,”⁸ remains, and redeemed man still commits sins venial and mortal. Thus does the Church also offer man (male and female) the Sacrament of Reconciliation, when he sins after Baptism, to restore man to friendship with God through the graces won for man by the incarnate Second Person of the Holy Trinity, Jesus Christ.

So sinful man is disordered, and even after he is redeemed, he still must contend with the inclination to sin, the inclination to act contrary to his nature. And, of course, the drive and pleasure of human sexuality offer a potent arena in which man can act contrary to natural law and God’s revelation in ways small and gross. Human beings dealing with sexuality in the state of original sin or mortal sin or just under the influence of concupiscence are like children playing with fireworks.

Nevertheless, the order of creation persists, though seriously disturbed. To heal the wounds of sin, man and woman need the help of the grace that God in his infinite mercy never refuses them. Without his help man and woman cannot achieve the union of their lives for which God created them “in the beginning.”⁹

Humanae Vitae warns, “With regard to man’s innate drives and emotions, responsible parenthood means that man’s reason and will must exert control over them.”¹⁰ And yet, we experience sexual desire disordered by sin and feel inclined to enjoy the sensual pleasure of the act without accepting the responsibility of its life-giving result. Nevertheless, the procreative and unitive powers of sexuality are so essential to man that Jesus through His Church affords them their own sacrament. Thus does God offer through the Church the Sacrament of Matrimony to give humanity the grace to engage in the complementary unitive and procreative relationship between man and woman in a way that is pleasing to God and his creation and that serves as a sign of the relationship of God and the Church:

By coming to restore the original order of creation disturbed by sin, [Jesus] himself gives the strength and grace to live marriage in the new dimension of the Reign of God. It is by following Christ, renouncing themselves, and taking up their crosses that spouses will be able to “receive” the original meaning of marriage and live it with the help of Christ.(109) This grace of Christian marriage is a fruit of Christ’s cross, the source of all Christian life.¹¹

“The marriage of those who have been baptized is, in addition, invested with the dignity of a sacramental sign of grace, for it represents the union of Christ and His Church.”¹² The sacrament also protects the union from attacks from the devil and his minions. Therefore man and woman have the grace in the Sacrament of Matrimony to live in a life-long union of self-giving love within a fallen world. This comports with the virtue of chastity.

Humanae Vitae further reflects upon the beautiful nature of love in the Sacrament of Matrimony that is too often obscured by the vulgarity of our present culture:

This love is above all fully human, a compound of sense and spirit. It is not, then, merely a question of natural instinct or emotional drive. It is also, and above all, an act of the free will, whose trust is such that it is meant not only to survive the joys and sorrows of daily life, but also to grow, so that husband and wife become in a way one heart and one soul, and together attain their human fulfillment.

It is a love which is total—that very special form of personal friendship in which husband and wife generously share everything, allowing no unreasonable exceptions and not thinking solely of their own convenience. Whoever really loves his partner loves not only for what he receives, but loves that partner for the partner’s own sake, content to be able to enrich the other with the gift of himself.

Married love is also faithful and exclusive of all other, and this until death. . . .

Finally, this love is fecund. It is not confined wholly to the loving interchange of husband and wife; it also contrives to go beyond this to bring new life into being. “Marriage and conjugal love are by their nature ordained toward the procreation and education of children. Children are really the supreme gift of marriage and contribute in the highest degree to their parents’ welfare.” (8)¹³

Therefore, since by its nature before sin and now in its sacramental form the sexual union of man and woman in the Sacrament of Matrimony is both unitive and procreative, any sexual activity that would occur outside the sacrament and/or pervert the complementary, unitive, and procreative qualities of the act would be sinful. Thus, it is sinful for human beings to engage in the sexual act outside of the Sacrament of Matrimony of one man and one woman that is open to accepting any child that may be conceived in that act. Though a married couple may for serious reasons purposely take advantage of nonfertile times of the reproductive cycle to engage in the marital act, artificial birth control not only closes the act to its procreative nature but also to its unitive nature in that the act of self-giving is perverted into a profound act of selfishness and rejection of the other: the spouse; the child that might have been conceived; and the God that gave man and woman the gift of each other, their fertility, their sexual complementarity, the act itself, and the marital union. Furthermore, any time a person engages in a sexual act that is contracepted and/or outside of the Sacrament of Matrimony, the desire that drives one into the act is not satiated but rather frustrated and perverted, and the act leads the persons and the union into evil. Contraception strangles a marriage; the marriage may survive it, but if contracepted, it will never be what it was intended to be. On the other hand:

But to experience the gift of married love while respecting the laws of conception is to acknowledge that one is not the master of the sources of life but rather the minister of the design established by the Creator. Just as man does not have unlimited dominion over his body in general, so also, and with more particular reason, he has no such dominion over his specifically sexual faculties, for these are concerned by their very nature with the generation of life, of which God is the source.¹⁴

Now, especially in our current culture, it is a high bar to “save sex for marriage” and to not give in to the temptation of contraception, and hence people will fail to always live up to that high bar, but the more we support and encourage each other in a culture of life to live according to that ideal, the more likely we are to succeed in it and the better the world we will help to make in which to live. And if and when we fail in it, we can seek forgiveness from God, ordinarily in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, and with renewed grace seek to live rightly again.

And that is where we will wrap up Part Five. Part Six should follow shortly.

Thank you.

P. A. Ritzer

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Again, thanks.

©2025 P. A. Ritzer

1. Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2022), 68.

2. Ibid., 69-70.

3. Ibid., 70-72.

4. Gen 3, The Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (1966).

5. Gen 11:1-9 (RSVC).

6. 1 Cor 13:8-13, Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, RSV, Second Catholic Edition (2010).

7. Phil 2:5-11 (Ignatius).

8. Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition: Revised in Accordance with the Official Latin Text Promulgated by Pope John Paul II (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 2000), para. 1264, 1426, 2515.

9. Ibid., 1608.

10. Paul VI, Humanae Vitae (Vatican: The Holy See, 25 July 1968), 10, accessed 31 December 2024, https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae.html.

11. CCC, 1615 (including footnote 109 in original):

“109 Cf. Mt. 19:11.”

12. Humanae Vitae, 8.

13. Ibid., 9 (including footnote 8 in original):

“(8) Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the World of Today, no. 50: AAS 58 (1966), 1070-1072 [TPS XI, 292-293].”

14. Ibid., 13.