New guide presents chastity as good advice rather than an order

The pope has told couples not to have sex before marriage, showing that despite his outreach to gays and divorcees, he is still a stickler for premarital celibacy.

In the preface he wrote to a new Vatican guide to marriage, Francis claims couples today do not prepare properly for married life, meaning marriages ‘‘fall apart in a short space of time’’.

The guide then recommends chastity as a crucial way to get ready for wedlock, calling it the key to ‘‘learning how to respect the individuality and the dignity of your partner’’ without sexual desire getting in the way. It adds that premarital chastity teaches couples to endure sexless periods during their later married lives caused by illness or absence.

Francis appeared to relax a little on the question of lust last year, telling reporters ‘‘sins of the flesh are not the most serious’’ before adding that pride and hatred were ‘‘the most serious’’.

Luigi Accattoli, a Vatican expert, said the pope was showing a little bit of flexibility on pre-marital sex. ‘‘Chastity is presented in the new document as good advice, rather than an order, as in the past,’’ he said.

But the new guide is still back-to-basics Catholicism, reflecting the church’s catechism, or set of rules, which defines fornication as ‘‘a carnal union between an unmarried man and an unmarried woman’’ and damning it as ‘‘gravely contrary to the dignity of persons and of human sexuality’’.

The flipside is that once you are married, the church sees a healthy sex life as crucial, as long as couples have children in mind.

‘‘Fecundity is a gift, an end of marriage, for conjugal love naturally tends to be fruitful,’’ states the catechism, adding that married couples should see having children as their ‘‘mission’’.

Francis has previously been prepared to bend the rules, telling a gay man in 2018 that ‘‘God made you that way and loves you as you are’’ even though the catechism claims that ‘‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered’’.

In 2016 he made life easier for Catholics who marry in the church, then divorce and remarry at a register office. Since the church does not recognise divorce they are deemed to be living in sin and refused communion.

In a move which earned him the wrath of conservatives, Francis suggested there might be some wiggle room, however, by claiming communion could go ahead if the first marriage was ‘‘irreparably broken’’.

At the time he also had advice for how to avoid getting divorced in the first place, advising a routine for newlyweds which included ‘‘a morning kiss, an evening blessing, waiting at the door to welcome each other home, taking trips together and sharing household chores’’. –