Nothing wrong with pleasures of food, sex, says Pope Francis

LIFESTYLE  | POPE FRANCIS

The pope and I are in agreement; the pleasures of a well-cooked meal or loving sexual intercourse are "divine", meaning they come straight from God.

Pope Francis says in a book of interviews published Wednesday that food and sex have unjustly fallen victim to "overzealousness" on the part of the Church in the past.

"Pleasure arrives directly from God, it is neither Catholic, nor Christian, nor anything else, it is simply divine," Francis told Italian writer and gourmet Carlo Petrini.

The pope is the spiritual leader of 1.3 billion Catholics around the world.

"The Church has condemned inhuman, brutish, vulgar pleasure, but has on the other hand always accepted human, simple, moral pleasure," he added. "There was no place for an overzealous morality that denies pleasure. It is a wrong interpretation of the Christian message."

Wednesday's book, "TerraFutura, conversations with Pope Francis on integral ecology" was written by Petrini, the founder of the global "slow food" movement created in the 1980s in opposition to "fast food".

The interviews focus on the pope's vision of environmentalism with a social face, outlined in his 2015 encyclical "Laudato Si".

"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," the pope said.

Church history has had puritans movements some of which condemned the fun of sex and food. The most notable movements were the English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries, who advocated for greater purity of worship and doctrine, as well as personal and corporate piety.

Today, they are still many Christians who get embarrassed by any professed love for food and sex, associating them with evil and satan. They preach total depravity as a virtue.

But the Pope said: "The pleasure of eating and sexual pleasure come from God."

So do I. I am sure the pope have experienced the pleasure of food. For sex, he may not be so close to it. So, how did he know this if it wasn't a divine revelation? Matthew 16: 17: "… for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven."

However, total piety in worship, practice and ethics is not necessarily wrong; every person must have a convincing reason for a specific format of worshipping God. But that which is not yours is not necessarily wrong simply because it is different.