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National Kansas City Bishop Takes on Porn Goliath
Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Mo., has issued a pastoral letter as a first step in trying to combat the “plague” of pornography.
BY PATRICK NOVECOSKY Register Correspondent March 25-31, 2007 Issue |
Posted 3/20/07 at 7:00 AM
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A growing number
of U.S. bishops are going head-to-head with the multi-billion dollar
pornography industry and successfully breaking porn’s hold on men and women
across the country in the process.
Philip, a 53-year-old Missourian,
joined a Catholic support group established by Kansas City-St. Joseph Bishop
Robert Finn a year ago when he realized that he couldn’t fight his porn
addiction on his own.
“It would be so much easier for me
to go back to my old ways,” he said, “but the Good Lord has put it on my heart
that this addiction is so pervasive in our world today that if I don’t change,
I’m not going to impact God’s design not only for me, but for children.”
Although he doesn’t have a family of
his own, Philip came to realize that women and boys are the fastest growing
demographic of porn consumers. After years of working with an accountability
partner — one of several strategies to break porn’s addictive hold — Philip
found success in a weekly support group for men who struggle with impurity.
The group is one component of a
multi-pronged strategy Bishop Finn drew up with his anti-pornography task force
established in 2004. On Ash Wednesday, the bishop issued a pastoral letter
calling Catholics of his diocese to take a fresh look at the virtues of purity
and chastity — and giving them tools to help break porn’s hold.
The support groups, Bishop Finn told
the Register, “are to ensure that men are supported and fortified by each other
to grow in their awareness and responsibility for the spiritual and chaste
development of themselves and their families — and to be a help to the pastor
because we want each pastor to have a go-to person.
“We need to raise awareness on this
issue and instill an understanding of the Church’s teaching on the dignity of
the human person and human sexuality, especially by way of the theology of the
body,” he said. “We also saw the need to have a support system for people who
are struggling with this temptation, a serious addiction in some cases.”
His pastoral letter — “Blessed Are
the Pure in Heart” — follows the efforts of several bishops, including Bishop
Paul Loverde of Arlington, Va., who
issued a letter on this subject last year.
Bishop Finn’s efforts piggyback
those of his neighboring Archdiocese of Kansas City, Kan., where Archbishop
Joseph Naumann set up a similar task force at the suggestion of his
predecessor, Archbishop James Keleher.
More than ever, Catholic and
evangelical Protestant leaders are organizing to help porn addicts, said Bob
Peters, president of Morality in Media, a national interfaith organization
founded by Jesuit Father Morton Hill in 1962 to combat obscenity and uphold
decency standards in the media.
“Clearly, there’s a spiritual
dimension to this pornography problem that the churches are uniquely qualified
to address,” he said. “Another issue in the evangelical community is the large
number of pastors struggling with this problem. I’ve seen statistics that say a
third to a half have looked at [porn] and have struggled to not go back, which
shows the power of it.”
The porn industry brings in $57
billion a year worldwide. Porn is larger than the combined revenues of all
professional football, baseball and basketball franchises. In the United
States, porn revenue ($12 billion a year) exceeds the combined revenues of the
three major television networks — ABC, CBS and NBC ($6.2 billion).
In addition to the devastation porn
wreaks on families, Peters said it is also becoming increasingly dangerous for
those in the porn industry, which has been linked to human trafficking.
“A lot of the most vile and violent
pornography is no longer simulated,” he said. “It’s actually sexual torture and
abuse of women who’ve been trapped into slavery.”
Philip, who has struggled to break
free from porn for the past 30 years, said he has seen countless lives
shattered by this addiction.
“When men get to this place, they’ve
forgotten about the sacraments,” he said. “They’ve forgotten about God. They’ve
forgotten about their wives and they’ve forgotten about their children.
Unfortunately, it’s usually trauma that snaps them back into reality — loss of
job, loss of family.”
Claude Fasso, vice chancellor of the
Diocese of Kansas City, is a member of Bishop Finn’s task force. The reason
porn has become so pervasive, he said, is because of easy access on the
Internet, cell phones and portable media players.
“We plan to do some Internet
awareness in the parishes and well beyond that because there are so many people
addicted to pornography,” he said.
Support groups are a key element in
the diocese’s plan, he said.
“The first part of the effort is to
get them into discussion, recognize the problem and need for a spiritual
solution,” Fasso said. “Once they get beyond that and want to do something
about it, we get them into an accountability program.
“Once you burn 10,000 bad images
into your brain, they don’t go away,” he explained. “You have to have a strong
network in the long-term battle. I spoke to a man who was in an accountability
group for eight years before he felt like he had beaten the addiction.”
Philip, who recently came back to
the Church, is now helping lead one of the diocesan support groups.
“There’s not a man who can walk
through that door with a story that doesn’t rattle me,” he said, “because I’ve
been there.”
Patrick Novecosky is based in
Naples, Florida.
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