As you may know, I’m getting married in less than a month to the love of my life, an amazing, beautiful, faithful woman. I know this is a huge blessing that I probably do not deserve, and I know this is something that many men long for and yet something that many men consider to be an impossible desire in our postmodern landscape.

Looking back, I realize that I have been —almost involuntarily— preparing for marriage for years, even before I met my wife-to-be. A close friend of mine who also recognized this approached me recently to ask if I could give him some guidance as to how he should prepare for marriage, since he’s considering proposing and wants to take his vocation to marriage seriously.

For that reason, I decided to write this article, giving all of you who feel called to the vocation of marriage a structured, step-by-step plan to follow. Keep in mind two things as you read:

1. This “protocol” is intended to be followed both by those men who have a girlfriend and those who don’t. It’s possible that you’ll already have completed some steps, but keep reading because I assure you there are some that you haven’t.

2. The decision to send you a good woman to marry is up to God and God alone. You can and should be prepared to receive her, but I cannot guarantee that you ever will. In my experience, however, following the steps below makes it highly likely that you do.

With that being said, here are 10 steps to prepare for marriage (even if you don’t know your wife yet).

Step 1: Put it to Prayer

The very first thing you need to do is to make sure you invite God into this process of preparation. This is important for two reasons: one, it ensures that you are being intentional about preparing for marriage, not merely going through the motions and hoping without a plan. Two, it keeps you centered on the Lord and ensures that this whole process is done out of love for Him, trusting Him and humbly accepting His will for you. It’s different to try and brute force your way into finding and marrying a good woman than it is to lay it at the foot of the Cross and asking God humbly to lead you, help you, and direct you.

Tell Him that you want to prepare for marriage and that you want His help with it. Tell Him that you’re going to start making an effort and that you want Him to purify and strengthen you. Tell Him that you accept His will no matter what and that you will do everything you can so that He can be assured that you’ll care for the woman He decides to send you. Tell Him that you accept His timing and that you won’t force your own.

Step 2: Make a List

Not a list of the qualities that you want in your future wife, but a list of all the things that are wrong with you. You are in no position to demand anything from God, and you surely have a lot of things to fix. So, take the time to identify them so you can then proceed to fix them.

List toxic behaviors that you need to cut out, vices that you need to get rid of, sins that you still persist in. Be honest and strict with yourself. Set high standards and list even those behaviors that you think you couldn’t possibly change. Remember that it’s God who changes you, and He absolutely can.

Step 3: Start with Chastity

I’m going to go ahead and bet that somewhere in your list there is something about quitting sexual immorality. If there isn’t, that’s great. But chances are there is, because most men nowadays struggle with addictions to pornography and other forms of sexual immorality.

If that’s you, I suggest you start your process of preparation by focusing your energy on trying to free yourself from those behaviors. For you to live chastely, you naturally have to build a ton of complementary virtues like discipline, fortitude, charity, and patience. Chastity is a cheat code for masculine formation.

Additionally, chastity allows you to discern more objectively, because when you remove sexual intimacy from the equation, you can be more honest and unbiased about whether or not the person you’re dating is a good fit. Lust, as we know, clouds your intellect, therefore chastity clears it.

Step 4: Learn to Commit

Most men are deeply afraid of commitment, and this becomes apparent in many areas of their lives:

• Relationally, they jump from one girlfriend to the next (or never even date anyone), always waiting for a perfection that isn’t real, or simply chasing novelty.

• Professionally, they stay at a job for a year or a few months and then jump to the next one.

• Spiritually, they never truly commit to living their faith fully, knowing that that will mean giving up certain things for good.

You want to be the exception to this rule. Commitment is a muscle that you train. Marriage is a lifelong commitment, and if you haven’t learnt to commit to something else before you give yourself completely to your wife, it’ll be difficult for you to keep that promise. I think that this is one of the reasons why it’s so critical to live a faith that is radical in the best possible sense: it trains you in commitment and actively teaches you what it means to choose one thing and reject all others.

When you surrender your entire life to Christ (not just what comes easily to you), you will learn what it takes to give yourself completely to your wife when she arrives.

Do not be a lukewarm Christian. Learn, study, and most importantly, practice the faith fully.

Step 5: Clarify Your Direction

After that, you need to engage in the difficult but incredibly rewarding process of finding out your calling, or at least the direction you feel compelled to walk towards over the foreseeable future. A man is the leader of his household, and if he doesn’t provide clarity and direction, the entire household will drift into chaos.

What this means practically is that you should analyze the talents God has given you, and think about how He’s calling you to use them. What sort of job do you think you can be good at that also helps others? What kind of missions or apostolates can you partake in to ensure you’re giving back? What do you imagine your life will be like in ten years?

How do you think God wants you to impact the world for the better?
What cause sets your heart on fire?

Ask yourself these questions in prayer, preferably before the Blessed Sacrament, because even if the answer doesn’t come with complete clarity, you’ll find in your heart at least some guidance as to the path that you should begin to walk.

Step 6: Determine Non-Negotiables

Now that you know your mission (or at least have a general direction), and now that you’re learning how to be a committed man who strives to live chastely, you can start —yes, only now— to think about the woman you’d like to marry.

You can begin to think about the things that you’d want for the mother of your children, in order to help you discern whatever dating/courtship opportunities appear in the future.

The reason why we didn’t do this sooner is that it would be hypocritical to start listing the qualities you’d want in a wife when you aren’t even in a solid position when it comes to your faith, purity, and life’s mission. Now that you are doing some things right, your mind is clearer, and thus you can start to consider what kind of woman you’d like to spend the rest of your life with. It’s important to do this because otherwise it’ll be much easier for you to ignore obvious red flags and persist in relationships that shouldn’t have a future.

List the virtues you’d like your wife to have, what you imagine her relationship to God being like, and list all the behaviors or beliefs that would make you say “no” to a potential relationship.

It’s only after you’ve done this that the real work begins.

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I had a friend who used to be an important guide for me in matters of faith back when I was only starting to open my heart to The Lord. He had been in the seminary discerning his vocation, but eventually decided that God wasn’t calling him to be a priest. However, the time he spent preparing for ministry made him very knowledgeable, and thus he was someone that I considered to be somewhat of a mentor in matters of the faith.

We became even closer when we did the Exodus 90 challenge together a few years ago. As part of the challenge, we were called to have weekly fraternity meetings to discuss our struggles and victories, and share the insights we had gathered through practicing asceticism.

In one of those meetings, I mentioned how I was a bit concerned about the new direction this project was taking. At that point I was starting to really take my faith seriously and felt called to be more open about Christianity in the content I produced. I was on the verge of deciding to give up my income in order to do what I felt in my heart was what I was truly called to do: write. And more specifically, write about Christian masculinity.

You can understand why I was concerned. It’s never easy to give up a stable income to pursue what you feel in your heart God is calling you towards.

So I mentioned this to my friend. How I was concerned about losing my income. How I didn’t know if people would appreciate the new direction of the page. How I didn’t know if anyone would pay for the subscription that I hoped would replace the income I was ceasing to receive.

What Guides Your Decisions?

And he simply asked me: “What do you think the Lord is calling you to do?”

I told him that deep in my heart I felt a calling to write about Christian masculinity, and to try, again, as I did when I first launched this project, to just help as many young men as I possibly could find their way in this sometimes hostile world. But I also wanted —and needed— to earn some sort of income, I said.

His answer provided me with clarity, and what he said gave me a framework I have returned to ever since.

You see, I had become somewhat disenchanted with the content I was putting out and with what my project had become. And the reason for that is that I had let myself lose sight of the true intention of Ad Aeternum (back then called Simple Men) and had let it become just a job, just a source of income. And that’s when you feel disconnected from what you’re doing. The main thing guiding our choices cannot be simply to make money.

My friend suggested that I should do what I felt God was calling me to do, and to ask Him for the grace of purity of intention. That a man ought to do things for the right reasons, and trust God to take care of the rest. After all, that is what we pray every day: “give us this day our daily bread.” God provides.

This reminded me of Matthew 6:33:

“But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”
Matthew 6:33

Purity of intention. That resonated with me. It was a virtue I had never explicitly asked for, but it was definitely something that I didn’t always have. I’m too human, and that means that sometimes I do things, even seemingly good things, for the wrong reasons.

Do Things for The Right Reasons

This is not a new concept. St. Ignatius of Loyola built the Spiritual Exercises around what he called the First Principle and Foundation, which states that “man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God, and by this means to save his soul, and that everything else on the face of the earth is created for man to help him in attaining the end for which he is created”.

From this foundation stems the Jesuit motto Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam (for the greater glory of God) which points again to purity of intention, as it reminds us to ask before any action "does this serve the glory of God?", not “will this succeed?” or “will this be recognized?”

To have purity of intention means to do things for the right reasons, and not let yourself be motivated or seduced by the temptations of worldly success. It means that when it’s time to act, you shouldn’t think mainly about what will increase your reputation, gain you the most praise, or fulfill the desire to be seen as virtuous, but rather consider simply what pleases God the most.

This means placing God at the very center, and letting everything you do in your life honor Him first and foremost. It also means following the path He wants you to follow, and not the one your human mind thinks will bring the most success.

As Saint Paul says:

“Whatever you do, work at it from the heart, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward.”
— Colossians 3:23-24

I’m still human. I still fail and make mistakes. But more and more I’m praying to God before I act: “Lord, go before me, take my hands, and help me make sure that what I do and say is done with purity of intention, for the right reasons.”

And it’s been working so far. To ask for something with an honest heart is to start receiving it, and as I ask, I am noticing greater peace, and a clarity I had not experienced before. And interestingly enough, business-wise, it’s working too. Not only am I once again finding it a joy to sit down and write, but the financial aspect is also picking up speed too.

It’s not always easy to follow God, but being conscious of the motivations behind your actions, and remembering to act with purity of intention makes it considerably easier, as when you do, God usually shows you clearly what the right path is.

Ask today for purity of intention. Pray to God to give you wisdom and discernment to see your own blindspots and false idols, and to free you from them so you can surrender your life and actions to the service of The Lord. Not only is this right, but it is freeing too, as we are all created for this purpose, and only when we accept this fact will we find the elusive peace that all men long for.

Ad Maiora Nati Sumus,

Juan

Thank you for reading!

If you enjoyed this post and could leave a like or comment it would be greatly appreciated, as it will help my work reach more people.

Also, if you liked this article, you’ll love my book.

In a modern world that seeks to strip men of nearly all virtues, there is one specific quality which seems to be almost completely absent.

It’s the virtue that gives a man weight, conviction, solemnity, and integrity. The average man exists on a superficial level, occupied with useless facts, focused on entertainment, celebrities, politics, news that don’t affect him, or simply too caught up in the hustle of day to day life to ever leave the surface. This man ends up treating everything with the same register of casual levity, speaking words that carry no weight and shifting his positions casually, almost involuntarily, depending on whoever he last spoke to.

In this ocean of lightness, the mere presence of a grave man causes discomfort and awe, sparking both envy and a hunger to possess such seemingly natural poise and influence. That’s a man who has the virtue of gravitas, whose interior depth becomes visible in his presence.

What Is Gravitas?

In the Roman world, gravitas was one of the core virtues of the aristocratic ideal alongside severitas, pietas, and virtus. It meant weight, the quality of a man whose words and presence carried natural authority because he himself was deeply rooted on something bigger.

A man of gravitas was not someone who made an effort to try and seem serious and solemn, but someone who, because of his interior depth, simply was serious, composed, and grave (in the best possible way).

Many mistakenly think that gravitas is sullenness or being joyless all the time, and some others mistakenly think that gravitas is the pomposity of the man who performs seriousness to try and look cooler. True gravitas is neither. True gravitas is the natural outward expression of a man who has developed interior depth and is thus not easily swayed by the surface turbulence of the world around him.

The Baptism of Gravitas

As is the case with most Roman virtues, the early Christians did not simply reject them, recognizing their intrinsic value, but they did reorder them, also understanding that a virtue expressed in a pagan environment could easily be misunderstood and sought for all the wrong reasons. In ancient Rome, gravitas was ordered toward social authority, political influence, and pursued for prideful reasons (power, praise, etc).

The Christian tradition kept the substance but redirected the foundation: a man of Christian gravitas should carry weight not because of his status or achievements but because he is grounded in something solid, eternal, and unmovable: Truth.

This is reflected in St. Paul’s instruction to Titus:

“In all things shew thyself an example of good works, in doctrine, in integrity, in gravity.”
— Titus 2:7

In the original Greek, the word used is semnotes, which translates to gravitas: dignity, moral seriousness, weightiness.

As we can see, the Church has always understood that there’s a virtue which imbues certain men with an authority that can only come from the seriousness and depth of their character. That is gravitas.

What We Lose When We Lose This Virtue

I believe that there are three main forces that have specifically eroded gravitas in modern men.

First, the entertainment industry, which undoubtedly rewards levity, relatability, and the performance of casualness. Under the influence of Hollywood, seriousness becomes systematically penalized. Think about it: all modern movies or TV shows always try to include some form of “comic release” to avoid presenting situations as truly grave. Watch modern movies long enough and you’ll slowly start to act like the characters portrayed on screen.

Second, the therapeutic culture pushes for unrestrained emotional expression as the highest form of authenticity. What naturally follows is that we become convinced that our emotions are the source of truth, and slowly start to believe that interiority and restraint are forms of harmful repression.

Finally, the disappearance of rites of passage into manhood has left us with a vacuum of formation in which men never learn how to approach life with a weighty, solemn spirit.

The cultural consequences of these influences are dire, and we are seeing them play out in real time: men no longer have any authority in their own households, fathers are not capable of correcting and being taken seriously, and Christian men cannot speak the truth with authority, as Christ did and instructed us.

It’s absolutely imperative that we become men of authority again, and that we learn to speak with conviction, so that we can communicate the Truth effectively and make other masculine men capable of doing the same. Recovering gravitas can be done through four concrete practices you can start doing right now:

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One of the main reasons why so many men seem to be losing the fight against lust is that they fail to identify the triggers that lead them to acting immorally. While some triggers are easy to identify (provocative content in social media, for example), others are much subtler, and thus sometimes completely unrecognizable unless you know beforehand how to spot them.

A few years ago, a very wise priest told me something that completely changed the way I understood the battle against lust.

Since it was a while back, I don’t remember what he said word for word, but the central concept was that lustful actions are very often consequences of pride.

He mentioned how it’s common for lust to creep in when you’re feeling high and mighty, maybe particularly proud for something you accomplished, because that’s when you most often let your guard down, begin trusting in your own power, and forget that it’s God who strengthens and protects you.

This is something that usually happens to those men who have made solid spiritual progress: they start to grow in confidence, and then, almost without warning, they find themselves falling for a temptation they thought they had largely defeated. And the fall seems completely random, but that’s precisely because the prideful trigger was carefully hidden and was therefore not recognized on time.

A Hidden Trigger

Like we mentioned earlier, those who struggle with lust usually learn to recognize its most obvious triggers: boredom, social media, certain TV shows or movies, stress, loneliness. And those are all real and worth keeping under control. But because they are obvious, they are also the easiest to eradicate.

Pride, on the other hand, is very subtle, very quiet, and thus, much more dangerous. The reason why pride is a trigger for lust is that when you have just succeeded at something or gained recognition or praise, it’s common to start believing that you have it all under control. You look back at your accomplishments (which aren’t really yours), and you start to believe that you are just great. That belief carries with it a subtler one that claims that you don’t really need God’s help. And as you can probably imagine, that’s the crack through which lust enters.

What pride does, in essence, is that it displaces God from the center. And when God is displaced from the center, everything becomes disordered: the lower appetites rush in to fill the space, you lower your guard, you become careless, and you forget that you’re too weak to be flirting with temptation. By letting yourself believe you are strong enough, you lose the very strength that was sustaining you. The moment you forget that God is the source, you lose the source.

The Solution?

1) Humility

The good news is that now that you know that pride serves as a hidden trigger for lust, you can be aware of it and seek to remain humble even when the world tries to make you believe in your own greatness. One thing I’d recommend is that you train yourself to react with a short prayer any time you start thinking prideful thoughts. Whenever you begin to contemplate your own successes or imagine all the praise you’ll receive or have received for a certain accomplishment or action, instantly shift your focus to praying the Jesus prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

The discipline of following every prideful thought with a prayer that reminds you that you’re a sinner saved by Grace is extremely powerful, not just to avoid thinking too highly of yourself, but also, as we’ve seen, to prevent pride from becoming a hidden trigger for lust.

Now, this doesn’t mean that you won’t ever fail again. You probably will. That’s the race we run, and we must persevere. But discovering this subtle trigger will undoubtedly help you be more aware and remain more vigilant against lust.

It’s also encouraging to remember that God is so good that He turns even your mistakes into grace. Even though He never wants you to sin, sometimes falling can become a blessing because it keeps you humble and aware that you cannot make any real progress without Him.

2) Accountability

Accountability works because it also fosters humility. It forces you to recognize your failures and mistakes to others (whether that be confessor, a spiritual director, or a fraternity of men), which directly combats pride by making it impossible for you to ignore all the flaws you have and all the ways in which you are fully dependent on God. You simply cannot pretend you “have it under control” when you persistently show up and admit to other men that you’ve failed again. This is why the sacrament of confession is so powerful.

The accountability relationship itself is what keeps pride from settling in, which in turn keeps the door closed that pride would otherwise open to lust. A common problem men have nowadays is that they don’t have likeminded men around them who can provide this structure of accountability. You should start with confession, sure, but sometimes you also need a group of other men who are fighting the same battle so you can face it in a fraternity, not alone and isolated.

There’s an amazing app called Relay which provides precisely that accountability structure. They are official partners of Ad Aeternum, so you can try it out for free and see if it helps you with the code AETERNUM here. Some of my closest friends have told me it has made a huge difference in helping them quit pornography after many other methods have failed, so I strongly recommend you try it out.

Conclusion

Understanding the connection between pride and lust gives you a tool to combat sexual immorality that most men never receive: it’s a line of defense that works even before lust appears. You can now recognize a “higher-level” trigger beyond the obvious ones, and thus prevent lust from arising even earlier.

Additionally, the awareness that you’ll build from now on, held consistently, will itself be a form of the humility that protects you.

Just remember to maintain God at the center, by being grateful for all the blessings He’s given you, by directing all praise for Him, and by admitting that everything you’ll ever accomplish is thanks to Him and His everlasting love for you.

Ad Maiora Nati Sumus,

Juan

Thank you for reading!

If you enjoyed this post and could leave a like or comment it would be greatly appreciated, as it will help my work reach more people.

Also, if you liked this article, you’ll love my book.

Effeminacy, as St. Thomas Aquinas defines it, is the vice that is opposite of the virtue of perseverance, namely, “when a man is ready to forsake a good on account of difficulties which he cannot endure.” St Thomas continues and explains: “This is what we understand by effeminacy, because a thing is said to be ‘soft’ if it readily yields to the touch.” St Thomas also describes effeminacy as a reluctance to suffer due to an attachment to pleasure.

Effeminacy, then, is when a man refuses to do what he needs to do, out of fear of dealing with hardships or losing his precious comforts, to which he is disorderly attached. He is a slave to comfort and his worldly pleasures become more important to him than the pursuit of virtue or acting righteously as a man.

This showcases a sort of spiritual “softness”, in which the actions of a man are determined not by morality, values, or principles, but by that which is easier and most comfortable.

Effeminate is different from femininity —which is a virtue women should pursue—, but effeminacy does make a man less masculine, as it makes him softer, less perseverant, and incapable of leading properly.

What Causes Effeminacy?

“This effeminacy is caused in two ways. On one way, by custom: for where a man is accustomed to enjoy pleasures, it is more difficult for him to endure the lack of them. On another way, by natural disposition, because, to wit, his mind is less persevering through the frailty of his temperament. This is how women are compared to men, as the Philosopher says (Ethic. vii, 7): wherefore those who are passively sodomitical are said to be effeminate, being womanish themselves, as it were.”
— St. Thomas Aquinas

For the purposes of this article, we’ll focus on the first one, because that is the main cause of effeminacy in our postmodern world. It is true that some men, because of their temperament, will be more or less inclined towards acting effeminately, but that’s a matter for another article.

In this one, the goal is to expose the main attachments that the modern man has, that are considered generally “harmless”, and yet aren’t harmless at all, and provide strategies to fight against effeminacy effectively.

We know that effeminacy is an excessive attachment to comfort, which leads to spiritual softness and an incapability to do the hard things that a man must do. There are a lot of obvious sources of effeminacy: addictions to junk food, video games, social media, entertainment, pornography, and so on, but there are a few that aren’t so commonly spoken of and yet are very strong attachments that need to be removed from your life. For the modern man, from what I’ve seen, aside from the things already mentioned, there are 3 unspoken and distinct attachments that make him effeminate.

I anticipate that some readers will dislike what I’m about to explain, because these are things that most men are profoundly hooked to, so much so that they can’t even begin to consider removing them from their lives or seeing them as a source of effeminacy. I encourage you to read the whole article with an open mind, and ask yourself honestly if the things I’m about to describe could be things that are keeping you addicted to comfort or attached to the world and if getting rid of them could be a step forward in your journey towards sanctity.

I will explain what they are, and then provide both general and more specific strategies to combat them and remove effeminacy from your life.

So what exactly are these things that are making you effeminate?

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“Judge not, that you may not be judged”
— Matthew 7:1

A long time subscriber recently reached out to me and asked me if I could write an article on the concept of “judgment”, since he was both confused and concerned at the lack of clarity surrounding this term. I thought this was a great idea, because I’ve also seen a lot of people —both within and without the faith— misunderstanding what it means to “judge” someone.

You have probably also been faced with many who believe that the Christian command is to never “judge” anything, meaning that we shouldn’t make any moral judgments at all, because we are all sinners needing God’s grace. And while that is true, when Christ tells us not to judge, He doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t hold firm moral convictions (as is evident by the much more abundant examples of Him commanding us to live righteously and proclaim the Gospel), but rather saying that we should not take up a role that isn’t ours, as the final judges for someone’s fate or intentions.

This explains it best:

Matthew 7:1 is a passage that is used ad nauseam mostly by unbelievers or lukewarm Christians to try and guilt trip you into not correcting them or naming the sin they are committing. Ironically, it’s often those who despise religion who use this passage and this shallow understanding of one Gospel phrase as a sort of shield against any behavioral or moral critiques.

“Who are you to judge me? The Bible says ‘do not judge.’”

Yes, that is true, but the Bible also says about a million other things about judgment and correction, for example:

“Judge not according to the appearance, but judge just judgment.”
— John 7:24

“But if thy brother shall offend against thee, go, and rebuke him between thee and him alone. If he shall hear thee, thou shalt gain thy brother.”
— Matthew 18:15

It’s problematic enough that the mainstream understanding of Christianity is that it’s a philosophy that calls us to “just let everyone do whatever they want”, but it’s even worse when so many Christians also believe this to be the case. At the core, this stems from a fundamental error that equates “judgment” with “condemnation”, and love with tolerance.

When you believe that the Christian duty is all about “tolerating”, you will naturally be led astray.

Tolerance is Not a Christian Virtue

Archbishop Charles J. Chaput explains why this misunderstanding can in fact even lead to grave sin:

Tolerance comes from the Latin words tolerare , which means to bear or sustain, and tollere , which means to lift up. It implies bearing other people and their beliefs the way we bear a burden or a really nasty migraine headache. It’s a negative. And it’s not a Christian virtue.

As Catholics we have a duty to treat all people, regardless of their beliefs, with justice, charity, mercy, prudence, patience, and understanding. We’re not asked to “tolerate” them but to love them, which is a much more demanding task. Obviously, tolerance is an important democratic working principle. Most of the time, it’s a good and vital thing. But tolerating lies about the nature of the human person is a sin. Tolerating grave evil in a society is an equally grave evil. And using “tolerance” as an excuse for not living and witnessing Jesus Christ in our private lives and in our public actions is not an act of civility. It’s a form of cowardice.

People who take the question of human truth, freedom and meaning seriously will never remain silent about it. They can’t. They’ll always act on what they believe, even at the cost of their reputations and lives. That’s the way it should be. Religious faith is always personal, but it’s never private. It always has social consequences, or it isn’t real. […].1

The key point here is that we’re not called to merely tolerate others, but to love them. And love, understood as “willing the good of the other”2, often requires a clear moral judgment of those actions that are causing them harm. It demands fraternal correction, and it demands speaking the truth boldly.

Now, none of this negates the fact that we ought to look at ourselves first and foremost, because it is wrong to focus exclusively on other people’s sins while remaining oblivious to yours. But it is not wrong to, in humility, look at the self-destructive vices of someone else and lovingly calling them out on it.

Hate the Sin, not the Sinner

It’s key to understand what the Church tradition clarifies about passing judgment. Perhaps the clearest interpretation of Matthew 7 comes from St. Thomas Aquinas, who explains:

“First, therefore, he ordains that there be not rash judgment, and he says, do not judge, i.e., out of the bitterness of hatred; you have turned judgment into bitterness (Amos 6:13). Or in this way: do not judge as regards those things which are not entrusted to our judgment. Judgment is the Lord’s; he has charged us to judge about exterior things, but he has reserved the interior things for himself. Therefore do not judge about these things. Therefore do not judge before the time (1 Cor 4:5); the heart is perverse above all things, and unsearchable, who can know it? (Jer 17:9–10), for no one should judge about another that he is a bad man; for the doubtful things should be interpreted on the good side. Likewise, judgment should be fitting as regards the person of the one judging. Hence if you are in the same sin, or a greater, you should not judge; for wherein you judge another, you condemn yourself (Rom 2:1).”3

A few important points here:

1. We are called not to judge out of bitterness or hatred, but out of love, meaning that any moral judgments we pass must come from a place of wanting what’s best for someone else.

2. Most importantly, we are called not to judge those things not entrusted to our judgment, like the heart or the intentions of someone else, which we do not and cannot ever know.

3. Additionally, we are not to judge the person as a whole, and those things which are negative we should try to interpret on the good side, meaning that we are called to give others the benefit of the doubt.

4. Finally, we are not to judge those who are in the same sin as us, as that would be hypocritical. Humility, understood as the proper understanding of one’s current position, serves us here to know when we are and aren’t qualified to offer advice and correction regarding particular sins or behaviors.

It is fitting, however, to judge actions, because we have a clear moral standard to compare them against: we can know if an action is sinful and it’s not judgmental in the negative sense to call it as such.

It’s not wrong to tell someone who cheats on their wife that they are doing something wrong. It is wrong, however, to condemn the person as a whole, because even though we can recognize, name, and attempt to correct a specific behavior, only God knows the person’s wounds, story, struggles, and heart.

As long as the judgments we make pass Aquinas’s four conditions (doing it out of love, judging only those things entrusted to our judgment, not judging the person as a whole, and not taking it upon ourselves to judge behaviors that we ourselves engage in), it’s not wrong to offer clarity as to the morality of a particular action, ideology, or mindset.

Like most theological principles, this requires nuance. It is not as simple as refusing to make moral claims and practicing unrestricted tolerance of sinful behavior in yourself and others. It’s also not as simple as the pharisaical position of judging and condemning everyone out of pride, resentment, or to prove a point.

The Christian call is neither cowardly silence nor prideful condemnation but love expressed through truth, which is a much more demanding standard than either.

In this age of relativism and rampant immorality, we need more loving judgment, more fraternal correction, and more moral clarity.

That is also a Christian duty.

Ad Maiora Nati Sumus,

Juan

Thank you for reading!

If you enjoyed this post and could leave a like or comment it would be greatly appreciated, as it will help my work reach more people.

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It’s a terrible tragedy —and an undeniable truth— that most men feel deeply lonely. Even when surrounded by kind, welcoming people, most men share a quiet and yet fundamental notion of being alone and unknown. It’s as if something inside of us always remained carefully hidden, regardless of how rich our social life might look like on the outside.

Too often, this feeling of solitude becomes so sustained that we start assuming that it’s just an inescapable condition of being a man in a fallen world. We start to believe and accept that we will always feel, on some level, alone and misunderstood. And while I’m not going to argue against the very real struggles that we men face, it’s important to understand that frequently, the specific sentiment of social isolation is made worse —and even, in some cases, caused— by sexual sin.

This is not, however, mainly an article about sexual sin (I’ll link a couple of those at the end of this article), it is an article about the specific effects that sexual sin has on a man’s capacity for authentic human community, which is a consequence that is rarely discussed. Most writings on chastity focus on the individual, but there is a great saint who chose to address something the individual usually fails to recognize: the social cost of sexual immorality.

Who Was Peter Damian?

Saint Peter Damian was an eleventh-century Benedictine monk who later became Cardinal Bishop of Ostia. On September 27, 1828, Pope Leo XII officially declared him a Doctor of the Church. One of his most important works is the Liber Gomorrhianus, which he wrote around 1049 AD and addressed directly to Pope Leo IX. This seemingly simple action actually required a lot of personal courage, because the text named and exposed specific forms of clerical sexual disorder at a time when doing so could be dangerous.

While the text is widely used in culture-war contexts to speak against homosexuality (both within and without the clergy), some of its most relevant anthropological arguments are largely ignored or unknown. However, the structural argument which Damian makes about what sexual sin does to the interior life of a believer and therefore to the possibility of genuine community and fraternity is, in my opinion, extremely powerful, and worth knowing.

How Sexual Sin Leads to Isolation

Sexual sin has a particularity that makes it different from all other sins: it is by nature uniquely self-enclosing among the passions. Other sins like anger, avarice or pride are often visible to others and are thus somewhat subjected to social control or approval. Sexual sin, in contrast, usually operates in secrecy. It requires concealment to survive, and that concealment over time creates within a man an entire interior region that is systematically hidden from everyone around him. This is not merely a secret that you possess and keep private, but a completely secret “self”, another you that is completely different to the you that your community, family, or friends know and love.

This vice […] defiles in secrecy and dishonors in public. She gnaws the conscience like worms, burns the flesh like a fire. She fears to be exposed, to come out in public, to be known by others.
— St. Peter Damian, Book of Gomorrah, Chapter XVII.

The consequence that naturally follows from this fragmentation of your identity is that you slowly start to lose the ability for authentic human community, because it requires an interior transparency that you now feel you can’t afford to have (because they would know the other you who is deeply attached to sexual sin).

The effects of sexual sin, as you can see, are terrifying, and reach much deeper than most people realize. Not only does it cause great harm socially, isolating you and filling you with shame, but it also destroys you internally:

This plague removes the foundation of faith, enervates the strength of hope, breaks the tie of charity, destroys justice, undermines fortitude, banishes temperance, and blunts the sharpness of prudence. And what more shall I say? Since indeed it expels every cornerstone of the virtues from the court of the human heart, it also, as if the bolts of the doors have been removed, introduces every barbarity of the vices.
— St. Peter Damian, Book of Gomorrah, Chapter XVII.

Damian is clear: sexual immorality expels the virtues from your heart and opens it up to every barbarity of the vices. Thus, if your faith has been undermined, your hope weakened, your charity broken, and your prudence blunted by sexual immorality, you don’t have just a private problem, but a structural one that leads to isolation and the feeling of being unknown. These are the social consequences of lust’s destruction of the interior life.

When a man is consumed by sexual immorality, he stops being capable of developing genuine relationships, because any authentic relationship requires the mutual knowledge of each other’s interior.

The goal of this article is not to make you despair, however. Quite the opposite. Damian’s Book of Gomorrah has a more positive, practical second half, in which he provides a step-by-step protocol to quit sexual immorality and thus begin to thrive not just interiorly, but socially too.

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Earlier this year, I read The Life of Francis of Assisi to learn more about this great Saint, whose grave I had visited towards the end of last year. I realized that I didn’t know much about him, and I felt in my heart a calling to draw closer to him, perhaps precisely because St. Francis so clearly exemplifies the virtues that I lack the most.

It’s stated in the book that St. Francis made it a point to always give something to those who begged him for alms as he walked around 13th century Italy preaching the Gospel. Even though this seems like a simple enough practice, I felt directly called out by this. You see, I live in a somewhat dangerous city, and the cultural agreement we all seem to live under is that it’s always wise to completely ignore and turn away from those asking for alms on the street, lest you get mugged, robbed, or worse. So far, that’s how I had been living my life.

Ever since I learnt about St. Francis’s incredible generosity and commitment to serving the poor, I have been trying to change that mindset by saying yes to every single request for alms. This has proven to be both much easier and much harder than I would’ve thought: it’s easy because so far, I haven’t gotten mugged, but I have received looks of profound gratitude instead, by other children of God who have fallen into misfortune. It’s simultaneously hard, however, because my instinct whenever someone stops me or talks to me on the street is still to turn away from them and continue on my way so it takes a moment of grace to recognize that I’m supposed to help them.

This practice has been tremendously fruitful in my life. Being more aware of my duty to give keeps me humble and detached, helps me remember how grateful I should be, and it makes me aware of the fact that my possessions are not my own, but God’s, entrusted to me to manage virtuously. I highly recommend you do the same, even when you are short on cash. Whenever I don’t have any cash on hand, I just go into a nearby store and buy some fruit or a bag of peanuts and a bottle of water to give to whoever is asking for alms. There is always something we can give, and most of the time whatever we can give is more than enough.

This practice has also taught me something much more important, which is the main point that I want to communicate in this article: your life is your apostolate, and the proper way to spread the Gospel is by being a living embodiment of it.

Many men of faith often end up unwillingly behaving as though their faith was something they can turn on and off, like a light switch: it’s on every Sunday or when you consciously sit down to pray. It’s off at work. It’s on when you’re praying the rosary or in adoration, it’s off when you are running errands or having coffee with an old friend.

The problem with this view is that it misunderstands the role that our faith should play in our lives, viewing it as a mere complement or “segment” of your life, instead of as the fuel that should drive your every action.

Total Integrity

We should strive to live with total integrity, in a way in which our faith permeates and guides every single little detail of our lives. This doesn’t mean that you should focus on performing visible acts of piety constantly or seek to be in a state of deep prayer 24/7, but simply put, it’s a life in which faith operates as the organizing principle beneath every action, whether or not the action looks explicitly religious from the outside.

Thus it is evident to everyone, that all the faithful of Christ of whatever rank or status, are called to the fullness of the Christian life and to the perfection of charity.
—Lumen Gentium, 40

Total integrity means that you are honest in your business dealings out of fearful love of God, or that you stay patient with your children after a long stressful day.

Every time you invite God into the ordinary moments of your life, and every time you consciously seek to act as Jesus would, you are living with total integrity. It’s difficult to detach from the religiosity that receives praise because it’s explicit and public, but the hidden actions that no one but God will see are the ones that truly allow the Lord to purify and sanctify you. There are thousands of opportunities to be a testimony of God’s love, in the beggar on the street, in the annoying coworker, in the treacherous friend, in the dishonest business deal that promises quick riches. All of these are crossroads at which the lukewarm will push out their faith so they can follow the ways of the world, whereas the genuinely faithful will stay true to the motions of the Holy Spirit in their hearts and let their faith make the choice for them.

Your faith is not supposed to sit quietly in a separate compartment, waiting for Sunday, but should instead go before you into every room you enter from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to sleep.

Of course this is not easy. You could argue that it’s the ultimate goal of our life here on earth: to become so Christlike that we reflect His Gospel in every word, thought and deed. But that’s precisely the point. Unless we’re totally committed to aiming at sanctity, our faith will be a just a compartment that we open at Mass or when we pray. We will become fragmented men, wearing different masks and relegating what should be our guiding light to a secondary role that does it no justice.

Total integrity requires you to be radical in the best way possible, to truly make it your life’s mission to become a saint, to refuse the temptations that the world offers, to stop ordering your life around the opinion of others, to understand that your possessions are not really yours, and to live with a rebellious spirit that rejects the promises of the world and aims instead for the highest possible goal: holiness.

St. Francis did not compartmentalize because for him there was nothing left outside of God. He had given everything so completely that there was no domain of his life that belonged to himself rather than to Christ. That is the endpoint of the integrated life, and most of us are nowhere near it. But the direction is what matters most. Simply trying to live with total integrity means that you are already living your mission.

So, begin by saying yes to the beggar on the street. If you don’t have cash, take two minutes and buy something for him. Hand it to him and pray for him, letting him know that God loves him and cares for him. Everything we have is God’s, and I like to think that He’s pleased every time we use what He’s blessed us with to bless the other souls we encounter, especially those who are less fortunate.

When you do that, your life becomes already the proclamation of the good news of Christ. The world will read it whether you intend it to be read or not.

Ad Maiora Nati Sumus,

Juan

Thank you for reading!

If you enjoyed this post and could leave a like or comment it would be greatly appreciated, as it will help my work reach more people.

Also, if you liked this article, you’ll love my book.

One of the most interesting paradoxes of the Christian faith is that the most dangerous place in the spiritual life is not rock bottom, but the point where a man believes he is finally doing well.

You see, when you are neck deep in scandalous sins, it’s easy to know you’re failing. The nature of your vices is clear, and even if you find it difficult to defeat them, at least you can see them and know what you are fighting against.

When you get the more scandalous sins of the flesh under control and begin making progress in the spiritual life, it’s common to fall into the trap of thinking that you have triumphed, and that sin is a thing you have left in the past. But that’s precisely what the devil wants you to think, and it’s of critical importance that you do not lower your guard but remain all the more vigilant. Because when you think you are making progress is when more subtle sins can enter your life and poison your soul.

St. John of the Cross, in Book I of the Dark Night, writes a clear warning for the man who is past the early stages of the spiritual walk. What he recognized is that once you take the first —very worthy— steps towards sanctity and start detaching from the world, the seven capital sins don’t disappear all of a sudden (like most people unconsciously believe), but they transform into subtler, even deadlier forms of the same vices.

Not For Casual Readers

In the first chapters of possibly his most famous work, the Dark Night of the Soul, St. John of the Cross writes specifically to those who have started to make genuine progress in their spiritual life, developed a serious prayer life, real devotional habits, and real commitment to the faith.

He refers to them as “progressives”, those souls who have left behind the beginner phase and entered the spiritual life successfully but have not yet been purged of the subtle imperfections that piety itself produces. It’s important to understand who he’s talking to, because the specific spiritual stage you’re in will determine the battles you’ll have to fight.

Into this dark night souls begin to enter when God draws them forth from the state of beginners—which is the state of those that meditate on the spiritual road—and begins to set them in the state of progressives—which is that of those who are already contemplatives—to the end that, after passing through it, they may arrive at the state of the perfect, which is that of the Divine union of the soul with God.1

St. John’s Dark Night is particularly interesting because it is directed towards those who have already chosen to walk the ways of The Lord. I believe this is due to the fact that he understood a widely ignored but fundamentally critical truth: the further a man progresses in devotion, the more sophisticated his temptations become. St. John devotes a large portion of the Dark Night of the Soul to this diagnosis, but also provides an encouraging solution to the spiritual deadly sins, which we’ll share at the end of this article.

The Spiritual Seven Deadly Sins

As mentioned earlier in this article, the seven capital sins do not disappear when a man becomes devout. When their more scandalous forms get defeated, the sly demons go underground and resurface dressed in religious clothing. These subtler spiritual deadly sins are harder to detect precisely because they wear the appearance of virtue.

The logic behind St. John’s warning is that every single capital sin comes back in a different form when a man moves on from being a beginner to a “progressive” in the spiritual life. And it’s these subtler forms of vice that we must be on the lookout for, because they are just as deadly as the obvious capital sins that plague the lives of beginners.

The temptation for pride, for example, does not vanish when a man begins to pray seriously. It attaches itself to his prayer life and makes him feel spiritually superior to those souls who are behind, struggling, or fighting against sins he has already conquered. And so on and so forth with each deadly sin, as we will see next. The first three are those which are easier to recognize:

Pride

The most obvious way in which pride manifests itself spiritually is in the man who talks about his prayer life, his fasting, his reading, his conversions or other “spiritual achievements”. However, this sin is so subtle that it’s also alive in the man who feels private satisfaction at his consistency or who is quietly contemptuous of less serious Catholics.

St. John names a specific detail that exemplifies how spiritual pride leads a man away from correction and the call to humility:

Sometimes, too, when their spiritual masters, such as confessors and superiors, do not approve of their spirit and behavior (for they are anxious that all they do shall be esteemed and praised), they consider that they do not understand them, or that, because they do not approve of this and comply with that, their confessors are themselves not spiritual.

And so they immediately desire and contrive to find some one else who will fit in with their tastes; for as a rule they desire to speak of spiritual matters with those who they think will praise and esteem what they do, and they flee, as they would from death, from those who disabuse them in order to lead them into a safe road—sometimes they even harbour ill-will against them.2

If you notice yourself feeling pleasure when you correct others, or feeling good about yourself when you see how much progress you’ve made, remember that it’s not you who’s the author of your sanctification, but God, through His grace, which you do not merit. Pride is subtle and dangerous, and we need to be extremely vigilant to avoid following its seductive voice.

Avarice

Spiritual avarice is the vice of the man who hoards those objects and practices that relate to the spiritual life: devotional objects, books, prayer routines, etc.

The man who consumes endless hours of “catholic self-improvement” content is very often not doing it with purity of intention, but simply as a habit of avarice in which he seeks to hoard as much knowledge as possible. You probably know someone who is always beginning a new prayer program, a new rule of life, a new spiritual reading project, without ever going deep in any of them or without genuinely needing them for his spiritual progress. It’s not like these practices or objects are bad in and of themselves, but they become dangerous when the attachment becomes not to God but to the feeling of “spiritual acquisition” that they provide.

Many can never have enough of listening to counsels and learning spiritual precepts, and of possessing and reading many books which treat of this matter, and they spend their time on all these things rather than on works of mortification and the perfecting of the inward poverty of spirit which should be theirs.

Furthermore, they burden themselves with images and rosaries which are very curious; now they put down one, now take up another; now they change about, now change back again; now they want this kind of thing, now that, preferring one kind of cross to another, because it is more curious.3

Lust

Spiritual lust is one of the least obvious spiritual deadly sins. Simply put, it is the disordered attachment to the feeling of devotion. This vice occurs when someone falls for an overly sentimental version of the faith, in which they only engage in spiritual practices as long as they feel good about them.

For it often comes to pass that, in their very spiritual exercises, when they are powerless to prevent it, there arise and assert themselves in the sensual part of the soul impure acts and motions, and sometimes this happens even when the spirit is deep in prayer, or engaged in the Sacrament of Penance or in the Eucharist. These things are not, as I say, in their power; they proceed from one of three causes.4

Spiritual lust is a sort of pleasure at the outcome of spiritual practices, which leads the soul to undertake them not with the intention to love and honor God, but as a means to feel a certain way: excited, at peace, gratified, joyful.

You see this in the man who only prays when it feels good, who mistakes emotional consolation for genuine contact with God, and who abandons prayer when the sweetness dries up.

John of the Cross identified four more spiritual sins, and fittingly saved the most devastating diagnosis for last, after which, he provides a solution that begins with a simple but counterintuitive mindset reframe:

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There was recently a large masculinity congress taking place in a neighboring country, and it was extremely popular. They did an amazing job promoting the event on social media, got some speakers of great renown, and successfully welcomed thousands of participants.

And even though I believe the congress was —in general— a net positive, there were some things about it that bothered me somewhat, which prompted me to write this article. Now, I didn’t attend the event, so I’m writing this based on what I heard and saw on social media. Take it with a grain of salt however, because I might be missing some information.

The Manly Maxim #3

“Manly men make manly men.”
— Stephen Mansfield, Mansfields Book of Manly Men

One of the first books I ever read about masculinity (and still one of my favorites), is Mansfields Book of Manly Men, by Stephen Mansfield. In it, the author goes over what he calls the 5 Manly Maxims, five principles of masculinity that all men should live by.

Particularly relevant for this article is Manly Maxim #3: Manly men make manly men. The congress I mentioned at the beginning of this article had —in my opinion— some glaring problems, the main one being that they had female speakers presenting as part of the lineup of speakers. Bear in mind, this was explicitly promoted as a masculinity congress, for men and by men.

Look, I think we’re past the time when we must maintain a subtle feminist undertone that denies the obvious differences between men and women, so I’ll just state my issue plainly: I believe women will always be inadequate teachers of masculinity. Masculinity needs to be transmitted man to man.

This is in no way an attack on those single mothers, for example, who have been forced to raise sons on their own. They surely do their best and their effort and sacrifice is admirable. But men can only really learn how to be men from other men. If this wasn’t the case that would mean men and women are interchangeable, and we know this isn’t the case. Women can teach men a lot of things (moms are the best), but when it comes to masculinity, there are certain gender specific things that only a father can teach, just like only a mother can guide her daughter into womanhood through the particular challenges of growing up as a woman.

Feminism has permeated the very air we breathe, so much so that even seemingly countercultural initiatives like this masculinity congress play a part in furthering the lie of absolute equality between the sexes. When you have women teaching men about masculinity, you are accepting the premise that it really doesn’t matter whether you are a man or a woman, because all knowledge is learnable, ignoring the very real experiential wisdom that is unique to both men and women.

I’m reminded of a scene in Fight Club that reflects how I felt watching the highlights from this masculinity congress:

Our young men are desperate for strong masculine leadership, and for a return to the God-given order in which men bear the burden of headship at home and in society. We need to guide one another, support one another, be present in raising our sons, and help those younger than us to navigate the stormy waters of masculine development. We need to start reclaiming our authority over the transmission of manhood, not as an act of hatred against women, but as a necessary recognition that it is us who can and should teach men to act like men, not them, no matter how well intentioned women might be.

What Only Fathers Can Transmit

A father, or any older man who takes up the task of forming other men seriously, passes on things that cannot be reduced to mere information. He teaches masculinity by example, wielding authority that only comes with firsthand experience. He can show a boy how to carry physical risk and danger without being ruled by fear because he has been there and done exactly that. He can teach a boy how to absorb correction humbly from another man without collapsing into resentment or wounded pride, because he has been corrected himself directly, man to boy, and understands how it feels. He can teach him how to compete and lose without bitterness, how to channel aggression into protection rather than domination, how to endure discomfort in silence rather than narrate it because he has done all of that himself. None of this arrives through a course on masculinity. It arrives through example, often without either the man or the boy fully realizing the lesson is taking place.

This is why the transmission has to happen man to man: what is being passed on is not just information. A woman can describe every one of these things with complete accuracy. But she cannot induct a boy into them, because induction is not merely a transfer of facts and knowledge, but a transfer of proven capacity, verified through shared trial. The message matters, of course, but the messenger matters, in many cases, much more.

The Philosophical Foundation

The deeper problem in the congress's choice is not really about whether the female speakers said true things, because they probably did. The error is in treating masculinity as a body of information that can be transmitted by anyone qualified to speak about it, rather than as a deeper formation that happens through relationship, example, and shared trial between men. Information can come from any credible source, but formation requires an initiator who has walked the path himself.

This is, for example, why the Church has always ordained men to the priesthood through apostolic succession. She understands the need of a direct, embodied transmission from man to man, stretching back to Christ and the apostles. This is diametrically opposed to what happens in other Christian denominations that have been permeated by relativism and feminism, in which formation is seen as merely as a set of theological facts that any sufficiently informed person could convey. The same logic, on a natural level, governs masculine formation. You cannot fully induct someone into a state you have not occupied yourself.

Conclusion

The organizers of the event were surely well-intentioned, and they recognized a real problem: men are starving for formation, for answers, for fraternity. They failed, however, in purging the subtle feminist ideologies we have all absorbed from their congress, by thinking that masculinity could be transmitted by anyone qualified to speak about it, when the entire structure of formation requires the speaker himself to be a man who has walked the path.

If the renewal of masculinity is going to be real, it has to be rebuilt on the actual mechanism by which masculinity has always been transmitted: men, present to other men, modeling and demanding and forming what they themselves were once formed in. This requires standing against the cultural forces that will instantly condemn you for creating spaces that are exclusively male, but it’s worth it and necessary.

Only when more men muster up the courage to speak with their chests, and boldly take up the weight of masculine leadership will our culture produce more virtuous men who can guide society towards a brighter day, ordered under Christ and aimed towards eternity.

Ad Maiora Nati Sumus,

Juan

Thank you for reading!

If you enjoyed this post and could leave a like or comment it would be greatly appreciated, as it will help my work reach more people.

Also, if you liked this article, you’ll love my book.

None of us are totally immune to the cultural trends of our time. We absorb them unwillingly, similarly to how we absorb a native language, simply by being immersed in them. Over the last few decades, there has been a sustained cultural effort to dissolve every distinction between man and woman, redefine the language we use to describe them, and quietly displace the order God established. The real danger lies not in the conditioning itself, but in the fact that most of us think that, because we hold to the Christian teaching on marriage, family, and the roles of men and women, we are safe from the cultural forces that seek to confuse us.

But thinking that we’re protected ironically makes us more liable to be manipulated.

Even the man who believes himself most resistant to feminist ideology has likely internalized some of its premises without ever noticing the moment they moved in. In this article, I’ll share five of the most common ways in which this happens. At the end of this post, we’ll take a look at how you can actually eliminate these subtle feminist beliefs and truly resist the cultural forces of gender-role-confusion.

5 Ways In Which You’ve Internalized Feminism

1. Thinking that your woman should be less emotional

This is something that I recognized very strongly in myself some time ago. I found myself becoming frequently frustrated by the sensitivity of my girlfriend. I didn’t understand why “she made such a big deal” of things that I considered trivial, and I tried to fix whatever was going on by suggesting that she be less emotional. I don’t know if this has happened to you too, but in my experience, it happens to almost all men nowadays.

This is a direct result of subtle feminist conditioning, because it’s a passive conviction that women should be more masculine, more similar to us. We think that if only they were less emotional, the relationship would flow better.

Women are different than men. They experience emotions differently, they view the world differently, and they need different things. You and I know this rationally, but when it comes time to manage the emotions of the women that we love, we fall into the feminist trap of treating them as we would a male friend: we offer solutions and try to get them to toughen up, becoming frustrated when they don’t, instead of offering the emotional stability and learning to provide them with the emotional safety that their feminine hearts require. Of course there are times and situations when your girlfriend or wife can be excessively emotional, but most of the times, it’s just her being a woman, with all the richness and complexity that real femininity carries.

2. Forgoing your leadership in the small things

Carrying the burden of leadership in a relationship is a very difficult job. Our feminist era always focuses on the “privileges” of leadership, and conveniently ignores all the pressures that come with it.

What has happened as a consequence is that most men, in an attempt to be kinder, seek to share the role of leaders of their relationship with their women, unknowingly placing an unwanted burden on their shoulders.

Every time you delegate a decision to your wife or girlfriend, no matter how small, you are tasking her with the weight of choosing. There are obviously times when this is the right decision, and in a properly ordered marriage, the woman will be responsible for making some important choices. More often than not, however, what I’ve seen —in myself and others— is simply cowardice disguised as prudence.

A man is tasked with leading even in the small decisions, and contrary to what the feminist zeitgeist claims, when you act decisively and when you try to avoid burdening your woman with making the important decisions, you are actually acting in a charitable way by giving her the space and freedom to thrive in her femininity.

3. Measuring your own worth by productivity and achievement alone

There’s a feminist notion that has been internalized by the vast majority of the population, and that is that a person’s value is primarily found in career output and measurable achievement. This is a premise feminism borrowed from a materialist, achievement-based view of human worth. Even though this is obviously opposed to our faith, many Christian men (including myself in many cases) have unknowingly absorbed this same metric, evaluating our own dignity by output rather than by our fidelity to God and by God’s love for us.

The feminist worldview is completely at odds with the Christian worldview. It focuses too strongly on the outside variables that surround a human life instead of on the interior life, the pursuit of virtue, and the humility required to surrender the heart to Christ. In that sense, feminist ideas don’t affect us just relationally, but they can affect how we understand the most fundamental questions regarding human dignity and worth.

If you find yourself letting your worth be determined by the titles you hold, the money you make, or how prestigious your career is, you’ve likely internalized the feminist idea that humans are only worth something when they make their career their number one priority.

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Some weeks ago, I came across a YouTube short that has stuck with me ever since:

I don’t have a long article for you today, just some words on Dr. Lennox’s answer and a reminder to live life with our gaze set on eternity.

I thought that Dr. Lennox’s answer was such a beautiful way of summarizing the hope upon which our entire faith rests: that when all is said and done, that after we reach the end of our lives exhausted by living a life devoted to service, we will finally meet Our Lord and remain with Him and in Him forever.

The conviction that Jesus Christ awaits us in eternity is what gives us the strength to push through this valley of tears, to remain steadfast in the faith, to continue to sacrifice and die to ourselves every single day, because we know that if we do our part, eventually, when our time comes, we’ll wake up someplace better, and hear the words that our souls so desperately thirst for:

Well done, good and faithful servant.
— Matthew 25:21

One of the most challenging things —in my experience— about being a Christian is to detach from this imperfect world and put all our hopes in the coming one. Our fallen nature clings to this life and to the many treasures in it, and it is a constant battle to rest in the certainty of Heaven instead of fighting to grasp at the worldly things that falsely promise us fulfillment.

But seeing someone at the dusk of his life answer with such honest simplicity reminds us that not even death is the end, and that we must not fear nor resent the passing of time and the physical decay that it causes. Because the most precious thing we have is not our bodies but our souls, and even when our bodies are old and withered, can our souls remain pure and ready to meet their Creator.

May we all, like Dr. Lennox, remember that we are not created to spend our days seeking the emptiness of the things of this world, but rather called to do all we can to meet Our Savior in eternity, resting firmly on the knowledge that He’ll help us to Him, if we surrender our hearts to His loving mercy.

Ad Maiora Nati Sumus,

Juan

Thank you for reading!

If you enjoyed this post and could leave a like or comment it would be greatly appreciated, as it will help my work reach more people.

Also, if you liked this article, you’ll love my book.

Most of us have started and quit more things than we can count: training programs, prayer routines, diets, business ideas. The same pattern repeats incessantly: we come up with a new project or idea, begin full of motivation, and then we just can’t get ourselves to follow through.

You’ve probably seen this happen in your own life, how as soon as you sit down to work, pray, or study, you find yourself — within minutes — with an overwhelming conviction that you should be somewhere else. You start thinking that the work is pointless. That everyone around you is irritating. That somewhere else, something more useful or more meaningful is waiting. That you are wasting your time here when you could be doing something better elsewhere.

The diagnosis that the modern world offers is that you simply lack discipline. But the truth is that there is a spiritual component to this phenomenon of restlessness, and there’s a fifth-century monk who identified it, analyzed it, and devised strategies to defeat it.

Who Was John Cassian?

John Cassian was a monk and theologian who spent his formative years living among the Desert Fathers of Egypt and Palestine, learning firsthand from the great ascetics who had made the harshness of the desert the center of their spiritual life. Eventually he made his way west, founding two monasteries in Marseille around 415 AD1, and he would then spend the rest of his life translating what he had learned in the deserts of the East into a form that the Latin Church could use. The result was the Institutes and the Conferences, two of the most in depth and practical documents on the interior life ever written. It’s in large part thanks to John Cassian that the wisdom of the Egyptian desert reached the Latin West.

Even Saints of great renown like Saint Benedict of Nursia owe a lot to Cassian: in the Rule of St. Benedict, he explicitly recommends Cassian’s Conferences to his monks as nightly reading. This means that every Benedictine monastery that has ever existed has been shaped, directly or indirectly, by what Cassian learned in the Egyptian desert.

The Vice: Acedia

Going back to the vice we have been referencing since the beginning of this essay, it’s telling that St. John Cassian devotes an entire book to it: Institutes Book X, De Spiritu Acediae, written around 420 AD. He considered the vice of acedia to be so incredibly destructive that he wrote a whole book about it.

Cassian describes acedia in plain terms:

(…) It produces dislike of the place, disgust with the cell, and disdain and contempt of the brethren who dwell with him or at a little distance, as if they were careless or unspiritual. It also makes the man lazy and sluggish about all manner of work which has to be done within the enclosure of his dormitory.

It does not allow him to stay in his cell, or to take any pains about reading, and he often groans because he can do no good while he stays there, and complains and sighs because he can bear no spiritual fruit so long as he is joined to that society; and he complains that he is cut off from spiritual gain, and is of no use in the place, as if he were one who, though he could govern others and be useful to a great number of people, yet was edifying none, nor profiting any one by his teaching and doctrine.

He cries up distant monasteries and those which are a long way off, and describes such places as more profitable and better suited for salvation; and besides this he paints the intercourse with the brethren there as sweet and full of spiritual life. On the other hand, he says that everything about him is rough, and not only that there is nothing edifying among the brethren who are stopping there, but also that even food for the body cannot be procured without great difficulty.

Lastly he fancies that he will never be well while he stays in that place, unless he leaves his cell (in which he is sure to die if he stops in it any longer) and takes himself off from thence as quickly as possible.

Then the fifth or sixth hour brings him such bodily weariness and longing for food that he seems to himself worn out and wearied as if with a long journey, or some very heavy work, or as if he had put off taking food during a fast of two or three days.

Then besides this he looks about anxiously this way and that (…) and often goes in and out of his cell, and frequently gazes up at the sun, as if it was too slow in setting, and so a kind of unreasonable confusion of mind takes possession of him like some foul darkness, and makes him idle and useless for every spiritual work2 (…)

It’s important to note that acedia is not laziness. Acedia is something more insidious, which exists on a higher level than mere laziness: a restless spiritual torpor that presents itself as the conviction that the present place, task, or commitment is the wrong one.

The “Noonday Demon”

Cassian understood acedia as a demonic assault specifically targeting the will’s capacity to find meaning and fruitfulness in the here and now. The demon’s strategy —according to this Saint— is not to make the monk sinful but to make him restless: to convince him that the fruit he seeks is always elsewhere, in the next thing, the better commitment, the more spiritually productive environment.

There are some of the elders who declare that this is the midday demon spoken of in the ninetieth Psalm.3

You will not fear the terror of the night,
nor the arrow that flies by day,
nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness,
nor the destruction that wastes at noonday.
— Psalm 91:5-6

The earliest Greek translations of this Psalm speak of daimonion mesembrinon, which literally translates to a demon, evil spirit, or supernatural entity at midday or noontime. You can see that the english translation that speaks of "destruction” misses a bit of the original meaning that refers to an actual spiritual force, not just a random, unguided “destruction”.

This is a very unique form of spiritual attack, because it’s not one that comes in darkness or temptation but in the middle of ordinary work, in the full light of a regular day, when nothing dramatic is happening and the soul simply cannot stay put.

This is why acedia can be so difficult to recognize: it does not even look like sin, but more often than not, as simply reasonable discontent.

It’s easy to be oblivious to this demon’s attack, but when left unchecked, he is one of the most comprehensively destructive forces in a man's life.

• Spiritually, your faith lacks a strong foundation. You parish-hop without ever being formed, you begin prayer routines and abandon them quickly, and your relationship with God remains permanently shallow. When suffering comes (and it will), you will have nothing to stand on because you never stayed put long enough to build anything solid.

• Professionally, you never become excellent at anything. Excellence requires the kind of sustained, unglamorous commitment that acedia makes impossible. You move from job to job, project to project, always leaving before the difficult part, which is precisely where mastery is built. You will spend your career being competent at many things and exceptional at none.

• Relationally, you become impossible to depend on. Your friendships stay surface-level because real friendship requires the willingness to stay through conflict and disappointment, which the noonday demon tells you is a signal to leave. Your capacity for marriage is directly affected, because the vow of lifelong commitment that marriage requires is precisely what acedia makes unbearable. The men and women in your life learn, gradually, not to count on you.

• Psychologically, acedia produces a very specific and very corrosive form of anxiety: the permanent suspicion that you are missing out on something better elsewhere. Over time this hardens into an identity. You become the man who tries everything and commits to nothing.

• Vocationally, you never answer the question of what you are actually created for. The man dominated by acedia spends his life feeling called to something great while systematically avoiding the conditions under which greatness is actually formed: stability, repetition, endurance, and the willingness to be ordinary for a very long time.

The compounding effect of all of this is that your life always looks busy but feels completely empty. You slowly become the man who has moved through many places, many relationships, many commitments, and many versions of himself, and who has no real deep-rooted fruit to show for any of it, because he never stayed anywhere long enough.

Cassian understood this with clinical precision. And he also identified exactly why this feeling hits hardest at midday, and more importantly, he prescribed a remedy that is the opposite of what every instinct tells you to do.

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Most people believe the political spectrum is something like this:

The assumption embedded in that image —which most believe— is that the center is where wisdom and prudence live, that the extremes are inherently dangerous and that moving toward either end is necessarily negative.

But there’s a massive problem with that view, and that is that the scale that we’re using to measure “extremes” is not fixed or objective. Beyond that, we’ve fallen for rhetorical tricks that have convinced us that every “extreme” is necessarily and inherently wrong. This is —as we’ll see— not true at all: extremes can be good when they are morally coherent. There is such a thing as extreme goodness, extreme virtue, extreme and radical rejection of sin. None of those are bad, but they are extremes.

So what if the scale itself is the problem?

The Scale Measures Nothing Fixed

Many believe that the left-right political spectrum is a fixed scale.

But history proves the contrary. The left-right distinction originated in the seating arrangement of the French Revolutionary Assembly in 17891: those who supported the king sat on the right, those who opposed him sat on the left. That is the entire origin of the most dominant political framework in the modern world.

This physical seating arrangement gave rise to the political terminology we use today. The "left" came to symbolize progressive, liberal, and radical ideas, while the "right" became synonymous with conservative and traditionalist values.
— Ronald Dodson, The Left versus the Right

But even though as time went on, these terms became associated with certain specific ideas, “left” and “right” and even “conservative” and “liberal” have meant radically different things in different eras and different countries. What is “moderately liberal” in one decade is “extremely conservative” in the next.

The scale does not measure a fixed moral or political reality. It’s not objective but completely arbitrary, measuring the relative distance from wherever the current consensus happens to be standing.

The Center Lacks a Foundation

You can probably begin to see the problem with the whole right vs. left debate and with aiming for the center as the correct moral option. Those who vote “center” regardless of anything else are basing their opinions on terms that are subjective and undefined: left and right don’t really mean anything fixed, and thus the “center”, being a concept completely dependent on their position on a made up spectrum, means even less.

The man who prides himself on being “centrist” or “moderate” has not found the truth equidistant between two errors. He has simply refused to commit to a position, looked at an arbitrary line, and accepted the assumption that the extremes are inherently problematic.

The center shifts with the consensus — which means the centrist does not hold a stable conviction, but a moving average of whatever the culture currently believes. What was considered “center” two decades ago is considered strongly conservative nowadays, as the Overton Window2 has shifted dramatically to the left since the end of the last millennium. The liberals have become more extreme, and the conservatives have become more liberal. The “center”, which exists simply as a middle point somewhere between the two, devoid of any stable foundation, simply shifts with the window, trying to pass as “reasonable” by presenting itself as “not extreme”.

You can see how aiming for the center by default is a form of intellectual cowardice dressed as reasonableness. It’s the easy way out: instead of choosing a moral code, you simply choose “the center”, knowing that this weak neutrality will likely be accepted by most.

What we should be trying to arrive at is at the Aristotelian mean. And this is not the political center (because it changes with the Overton Window), but the precise point of virtue between two vices (objective and timeless), which requires judgment and wisdom to locate, not merely shunning what is currently being labelled “extreme”. The Aristotelian mean requires you to first know what virtue actually is, which means you cannot locate it by consulting a poll or a political consensus.

Extreme Is Not a Moral Category

The word “extreme” describes a position on a scale, not any sort of moral quality. It’s not wise to choose your political or moral position simply by avoiding what is called “extreme”, because you can be at the extreme of virtue or the extreme of vice —one of them is objectively good, the other one isn’t. And on that same line, the “center” can shift towards all the wrong things, and be false and evil without being labeled “extreme”.

The point is that your moral position should not be determined by a scale that is, after all, completely subjective and liable to being shifted by cultural forces. You shouldn’t shy away from extremes just because, nor should you aim at the center by default.

You can hold an extreme commitment to truth or an extreme commitment to lies. We Christians know and understand this: Christ’s demands are extreme by any reasonable measure. We are called to total self-denial, total love of enemies, the surrender of everything. The saints were extreme. The martyrs were extreme. But they were also right. They were also moral.

What made them right was not that they found the center but that what they were extreme about was worth being extreme about. Something is not wrong because it is extreme. It is wrong because it is false or evil —and those are independent questions.

The Real Question

I want to invite you to think about things differently: strip the left-right framework entirely and replace it with the only question that actually matters: is it true, and is it good? Is it rooted in the eternal moral laws that lead to genuine human flourishing?

A man of conviction does not base his decisions off of a subjective political scale. He challenges it and asks whether it conforms to reality, to reason, and to God. And then he chooses the option that most closely aligns with the eternal laws that are the only source of objective morality there could possibly be.

The center doesn’t give its adherents the moral high-ground, nor is it inherently good by avoiding “extremes”. It is, at best, the safe bet, and at worst, a comfortable excuse for never having to decide what you actually stand for.

Ad Maiora Nati Sumus,

Juan

Thank you for reading!

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Everyone knows there are certain habits that lead a man to perdition. But from what I’ve seen, most people fail to see beyond the obvious ones (porn, masturbation, etc.) and thus don’t recognize other harmful behaviors that are more subtle and hidden.

The reality is that we all engage in a long list of destructive habits. Without careful consideration and a strategic approach to eliminating them, they will eventually lead you astray and, simply put, destroy your future.

Let’s get right into it. Here are the top 10 habits that you need to quit asap:

#10: Substance Abuse

For the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people. It teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age.
— Titus 2:11-12

I’m not referring to hardcore drugs here. Of course you should avoid them altogether. But I’ve come to realize most of us are addicted to lots more substances than we might think. Maybe it’s coffee. Maybe it’s sugar. Maybe it’s junk food. Maybe it’s nicotine. Maybe it’s a particular supplement. The list goes on and on.

You cannot allow yourself to become dependent on any substance, even if it’s not bad on its own. Take caffeine, for example: it’s not the substance that’s bad, it’s the addiction to the substance.

God calls on us to live detached from wordly things, so we can better focus on eternity.

The cure to this habit: Practice asceticism, fast, and voluntarily give up —permanently or temporarily, depending on the nature of the addiction— those things that you are too fond of.

#9: Carnal Thinking

For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Because the carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be. So then, those who are in the flesh cannot please God.
— Romans 8: 6-8

Every aspect of your being should be oriented towards God. Thinking carnally —letting your flesh and its desires guide your decisions and instruct your intellect— goes directly against the precepts of a sound life under God. The carnal mind is not subject to the law of God.

We are to practice purity in our thinking, for it’s from our minds that our actions and beliefs flow from. It’s a battle that we all must face, but a necessary one: to guard our minds against carnal thinking, to make sure our mind is focused on the world to come, and let eternity be the goal at which we aim.

The cure to this habit: Practice chastity, ask for this virtue in prayer (Our Lady, Saint Augustine, or St. Maria Goretti are great saints to ask for the virtue of chastity). If you struggle with pornography and masturbation, check out this app.

#8: Childish Entertainment

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 put away childish things.
— 1 Corinthians 13:11

This one might be tough to read for some of you, but I promise I don’t write this intending to judge you or criticize you. This is something that I struggled with myself. I believe it’s not fit for a man to still be hooked to childish forms of entertainment: video games, fantasy TV and movie shows, anime, etc. These things —in my opinion— keep you from maturing and keep you attached to childhood, directly impeding your development as a man. I know because I was an avid gamer until a couple of years ago and I had to make a great , intentional effort to stop wasting my time with games.

Again, it’s not that video games and TV are “wrong” in and of themselves, it’s simply that a man should occupy his mind with higher things. There’s always something better to do than spending countless hours playing games or watching movies. These are legitimate forms of recreation, but you need to be very careful that they don’t become an attachment. You should be able to enjoy the odd movie or sports game here and there, but they should never be a priority in your life.

A man simply should not know every little detail and “easter egg” from the entire Marvel multiverse. It’s a net negative to be so invested in childish things because it distracts you from more fruitful, productive things.

The cure to this habit: Find better forms of entertainment, start a creative project, sell your console and TV if you cannot keep yourself from using them. Throw aways the superhero T-shirts.

#7: Lack of Contentment

 But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it.
— 1 Timothy 6:6-7

Because this life is temporary, and because we understand we can take nothing out of this world into the next one, we have to learn to be content with what we have. Focusing on what you lack is a sign of ingratitude, and it leads to dark places: instead of thanking God for the blessings he’s given you, you start resenting Him for not giving you more.

Additionally, those things that really matter are those you can’t measure: the love of your family and friends, the life God’s given you. The very best things in life, those that bring true joy, are not material. Learn to be content with the simple things, focus on the blessings you do have, and set your mind and heart on preparing for eternity.

The cure to this habit: Practice minimalism, give to charity regularly, learn to do away with things that you don’t need.

#6: Low Self-Esteem

 For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.
— Ephesians 2:10

Not only will low self-esteem make it difficult for you to achieve your goals here on earth, but it also goes directly against our faith. Think about it: you are made in God’s image. He put careful thought into creating you. He crafted every single detail of your being. He made you exactly as you are. Who are you to say He made a mistake? Who are you to say His work is not good?

You are a perfect creation, not only in your present state but also in your potential. Your understanding, your criteria, and your feelings about yourself do not trump God’s design.

However, you need to honor God by working to build yourself up in character and virtue. It’s not enough to sit back and rejoice in the knowledge of being created in God’s image. You are to use this knowledge virtuously by making of your life something beautiful and pure.

The cure to this habit: Pray and meditate on God’s love for you. Be conscious of trying to see yourself as Jesus would. Build yourself both spiritually and in matters of the world.

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This is the second installment of a series of 2 articles titled St Thomas Aquinas on the Daughters of Lust: A systematic breakdown of how lust affects the will and intellect.

You can read the first installment here.

Two weeks ago we looked at St. Thomas Aquinas’s theory of the “eight daughters of lust”, eight negative effects that sexual immorality has on the will and intellect.

In the first installment of this series, we went through the four “daughters” that affect the intellect (Sexual Sin Makes You Dumber). In this second and final installment, we’ll analyze the remaining four daughters, those that affect the will (Sexual Sin Makes You Weaker). If you haven’t, I recommend you go and read the first installment before you continue reading this article:

As was said in the aforementioned article, the goal of this series is twofold:

1. To help you run a more honest and unbiased self-diagnosis.

2. To help you understand just how deeply sexual sin affects you, so that you can no longer justify it as “not that bad”.

Finally, at the end of this essay, I’ll also share some practical resources to help you quit pornography and defeat other forms of sexual immorality.

The 4 Daughters of Lust that Affect the Will

In the previous installment, we gave the example of the man who’s intelligent, capable, well-intentioned and otherwise disciplined, but whose judgment collapses consistently in certain areas of his life, usually when it comes to choosing to pursue chastity. That’s a good way of understanding how lust blinds the intellect.

When it comes to the will, consider the example of a man who has intellectually chosen to quit pornography and stop pursuing casual sex, but who simply cannot get himself to follow through.

Whereas in the first example the man is intellectually blind to the consequences and thus actively chooses poorly or justifies his sexual immorality, in this case the man chooses correctly with his intellect but has a will too weak to follow through. This is caused by the “four daughters” that affect the will, which are:

• Self-love: This is defined as an inordinate desire for pleasure for the self, by which a man chooses external, worldly goods instead of higher spiritual ones.
  Example: A man intends to keep a boundary (e.g., no porn, no provocative scrolling), but when temptation hits he quietly rationalizes “I deserve this,” making the pleasure the practical “end” of what he chooses next. In this case, the intellect is willing (sets the boundary), but the will is weakened and thus pushes towards the object of immediate pleasure.

• Hatred of God: Because of the aforementioned self-love, hatred of God arises as the will recognizes God as the One Who forbids the desired pleasure. Thus, the will directly shuns God (in aversion) when it becomes clouded by lust to the point of loving the self in a disordered manner.
  Example: Even when a man knows confession, grace, and God’s commands would help, he feels drawn to resent God’s law, because he feels like “God is just ruining my fun”, and thus he delays repentance because he doesn’t want to give up the pleasure.

• Love of this world: This is the effect by which a man treats worldly achievement/experience as the means to final happiness. Instead of setting his sights on eternity, a man acts as if the final objective of his existence was to be found among the things of this world.
  Example: A man starts prioritizing environments that feed lust (certain accounts, parties, flirting “for confidence,” bingeing content) not merely as entertainment, but as the “path” he instinctively uses to feel complete. The effect is that he’s less willing to choose prayer, purity, or stable commitments.

• Despair of the next world: As bodily pleasures intensify and as the will becomes more and more drawn to them, spiritual pleasures begin to be despised. In turn, spiritual goods start to seem pointless and/or unattainable.
  Example: After repeated falls, a man stops expecting real change: “I can’t,” “it’s too late”. He loses hope and interest and quits trying to pray, go to confession, or practice virtue, because eternal life no longer feels desirable or reachable.

Lustful actions have deep rooted and long lasting negative effects on your ability to think, reason, and choose the right course of action. The man who persistently engages in sexually immoral behaviors will slowly become less intelligent (literally), and weaken his will, becoming a slave to the pleasure that he has made it his life’s mission to get.

When the lower powers are strongly moved towards their objects, the result is that the higher powers are hindered and disordered in their acts. Now the effect of the vice of lust is that the lower appetite, namely the concupiscible, is most vehemently intent on its object, to wit, the object of pleasure, on account of the vehemence of the pleasure. Consequently the higher powers, namely the reason and the will, are most grievously disordered by lust.
— St. Thomas Aquinas, ST II-II

I can also tell you, from experience, that the theory we just examined is undeniably true. My life has changed dramatically ever since I started living chastely. It’s one of those things that you likely won’t even believe until you’ve experienced it yourself, but it’s as if you had been living with a veil over your eyes that lifts as soon as you clean up your life, allowing you to see the world clearly and understand profound things better.

Why Defeating Lust is Critical

Lust is probably the vice that is hurting young men the most all over the world. Sexual immorality is rampant, largely due to a lack of understanding of the vastly negative array of effects that lustful actions have on the mind, body and soul.

That is why it’s so important to understand the eight daughters of lust, because understanding the full damage of sexual immorality may finally give you the arguments you need to take a stand against it.

As you can see, sexual immorality affects everything else in your life. The good news is that it’s possible to defeat this enemy, and doing so will not just make you feel better, but it will make your intellect sharper and your will stronger.

Practical Resources to Help You Quit

I’ve written lots of articles about quitting sexual immorality in this blog, which I’ll link at the end of the article, but to save you some time, the tool I find myself recommending most is Relay, a Christian app built for men fighting pornography and sexual sin, combining accountability, structure, and a community of men in the same battle. Several men I know personally have told me it made the difference after other approaches had failed.

If you have been trying other methods and they haven’t worked, I recommend you give this one a try and see if it helps you. You can get a 7-day free trial with the code AETERNUM:

Try Relay for free here

Maybe after reading this you realize that your own will has been weakened by lust, or maybe you don’t.

Whatever the case, I want to encourage you to pursue chastity as a priority in your life. For me, choosing chastity was the final “yes” I needed to give God before He could truly start transforming my heart.

The shackles of sexual immorality can be broken, the daughters of lust can be defeated, and you can reclaim the faculties that pornography and masturbation have stolen from you.

God is there, ready to help you grow in virtue, ready to purify you. All you need to do is accept His help.

Ad Maiora Nati Sumus,

Juan

Additional Resources

Thank you for reading!

If you enjoyed this post and could leave a like or comment it would be greatly appreciated, as it will help my work reach more people.

Also, if you liked this article, you’ll love my book.

When I first started this project, I took a lot of inspiration from the Art of Manliness, by . I loved —and still do— the aesthetics of his blog, and how it promoted a return to the lost art of being a gentleman.

Last year, I read a book titled “The Catholic Gentleman”, by Sam Guzman. The book details how to be a gentleman from a Catholic perspective, which I think is a topic that needs to be more widely discussed, as the rules by which we Catholics order our lives are fundamentally different from those in the secular world.

For that reason, I decided to write my two cents on this topic, and give you ten unspoken rules of masculinity that make a modern Christian gentleman.

10. Learn people’s names

When you first meet someone, it’s a sign of respect to pay attention to their name and remember it afterwards. I’m terrible at this, but I’ve noticed just how disrespectful it feels when you have to keep asking someone for their name when they’ve told you multiple times already. Our names are something that we hold in high regard —a fundamental part of our identity—, so when you remember someone’s name, you are showing them that they are seen and valued.

9. Be the same man in every room

There’s a crisis of integrity plaguing most men today. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to encounter men who act, think, and speak in the same manner regardless of the context they find themselves in. Out of cowardice, or perhaps due to a disordered need to be liked by everyone, most men hide their true selves and compartmentalize their beliefs depending on the room they’re in.

A true gentleman is honest and upfront about the things that he holds sacred. He doesn’t hide his faith out of fear, he doesn’t avoid sharing who he truly is to be liked, and he doesn’t act differently depending on who he’s with.

Bear in mind, however, that integrity doesn’t mean imprudence. You need to be wise and understand when something is better left unsaid. But there’s a way to be wise and open, and it’s our duty to find that path.

8. Control your sexual urges

Controlling lust is the modern rite of passage from boyhood into manhood. Until you learn to control your sexual urges, you’ll forever be a slave to them.

Yes this is difficult. Yes, we live in a society in which we are bombarded by sexual content left and right. Yes, it’s the main sin of our age.

But that just means that conquering it makes you all the more virtuous. A man who controls his sexual urges shows uncommon temperance and fortitude. In contrast, a man who can’t control his most basic urges shows a lack of self-control that bleeds into every other area of his life.

The undisciplined man is ruled by his appetites. The gentleman, in contrast, rules them.

7. Return what you’ve borrowed promptly and without reminder

Nothing stains a man’s reputation faster than failing to make good on his word. Few things are more awkward than having to ask someone to return what they’ve borrowed from you. A gentleman fulfills his obligations, and that includes even “meaningless” obligations like returning what you’ve borrowed in exactly the same state that you received it. Borrowing something is a promise that you’ll return it, and failing to do so willfully and in due time is failing to keep it.

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A few days ago, in the middle of a conversation with a family member whom I don’t often talk to, I noticed something interesting that motivated me to write this article: her eyes were jumping all over the place, to her phone, to the door, to the waiter, everywhere but toward me.

This is something that has become more and more common, and it’s, in my opinion, a direct consequence of our quick dopamine addictions and of the loss of attention span that has become the norm thanks to the excessive use of our mobile phones.

We joke about how we’ve become distracted and addicted to cheap dopamine, but under the jokes hides a sinister reality: far from it being a victimless crime, our inability to concentrate for long periods of time is slowly harming us deeply, not just on a personal level, but culturally too.

The Personal Dimension: How This Affects You

The anecdote I related at the beginning of the article isn’t really anything special. It’s the new normal. Most —if not all— the conversations we have nowadays remain on an extremely superficial level, not just because people are slowly becoming less interesting by abandoning genuine hobbies and losing their exploratory spirit (that’s a matter for another article), but more so because it’s impossible to reach deeper levels of discussion when we compulsively pick up our phones every 30 seconds.

Even worse, the man who cannot sit still in a conversation is not merely distracted, but also anxious. The compulsive phone-checking is a symptom of a soul that panics at the prospect of being alone with a thought for more than a few seconds.

This anxious restlessness destroys the possibility of ever going deeper. Anytime you lose your focus on a conversation, you are immediately taken to the surface. When you ask a question and don’t pay attention to the answer because your mind is somewhere else, you miss the opportunity to dive deeper and further pursue a particular line of thought. If you can’t focus on what’s being said —really focus— the conversation will jump from shallow topic to shallow topic, without ever reaching any significant depth, because it’s much easier to ask about the weather or about a football game than it is to pursue the important truths that hide beneath the surface.

In an article I published last year, we looked at the way in which St. Benedict sought to eliminate acedia and restlessness from the monastic life, because he understood just how much damage this inability to stay put caused our souls:

“He understood that moving from place to place was but a symptom of a deeper problem, that of a restless heart that believes the next thing will finally work, or that somewhere else is where you’ll find peace. He understood that restlessness made it incredibly difficult to explore the depths of the soul, achieve any sort of mastery, and get closer to holiness.”
From St. Benedict’s Rule for Stability and Consistency

What St. Benedict identified on a macro level is also true in the micro dimension. He noticed that it took years of focus to master an art and to grow spiritually, and we are seeing that losing our ability to focus on a concept or conversation for more than 10 seconds is making us shallow, perpetually distracted, and anxious.

The damage, however, does not stop at the individual. A culture is nothing more than the sum of the interior lives of its members. When —as we’re seeing now— those interior lives become shallow and colonized by distraction, the society they produce will naturally bear the same mark

The Cultural Dimension: How This Affects Our Culture

As I said at the beginning of this article, we are mostly aware of the consequences that our dopamine addictions have on a personal level, but what happens when an entire society loses its ability to focus and venture into the depths of their own souls?

It’s been said that some of the masterpieces of art and architecture of the ancient world simply couldn’t be created or built nowadays, because there aren’t any artists capable of creating or building them. That is probably true, but it’s also true that things would surely be different if we just managed not to check our phones every time an interesting thought started to form in our minds. Maybe an artist somewhere could paint a new Sistine Chapel ceiling if he wasn’t watching Subway Surfers reels with one hand and holding the paint brush with the other.

Maybe there would be space for more masterpieces of literature if we weren’t going back and forth between the work at hand and YouTube shorts. Maybe, just maybe, we would build more beautiful buildings, commit to longer term projects, and allow God to use us as His creative instruments if we weren’t so incredibly prone to being swayed by our uncontrollable need for quick reward.

“The greatest menace to our capacity for contemplation is the incessant fabrication of tawdry empty stimuli which kill the receptivity of the soul.”
— Josef Pieper

All genuinely beautiful cultural creations require some level of interior stillness in order to receive inspiration from the source of beauty Himself: God. It is from this contemplative receptivity that great art, great architecture, and great literature (all marks of a great culture) have always emerged. This contrasts strongly with the frantic productivity of our age, and it’s instead a kind of deep, sustained attention that allows a man to be used as an instrument of something greater than himself.

When our brains are this distracted, we can’t focus and tap into the God-given creativity within us, and thus we remain on the material level, failing to grasp any shades of the divine and missing out on the astonishing beauty that the interior world offers. This manifests itself in the culture that we create, making the physical and spiritual world around us shallow, material, merely functional and gray.

The Way Forward

The recovery of our capacity to penetrate the surface —whether that’s in conversation, in art, or in prayer— starts with the same act: the deliberate refusal to reach for the phone. The discipline to focus on what you are currently doing, on the person you are speaking to, or on the piece you are creating. This is not, however, a “productivity hack”. It is way more important than that.

What we are looking to recover is our capacity for interiority, the inner silence without which neither beauty nor God can be heard. A man who has lost that silence has not merely become less productive. He has become less human.

And in exactly the same way, a culture filled with superficial-level humans will become a superficial, materialistic and ugly void, a society of numbness and function without soul.

Ad Maiora Nati Sumus,

Juan

Thank you for reading!

If you enjoyed this post and could leave a like or comment it would be greatly appreciated, as it will help my work reach more people.

Also, if you liked this article, you’ll love my book.

The battle against sin can be very discouraging, especially when you feel like you’re making no progress at all towards purifying your thoughts, words, and deeds. It gets to a point when the cycle becomes familiar, so much so that we accept it obediently: the fall, the confession, the resolution, the brief period of clarity, and then the slow return to the same disorder you swore you had finally defeated.

You have addressed lust and found yourself back in it. You have confessed anger and watched it resurface within the week. You have resolved against pride, against avarice, against the particular sin that seems to define your struggle, and you have kept that resolution until you didn't. Slowly, somewhere around the thousandth failure, despair starts to creep in. You are willing to fight, but it seems like you’re fighting a circular battle that has no end.

The reason why this happens is most likely that you’re fighting the wrong battle. Most of the sins you probably recognize, confess, and try to eliminate are symptoms, not root causes. This leads to a mistake in the way you approach them, treating each sin as a separate problem requiring a separate solution. As if lust and anger and avarice were independent failures that could be addressed one at a time, in isolation, without reference to each other.

That approach feels and sounds logical. However, according to a seventh-century Byzantine theologian who paid for his convictions with his tongue and his right hand, it is structurally wrong, because sins are not separate. It’s not like each sin is a tree that you can cut off independently. No, according to St. Maximus the Confessor, sins are all branches of the same tree. And you have been pruning branches while the root goes untouched.

Who Was Maximus the Confessor?

Maximus was a seventh-century Byzantine theologian and monk who, at the age of 82, was tortured for refusing to endorse the Monothelite heresy, the position that Christ had only one will, as opposed to two wills (human and divine).

They cut out the old man’s tongue and mutilated his right hand so that he could no longer write or speak, convinced that in so doing they had silenced this witness to the orthodox and apostolic faith.
What they failed to realize is that a confessor of the faith confesses that faith not only with his words, but with his whole being. And so this mute old man, missing a hand, became a living word. His silence was more powerful than any letter he had written or speech he had given, confessing his and the Church’s faith in the Incarnation of God’s Son.
Maximus was exiled to present-day Georgia. Exhausted by the torture he had suffered, he died that same year.1

St. Maximus was not someone writing from the comfort of a desk, theorizing without practicing what he preached. This was a man who understood the relationship between disordered will and disordered life from the inside, at a cost so high that most of us will never fully grasp. His theological anthropology —his account of what goes wrong in the human person— was forged under an intense pressure that tested every claim he made about the human will and about the structure of sins and passions.

One of his most significant findings was that he pinpointed and identified the root of sin in his Four Hundred Chapters on Love, and gave it a name: philautia.

The Root of All Disorder: Philautia

Philautia, as Maximus describes it, corresponds to irrational self-love. It’s not selfishness in the obvious sense or the crude self-centeredness that any man can recognize and condemn in himself but something far more subtle, far more pervasive, and far more difficult to uproot precisely because it does not always present itself as a vice.

“He who drives out self-love, the mother of the passions, will with God's help easily rid himself of the rest, such as anger, irritation, rancor and so on.

But he who is dominated by self-love is overpowered by the other passions, even against his will. Self-love is the passion of attachment to the body.”
— St. Maximus the Confessor, 400 texts on Love2

The important thing to note is that, according to St. Maximus, philautia is not another sin that you need to add to the list of sins you’re currently fighting against, but the root of all other disorders, the sin that breeds all sins. This is why it’s so powerful to understand how to fight directly against it, so that you actually address the root cause of your disorders, not the symptoms.

How the Passions Are Organized

In his work, the Four Hundred Chapters on Love, St. Maximus explains that the passions are not just a random catalogue of human failures, and that they have a structure —a genealogy. At the base of that structure sits philautia, irrational self-love, specifically attachment to the body as a self-enclosed unit, as if the self were its own origin and end.

From philautia flow three general passions: gluttony, avarice, and vainglory. From those three, every other passion grows.

“Overeating and gluttony cause licentiousness. Avarice and self-esteem cause one to hate one’s neighbor. Self-love, the mother of vices, is the cause of all these things.

Self-love is an impassioned, mindless love for one’s body. Its opposite is love and self-control. A man dominated by self-love is dominated by all the passions.”
— St. Maximus the Confessor, 400 texts on Love

It’s important to note that Maximus does not condemn self-love altogether. Rightly ordered love of self (in God, through God, toward God) is not philautia. Philautia is the love of self as a closed system, the self that does not refer itself to anything beyond itself.

How Philautia Manifests Itself

As we said, philautia does not usually present itself as obvious selfishness, but rather as reasonable, often justifiable self-protection, legitimate comfort, earned reward, and personal preference. In practice, the manifestaion of philautia might look like this:

• The man who consistently prioritizes his own comfort over the demands of his vocation. For example, the husband who chooses to watch a sports game during the weekend instead of spending time with his kids under the apparently valid pretext of needing rest or some time alone. In the accumulated small decisions that define a life, philautia presents itself as choosing our own preferences over sacrifice or service.

• The man whose spiritual life is organized around what he gets from it: consolation, peace, “nice” emotions, or a sense of being right with God, rather than around love of God Himself.

• The man who is generous in public and privately resentful about the cost.

• The man who justifies sexual sin because it makes him feel nice, go to sleep easier, or simply comforts him somehow.

• The man who has made his own peace, his own stability, his own emotional equilibrium the organizing value of his household, so that his wife and children unconsciously have to arrange themselves around his moods.

• The man who mistakes the absence of obvious vice for genuine virtue, because he has never interrogated the self-referential logic that governs his daily decisions.

• The man who justifies sinful or disordered actions under the pretext of health, caring for himself, “looking out for number one”, or not wanting to be taken advantage of.

All of these are rooted in philautia, as all of them are different branches of a tree that starts with a disordered love of oneself.

It’s possible that you’ve recognized yourself in one of the earlier examples, but the question that naturally arises is: if philautia generates all the other passions, what dislodges it?

Thankfully, St. Maximus doesn’t just provide us with a general diagnosis of the genealogy of sin, but he goes on to list specifically how philautia generates all other passions (lust, gluttony, etc.), and most importantly, to explain and prescribe the one movement that directly attacks philautia at its root and that will allow you to start making serious progress in breaking free from all other vices.

Read more

This is the first installment of a series of 2 articles titled St Thomas Aquinas on the Daughters of Lust: A systematic breakdown of how lust affects the will and intellect.

Part 2 drops the 4th of June, 2026.

A common misconception that keeps many enslaved to sexual sin is that they think that it’s exclusively a private matter. They believe that lustful actions do not cause any harm beyond the individual spiritual life, and thus, on some level, they think it’s “not that bad” to engage in sexually disordered actions.

The problem with this view is that it ignores the very tangible consequences that persistent sexual sin has on the will and intellect. St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologiae, identifies what he calls the “eight daughters of lust”1, eight negative effects that sexual immorality has on the will and intellect. Four of these “daughters” correspond to the intellect, and four correspond to the will.

Anecdotically, it’s easy to see the truth in Aquinas’ theology: you have probably encountered at least some men who are intelligent, capable, well-intentioned and otherwise disciplined, but whose judgment and willpower collapses consistently in certain areas of their lives, usually when it comes to acting chastely or controlling their sexual urges. These are men who seem to have their lives together, and yet, when it comes to sexual immorality, they have some pitch black blind spots that lead to them justifying their sin or simply ignoring the incoherent way in which they are behaving.

These blind spots are caused by the four daughters of lust that affect the intellect, which we’ll analyze in this article. In the next installment of this series, we’ll take a look at the remaining four daughters, which are the ones that affect the will.

The goal of this series is to help you run a more honest and unbiased self-diagnosis, and to help you understand just how deeply sexual sin affects you, so that you will have more reasons for fighting against it. Towards the end of this article, I’ll also share some practical resources to defeat pornography and other forms of sexual immorality.

Lust Is Not a Private Sin

As mentioned earlier, it’s important to begin by understanding that sexual sin is not private, in the sense that it’s not self-contained. It’s not just a personal weakness that doesn’t bleed into the rest of your life. The premise that defeats this assumption is that a human is an integrated whole, and just like your physical health affects your mental health, so too spiritual disorder causes intellectual disorder, for example. In that sense, we need to understand that the will and the intellect are not isolated faculties —and no section of your life is completely isolated.

Disorders in one faculty or area create more disorders in other areas. Sexual sin doesn’t “stay in its lane”, it wrecks havoc in all other areas of your life, by clouding your intellect and lessening your willpower.

The specific way in which lustful actions affect the intellect is as follows:

The 4 Daughters of Lust that Affect the Intellect

These “four daughters” are consequences that persistent sexual sin has on your intellect. Think of them as blind spots that appear when you keep engaging in sexually immoral behavior.

• Blindness of mind: This is defined as the inability to think with clarity about God, one’s own life, and one’s obligations. Blindness of mind is the effect by which the right knowledge of spiritual things is prevented. The man who cannot pray seriously, for example, is often not spiritually dry but sexually disordered.
  Example: A man who habitually consumes pornography can still “know” religious facts intellectually, but in practice he becomes incapable of perceiving the deeper realities of what grace, repentance, or chastity actually means for him. The consequences of this is that prayer feels flat, Scripture doesn’t penetrate, and even serious spiritual warnings seem unreal or irrelevant.

• Rashness: This is a collapse of deliberation, or, in plain terms, acting without thinking. This occurs because there is a connection between habitual lust and impulsive decision-making in other areas of life. After all, a man who can’t control his sexual impulses will be less capable of controlling his other impulses, making him more emotional, reactive, and prone to acting without weighing the consequences of his actions.
  Example: A man sees a “quick” path to gratification (a message, an unsupervised situation, a click he tells himself is harmless) and moves immediately, without consulting conscience, prayer, or seeking counsel, because the potential pleasure has already fixed his attention and weakened careful judgment of what spiritual good is at stake.

• Thoughtlessness/lack of consideration: Thoughtlessness is similar to rashness so I’ll do my best to explain why it’s distinct from the other daughters of lust. Rashness means acting impulsively without allowing space for deliberation, whereas thoughtlessness means a lack of intentionality in your choices, failing to examine the consequences rightly and an inability to properly weigh the importance of the matter. Think of it this way: rashness is when you hit click on an immoral picture right away before counsel and deliberation; thoughtlessness is when you don’t even consider the consequences properly in the first place. They are closely linked together, but they are fundamentally different.
  Example: After noticing an urge or temptation, a man doesn’t slow down to examine what’s happening (What am I choosing? What will this lead to? Is this compatible with virtue and his duties?). He fails to reflect because his intellect is drifting.

• Inconstancy: Inconstancy appears as a vice similar to effeminacy, in the sense that it is an incapability of persisting in what sound reason has chosen and abandoning it under pressure.
  Example: A man makes a good resolution or commitment: “I’m done; I’ll never go back to watching porn,” but when the next strong trigger arrives (stress, loneliness, late-night phone use), he ignores the earlier judgment and returns to the sin, not because he changed his mind about what was right, but because the lust-impulse overpowers the decision he previously chose and understood.

As you can see, lust is not something “harmless” or isolated. Sexual immorality is, in fact, a vice that clouds your intellect, makes you less capable of reasoning properly, and put bluntly, makes you dumber and blind to the consequences of your actions.

It’s quite interesting, when you think about it: why do you think that so many obviously erroneous ideologies are so widespread today? Why do you think that there is so many people who seem to have no common sense?

As we’ve seen, in a culture in which sexual immorality is the norm, the natural —and expected— consequence is that people’s intellects will be clouded, and thus they will lose the ability to reason properly, becoming more susceptible to propaganda, lack of emotional self-control, and thus it’ll be easier for dangerous ideologies to spread.

The Good News

I’m not sharing all this to try and make you feel guilty or hopeless, but simply as a theological and psychological theory that will help you in your fight against sexual immorality. In fact, I believe this should, if anything, increase your hope, because now you see just how much better your life will be after quitting pornography and sexually immoral behavior. By understanding that your intellect is clouded, you can now see how much brighter a life of chastity is.

Because the good news is that if lust produces these effects systematically, then chastity reverses them. When you start practicing chastity and purifying your life, you’ll gain the opposite virtues to the vices that lust causes: understanding (the virtue opposite blindness of mind), counsel (the virtue opposite rashness), sound judgment (the virtue opposite thoughtlessness), and constancy (the virtue opposite inconstancy).

Gaining custody of your sexual life does not merely make you feel better, it —literally— makes you smarter! Your intellect clears. Your judgment improves. Your prayer life becomes possible again. You gain wisdom and understanding.

The same faculties that were degraded by the vice are restored by the contrary virtue.

On a Practical Note

We’ve seen just how deeply sexual immorality affects you and how important it is to purify your intellect. I can also tell you, from experience, that the theory we just examined is undeniably true. My life has changed dramatically ever since I started living chastely. It’s one of those things that you likely won’t even believe until you’ve experienced it yourself, but it’s as if you had been living with a veil over your eyes that lifts as soon as you clean up your life, allowing you to see the world clearly and understand profound things better.

If you want to think more clearly, lead more effectively, pray more seriously, and govern your household with authority, quitting porn and sexual immorality is the place to start. Not because sexual purity is the whole or end goal of the Christian life, but because its absence makes the rest of the Christian life progressively harder to live.

Practical Resources to Help You Quit

I’ve written lots of articles about quitting sexual immorality in this blog, which I’ll link at the end of the article, but to save you some time, the main resource I always recommend is Relay, a Christian app designed specifically for overcoming pornography and sexual sin. It provides structured accountability, evidence-based protocols, and a community of men fighting the same battle.

There’s a ton of positive testimonials of men who have found freedom from pornography addiction, masturbation, and other forms of sexual immorality with the help of the structured, evidence-based protocol that Relay offers. Many men (even some close friends) have also told me personally it made the difference after other methods failed.

If you have been trying other methods and they haven’t worked, I recommend you give this one a try and see if it helps you. You can get a 7-day free trial with the code AETERNUM:

Try Relay for free here

The Man You Could Be

Maybe after reading this you notice some of the blind spots that sexual immorality has caused in your own intellect, or maybe you don’t. Whatever is the case, I want to encourage you to genuinely pursue chastity. The clean, sharp intellect that chastity produces is one of many reasons why you should absolutely prioritize quitting pornography, masturbation, and sexual immorality as a whole, but it’s not even the most important one.

We live in a spiritual universe, in which our actions have more consequences than we can see with our eyes. Every single evil thing you do has a spiritual consequence, beyond the psychological consequences that sin also carries with it.

This is why Christ warns us so strongly against sins of the flesh:

If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.
— Matthew 5:29

No sin is “meaningless”. No sin is private. Sexual sin definitely isn’t. We need to face the harsh reality of the evil it contains, because only then will we understand why it’s so critical to quit.

Beware, brother, if you do not be converted now, you may never be converted.
— St. Alphonsus Liguori

Do not postpone this. Do not brush it off. Take it seriously. Do whatever you need to do to purify your life. Work to order your life towards all that’s good, beautiful, and true, and be radical in rejecting sin. Give it all to Christ, and let Him be your strength. Help Him too, by making an effort, by taking this purpose seriously, and by doing whatever it takes to get rid of these sins that have led so many men to intellectual disorders, but mainly —and much worse— to eternal damnation.

God is with you, you are in my prayers, and surely too in the prayers of all the men who fight this battle alongside you.

May God bless you and keep you.

Ad Maiora Nati Sumus,

Juan

PART 2:

Additional Resources

Thank you for reading!

If you enjoyed this post and could leave a like or comment it would be greatly appreciated, as it will help my work reach more people.

Also, if you liked this article, you’ll love my book.