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Pope Francis, a critic of fanaticism that sometimes made law in the Catholic Church, considers that culinary and sexual pleasure “are simply divine in nature”, in a volume of interviews published this Wednesday in Italy, informs AFP, according to Agerpres.
“The Church condemned inhuman, crude and vulgar pleasure, but always accepted human, sober and moral pleasure,” said the Sovereign Pontiff, answering questions from Carlo Petrini, Italian writer and gastronomy expert.
“The pleasure comes directly from God, it is not Catholic or Christian, or anything else, it is simply divine,” Pope Francis emphasized. “The pleasure of eating serves to keep us healthy when we eat, just as sexual pleasure is made to beautify love and guarantee the perpetuation of the species,” said the Sovereign Pontiff.
The Pope categorically opposes an “intolerant morality” that rejects the notion of pleasure, which has existed in the history of the Catholic Church and which constitutes “a misinterpretation of the Christian message.” That vision “has done enormous damage, which is still strongly felt today in some cases,” the Pope lamented.
“On the contrary, the pleasure of eating, like sexual pleasure, comes from God,” insisted the spiritual leader of the 1.3 billion Catholics around the world.
Volume of interviews with Pope Francis, published on Wednesday in Italy
In the new book, Pope Francis mentions in passing his unconditional admiration for the film “Babette’s Feast,” set in a 19th-century ultra-Puritan Danish Protestant community invited to a sumptuous banquet prepared by a French chef who won the lottery. “For me, it is a hymn to Christian mercy and love”, confessed the Sovereign Pontiff.
The new volume, which contains three interviews, is titled “Terra Futura, Conversations with Pope Francis on Integral Ecology” and was written by the founder of “slow food”, a concept created in the 1980s to oppose “food fast “.
The book focuses on Pope Francis’ extremely social vision of ecology, also highlighted in his encyclical “Laudato Si”, published in 2015.
Editing: Robert Kiss
