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Question

Good evening father Angelo,
My name is C. and I am contacting you to thank you for the service you provide. I would like to share with you a personal thought.  For years I have been a slave to pornography and masturbation, living with a constant sense of guilt, hatred for life, pornography has robbed me of everything.  I have looked in vain for a human solution, exercising willpower, trying to understand the phenomenon scientifically, participating in addiction forums, but nothing worked.  A friend of mine suggested that I visit this site of yours for other reasons, and while I was looking into other discussions I saw you mention that the only way of getting over these sins is to let Christ attract you more.  That’s what I had been missing for years, something, or rather someone who attracted me more than sin.  I opened up to the Rosary, eucharistic adoration, frequent confession, also immediately after having sinned, and this has allowed me not to lose the grace of God and to remain in communion with Him. The negative feelings are now being replaced by joy, peace, moreover I have joined the neocatechumenal group, which has given me a chance to measure up to the Word of God and to meditate on it.  I am so very grateful for your service and I thank the Lord for not abandoning me.

Priest’s answer

Dear C.
1. Your email filled me with joy and I believe it will have the same effect on many of our readers and also in those who are still slaves to pornography: your testimony clears a path of hope for them too, and will encourage them to follow your example, maybe just out of curiosity at first, to see “if it works”, as we sometimes say.

2. On several occasions I recalled that our lady at Fatima asked everyone to pray the Rosary every day.
That was in the middle of a world conflict.
She asked to pray the Rosary to receive the gift of peace.
We all need peace: in ourselves, in our relationships, in our families, and in our communities.

3. What is so special about the Rosary that produces such great fruits?
The Rosary is not just a prayer.
It is a Christian prayer.
And the Christian prayer is set apart from all the others that can be found in various other religions in that in all other religions a prayer is either an invocation of God’s help, or is used to give praise to God (which is undoubtedly a good thing to do), whereas the Christian prayer is not just an invocation of God’s help, and is not just to give praise or a blessing, it is also a way to bring God’s presence into our life.

4. With the Rosary in particular we bring Jesus into our own personal life.  We bring him in with the same divine and salvific omnipotence with which he acted two thousand years ago in Palestine.
It is not just about remembering what he did.
Whenever we mention, even just at an intellectual level, what he said and did then, he repeats that right here and now with the very same power in our favor.

5. I believe I can say that when we start praying the Rosary by making the sign of the cross, all the demons join to say what they cried out to Jesus when he went into the region of the Gadarenes: “What have you to do with us, Son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the appointed time?” (Mt 8,29).
Or what they told him as he entered the synagogue at Nazareth: “Ha! What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are – the Holy One of God!” (Lk 4,34).
And Jesus rebukes the demon the same way as when he commanded him : “«Be quiet! Come out of him!» Then the demon threw the man down in front of them and came out of him without doing him any harm” (Lk 4,35).
So with the Rosary we bring the very presence of Jesus into our life.
It’s a liberating presence, a presence that drives away the demons, their temptations, obsessions and vexations.

6. Viewing pornography acts as a kind of bombardment within a person, leaving one broken and devastated inside, as was prophetically proclaimed by Jeremiah (“My eyes torment my soul at the sight of all the daughters of my city.” (Lam 3,51). Conversely, the presence of Christ – obtained through the Rosary – routs out the devil with his machinations, so that at the end of this prayer we find ourselves whole, saved, firmly in possession of our soul and of all the goods it guards.
Don Bosco rightly said that the Rosary is the devil’s bankruptcy.
And when one prays the Rosary, and does it so daily – maybe even more than once a day – it truly plunders him, torments and ruins him to no end!

7. At the same time as he routes the devil away, Jesus breathes his fragrance on us, and draws us to him.
In other words he produces in us an attraction much more powerful than the senses can provide, an attraction that we just can’t do without.
He renews more or less in us Saint Augustine’s own experience, when he said: “Thou didst become fragrant, and I drew in my breath and panted after Thee. I tasted, and I hunger and thirst.  Thou touchedst me, and I burned for Thy embrace” (Confessions, Book 10, Chapter 27).
The proof of it is the fact that those who habitually pray the Rosary every day, feel a void when they happen to skip a day, as if they had missed something important, precious, as if some special blessing and protection was not following and guarding them.

8. That’s the secret of such fascination.
That is why Heaven recommends it so often.
Whoever experiences this fascination manages very easily to stay away from pornography. Indeed, he begins to feel it like smoke in his eyes and can’t stand it anymore.  He regards it as a true enemy that could soon rob him of everything. He feels that he can master it, he defeats it as he wishes, and despises it.

I thank you for your beautiful testimony.
I hope many others will “open up to the Rosary” as you did, and by doing so they will open up to Jesus Christ, to his Word, to eucharistic adoration and to an active ecclesial life, following your example.
I thank you again and I bless you.
Father Angelo