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Question

Dear Father Angelo,

I wanted  to share with you some amazing news. Last year I managed to graduate from college and,since the past spring, I have been hired as a computer programming intern. As my girlfriend had also been working as a teacher for a couple of years, in July I asked her to marry me, after 4 1/2 years of dating. 

We don’t currently have a stable job, we are quite young (I am 27 years old, and she is 26) and we have never lived together. I am full of joy for how this relationship, by God’s grace, has been centered in purity, listening to each other, sharing values and projects.

After the proposal some unpleasant events occured, including the death of an aunt of hers whom she was very fond of, that has left us a bit unprepared. Now, however, things are slowly going back to normal: we have found a house to move into when we will be married, and a nice location where we will celebrate our wedding with families and friends. We even settled on a date: at the beginning we thought we would be forced to put off getting married more than expected (we wanted to get married in spring), but finally a new availability popped up for both the church and the location: May 13th, Feast of Our Lady of Fatima.

During these years I have been able to really discover the beauty of marriage, lived as God intended, so much so that I fell in love with this vocation. For many people our story might seem atypical, since, when we shared our decision to get married and that we had to figure out how to find a house to inhabit only after the wedding, some friends asked why we wouldn’t live together straight away. For so many people living together before getting married is “crucial,” and it saddens me a little.

I am writing you this email because I usually read your articles, and they are helping me to build a solid doctrinal basis for growing in the faith. I just wanted to share with you the good news of my engagement, because it feels great to make you participate in the joy I carry in my heart. I really appreciate what you continue to do and I assure you my prayers. I ask you to please keep me and my future bride in your prayers too, so that we may always be able to entrust ourselves to the One who has placed us next to each other and to His Mother, on whose memory we will unite our lives, to resist all temptations and assaults against the family that are becoming more and more incessant.

With affection,

Matteo

Praised be Jesus Christ

Priest’s answer

Dear Matteo,

1. I am glad to read what you wrote, especially about your willingness to live in chastity during  your engagement.

I am sure that you will never have to regret trusting in God’s teachings.

In fact, I trust that you will experience great blessings.

Blessings, according to Scripture, are an outpouring of grace and of gifts.

2. I like to recall what St. John Bosco said about purity.

He reminded that it is a virtue so dear to God that, in every age, he was rewarded for it with the most stupendous wonders.

That is why in Noah’s time, when “all flesh was corrupted” (cf. Gen. 6:11) with impurity, He saved Noah and his family by keeping them in the ark because of their righteous life.

That means that, thanks to purity, God also delivers from many misfortunes.

3. When again humanity had become corrupt in the days of Lot, Abraham’s cousin, God saved Lot and his family from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Sadly, shortly thereafter his wife died because she had disobeyed the order she was given not to look back. 

Don Bosco said that God allowed this death to teach everyone a lesson about the need to guard the health of our soul.

He added, “The eyes are two doors through which the devil most frequently enters.”

He also enters through many other doors, but the one he most frequently enters through is the eyes.

4. Going further along in sacred history, Don Bosco recalled the beautiful testimony of Joseph who, in order to not consent to an insistent impure temptation, accepted to be slandered and ended up in prison. “But wisdom (God) did not forsake him” (Wis. 10:14).

And God got Joseph out of that prison by rewarding him in such a stupendous and grand manner that He gave him the office of viceroy and superintendent of all the goods of Egypt.

It came easy for Don Bosco to recall in this connection the promise made in Holy Scripture, “All good things came to me along with her” (Wis. 7:11).

5. He then recalled the story of Judith, who was able to bring a striking victory by overcoming the enemy army, thanks to her upright conduct after the death of her husband.

And along with Judith, he remembered Susanna who also chose to be slandered and condemned to death rather than caving in to the lust of two old judges. In extremis, God saved her through Daniel’s work by overturning the judgment against the judges.

6. Don Bosco also recalled the three Jewish boys, who did not want to defile themselves in any way with pagan practices and were found unharmed in the midst of the flames of a furnace by virtue of an angel assisting them.

7. And saying “Let’s go on, that this is not enough,” he highlighted that when the time of the incarnation came, God chose to be received by the purest and holiest of all girls.

The reason Jesus conversed with children and caressed them was because of their purity. He added that unless we become like children thanks to purity, we will not enter the kingdom of heaven.

8. He wondered then why God favored St. John among all the apostles and why He had given him the privilege of laying his head on his breast at the Last Supper and giving him in trust his mother, Mary (“the greatest creature that ever came out of the hands of God and similar to whom no one will ever come out,”), he concluded: “But why such preference? Why? Because, O dear young people, St. John had a special claim to Jesus’ affection thanks to his virginal purity.”

9. Finally, he embraced the interpretation of the Holy Fathers to the passage in Revelation where we read of some souls in heaven “who sing a new song, so beautiful and so sweet that they cannot bear so much sweetness” which no one else but them and the Lamb can sing. He in fact said that “It is those souls who have preserved the beautiful virtue of purity”.

10. I also wish you to always keep your mutual love pure.

You will find yourselves preserved from much evil and you will be rewarded as those whom God has rewarded in Holy Scripture, precisely because of their purity.

I thank you for your witness and I bless you and remember you in prayer.

Father Angelo