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Question

Good evening, Father,

and how can I make him understand this value? I mean chastity… should we perhaps read something together? I am praying but unfortunately I am also impatient and afraid.

He absolutely does not insist with his demands, he lets me decide, but I feel him distant, he tells me that he is happy with me while I instead feel that he is missing something.

Maybe I am not able to make him enjoy the beauty of chastity because deep down I   too struggle.

He is a good man, Father, he intends to find a woman and be faithful to her, I am sure of that.

My position is considered to be that of someone who plays hard to get, who wants to have power over him… how do you make it clear that it is for the good of our union?

I am afraid that our story will end, I am also beginning to fear that he may be interested in other acquaintances.

In this period I am not happy, I cannot convey to him the joy of being together but rather the fear that this will not work.

Thank you for your attention.

Have a good evening.


Answer 

Dear Daniela,

It’s been a long time since you wrote to me. Today I got to your email.

I apologize for the delay.

1. You tell me that your boyfriend has not yet understood the value of purity and mistakes it as a will to dominate him or as a subterfuge to make him want you.

2. To put every touchy root to flight it would be enough to tell him that it is the Lord who wants it.

Not only that, but that he only wants it for our good, so that our love is always pure, lasting, ever growing and respectful of the person, of his body, of his integrity.

We read in Sacred Scripture: “Following exactly the way prescribed for you by the Lord, your God, that you may live and prosper, and may have long life in the land which you are to occupy” (Dt 5,33).

3. The law of the Lord is ordered precisely to this: to give life to everything, even to our love.

While turning aside to the right or to the left (with sin) only makes it miss the real breath.

It is ordered to make you happy. When purity is lost before marriage, there is no great gain at all.

Observance of the law of the Lord is also the condition that allows our angel to keep the engagement and marriage intact.

4. I think that any young man when he seriously begins a love story is happy to find himself in front of a girl who has kept her integrity, who has not given herself up to anyone.

And that she has kept her virginity, a symbol of the integrity of her heart and of all her affection, only for the one who will give himself totally to her with the grace and commitment of marriage.

5. Yesterday was the feast of Don Orione (May 16). I reread some things from his life.

I liked the first episode I read so much that I reported it in Church.

It was Don Orione himself who told it.

Here it is in his own words: “It was in the year 1848, and the soldiers on their way to war were passing through Pontecurone, my town. A troop stopped in the village and some soldiers went to eat at an inn where my mother worked as a waitress. Seeing that girl serve quickly at the table, some of those soldiers took the liberty of saying a few impudent words to her…

She slapped the nearest soldier and silently continued her work. Later they told her that the man she hit was called Vittorio D’Urion. My father then spent eight years as a soldier. Back in Tortona, he went to Pontecurone to see if that waitress was still free, thinking to himself: “She must be an upright girl!”.

6. I think your boyfriend can also say about you and your desire to keep yourself pure: she is upright, she is reliable, I can trust her.

Precisely for this reason he will respect you more. He will consider you a precious treasure not to be missed.

I think it won’t be long until he considers it a true grace from the Lord to have found a girl who desires to guard her purity and who also helps him overcome temptations and learn faithfulness.

7. Ask Our Lady, who is “the mother of fair love, and of fear, and of knowledge, and of holy hope” (Sir 24:18) for the grace that your boyfriend can open his eyes, trust God and consider the purity of your love as the most beautiful treasure that the Lord has placed in your hands as the secret of your success in everything.

Ask her with the Holy Rosary recited every day also for this reason.

I assure you of my prayers for you two, I wish you well and I bless you.

Father Angelo


Translated by Chiara P.