"From purity springs that singular beauty that permeates every sphere of reciprocal common life between human beings and allows them to express in it the simplicity and depth, the cordiality and unrepeatable authenticity of personal trust." Source: Pope St. John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them, Pauline Books and Media, 2006. [...]
"If purity disposes man to 'keep his own body with holiness and reverence,' as we read in 1 Thessalonians 4:3-5, piety as a gift of the Holy Spirit seems to serve purity in a particular way by making the human subject sensitive to the dignity that belongs to the human body in virtue of the [...]
"The Apostle, however, goes further: according to him, a sin against the body is also a 'profaning of the temple.' What is decisive for the dignity of the human body, in Paul’s eyes, is not only the human spirit, thanks to which man is constituted as a personal subject, but much more so the supernatural [...]
"Purity as a Christian virtue is revealed in the Pauline letters as an effective way of detaching oneself from what is a fruit of the concupiscence of the flesh in the human heart. Abstaining 'from unchastity,' which implies keeping the body 'with holiness and reverence,' allows us to deduce that according to the Apostle’s teaching, [...]
"In the first place, purity is an “ability” or, in the traditional language of anthropology and ethics, an attitude. And in this sense it is a virtue. When this ability, that is, virtue, leads to abstaining 'from unchastity,' it does so because the man who possesses it knows 'how to keep his own body with [...]
"Purity consists above all in holding back the impulses of sense-desire, which has as its object what is bodily and sexual in man. Purity is a variant of the virtue of temperance." Source: Pope St. John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them, Pauline Books and Media, 2006.
"Christ opposed it (external moral purity) in a radical manner: nothing makes a man unclean 'from the outside'; no 'material' dirtiness makes a man impure in a moral sense. No washing, not even ritual washing, is by itself suited to produce moral purity. Moral purity has its wellspring exclusively in man’s interior: it comes from [...]
"The one who lives in this way, 'according to the flesh,' that is, who subjects himself – even if not altogether consciously, nevertheless effectively – to the threefold concupiscence, particularly to the concupiscence of the flesh, ceases to be capable of this freedom for which 'Christ has set us free'; he also ceases to be [...]
"In fact, Christ realized and showed the freedom that finds its fullness in love, the freedom thanks to which we 'serve one another'; in other words: the freedom that becomes the source of new 'works' and of 'life' according to the Spirit. The antithesis and in some way the negation of this freedom takes place [...]
"Purity is a requirement of love. It is the dimension of the inner truth of love in man’s 'heart.'” Pope John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them, Pauline Books and Media, 2006.