What once was confined to the seedy 42nd St./Eighth Ave. environs their parents knew, is now but a few strokes of a keypad away – as most mid-teens know.

According to 2006 statistics from Top TenREVIEWS (publisher of Internet product reviews), 90% of eight-to-16-year-olds have viewed pornography online. In the United States alone, porn revenue ($13.2 billion) exceeds the combined revenues of ABC, CBS and NBC and is larger than the combined revenues of all professional football, baseball and basketball franchises.

The over 4.2 million pornographic websites occupy 12% of the Internet. Yet like the proverbial elephant-in-the-living-room addictions well-known to those in 12-step programs, denial about the XXX in America’s uptime is an environmental issue of dramatic proportions.

Pornography is a moral plague in the heart of the American home. And it is highly addictive. Like hypertension – the so-called “silent killer” – it is not detected unless carefully monitored, often after the damage is done. Unlike other scourges, however, it can be quarantined – at least at home – by the flick of a switch.

The red-light district in Hamburg, Germany, where prostitution is legal.

As with all addictions, those “hooked” on pornography know no distinctions by age or life profession, though the population of users remains overwhelmingly male (72%). They suffer in silence, often without the knowledge of their spouses or closest friends.

Yet there is nothing solitary or private about the vice. For every anonymous viewer there are also real human victims, often children. Repeatedly, those whose exposed bodies feed the lust of strangers are mentally raped by them. Pornography shatters the innocence of thousands of young people for profit, destroys marriages, enslaves users in fetishes and addictions and leads to numerous emotional problems.

And there is no end in sight. Recently, a group of scientists in Britain suggested that “science and technology” may render pornography obsolete, with robotic partners becoming available in about 20 years. Their prophecy grossly understates the reality that is already here.

Pornographic images – especially those allowing various forms of contact with “live” partners (so-called “cyber-sex”) – are, in reality, just that: images or replicas. Aside from the unwholesome nature of the interaction, which separates the sexual from the personal (no one really knows for sure who the other party is), the face-to-face, body-to-body contact which humanizes sexual intimacy is replaced with plastic screens and buttons. Pornography is a form of robotic sex and, therefore, grossly inhuman.

Unfortunately, plastic screens cannot protect the abusers and the abused any more than plastic charge cards can insulate spenders from accumulating debts into bankruptcy. Yet the consequences of the abuse are real. Many of the victims of pornography are minors and vulnerable adults who are exploited by promises of quick and easy money. Like those who have stumbled into the clutches of that more ancient ring of vice that fallen humanity has institutionalized as prostitution, the techno-age victims are subject to all the collateral damages from an opportunistic drug culture, disease, blackmail, extortion and early death.

What movie classics like “Taxi Driver,” or even “Hardcore,” have revealed about the horrific, poisoned tentacles of institutionalized prostitution could as well be said of the Internet porn industry, perhaps even more so, as poignantly portrayed in “Boogie Nights.”

Cybersex, in effect, makes prostitutes not only of the purveyors but also the purchasers, blurring the distinction between who is buying and who is selling. What remains common to both pornography and prostitution is that it is human beings who are being bought, sold and devoured as if their bodies were commodities like slaughtered animals – whose flesh and body parts, ironically, provide inspiration for some of the language used in the trades.

In the face of this plague, where is the outrage? Some folks may cite an aversion to the Bible-brandishing hell-and-damnation sermonizing that often accompanies pulpit-talk about pornography. Others may feel it hypocritical to denounce any behaviors which they themselves at times have succumbed to.

Or is there something vaguely voyeuristic in being even slightly curious about salacious publications and websites? Ignorance is bliss, as the saying goes. But sometimes, like postponing the dreaded colonoscopy, it is what we choose not to know that can kill us.
Pope Paul VI never explicitly mentioned pornography in Humanae Vitae. But it is an obvious consequence to be foreseen when the forever-love of a truly “holistic” sexuality is sundered into its purely material components. To dwell a moment on this thought, the vision of human sexuality that is joyfully announced by Catholic teaching includes a holistic reverence for its totality, its depth and full integration within the human personality.

Human sexuality – like everything else “human” – must encompass what human beings really are: incarnate spirits. To separate “sex” from a person who is an image of God is to deprive sexuality of its ultimate orientation: the ecstatic eternity of heaven, which is the joyful presence of God.

Human sexuality is a mystery which has long tempted humanity’s curiosity: to seek to separate its immediately desirable parts from its promised joys that must be waited for. The desire to “have it all now” is precisely the original temptation that leads to a destruction of the gift that keeps giving only when it is free to be what it really is – as God gives it.
Forty years after Humanae Vitae reminded us of the integrity of human sexuality and warned about the consequences of tampering with it, are we any better off now that we can watch its ruination on a plastic screen?
The first paragraph of this article identified pornography as an urgent “environmental” issue, a kind of moral pestilence. So what can be done about a plague?

Not more than a decade ago, efforts to change public policy so as to inhibit the increase of nicotine addiction and the effects of secondary tobacco-smoke were laughed off as unrealistic. Now even the same young people gracefully embrace the new abstinence from smoking whom, we are told, could never learn to conform their sexual lives to the call of chastity.

Today, however, any hopes of curtailing the plague of pornography must first cut through the wall of denial about the extent of its presence in our midst. Once recognized, the facts about its negative impact are relatively easy to demonstrate. Those who accept the first premise – that the problem is serious and urgent – and wish to know the facts can do no better to inform themselves than to read the pastoral letter of Bishop Paul S. Loverde (Bought With a Price: Pornography and the Attack on the Living Temple of God) at http://www.arlingtondiocese.org/documents/BoughtPrice_F.pdf.

Msgr. Scharfenberger holds degrees in Moral Theology and in Civil and Canon Law. He has served on the Diocesan Review Board for Sexual Abuse of Minors by Clergy and is currently pastor of St. Matthias parish, Ridgewood, and Promoter of Justice for the Diocese of Brooklyn.