April 7, 2010

Deacon spells out the detrimental effects of porn

By Anna Maria Basquez

When Hugh Hefner began Playboy magazine, he started with $600, bought the rights to one photograph, and by his first publication, made $10,000, Deacon Chet Ubowski told an audience at a recent Byzantine Wednesday event.

Pornography, as a whole, has become a $14 billion industry.

It’s one that Deacon Ubowski has seen in computers confiscated by law enforcement agencies and analyzed by Colorado Bureau of Investigations in his work. 

“If you look at people who are engaged in pornographic acts, you see that they don’t look at each other,” Deacon Ubowski said. “It becomes a selfish act. That’s what the pornography industry wants you to do. That’s part of the addictive (nature). It’s really a huge problem, not only in our relationships with others, but certainly in our relationship with God.”

Deacon Ubowski spoke on sexual addictions and pornography March 10 at Holy Protection of the Mother of God Byzantine Catholic Church in Denver during their series on addictions.  

At least four out of six Web sites worldwide are pornographic sites and roughly 30 million people a week are logging onto Web sites with pornography, Deacon Ubowski said. New studies suggest up to 34 percent of those looking at pornographic sites are women, he said.

“If you’re drinking, others might be able to smell it. You might stumble. You might have slurred vision. If you’re addicted to pornography,” he noted, “what’s the sign? What shows?”
The signs are a lot less detectable, he said.

Deacon Ubowski is a liaison for the Romans VI group that started primarily for men with sexual addictions at St. Frances of Cabrini Parish in Littleton.  

Signs that someone may be suffering a sex or pornography addiction may be visible to a close friend or spouse. They include the person spending excessive time on the computer. That person may also become secretive and withdrawing in emotion. The most common sign is abandoning activity in the conjugal relationship, Deacon Ubowski said. Another indicator is if the person requests role-playing or unusual sexual encounters that “you don’t know where those thoughts or ideas originated from.”

Christopher Stefanick, director of Youth, Young Adult and Campus Ministry for the Archdiocese of Denver, elaborated on the issue of pornography after addressing it at a recent purity rally.

“As men look at one two-dimensional woman after another, they lose the ability to see a human being to be loved,” he said. “Instead, they learn to see only a ‘human doing’ to be used for their pleasure. It’s no wonder that 20 to 25 percent of women in college have experienced attempted or completed rape. They are hanging around a generation of men who have been raised on a steady diet of porn. Men who have forgotten what respect is, and what ‘no’ means. 

“The very thing that makes a man what he is, is on the line with porn: his ability to love, protect and uphold the dignity of the opposite sex,” Stefanick said. “God created us to give ourselves in life-giving love to others.  That calling, however it is lived out, is written on our very bodies. Porn destroys our ability to fulfill that fundamental calling as it turns us in on ourselves, making us sexually self-centered.”

Thirty-seven percent of teenage girls admit having sent a sexual text, e-mail or instant message, Stefanick said.

“Don’t do it,” he advised. “Think about what might happen with those pictures after the break up.”

The “Catechism of the Catholic Church” defines pornography as removing the real or related acts from the intimacy of partners, as in man and wife, to display them deliberately to third parties.

“The ‘Catechism’ goes on to say it offends against chastity, one of the virtues that we want to pursue … because it perverts the conjugal act of the intimate giving of spouses to each other,” Deacon Ubowski said.

Extreme sexual addiction has manifested itself in the examples of some serial killers, Deacon Ubowski pointed out. When addiction to pornography becomes a sexual addiction, “the only way to satisfy it is to get more and more of it … and more varied aspects,” Deacon Ubowski said.

He said those who suspect their spouse or loved one has been engaged in pornography should try to approach the person on the subject along with a friend or a family member there for support. He urged his audience to learn more about the theology of the body, which are classes taught regularly through Holy Protection and other parishes throughout the diocese.

“There’s no maybe” when it comes to whether a person is using pornography or not, Deacon Ubowski said. If they are, he advised they take it to a confessor and consider joining the Romans VI group at Church of the Risen Christ or St. Frances Cabrini parishes.

Other options include Sex Addicts Anonymous and sexual addiction telephone help lines. Most important, Deacon Ubowski said, is to appoint an accountability partner who can get software that notifies them each time the afflicted person signs on to a pornographic site. Parents can similarly monitor by available programs when their child sends a pornographic text or e-mail. Stefanick said one anti-porn site with facts and information is www.whodoesithurt.com.