By John Zmirak, Chronicles, October 29, 2025
John Zmirak is author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism and many other books.
I sometimes joke that getting schooled by Irish Catholics taught me that sexual intercourse, like killing, is always bad—except in special circumstances, like self-defense and marriage. That’s a dire way of explaining the cultural hangover of a nation that endured the Irish Potato Famine and had to cram the idea of chastity into everybody’s heads, lest the island again get overpopulated and end up starving. (There were more mouths to feed in Ireland in 1848, when the famine started, than there are even today.) That trauma affected the Irish profoundly, and what had once been a rather libertine nation became one of the most strait-laced and moralistic in Christendom, up through the 1970s.
But my grim little wisecrack is not entirely wrong. We are made with powerful passions, corrupted by the Fall. They’re powerful because they’re the key to survival. They’re dangerous because they’re fallen. Give in willy-nilly to those powerful passions, and you end up in sin and suffering. Pretend that they don’t exist, or can be wholly suppressed, and you’re playing with plutonium, pretending to live in a world that vanished when man fell. …
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