Pure, Purity, Impure, Impurity

See also: Desire (Good and Bad), Envy, Concupiscence, Chastity, celibacy, Sexuality, Sensuality, Lust.

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The Adulterous woman alone with Jesus - James Tissot

The concepts of purity and impurity can relate either to the ritual practices of the Jews (including those of Purification), or to the full preservation of chastity, or to the holy conjugal relations between spouses, without excess or disorder, oriented towards the total gift of oneself, one to the other, in God, or again to the uprightness of intention of a moral act.

In "The Gospel as it was revealed to me"     

• Purity of Heart and gaze of Mary.
• (Jesus): The value of purity is such that Satan first focused on leading me to impurity. He knows well that a fault of sensuality dismantles the Soul and makes it an easy prey for other faults. Satan put all his effort on this crucial point to overcome me.
• You shall not commit impurities: "Oh! you especially men, say: Who among you has never tasted this bread of ash and filth which is sensual satisfaction? Is lust only what drives you for an hour into the arms of a courtesan? Is not also lust the profanation of marriage with the spouse?"
• As his desperate mother begs him, Jesus speaks to the young leprous libertine who had an adulterous relation with the young woman of a client of his father. Jesus is sad: "And when you sinned, did you not think of your mother? You were mad enough not to remember that you had a mother on earth and that there was a God in Heaven. And if the leprosy had not appeared, you would never have remembered that you were offending God and your Neighbor? What have you done with your Soul... with your youth?" - "I was tempted..." - "Are you a child to ignore that this fruit is cursed? You would deserve to die without my mercy." (He still cures him of his leprosy).
  "I have performed the miracle because of this poor mother. But lust disgusts me so much that I am revolted. You cried out with fear and disgust of leprosy. For Me, my Soul cried out with disgust of lust. All miseries surround me, and for all I am the Savior. But I prefer to touch a dead man, a just one already decomposed in his flesh who was honest and is already in Peace with his spirit, than to approach a lustful man. I am the Savior, but I am the Innocent. (...) I understand that you would like something else from Me. But I am incapable of it. The ruin of a barely formed youth destroyed by passion troubled me more than if I had touched Death. Let us go to the sick. Unable, because of the nausea which strangles me, to be the Word, I will be the Salvation of those who hope in Me. Peace be with you."
  Indeed, Jesus is very pale, as if he were ill. He only regains his smile when he leans over sick children and the infirm lying on their stretchers. Then, he becomes Himself again(...)
• I insist on the value of purity. Chastity is always a source of lucidity for thought. Virginity refines and then maintains the sensitivity of intelligence and affections at a degree of perfection that only the one who is virgin experiences.
• Blessed are the pure Hearts, for they shall see God.
• Regarding becoming Co-redeemer, a glory to which even the Angels cannot attain (): Meanwhile, prepare yourselves for this destiny with purity of Heart and intention. The purer you are, the more you will understand. For impurity, of whatever kind, is always a smoke that clouds and weighs down sight and intelligence.
• Purity of gaze: Be pure. Begin to be so in your body to then move on to the spirit. Start with the five senses to then pass to the seven passions.
  Start with the eye: the sense of sight is king, it opens the way to the keenest and most complex of hungers. The eye sees the flesh of the woman and desires the flesh. The eye sees the opulence of the rich and desires the gold. The eye sees the power of those who govern and desires power.
  Have a peaceful, honest, moderate, pure eye, and you will have peaceful, honest, moderate, and pure desires. The purer your eye, the purer your Heart will be. Watch carefully over your eye, eager to discover tempting apples. Be chaste in your gaze if you want to be chaste in your body. If you have chastity of the flesh, you will have chastity of riches and of power. You will have all chastities and be friends of God. Do not fear being mocked if you are chaste. Fear only being the Enemies of God.
• Be humble, gentle, patient. This is how the world is conquered, not by Violence and force. Be strong and violent Against your vices, Uproot them, even if it means tearing your Heart apart. I told you a few days ago to watch over your gaze. But you do not know how to do it. I tell you Myself: it would be better to become Confessionals by tearing from your eyes full of cravings, rather than becoming lustful.         
• John is a pure being. Among all my Disciples, he is “the Pure.” His Soul is a flower in an angel’s body. He uses, to call Me, the words of his first master and asks me to give him Peace. But Peace, he has in himself by the purity of his life, and I loved him for this purity. It is to him that I entrusted my teachings, my secrets, and even the person who was dearest to me. (Mary)
  He was my first disciple, he loved me from the first instant he saw me. His Soul united with mine from the day he saw me walk along the Jordan and saw John the Baptist point me out. Even if he had not met me afterwards on my return from the desert, he would have sought me until he found me. Indeed, the one who is pure is humble and eager to learn in the science of God, and he goes, like water to the sea, toward those in whom he sees masters of Doctrine heavenly.
• Pure and impure: Jesus comes to Save the baby (Faustina (Fausta)) of the Roman Valeria. "But here a small group of Israelites feels the need to intervene: "How dare you approach strangers? They are corrupt, impure, and whoever approaches them becomes like them." Jesus reproaches their own hypocrisy, they who do business with these same Romans, and explains in detail what is pure or impure.
• Unclean foods among the Jews: "But then why have they been classified by us as impure?" Philip asks.
  "(...) There is a supernatural and a natural reason for this classification. The first is to teach the chosen people the way of life having before their spirit their election and the dignity of man, even in a common action such as eating.
  The savage feeds on everything. It is enough for him to fill his belly. The pagan, even if not savage, also eats everything, without thinking that overeating foments vices and tendencies that degrade man. Pagans even seek to reach that frenzy of pleasure which for them is almost a Religion (...)
  The son of the people of God must know how to control himself and by obedience and prudence perfect himself thinking about his origin and end: God and Heaven. The natural reason also commands not to excite the blood through foods that lead to passionate impulses unworthy of man.
  Carnal love itself is not forbidden to him, but he must always temper it by the freshness of the Soul that tends to Heaven. So it must be love and not sensuality that unites man with his companion in whom he sees his equal and not a female. But poor beasts are neither guilty of being pigs nor of the effects that pork flesh can eventually produce in the blood."
• (Following reproaches of Pharisees): The pure and the impure. It’s not the Food, but what comes out of the Heart: "What contaminates man is what is his own, only his own, generated and born from his self. That is, what he has in the Heart, and that from the Heart rises to the lips and the head and corrupts thought and speech and contaminates the whole man. It is from the Heart that come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false testimonies and blasphemies.
  It is from the Heart that come greed, vicious inclinations, pride, envies, anger, excessive appetites, guilty idleness.
  It is from the Heart that come the stirring to all Actions. And if the Heart is evil, the Actions will be evil as the Heart. All Actions: from idolatries to slanders without sincerity... All these evil things that go from inside to outside contaminate man, but not eating without washing hands."
• I told you how man is purified by a humble and sincere repentance. There is no sin that God does not forgive if the sinner is truly repentant. Have faith in Divine Goodness. If you could understand what this Goodness is, even if you had on you all the sins of the world, you would not flee far from God, but rather run to His feet because only the Most Good can forgive what man does not.
• To priests: You have the living example of what a breast that nurses the Word who becomes Flesh must be. This example is that of the Woman without original fault and without individual fault who bore me. Observe how pure the summit of Hermon still wrapped in the veil of winter snow is.

In other works of Maria Valtorta

Notebooks

• Commentary on "Acts 10:15": The Holy Spirit purifies non-believers who are men of good will: "What God has made pure, even if it keeps the appearance of impurity, is a Soul that seeks God with pure intentions. (...) Like the tide that covers this shore and uncovers the opposite shore that, too sandy, does not allow the flow to rise to purify and water it, the Holy Spirit, whose coming you too many hinder because of your way of life, spreads its lights on others who deserve more than you to receive them. He purifies them for God, since He is the Purifier, the preparer of God’s work and the one who perfects it."

In fundamental Christian texts

In the Bible

• Food and external practices related to ritual purity.--
• "Wash me thoroughly from my fault and cleanse me from my sin".
• "Nothing external to man that enters into him can defile him. But what comes out of man, that is what defiles the man." (cf. verses 1-23 for context)
• "Let marriage be honored by all and the marriage bed undefiled, for the fornicators and adulterers God will judge."
• "Flee from fornication. Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body. But the fornicator sins against his own body. Do you not know that your body is the Temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God, and that you are not your own?"

In the catechism of the Catholic Church  

Commentary on the 6th commandment: "You shall carefully observe purity in your acts" 2331 - 2400

• CEC 2331: "Male and Woman He created them".
• CEC 2337: The vocation to chastity.
• CEC 2360: The love of spouses.
• CEC 2380: The offenses to the dignity of marriage.

Commentaries on the 9th commandment: "In thoughts, desires be careful to remain entirely pure" 2514 - 2533

• CEC 2517: Purity of the Heart.
• The fight for purity: The fight for purity:
• CEC 2520: Baptism confers on the recipient the grace of purification of all sins. But the baptized must continue to Struggle Against the concupiscence of the flesh and disordered cravings. With God’s Grace, he succeeds:
• – through virtue and the gift of chastity, because chastity allows to love with a right and undivided Heart.
• – through purity of intention which consists in aiming at the true end of man: With a simple eye, the baptized seeks to find and to accomplish in all things the will of God (cf. Rom 12:2; Col 1:10).
• – through purity of gaze, external and internal; through the discipline of feelings and imagination; through the refusal of all complacency in impure thoughts that incline to turn away from the path of divine commandments: “Sight awakens passion in fools” (Wis 15:5).
• – through prayer: "I believed continence was up to my own strength, ... strength I did not know I had. And I was foolish enough not to know that no one can be continent if you do not give it to him. And certainly, you would have given it if from my inner groaning I had knocked at your ears and if with a solid faith I had cast upon you my concern" (Saint Augustine, conf. 6, 11, 20).

Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992).