The proliferation of smartphones means explicit imagery is even easier to access, making it harder for Christian leaders to address the issue.
Online pornography is at par with gambling and cocaine addiction when it comes to its reach in the U.S. It is no more restricted to the paper printed adult magazine, where a person sees the pictures furtively when he thinks no one is looking. The advent of the smartphone has catapulted the images or porn into the hands of anyone using such phones. Pornography is now much more present. It has also become much more anonymous.
How Priests Can Battle the Porn Epidemic[/tweetthis]
The statistics echo the above premise. PornHub, an extremely popular porn video streaming site, has reported that it has 75 million viewers every day. It comes to about 2.4 million visitors every hour. Such popularity has been noted by the mainstream media. TIME magazine has calculated that the sheer number of hours the site has streamed to its consumers in 2015 was double the number of human beings who have populated Earth.
The Christian church has also seen its problems rise. At one time, the solution from the pulpit was simple: ask the person who made the confession to consecrate himself to Mary and attend church on a regular basis. The mass consumption of porn makes such actions redundant and useless. To combat these, Father Sean Kilcawley, the theological adviser and program director of Integrity Restored, has begun to provide intensive training for the clergy. He is providing them practical tips and also resources on the many ways to tackle the increasing crisis of addiction towards pornography.
Intensive training by Fr. Kilcawley is done in small batches comprising of a maximum of 12 priests. They are immersed in resources and provided hard training for a period of three to four days. They are taught how to reform the porn addicted in their churches. He said that smaller groups are the most efficient as it allows the priest to think about the provided information. All members gain empathy too.
According to Fr. Kilcawley, an attempt is made to equip the priest so the man of God can ask the person to visit the church and talk to the clergy outside of confession. The idea behind this affirmative action is to make the priest the first responder in the church's field hospital.
According to Dr. Todd Bowman of SATP Institute (Comprehensive Sexual Addiction Treatment Provider Training), it is important to model this relationship between a sex therapist and priest during training. This kind of healing needs psychological care.
Church can combat trafficking by raising up young men to treat women w/ respect & dignity. To not tolerate others degrading women, porn
— Beth Ann Cook (@revbethanncook) April 30, 2017