Delivered: True Stories of Men and Women Who Turned from Porn to Purity

BookshelfDelivered: True Stories of Men and Women Who Turned from Porn to Purity    Matt Fradd, ed.   (Forward by Jason Evert)

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When a major secular news outlet like Time magazine devotes its cover story to the perils of pornography (March  2016), we know the world is finally acknowledging what people of faith have recognized for some time.

Pornography is damaging.   It is widespread and addictive.    What Matt Fradd’s book offers, however, is that there is hope, not only through therapeutic methods, but most of all by surrender to God.

Editor Matt Fradd, himself recovering from pornography, has assembled testimonies from a number of people who have struggled with this addiction. Increasingly, Catholic priests report huge numbers of people confessing pornography.   Strange–despite the silence from the public, parents, or pulpit, people sense in their gut that what are doing is wrong and unhealthy.

Fradd’s contributors refute the stereotype of pornography addiction as a dysfunctional background or men-only problem.

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You’ll meet Joe, who tried to emulate his dissipated father’s sex life, but nearly lost his own marriage because of his addiction;

April, who reluctantly started using porn as a “marriage aid,” but eventually found herself driven by her husband to swing, strip, and ultimately act in porn films;

Josh, a Catholic youth minister who realized that healing was totally dependent on God;

June, low on cash, who shared her hatred for the men ogling her in strip clubs;

Jessica, a carefully brought up Christian girl active in her church, who became hooked on written porn:

Mark, a gifted, clean-cut athlete, who learned the value of frequent Confession and receiving Holy Communion in the state of grace;

Mike and Anne, a devoutly Catholic married couple engaged in spiritual warfare when Mike’s pornography addiction infected Anne with resentment and distrust.

Their warm, conversational voices make this an easy and attractive read.   You will learn much.   Coming out of the darkness is not done by a formula, nor does it have a definitive “end.”   Like all our struggles, it’s a journey with many paths, one that continues throughout life.   Sprinkled throughout and including an extensive appendix, Delivered suggests useful, practical resources: websites, books, and the observations of a Catholic therapist specializing in pornography addiction and treatment both for the addict and his spouse and children.

An abiding message from this book is that no simply human technique or strategy was sufficient: “You have to love God more than you hate sin.”       As detailed in Delivered, our Catholic spirituality, an arsenal of sacraments, sacramentals, conferences, and devotions, gives us the weapons to defeat pornography.

The stakes could not be higher:   Jason Evert reflects on the carnage of porn as “countless vocations lost”:   courtships that never result in marriages, marriages destroyed, religious vocations thwarted.

C.S.   Lewis, writing about pornography years ago, stated, “After all, almost the main work of life is to come out of our selves, out of the little dark prison we are all born in.”   Matt Fradd’s compassionate book reminds us of our common humanity in a struggle that ultimately affects our whole society.