Couple relate the joys of sex to Pope and his prelates

Pope Francis, cardinals and bishops from around the world have been given an unexpected lecture on the joys of sex, from an Australian couple brought in to talk about what makes a marriage last.

Ron and Mavis Pirola, Catholics and parents of four from Sydney, told a Vatican gathering of some 200 prelates that sexual attraction brought them together 57 years ago and that sex had helped keep them married for 55 years.

“The little things we did for each other, the telephone calls and love notes, the way we planned our day around each other and the things we shared were outward expressions of our longing to be intimate with each other,” the couple said in a statement to the closed meeting.

“Gradually we came to see that the only feature that distinguishes our sacramental relationship from that of any other good Christ-centred relationship is sexual intimacy, and that marriage is a sexual sacrament with its fullest expression in sexual intercourse.”

The audience of celibate men was a bit taken aback. “That’s not what we bishops talk about mostly, quite honestly,” a sheepish British Cardinal Vincent Nichols told reporters.

“But to hear that as the opening contribution did, I think, open an area ... and it was a recognition that that is central to the wellbeing of marriage often.”

The Pirolas told the gathering they occasionally read Church documents on family matters, “but they seemed to be from another planet, with difficult language and not terribly relevant to our own experiences”.

Pope Francis called the two-week meeting of bishops to try to figure out how to make Church teaching on a host of Catholic family issues — marriage, divorce, homosexuality and yes, sex — more relevant to today’s Catholics.