Nature & Animals Quote by Francis Arinze

Desire is allowed in the room, but only if it behaves. Francis Arinze's line is a classic move of modern Catholic moral rhetoric: concede that sex belongs inside marriage, then draw a firm perimeter around how it may be pursued. The target isn't lust in the abstract; it's the idea of "seeking" satisfaction as a primary goal, as if the spouse were a means to an end. By framing the warning as "even among the married", Arinze signals that vows don't magically sanctify every act. Marriage, in this view, isn't a blanket permission slip; it's a moral context that can still be violated from within.

The phrase "man's character as a person" does heavy lifting. It pulls the conversation away from technique and toward anthropology: a person is not an instrument, not a body you use, not a bundle of appetites. That "animal level" contrast is deliberately bracing, a rhetorical slap meant to shame a consumerist, porn-shaped imagination in which sex is treated as a product and orgasm as the KPI. It's also a soft rebuke to the therapeutic language of sexual fulfillment, which can sound like entitlement when detached from mutuality and self-gift.

Context matters: Arinze comes from a church culture trying to hold a line against the sexual revolution without sounding anti-sex. So the quote aims to preserve a high view of human dignity by policing the motivational core of sex: communion over consumption, persons over impulses, love over acquisition.