Love & Passion Quote by Pat Buckley

A clergyman saying "I believe that sex is good and so is the body" is a deliberate act of reclamation: he’s yanking two words long treated as spiritual liabilities back into the category of moral goods. The sentence is built like a small creed. "I believe" signals doctrine and authority, not mere preference, but what follows refuses the usual churchly escape hatch of euphemism. It’s plain, almost stubbornly unpoetic. That plainness is the point.

The specific intent reads as corrective medicine for a tradition that has often disciplined desire through shame. By pairing "sex" with "the body", Buckley denies the familiar split between a pure soul and a dirty vessel. The grammar makes them parallel goods, not a temptation tolerated under strict conditions. It’s a theological move disguised as a casual affirmation: incarnation over abstraction, flesh as part of the sacred economy rather than an obstacle to it.

Subtext: this is also pastoral triage. A line like this is for congregants carrying inherited guilt, for people bruised by purity culture, for anyone taught to treat their own skin as suspect. It hints at consent and tenderness without preaching them; it implies that spiritual health can’t be built on self-loathing.

Context matters because clerical approval of sex is never neutral. Said from a pulpit, it pushes against institutional histories of control - over women’s bodies, queer bodies, reproductive choices. The quote works because it’s simple enough to sound like common sense, yet radical enough (in that setting) to rewire what "holiness" has been allowed to include.