A man who lives in Jesus will deem it inconsistent with his true freedom to experience the distance between another person’s bodily privacy and his own as an unbridgeable gulf, especially when his relation with that person is such that they may address to each other the words, “The love of Christ has gathered us together” (Antiphon in the Liturgy of Holy Thursday, Washing of Feet). He who is so far dominated by his reactions of disgust as to live in a continuous solicitude about the protection of his bodily privacy, not allowing either the duty of charity (whenever it presents itself in a way requiring the breaking down of those barriers) or a close personal friendship in Christo to interfere with his anxious self-isolation, is most certainly wanting in true freedom. He is imprisoned in an unessential concern. By yielding to this tendency of his nature, he will in time slide into a kind of spinster-like fussiness about his jealously guarded intangibility—an attitude of prim egotism entirely unworthy of a Christian and certain to make its victim more and more incapable of love.

What true freedom implies in this context is not, in a word, a natural lack of sensitivity to disgusting impressions, nor a primary absence of the sense of distance and privacy, as it occurs in rude and primitive people. The right freedom concerning the sphere here referred to consists not in a natural antithesis to the state of feeling disgusted as such, but in the capacity, originating in a supernatural basic attitude, of responding to the call of God as transmitted by a given situation without being inhibited, in so doing, by the trammels of disgust: or, to put it differently, in the habit of a prompt and quasi-automatic control of disgust whenever an objective situation arises with which it appears incongruous, and which demands its exclusion.

True freedom means, to sum up, the primacy of love: its victory over all feeling of strangeness and all seclusion of self; an openness of the soul by virtue of its ultimate and unreserved dedication to Christ.

Disgust is sometimes associated with a certain vague fear of contagion, of infectious diseases one might catch from other people. In these cases of squeamishness, the stranger makes us shrink back as a possible carrier of germs. Of course, in dealing with persons who really suffer from some contagious disease, it is our duty to protect ourselves against infection as far as possible; for our health, too, is a talent given by God, of which we must make the most. But whenever a duty of charity requires that preoccupation to yield, it is charity that ranks supreme.

Apart from this obvious principle, what concerns us here is our duty of controlling the tendency to suspect all possible diseases in others, a suspicion which, with little or no basis in reality, serves unconsciously to encourage our inclinations towards fastidiousness and disgust. As long as there is no solid reason for it, we must not look upon our fellow man as a possible carrier of diseases, for this is a bad mental habit which hampers the free flux of love and fosters our tendency to egocentric self-isolation.