WARSAW, POLAND — A guide to better sex for married couples is flying off bookstore shelves in Poland. The shock and awe surrounding the book’s reception is due not as much to what the book advises, but instead to who penned the manual: A Franciscan friar.Rev. Ksawery Knotz’s Sex as You Don’t Know It: For Married Couples Who Love God counsels couples that giving up sex in marriage is a sin. Among his unexpected advice: Oral sex is perfectly normal.

“Some people, when they hear about the holiness of married sex, immediately imagine that such sex has to be deprived of joy, frivolous play, fantasy and attractive positions,” Knotz wrote. “[They think] it has to be sad like a traditional church hymn.”

Nothing could be further from the truth, he avers.

“The most important message is that sexuality does not deviate at all from religiousness and the Catholic faith, and that we can connect spirituality and a search for God with a happy sex life,” Knotz told The Associated Press.

Many laymen have written Catholic sex guides, and even two Popes — John Paul II and the current pontiff, Benedict XVI — have written about the role of sex in marriage. Knotz, however, bears the distinction of being the first ordained man of God to provide explicit instructions.

“Every act — a type of caress, a sexual position — with the goal of arousal is permitted and pleases God,” Knotz wrote. “During sexual intercourse, married couples can show their love in every way, can offer one another the most sought-after caresses. They can employ manual and oral stimulation.”

They may not, however, employ condoms or birth control pills. That behavior specifically is forbidden by canonical law.

“Married couples celebrate their sacrament, their life with Christ also during sex,” Knotz noted in the book. “Calling sex a celebration of the marriage sacrament raises its dignity in an exceptional way. Such a statement shocks people who learned to look at sexuality in a bad way. It is difficult for them to understand that God is also interested in their happy sex life and in this way gives them His gift.”

The publisher, Sw. Pawel, admits the sensation created by a celibate priest holding forth about sex probably was responsible for the way the Polish public snapped up the book’s 5,000-copy first printing. Whatever the reason, the publisher is considering translating the manual into English, Italian and Slovakian.