INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW OF THE THEOLOGY OF THE BODY

“As a young priest I learned to love human love... If one loves human love,there naturally arises the need to commit oneself completely to the serviceof ‘fair love,’ because love is fair, it is beautiful.”-Bl Pope John Paul II,

Crossing the Threshold of Hope,

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In the first talk I would like to discuss two questions: first, why is there a need for atheology of the body? second, what is the theology of the body? In the second talk I willdiscuss priestly spirituality and the theology of the body and its practical uses in the daily ministry of a priest, especially in proclaiming and living the Gospel of life to those entrusted toour care.

The Need for Priests to be Formed in the Theology of the Body

The last forty-some years since the Second Vatican Council has seen major paradigmatic shiftsin the way that the Church beholds and presents the mystery of the human person and his dignity,the holiness of marriage and family life, and the truth and meaning of human sexuality. This ispartly because there has been such a brutal and unrelenting attack on the sanctity of human life, theindissolubility of the one-man, one-woman marital union, mixed together with widespread unbridledhedonism. In this environment, to borrow an image from St Louis Marie de Montfort, priests arecalled upon by the Lord to, with one hand, tear down the kingdom of the devil, his culture of deathand civilization of lust, and with the other hand, build the reign of Jesus Christ, his culture of lifeand civilization of love.In order to do this well, it has been clear that there needed to be not only a deeper training of priests called for by the Council,

but also aiding priests in parishes to shepherd their flocks amidsttheir very real and complex social and familial problems. As in every age, the priest today is called tobe an

alter Christus

, another living replica of Jesus Christ, true God and true man. Intellectualformation in both Christ’s divinity and his humanity here are important if the priest is to help makethe immutable divine truth of Christ present to the people of our time in all their human needs.Intellectual formation in Christ’s divinity could be said to consist of the speculative intellect’spenetration into the divine science

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sacred theology. The Council recommended that men beformed with the methodology of St Thomas Aquainas.

Intellectual formation in the humanity of Christ could be said here to consist of theology’s practical penetration into our humanity. TheCouncil recommended that men acquire a sound anthropology, a Christo-centric view of man.Where would we find a view of man, an anthropology that would acknowledge themetaphysical aspect of the being man that we find in thomistic realism yet be open to integrate theempirical, scientifically measurable facts and datum of human existence? Modern science has not yetrecovered from a kind of Cartesian schizophrenia, the dualism that tends to oppose body and spiritintroduced by the philosopher who said, “cogito ergo sum”

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I think therefor I am.

The result, as

Second Vatican Council, Optatum Totius, 13-18

Ibid. 16 Interesting to note that he was the only Church Father who was recommended by the Council. Also, he hasbeen the only author in human history to hear from the Lord, “Bene scripsisti de me, Thomae” - you have written well of me. Christ did not say that to any evangelist or other sacred author. Could priests nowadays do with some improvementsin articulation of theology especially as Aquainas put it, “to express oneself with eloquence and charm”?

René Descartes

was noted by Karol Wojty

a in his work,

Love and Responsibility

(1960), “the habit widespread among intellectuals of confusing the order of nature with the biological order,” a kind of divorce of metaphysics from empirical sciences or speculative truth from empirical fact. As we all know, thisrupture in science and philosophy has even reached into the study of the sacred theology, resulting inthose mistakenly divide the Christ of faith from the Jesus of history. Hegelian and Heideggerianfoundations of theology also have this rupture present and have spawned the denial God’s divinepower working in human history in miracles such as the parting of the Red Sea, the multiplication of loaves, and even the bodily resurrection of Jesus.Christian morality is greatly effected by a division between divinely revealed moral absolutesfrom historical and personal acts, giving rise to erroneous methodologies such as proportionalism,consequentialism, and the fundamental option, which falsely purports that a person’s intention tochoose fundamentally the good overrides the morality of any personal act that is opposed to thegood. This flies in the face of the dogmatic teaching of the Council of Trent that one mortal sinseparates a soul from God and from the possession of the good and that sins must be confessed inthe Sacrament of Reconciliation in kind and number. It is also the reason why there is a “loss of thesense of sin”

and why the lines to the confessional are so short.In the area of bio-ethics, this dualistic dichotomy has caused a rather damaging divide betweenman as a moral being, and the biology of the human body. Much of moral theology on life issuesand human sexuality is better termed immoral theology because it presents the conclusions of thisdivision:-the body’s biological processes determine the goodness of the moral act, not the personacting to submit their body to human reason and the precepts of the natural law -a couple may choose to use contraception because a doctor will falsely assert that itregulates the woman’s body -a baby with a disease may be removed from the womb based on it’s “quality of life”-an elderly person’s life may be ended because the physical pain compromises their body’sability to enjoy lifeThis is perhaps why we have to insist to the people whom we serve to get a second or thirdmedical opinion from a doctor or nurse who is pro-life.In the area of human sexuality, this dualism has spawned what Bl Pope John Paul II calls aNeo-Manichaeism expressed as it was in St Augustine’s day in either a rigorist puritanism or in self-gratifying hedonism. Both of them are a denial of the dignity and meaning of the human body andof our sexuality. We will talk about why this is later bur first a more important topic that must bebroached before diving into the substance of the text.

Misrepresentations

There are some that would say that Blessed Pope John Paul II started a kind of sexualrevolution. Mostly this is said to grab people’s attention the way an advertisement would, or a catchy blog title might attract readers. It is true that his fundamental thesis about human sexuality as theexpression of being made in the image and likeness of God is quite revolutionary. However, thereare some that take this kind of “grab value” too far and exploit it. The most famous example is when Christopher West on the Nightline Show compared Bl Pope John Paul II to Hugh Heffner and

Post-synodal exhortation of Pope John Paul II, Reconciliatio et Paenitentia, 6

said that both men had revolutionized human sexuality. Another problem is a certain kind of misrepresentation of what Blessed Pope John Paul II said that could be classified in one phrases asphilosophical equivocation. This happens when two metaphors are mixed that the Holy Father neverintended. No where in the TOB did he say or even hint that heaven’s ecstasy is comparable to ansexual orgasm, yet this is a common image that is given when the TOB is presented. Anotherproblem is theological. It is the question of the eschatology of redemption, where it is assumed thatin this life one can reach back to original integrity and thus remove any kind of fig leaves that coverthe nakedness of the human condition. In fact, in his book, Love and Responsibility, the Pope saidthat there is a necessary kind of shame that ought to shield man still struggling with concupiscence.Finally the most popular catholic “Star,” if you will, of the TOB, Christopher West was asked by hislocal ordinary to take a leave of absence for a year in order to rethink his presentation. He did for asome weeks and started teaching the same thing he had been presenting.It is to be noted that he is a very gifted speaker and is capable of doing great things to forwardthe popularization of the TOB, however, I think there are priests and good faithful catholics whoresist the theology of the Body because it has often been associated with this kind of presentation.I was at the international TOB conference last summer in Philadelphia and not a few people who were supposedly in positions of teaching or facilitating in their parishes and diocese were asking me ,“If I had read Christopher West’s theology of the body.” They did not even know that it wasauthored by Blessed Pope John Paul II.Please! Do not let this deter you. Please read the original text. It is amazing and it willtransform your life. It is a gift of the Holy Spirit for our time and priests of our time would be very well equipped to face the challenging complexities of family and social issues that are on theforefront of the pro-life battle.

The Philsophical Background of Bl Pope John Paul II

As a seminarian, Karol Wojty

a studied the Summa Theologiae with his Emminence CardinalSapieha, who often tutored him in his philosophical and theological development. He was ordaineda priest and was sent to the Angelicum in Rome, where the ecclesiastical tradition was to unite Thomistic realism with the experience of the Carmelite tradition. He wrote his dissertation on theunderstanding of faith in St John of the Cross’ works. He taught university in Lublin and Krakow where he encountered a rereading of Aquainas that sought to answer modern and post-modernphilosophical problems. In order to teach in Poland he had to write a Habilitationsgeschift, ahabilitation thesis. He attempted to ask if phenomenology could be used as the basis of Christianethics. Here he was interested in bridging the dualistic gap of Descartes, while addressing MaxScheler’s critique of the ethical puritanism of Kant using the intuitive experiential realism of phenomenology. He found phenomenology to be lacking as a sound investigation of ethics, but if it were so to speak, galvanized in a thomistic foundation it could form the basis of evaluating man’smoral acts. What developed in him was a kind of Lublin Thomism that has been penned Wojty

anPersonalism, in which he attempts to show the acting person’s experience of reality, even the reality of his own existence and being, as a solid basis for the investigation of truth, even metaphysicalbeing. This is the philosophy which you will encounter not only in TOB but also in his papalencyclicals.

The Pastoral Background of the TOB

At the universities in Krakow and Lublin he began to encounter young people who wereasking the burning questions that occupies young people, “Am I lovable? Am I capable of loving and being loved?” He said in Crossing the Threshold of Hope, “As a young priest I learned to lovehuman love... If one loves human love, there naturally arises the need to commit oneself completely to the service of ‘fair love,’ because love is fair, it is beautiful.” It was the secondary pastoral