Two more articles to highlight at the Register’s Theology of the Body Symposium. Last week Sr. Prudence Allen wrote about how the TOB is important in understanding “the complementarity of marriage and continence for ‘the Kingdom of heaven’ in their meaning and manifold importance.”
In the early autumn of 1979, Pope John Paul II introduced to the universal Church his teaching on the theology of the body during a series of general audiences. As Karol Wojtyla, he had already published in Poland Love and Responsibility and The Acting Person and given lectures on the family and parenthood as a community of persons. These lectures are now available in English in Person and Community.
And today, Christopher West talks about how the TOB is John Paul II’s antidote to the culture of death:
As John Paul II insisted, “It is an illusion to think we can build a true culture of human life if we do not … accept and experience sexuality and love and the whole of life according to their true meaning and their close interconnection” (Evangelium Vitae, 97). For as our understanding of sexuality goes, so go marriage and the family. As marriage and the family go, so goes civilization.”
This is the great gift of John Paul II’s theology of the body: By revealing the glory of God’s plan for man and woman, it provides the antidote to the “culture of death” and the surest foundation for building a “culture of life.”
Read more as West goes on to comment on the present “Great TOB Debate” and the future of the TOB and how it could relate to the message of Fatima.