Part I.
A few days ago, a text was published on this portal about the saturation of influencers and neoconservative movements that preach about dating, sex, and marriage, in a probable misinterpretation of Saint John Paul II’s Theology of the Body.
In some comment, I was accused of puritanism, arguing that young people are already saturated with sex in this hypersexualized society. But precisely for that reason, I posed the question of whether the Church, in a hypersexualized society, has to offer the same as the world. And whether it is legitimate, in the face of the world’s cultural change, to shift the focus in the Church’s praxis, such as the application of the theology of the body (hereinafter, TdC). As far as I know, I am neither Jansenist nor puritan; but I do wonder if there are not other topics and if these TdC-centered neoconservatives are not, after all, like the Titanic’s musicians, who keep playing their music while the ship sinks.
It is true that the Church is surely preaching chastity before marriage as it had not preached since the Second Vatican Council, and this is certainly a very positive issue.
However, we did not enter the previous text into John Paul II’s own catecheses, but only into their interpretation and application by others. Now let us see how these catecheses of the Polish pope fit into the Church’s traditional teaching on sexual morality. For this, we will base ourselves mainly on various scholars of Catholic topics with a traditional approach.
Let us begin by defining what we are going to talk about. The «Theology of the Body» is the title of a series of catecheses that Pope John Paul II gave from September 1979 to November 1984. To summarize the following exposition, we will say from the outset that, when evaluating this doctrine in the light of Tradition, most of the authors consulted consider that the central position does not represent an advance in Catholic teachings (in the sense of a clarification or deepening of those teachings), and that it actually supposes a break with them; that it is something novel, in other words. That is why some authors consider that the TdC cannot be described as a Catholic doctrine, but rather as personal meditations of that Pope. In fact, the novelty of the TdC led to a popular wordplay that came to say that “just as Blondel and de Lubac discovered the “authentic Christianity” 2000 years late, so Karol Józef Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) discovered the “authentic Christian sexuality” for the Church at 2000 years of its existence”, as if for such a task the Natural Law, the Scriptures, the Magisterium of the Church, and Tradition had proven inadequate.
Jokes aside, there is a curious and not coincidental relationship in the origin of the development of Saint John Paul II’s ideas about conjugal love from the 1940s, his participation in the drafting of the conjugal love schema in Gaudium et Spes and the study of a new approach by the Church to birth control, which later became the “natural” methods (of family planning).
To understand why this teaching of Saint John Paul II represents a discontinuity in the Church’s teaching on sexual morality, let us see what the Church always taught: that marriage has three ends, ordered in a hierarchical manner: 1) to procreate and educate children; 2) the mutual assistance of spouses; 3) as a remedy for concupiscence. By that hierarchical order, the Church teaches that the first end is also the primary end.
Reviewing chronologically magisterial documents on this matter, Casti Connubii, by Pope Pius XI, is considered by many as the best document on marriage. In this document, the following is affirmed: “This conjugal faith (…), which Saint Augustine very aptly calls “faith of chastity,” flourishes more freely, more beautifully, and more nobly when it is rooted in that most excellent soil, the love of husband and wife, which permeates all the duties of married life and occupies a privileged place in Christian marriage. For conjugal faith demands that husband and wife be united by a love especially holy and pure, not as adulterers love, but as Christ loved the Church. The Apostle established this precept when he said: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ also loved the Church,” that Church which He embraced with boundless love, not for His own benefit, but seeking solely the good of His Spouse (…). The love of which we speak is not based on the fleeting lust of the moment nor consists only in pleasant words, but in the deep attachment of the heart that is expressed in action, since love is demonstrated by deeds. This outward expression of love in the home demands not only mutual help, but must go further; it must have as its main objective that man and woman help each other day by day to form and perfect themselves in interior life, so that, through their union in life, they may advance more and more in virtue and, above all, so that they may grow in true love toward God and neighbor, from which, in fact, “depends the whole Law and the Prophets.” For all men, whatever their condition, whatever honorable profession they exercise, can and must imitate the most perfect example of holiness that God has placed before man, that is, Christ Our Lord, and, with the grace of God, reach the summit of perfection, as shown by the example given to us by many saints.
From these words of Pius XI, Professor Peter Kwasniewski considers that Saint John Paul II’s TdC is compatible with traditional teaching, as it focuses, as we will see, on the love between spouses. Michael Waldstein has explored this issue exhaustively and has reached the same conclusion.
Subsequently to Casti Connubii, Pope Pius XII defined the traditional doctrine and explicitly condemned the inversion of the ends of marriage that had already been occurring among some theologians in the first half of the 20th century, both in De Finibus Matrimonii, of 1944, and in the ‘Address to Midwives,’ of 1951. In the first, he rejects the theory that ‘mutual love and union of spouses should be developed and perfected by bodily and spiritual self-giving’; in the second, he adds that ‘such ideas and attitudes clearly, deeply, and seriously contradict Christian thought.’
However, the vision condemned by Pope Pius XII, as well as so many heterodox positions, were later recovered in the Magisterium, obliquely, through the Second Vatican Council. Most authors who have studied the TdC affirm that this condemned vision later entered the Code of Canon Law, the New Catechism, and several encyclicals; a vision promoted and popularized by the TdC and which has found its crudest form to date in Amoris Lætitia. For all this, most authors who have studied Saint John Paul II’s TdC, to his personalist and subjective philosophical approach is added a Copernican shift in relation to the hierarchical ends of marriage.
The main themes of Wojtyla’s new philosophy and theology regarding the bodily dimension of human love, sexuality, marriage, and celibacy were gestated and took concrete form over a long period that began even before his priestly ordination in 1946 and continued when he was made auxiliary bishop and then Cardinal Bishop of Krakow, Poland (1958-1978).
As auxiliary bishop of Krakow, in the 1958 and 1959 courses, Karol Wojtyla gave a series of talks directed at university students at the Catholic University of Lublin, centered on Catholic sexual morality, conjugal relations, chastity, and sexual ethics. The talks were collected in the volume “Love and Responsibility,” first published in 1960, in Polish. The French and Italian editions were published in 1965, but the English version did not see the light until 1981. The alternative title of his work, Theology of the Body, was given by the pope himself.
But we have seen that the teaching of certain modern authors, which the TdC assumes, that the good of the spouses (cf. the second end) is on the same level, or a higher level, than the good of children (cf. the first end), had already been condemned by the Magisterium. A declaration from the Holy See in March 1944 (AAS XXVI p.103) asks: “Can the doctrine of certain modern writers be admitted who reject that procreation and education of children is the primary end of marriage, or who teach that the secondary purposes are not necessarily subordinated to the first end and that they in fact have equivalent value and are independent of it? The answer: No, this doctrine cannot be admitted.” In his Address to Midwives (1951), Pope Pius XII refers to that type of doctrines as “a serious alteration of the order of values and purpose that the Creator Himself has established”.
Despite these declarations, this modern concept was reintroduced, as we have said, in the Second Vatican Council assembly, and also found a place (though covertly) in the texts of Humanae Vitae, and from there to the new Code of Canon Law, the new Catechism, and to Familiaris Consortio, among others.
Saint John Paul II’s Theology of the Body must be considered against this background of rupture between the Church’s traditional teaching on the ends of marriage and its inversion among modernist theologians and pastors, which the Polish pope assumed in his TdC. Because, although he does not explicitly deny that procreation and education of children is the primary end of marriage, he is almost exclusively concerned with conjugal love and only mentions procreation as a mere addition; as when the Pope, referring to “the communion between persons that man and woman create…,” adding that: upon “all this descended, from the beginning, the blessing of fertility” (November 14, 1979).
At this point, it may be useful to recall that, at the opening of the second session of the Council, on October 6, 1963, already there was talk among the conciliar fathers of an approaching paradigm shift on marriage and its ends. This rumor was further fueled when Pope John XXIII, in March 1964, only a few months before his death, with the approval of Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini, his successor, commissioned the creation of a special Pontifical Commission to study the recent advances in hormonal contraception and to reexamine the Church’s opposition to contraception in light of new demographic trends. The relationship between the inversion of the ends of marriage and the forgetting of traditional preaching on the procreation of children is a disturbing matter that escapes the objective of this text. However, we will mention how Romano Amerio, in his essential work “Iota Unum” (1996), considers Montini’s actions already as Paul VI on conjugal morality as firm and grave in the third session, in 1964. “Having pronounced in the hall – Amerio explains -, even through cardinal mouths (Léger and Suenens), new theories that downgraded the procreative end of marriage and opened the way to its frustration (while elevating a pari or a maiori its unitive end and personal self-giving), Paul VI sent to the commission four amendments with orders to insert them into the schema that relied on texts from Pius XI’s Casti Connubii, declaring that procreation is not an accessory or equivalent end of marriage to the expression of conjugal love, but necessary and primary. The amendments were admitted, but Pius XI’s texts were not cited.” Here is observed the very tough struggle between traditional teaching and the innovations that some Central European cardinals and theologians intended to introduce.
If we continue reviewing the chronological development of this vision of Karol Wojtyla’s sexual morality, which had begun as early as 1946, we see that, in the cited context of the Second Vatican Council, from January 31 to April 6, 1965, Wojtyla participated in the drafting of Schema XIII, Gaudium et Spes, the pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world, but he was not one of the main architects of the document, as was said. Wojtyla’s influence, as well as that of the conciliar fathers who shared some of his revolutionary ideas on marriage, such as Cardinal Leo Jozef Suenens of Malines-Brussels and Cardinal Paul-Émile Léger of Montreal, can be seen in Gaudium et Spes, Part I, Chapter 1 “The Dignity of the Human Person,” and Part II, Chapter I “Fostering the Nobility of Marriage and the Family,” with its strongly personalist connotations; in the description of conjugal love as “a primary form of interpersonal communion”; and in the glaring absence of the terms “primary” and “secondary” with regard to the ends of marriage in the decree’s text.
Once the Council was finished, in 1966, already as archbishop, Wojtyla created the “Krakow Commission”, which brought together a small group of theologians expert in Catholic morality from Krakow and Tarnow whom Wojtyla entrusted with the task of examining the theological foundations of the Church’s ethical norms in conjugal life. That Wojtyla directed and carefully controlled the orientation of the Commission’s work, using it more as a sounding board for his own ideas on the TdC than as an important source of contributions from his collaborators, is obvious even from a superficial reading of the Commission’s final report. The report “The Foundations of the Church’s Doctrine on the Principles of Conjugal Life” was concluded in February 1968 and makes no reference to the primary and secondary ends of marriage. As in the case of Gaudium et Spes, it remains silent on this traditional formulation, preferring to consider the procreative, unitive, and social ends of marriage as equally important among themselves.
PD. I regret the perhaps excessive length of this text, but I have not found another way to do it in order to try to expose the origin and chronological development of the differences between the Church’s traditional teaching and the Theology of the Body, on which John Paul II worked for four decades and which coincides with the change in the Church’s teaching on sexual and conjugal morality that emerged with the Second Vatican Council. In upcoming texts, I intend to finalize the chronological and “doctrinal” development of this topic so popular today in the Church.