Part III
We had left off in the first part with the development of Karol Wojtyla on conjugal love in his convening of the Krakow Commission in 1966 and the report that emanated from it. Based on what has been stated, it seems that Wojtyla’s trajectory ran parallel to the conclusions of the Second Vatican Council and its changes, in which he participated and on which he had been working beforehand. His work “Love and Responsibility” is cited in a footnote in the section of the 1966 Krakow Commission report that deals with the functions of sexuality; and important themes that will be significant in his Theology of the Body are found throughout the report, especially in its hyper-emphasis on the human person, their dignity and genius; in its emphasis on the primacy of the personalist norm within the conjugal relationship; and its insistence that every sexual relation of spouses must be a ‘reciprocal gift’, a bodily expression of their love.
Very dangerously, moreover, there is a statement in the Commission report that opposes traditional Catholic teachings on marriage, and it is the Commission’s pronouncement on the so-called “regulation of births.” The Krakow Commission clearly rejected contraception, direct sterilization, and induced abortion as means of “birth regulation.” However, it spoke in favor of the ideology of “systematic regulation of births,” also known as “responsible parenthood” or “planned parenthood,” “family planning,” and “birth control,” though by “moral means.” But once the principle of “family planning” has been enshrined as an “inalienable right,” and couples become the definitive arbiters of how many children they will have or not and when they will have them, how is it possible to judge their consciences and the gravity or not that they assign to their circumstances? The Church has never judged consciences, but from the outset, the idea of “planned parenthood” is observed to be so alien to the truly Catholic mind, which is reflected in Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani’s refutation of Cardinal Suenens’ attack against the primacy of procreation and the education of children in marriage, at the end of October 1964, during the Council debate on article 21, “The sanctity of marriage and the family”: “It does not seem right to me that the text affirms that married couples can determine the number of children they are to have. This has never been heard of in the Church (…). I am astonished that yesterday in the Council it was said that doubt was cast on whether until now a correct stance had been adopted on the principles governing marriage. Does this mean that the Church’s inerrancy will be called into question? Was not the Holy Spirit with His Church in past centuries to enlighten minds on this point of doctrine?”.
The line between what God allows in natural law and natural planning, even with family planning using natural methods, seems very thin.
John Paul II began his “meditations” on the Theology of the Body on September 5, 1979, having been in office for less than a year, as part of his Wednesday General Audience addresses. A year later, from September 26 to October 25, 1980, John Paul II held the Synod on the Role of the Christian Family in the Modern World, and immediately afterward published his great apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio in December 1981. The publication by the Holy See, on October 22, 1983, of the Charter of the Rights of the Family completed this trilogy on marriage and family. Throughout his twenty-six years as Pope, John Paul II methodically used his office to promote and popularize his new theology on sex and marriage. His efforts have been so successful that, apart from a few Traditional Catholic circles, the TOB has become the de facto theology of the post-conciliar Church on sex and marriage. However, only recently have the faithful Catholics realized the impact of the TOB on the life of the Church, for better or worse.
The encyclical Familiaris Consortio is saturated from beginning to end with numerous references to the Theology of the Body; between its initial call for a new post-conciliar universal humanism, and its final invitation to the family to cooperate with a “new international order” to achieve justice, freedom, and peace, we find statements such as the following: “With regard to the question of the licit regulation of births, the ecclesial community today must assume the task of infusing conviction and offering practical help to those who wish to live their parenthood in a truly responsible way (…). This implies a broader, more decisive, and more systematic effort to make natural methods of regulating fertility known, and to ensure that they are respected and used” (#35). “This preparation (for marriage) will present marriage as an interpersonal relationship between a man and a woman that must develop continuously, and will encourage those concerned to study the nature of conjugal sexuality and responsible parenthood, with the essential medical and biological knowledge developed with it” (#66).
In relation to the convening of the Synod on the Family, on May 9, 1981, the Pope promulgated the motu proprio Familia a Deo Instituta, which replaced Pope Paul VI’s Committee for the Family with the Pontifical Council for the Family. In 1992, the Pope established the first John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family as an annex to the Pontifical Lateran University, in Rome. Both the Pontifical Council and the worldwide network of John Paul II Institutes established by John Paul II before his death have become important means for the promotion and dissemination of the Theology of the Body.
What are the problematic characteristics of the Theology of the Body?
First, as a catechetical work, the Theology of the Body is anthropocentric, that is, centered on man, while also personalist, in line with the central theme of the Second Vatican Council and Wojtyla’s own personalist and phenomenological philosophical style. Love and Responsibility includes Wojtyla’s initial ideas about the sexual value of the body, marriage, adultery, chastity, continence, celibacy, and above all, the value and supremacy of the “person.”
From a Catholic point of view, the very name “theology of the body” is problematic, since “theology” [from the Greek theós, meaning God, and logos meaning discourse], in all its forms, focuses on God and His attributes, on everything divine, revealed truths, and matters of faith, but not, properly speaking, on man. Moreover, with regard to the human body, man is one: he is composed of both a spiritual and rational soul and a material body that gives man his bodily identity. The immortal and intellectual soul, infused into the body at the moment of conception, is the substantial principle that informs the body and gives it life. The body without the soul is inert, a corpse. How, then, can a “Theology of the Body” exist? It is a question that is difficult to answer.
Researcher Randy Engel, founder and director of the Coalition for Life in the United States of America, produced a detailed report in 2008, published in Catholic Family News, which provides a very valuable contribution on this topic. Engel states that many of the premises and main themes of the TOB are not original to Wojtyla: “When Wojtyla delivered his lectures on Love and Responsibility at the University of Lublin in 1958 and 1959, there was already a strong movement in certain Catholic circles to reorient Catholic marriage toward more “personalist” lines, led in part by the German philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand and the German Benedictine priest Dom Herbert Doms.”
Engel considers that “the fact that the TOB is difficult to read and even more difficult to understand is something that both adherents and detractors of Wojtyla’s work agree on. In fact, it has given rise to a small worldwide business whose sole purpose is to explain and disseminate this new theology among both Catholic and non-Catholic laity, clergy, and religious. The day has not yet come when those who worship John Paul II realize that the reason John Paul II’s writings are difficult to understand is probably because ‘in what his writings have of original, they are not Catholic, and in what they have of Catholic, they are not original.’ The title, Love and Responsibility – Engel affirms -, also marked the beginning of a covert attack on the Church’s traditional teachings about the primary ends of marriage, namely, procreation and the education of children and the formation of a family (a principle that Wojtyla did not view favorably since he believed that such an element devalued conjugal love) in order to give greater importance to “interpersonal relationships,” “integration,” “love,” and “responsibility.”
Love and Responsibility represents one of Wojtyla’s first attempts to “marry” the traditional Scholasticism of St. Thomas Aquinas with modern secular philosophies (modernist), particularly that of Max Scheler, a disciple of Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl, the father of phenomenology. When he was a young seminarian, Wojtyla found deficiencies in Scholasticism and held the hope of developing a new philosophical and ethical system that incorporated the objectivity of Thomism with the personalism and human subjectivism of Schelerism — a system that was more adequate for the demands and problems of that mythical creature from Gaudium et Spes, namely, “modern man.” Wojtyla attempted to create an original philosophical system that incorporated contemporary philosophies, such as phenomenology and personalism. He believed that the new system offered valuable insights and truths that could be used to form a truly Christian humanism and make the Gospel more comprehensible to the modern world.
Randy Engel considers that the attempt to “marry” such philosophical ideas did not go well, as was to be expected: “The warning of St. Pius X, who, in his 1907 encyclical Pascendi, linked the modernists’ affinity for philosophical and theological novelties with their hatred of Scholasticism, and pointed out that ‘there is no surer sign that a man is on the road to Modernism than when he begins to show his aversion to Thomism.’ Wojtyla knew that he should not attack Thomism directly, but he did attempt to circumvent it.
Fr. Richard N. Hogan, a disciple of John Paul II, although he recognizes the contribution of the Thomistic and Augustinian traditions that start from the existence of God and are “objective, deductive, and principle-based,” nevertheless believes that our “modern culture” demands that, now, the truths of faith must be revealed through new paths that are “primarily subjective, inductive, and experiential.” Hogan highlights Wojtyla’s contribution in this regard: “The difficulty, however, lies in taking the ‘jewels’ of the faith (…) and presenting them in a new way through a new philosophical system, without changing the content of these ‘jewels.’ We need another genius, another St. Augustine, another St. Thomas, who will do for our era what each of these saints did for his own. John Paul II is another St. Thomas, another St. Augustine. Wojtyla saw that phenomenology provided a way to re-link ethical norms to reality (…).
It was clear from the beginning that the author of Love and Responsibility had ventured into very strange and dangerous philosophical waters. In his original introduction, written in 1960, Wojtyla states that his work “is not an exposition of doctrine.” Rather, it reflects throughout a “personalist character.” He attributes the origin of the book to the “incessant confrontation of doctrine with life,” that is, with the experience lived by people, by himself and by others. “Sexual morality belongs to the realm of the person. … The personal level is the only adequate plane for all debate on sexual morality issues,” explains Wojtyla. His idealization of sexual and marital love also explains how the Pope (in Familiaris Consortio and in the 1992 Catechism, for example) is able to put the states of marriage and celibacy on the same level, in opposition to the Church’s Tradition (see Council of Trent, session 24, canon 10). Because the Church has always taught that the state of celibacy is the only state that allows both man and woman to love with a total self-giving, but if marriage offered the same total loving self-giving, then the two forms of life would become equivalent (at least in this sense). There are two other ways in which the Pope divinizes the love of spouses, and they are in presenting sexual love as an expression (that is, it is an image) of God’s love for man (which is Christ for His Church) and as an expression (image) of God’s love for Himself, within the Most Holy Trinity.
This type of purely natural human act is, however, very different from God’s supernatural love for man, as well as from His love for Himself, which is said to be an expression (or image) of such an act. Moreover, it should be said that the divinization of such acts is completely alien to Catholic thought. Physical generation, although on the purely natural level promotes the greatest human good, that is, the preservation of the human species, on the supernatural level passes through death, both physical and spiritual (if the offspring is not reborn with baptism and does not end their life in a state of grace). For this reason, St. Gregory of Nyssa describes Consecrated Virginity as a triumph over death. The divinization of such acts undoubtedly belongs not to the Catholic Church, but, on the contrary, to the Gnostic tradition, manifested particularly in the Masonic tradition and symbolism. The foundation for their divinization is nothing deeper or more edifying than the Masonic view that man is divine, which implies that man’s act, in his life, must also be divine.
The cornerstone of the Theology of the Body is the premise that the conjugal act of love consists of “a total and reciprocal self-giving between husband and wife” (Familiaris Consortio 32, quoted in the 1992 Catechism, 2370). But if this proposition is false, the entire edifice of the Theology of the Body collapses. Is it? Is it false? So believes Randy Engel: that “it is false first from the metaphysical point of view, since the human person is not communicable; second, from the physical point of view, because the conjugal act of love essentially consists of the search and conquest of pleasure, without which it would not be possible; and third, morally, because total self-giving in love is only possible and decreed to be so only for God (Lk. 10:27). While man is commanded to love his neighbor to a lesser degree, and with regard to conjugal relations, with modesty and moderation [1] (cf. Roman Catechism on marriage). In fact, to love one’s neighbor with total love would be idolatry.”
To what extent does the TOB demand our assent as Catholics?
Given the great amount of verbiage and ambiguity that characterizes the TOB, this discernment is not an easy task, especially when the Theology of the Body is presented, in perfect modernist style, as an “authentic development, not a deviation” from the Church’s traditional teachings on sex, marriage, and family.
When the main exponent of the Theology of the Body after John Paul II, Christopher West, assures that John Paul II’s ideas in the TOB “will surely leave the Church reeling in self-discovery for centuries to come,” he could not have spoken with greater propriety.