Dear Madam or Miss Catholic (ex) Perplexed… I would like to know your name to address you by it, with all the respect you deserve:
I write to you from Monterrey, in northeastern Mexico. I am a 56-year-old layman, 29 years married, and father of two professional children. I studied full-time for 5 years at the John Paul II Institute in Washington D.C., the only one that remained immune from all the draconian decisions taken, to the detriment of the John Paul II Institute (central headquarters in Rome and all other headquarters worldwide), by Pope Francis, uncomfortable with such a small institution that was an obstacle to his agenda outlined, above all, in the lamentable chapter VIII of his Amoris Laetitia. I am one of the very few, countable, Mexicans who have emigrated to the United States to study at that unique institute, something similar to what a music conservatory would be, with a small student population attended by teachers who have been teaching there for decades. Therefore, be completely assured that I know in detail and have studied for years the Theology of the Body according to Saint John Paul II, in addition to having taught it in the classroom of the John Paul II Institute, Monterrey session, Mexico, despite the fact that the branches of that institute in Mexico were always very similar to the one that Francis shaped with his new Institute of Family Sciences, which he even confusingly called “Theological.” I also taught in various in-person forums and, due to the pandemic, virtual ones, numerous 60-hour courses on the Theology of the Body. Therefore, without pretending to have more philosophical and theological formation and knowledge than you, honorable Lady Formerly Perplexed Catholic, I would like with great respect to comment on what you have been writing in Infovaticana regarding the Theology of the Body according to Saint John Paul II.
First of all, I want you to know that I love the Tradition of the Church and I can tell you that, without being an expert or scholar, I love it because I know it. I “awakened” to the Tradition of the Church not only at the John Paul II Institute in Washington D.C. (unique in its kind), but I ended up realizing the beauty of the traditional liturgy and the Holy Mass in the Tridentine Rite in Latin as a result of the draconian document of July 2021, the Apostolic Letter in Motu Proprio form Traditionis Custodes by Pope Francis, with which he flagrantly lies from article 1, stating that: “The liturgical books promulgated by the saintly Pontiffs Paul VI and John Paul II, in conformity with the decrees of Vatican Council II, are the sole expression [emphasis added] of the lex orandi of the Roman Rite.” With this starting point of the document, Francis contradicts what was established by Benedict XVI in Summorum Pontificum in the summer of 2007 (less than 15 years after its promulgation and with Benedict XVI still alive), and Pope Francis also contradicts the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which in no. 1203 states:
“The liturgical traditions, or rites, currently in use in the Church are the Latin rite (principally the Roman rite, but also the rites of certain local Churches, such as the Ambrosian, Hispano-Visigothic or Mozarabic rites, and those of certain religious orders) and the Byzantine, Alexandrian or Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Maronite and Chaldean rites. ‘The sacred Council, faithful to the Tradition, […] declares that the holy Mother Church renders equal honor and glory to all legitimate rites and wishes that they shall be preserved in the future and flourish in all things’.”
Thanks to that lamentable content and to its aim that the millennial liturgy of the Church die slowly, suffocating any attempt at revival, I sought and found the Holy Mass in the Tridentine Rite. So I thank Pope Francis for, being so uncomfortable with the Millennial Liturgy of the Latin Rite in the Church, I was able to know it, I have been able to live it, and I have managed to experience its beauty and the sacredness of all its gestures, and the teaching of its prayers, antiphons, and the Roman Canon, rediscovering precisely the sense of the sacred, of mystery, and of sacrifice that I had stopped perceiving in the masses of the parishes where the priest is the center of the celebration; the sacrifice takes a backseat, leaving the protagonism to the paschal banquet; and the laity show a need for participation, either as readers or as supposedly extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist, being really totally ordinary ministers.
The Holy Mass in the Tridentine Rite, whose missal has nourished the life of many saints, martyrs, confessors, doctors, and missionaries for fifteen centuries, cannot suddenly cease to be something sacred that needs to be gotten rid of. Cardinal Robert Sarah stated in September 2019, while still Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, in an interview with journalist Edward Pentin, that “prohibiting the Extraordinary Rite —as it is now called to the Holy Mass that has been the most ordinary in the history of the Church— or making it an object of suspicion is something inspired by the Devil, who desires to suffocate and kill us spiritually.” Having been able to live the Tridentine Holy Mass, I can understand as truth what this great lord said.
Before entering the topic regarding the Theology of the Body, I want to affirm that I understand the Catholic Church as the place where all truth of the Word of God is announced and preserved; the sacred is distinguished from the profane; the faithful is nourished by the liturgy and the grace of the sacraments; and it is understood that eternal salvation is not automatic, but requires arduous effort of constant conversion and renunciation of sin. Furthermore, I consider that it must be denounced that the Church runs the risk of dissolving into a permanent adaptation to the path that the world indicates to it, instead of it indicating the path of salvation to the world; it must be denounced a Church that has decided to listen to man, instead of understanding that man is the one who must listen to the Church; it must be denounced that the Church continues to lose its supernatural identity by lightening the teaching of the Gospel, by speaking more of mercy than of the need for conversion —giving the impression that it would prefer that what was said by the Lord Jesus to the adulterous woman had ended in “Neither do I condemn you,” without telling her afterward “go and sin no more”— , by softening the Word of God by speaking more of processes than of truth, by proposing more accompaniment than fidelity, and by giving absolute value to dialogue with religions that worship false gods, building bridges to achieve encounter and fraternal love, in order to live in peace —not in the peace of Christ but in that of the world—, affirming that we are all brothers without the need for Baptism to unite us. This does not mean that I consider that mercy (always united to truth), processes, dialogue, and accompaniment have no place in the Church; quite the contrary, especially the infinite mercy of God Our Lord toward us sinners. However, what must be denounced is that these issues have become the supreme criterion, values in themselves, that suffocate the true path of the Church and its evangelizing mission. As Cardinal Sarah affirmed at the Catholic University of Ávila: “the temptation to consent to the spirit of the world dominant today has arisen thanks to an erroneous theological-pastoral excuse: the adaptation of the Church’s teachings to the realities of the contemporary world.”
On the other hand, the philosophical, theological, and doctrinal positions that, in the name of a supposed fidelity to the Tradition of the Church, affirm that the entire Vatican II Council is something bad; that all the teaching of post-conciliar Popes constitutes a total break with Tradition; that every philosophical and theological current after Scholasticism is wrong from beginning to end; and that nothing more can be said than what was said before Vatican II, as if the Holy Spirit had become mute and suffocated since the beginning of the 1960s decade, must also be denounced.
I would now like to try to respond to the lady who calls herself Formerly Perplexed Catholic regarding the topic she has been addressing in her articles about the topic or phenomenon called the Theology of the Body according to Saint John Paul II. I end this section by sharing that, like her, I also read Letter to Confused Catholics by the great prophet of our times, Msgr. Marcel Lefebvre, and that I perfectly understand the warnings he launched to the Church by the great Pope Saint Pius X in his prophetic encyclical letter Pascendi Dominici Gregis, where he denounced the infiltration of modernism in the Church, which he qualified as “the synthesis of all heresies,” and ratified the Immaculate Ever Virgin Mary as “the destroyer of all heresies”.
The damage done by the effervescent sentimentalist and pseudo-mystic influencers
First of all: I completely share the fact that the Theology of the Body that Saint John Paul II transmitted and that has been published in Spanish in at least two prestigious Spanish publishers, such as Ediciones Palabra (in 4 volumes) or Ediciones Cristiandad (in a single volume), has been completely prostituted, reduced, and trampled as a cheap psychology of sex by all these influencers and some emotional sex-mystics who, without even having read and studied all the Catecheses that make up this Theology of the Body, wander on social networks, give talks, courses, and even retreats that are often loaded with testimonies with very little doctrinal explanation and reflection. I am not against testimonies; on the contrary. In fact, one of them has impacted me a lot and, every time I hear it, I experience a joy in the heart full of gratitude, as if I were hearing it for the first time. But if preponderant importance is given to testimonies, the sessions remain just that: sharing testimonies that only indicate to us that each person’s story is unique and unrepeatable, and that what was lived by any of them will hardly be repeated in another person, since God Our Lord has and will have his plan of love and his rhythm with each one.
I am a firsthand witness that people considered celebrities, simply because they studied something of personalist philosophy or because they are or were consecrated laymen or consecrated laywomen, dedicate themselves to transmitting, emotionally and loaded with exaggerated feelings, topics of courtship, chastity, sexuality in marriage, and now, with the very confusing influence of Amoris Laetitia, they propose an accompaniment without an endpoint, without affirming that the person’s suffering arises from a disorder in their feeling and living their own personal identity, making dialogue an absolute and primordial value and, explicitly, without seeking the healing of the person suffering from gender dysphoria or disordered sexual attraction. I totally share with the Formerly Perplexed Catholic Lady that this has become a plague, and the worst is that it has sickened a beautiful sector of the Church made up of people of good will, of assiduous sacramental life and prayer, and of sincere search to follow the Lamb of God wherever He goes, but who have been educated by the current modernist Church that seems to have forgotten the first 1960 years of history and Tradition, avid for emotions and constant novelties, whatever they may be, and that seeks to dilute, adapt, accommodate, and soften the Word of God and the teaching of twenty centuries of Church Tradition, proposing an attractive but false path that seeks to avoid speaking of sin, of hell, of the possibility of eternal damnation, of the call to conversion, of the evil of contraception, of adultery in all its forms, of the fact that mercy can only be united to truth, and of the unity of the Church that Pope Leo XIV now wants to attempt will never be given, unless it is based on the immovable rock of truth.
The one who initiated an emotional, sentimental way and with several doctrinal deviations in transmitting the Theology of the Body of which the Formerly Perplexed Catholic Lady complains, with very just reason, is the American Christopher West, who grew up in the bosom of a family belonging to an ecumenical charismatic covenant community, which underwent a beautiful purification because it needed to heal a way of living proper to a cult or a sect: Mother of God Community, in Gaithersburg, MD. Christopher lived this beautiful and painful process of this community firsthand. My family and I had the enormous blessing of living in that community years after they had lived this strong stage of purification, which had left it with a maximum of 10% of its members; and for us it was the closest thing to having lived Heaven on Earth during those three years, while I studied my second master’s degree at the John Paul II Institute in Washington, D.C. However, it is necessary to recognize that it is to Christopher West that the fact that the Theology of the Body has reached so many Catholics who would never have known anything about those catecheses of Saint John Paul II on human love is owed, if Christopher had been just another graduate of the Saint John Paul Institute in its Washington, D.C. headquarters, who would have ended up working in American dioceses as director of family pastoral care —in fact, Christopher started that way, if I remember correctly, in Denver, CO—.
I am a witness that many people have changed their lives as a result of living the courses and conferences of Christopher; numerous people have saved their vocation to consecrated virginity; priests have renewed their first love and rejuvenated their ministry; and many marriages have come out of their crises as a result of what West has taught them. Many people have found their vocation, either of consecration in perpetual virginity or of embracing the path of marriage, thanks to what they lived in the events where Christopher participates. Blessed be God for Christopher West.
I personally know Christopher West. We were classmates in my first Master in Theological Studies in Washington, D.C., in the late 1990s, where he and I met and studied the Theology of the Body and from where West was seriously and charitably criticized by the dean of the Institute while I was taking my second Master in Theological Studies at that JPII Institute between 2008 and 2011, while West traveled the United States and began to go to other countries with his clamor of having found a great novelty. David L. Schindler, of very happy memory, who rests in the Glory of God, dean of the Institute throughout what we have of the 21st century until his death in 2022, who was my professor from 1997 to 1999 and from 2008 to 2011, was also Christopher West’s professor during the 1990s and in 2009 stated that West was “dangerously imprudent” in claiming that Saint John Paul II, with his Theology of the Body, and Hugh Hefner (founder of Playboy), with his pornographic propaganda, were called “the two great heroes” and that they represented the call to Christians to “complete what the sexual revolution began.” Despite this aberration, Schindler stated that he did not question at any moment Christopher West’s genuine love for the Church and even for humanity, but he did reiterate that his proposal needs patient reflection and correction.
I would add that Christopher West is a super gifted communicator, like very few, and he really communicates what he believes: he is authentic. I perceive his emotivity and enthusiasm as totally genuine, although they seem to me many times exaggerated or, simply, not my style. But since no one dared to do what he did from the beginning of the 21st century, he deserves respect, admiration, and gratitude for launching himself into the world to announce and transmit the Theology of the Body according to how he understood it with his famous “Good News about Sex & Marriage” —to which David L. Schindler replied: “yes, but Good News about God & Love first”—, to end up having a very successful Theology of the Body Institute in the Philadelphia, PA area, which boasts being “the place” that certifies people who go around the world spreading these contents with the way of understanding and transmitting them of this great communicator, Christopher West.
For my part, although I do not share his way of transmitting the Theology of the Body of Saint John Paul II, he has all my respect, my admiration, my gratitude, my appreciation, and my esteem; and I am a firsthand witness and testify that he is a man who knows how to give himself to others, especially to very needy and even defenseless people. Therefore, I reiterate that blessed be God for Christopher West. May God bless him, bless his home, his family, and each of his loved ones.
I clarify that I do not consider Christopher West as the reference for the understanding and interpretation of the Theology of the Body according to Saint John Paul II. I consider him the great responsible for many people having come across it and I consider him a great instrument that God Our Lord has used to give light and fresh air to the lives of many people in the Catholic Church.
In my opinion, you, honorable Formerly Perplexed Catholic Lady, and all the self-proclaimed traditionalists, who seem that for them everything that has come after the death of the great Pope Pius XII is invalid a priori and all possible means must be used to discredit it or even ridicule it, what they should do is seriously study the Theology of the Body according to Saint John Paul II and launch themselves to correct and discredit all these excited sentimentalist influencers who transmit a cheap emotional psychology, calling it Theology of the Body, which anyone would say that some of their contents are impregnated with the sordid smelly books loaded with perversion, Heal Me with Your Mouth and The Mystical Passion, by the same author of the Vatican document that proposes blessings for irregular couples, even of people of the same sex, and who seems very uncomfortable with the most holy virginal purity of the Blessed Ever Virgin Mary and her indispensable role in the Mystery of the Redemption of the human race: Cardinal Víctor Manuel “El Tucho” Fernández.
Because of this type of people —who I do not doubt do it with the best of intentions, despite their poor formation, and transmit this type of contents in the name of the catecheses on human love that Saint John Paul II transmitted— the traditionalists make a gross error in discrediting the Theology of the Body that Saint John Paul II transmitted in his Wednesday catecheses to found, sustain, and explain the truth of Humanae Vitae.
By the way, Humanae Vitae is also discredited by the Formerly Perplexed Catholic Lady in her second article published in the Infovaticana Tribune, titled “The traditional teaching of the Catholic Church and the transformations in the 20th century on matters of sexual morality”, where she quotes the great bishop Athanasius Schneider. Furthermore, quoting Romano Amerio, it is clearly manifest that she did not read well or did not study the catecheses of the Theology of the Body, for she erroneously affirms —and I don’t even know if maliciously— that, I quote: “John Paul II, in the long catechesis dedicated to the meaning of the union of spouses, has never cited this passage from Luke, which certainly weakens the doctrine of the parity of the two ends prevailing after the Council: ceasing mortality, generation ceases, and ceasing generation, marriage ceases”, referring Amerio to the passage of Lk 20, 35-36.
This is absolutely false. Amerio and the Formerly Perplexed Catholic Lady either did not read the catecheses of the Theology of the Body, or did not read them well, or, if they read them well, then they lie: Amerio in saying this and the honorable Lady in quoting him. Saint John Paul II dedicates the Wednesdays from November 11, 1981 —resuming his catecheses after his convalescence from the attack perpetrated against his life on May 13 of that same year— until February 10, 1982, to meditate precisely on the dialogue of the Lord Jesus with the Sadducees, which is found in the three synoptic gospels, and which Saint John Paul II quotes from the first catechesis on the Resurrection of the Flesh, November 11, 1981.
I end this section insisting that it gives the impression that the traditionalists want to discredit the Theology of the Body perhaps because it came after Vatican II or because it has elements of philosophical schools after Scholasticism, and they are encouraged to do so even showing that the intellectual rigor with which they do it, no matter how scholarly it may be, does not seem very accurate and leads them to errors that I would not want to think could be with bad intention. I very much doubt that it is so, but the Formerly Perplexed Catholic Lady ended her article published in Infovaticana on January 3 of this year 2026 by quoting this paragraph from Amerio, where he clearly shows his ignorance or his bad will, whatever that causes his blunder.
To be continued in Part II
Note: Articles published as Tribune express the opinion of their authors and do not necessarily represent the editorial line of Infovaticana, which offers this space as a forum for reflection and dialogue.