What to do then regarding the Theology of the Body, according to Saint John Paul II?
I am going to try to conclude and I hope with this to inaugurate a constructive dialogue with the Perplexed Ex-Catholic Lady and with any of you, traditionalists, for what unites me to you is much greater than the distance established in this healthy discussion.
To completely discredit Saint John Paul II’s Theology of the Body—above all, mostly because of these sex-mystical influencers who prostitute Saint John Paul II’s legacy by saying any barbarity—in the name of a certainly incomplete “traditional doctrine” or a Thomism that seems to indicate that the Holy Spirit fell silent forever with the death of Saint Thomas Aquinas, has gone too far. It seems to me that anyone who does this, in a debate with my professors from the John Paul II Institute in Washington D.C., would fare quite poorly.
Furthermore, the Theology of the Body must be read in the light of the entire magisterium of Saint John Paul II; without forgetting his apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio, from which Pope Francis has distanced himself with his confusing and harmful Amoris Laetitia; without forgetting the great encyclical Veritatis Splendor, which Pope Francis has also completely ignored in his Amoris Laetitia and regarding which he has avoided answering the five questions (known as the dubia) presented to him by honorable cardinals, based precisely on four of them in the Veritatis Splendor, one of those cardinals being the great Carlo Caffarra, founding president of the John Paul II Institute in Rome; and without forgetting the apostolic letter Mulieris Dignitatem, nor the beautiful Letter to Families, nor the first encyclical of Saint John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis.
In addition to all this, it must also be read in the light of what serious intellectuals have developed in thought and reflection as a result of these catecheses, above all discovering in it not only the nuptial and fruitful meaning of the body, but the filial meaning that Saint John Paul II did not mention, but which he hinted at, and about which Benedict XVI spoke on May 13, 2011, in the speech on the 30th anniversary of the John Paul II Institute.
I particularly recommend entering into dialogue with the professors of the John Paul II Institute in Washington D.C. (with no other institute, please) and with Father José Granados, superior general of the Disciples of the Hearts of Jesus and Mary, whom I consider the highest authority in the correct understanding and interpretation of the Theology of the Body according to Saint John Paul II.
And to be able to understand not only the Theology of the Body, but the entire pontificate of Saint John Paul II, one must always keep in mind paragraph 22 of the pastoral constitution for the Church in the modern world, Gaudium et Spes, the most mentioned and quoted by Saint John Paul II in all types of documents, audiences, and speeches:
“In reality, the mystery of man is only unveiled in the mystery of the Incarnate Word. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of the one who was to come, namely Christ our Lord. Christ, the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and makes known his sublime calling… He who is the image of the invisible God (Col 1:15) is also the perfect man, who has restored to the offspring of Adam the likeness to God, deformed by the first sin. In him, the human nature assumed, not absorbed, has been raised in us also to an incomparable dignity. The Son of God, by his Incarnation, has in a certain way united himself with every man. He worked with human hands, he thought with a human mind, acted with a human will, and loved with a human heart. Born of the Virgin Mary, he has truly been made one of us, like us in all things except sin.”
Saint John Paul II constantly referred to the fact that Christ fully reveals man to himself.
This paragraph has been discredited by some traditionalists who have labeled it anthropocentric. It is clear that modernism has forgotten God and has focused on human rights and human dignity, forgetting the gift of the Holy Spirit of the fear of God. But I honestly wonder: does trying to understand ourselves, we men, from Christ—for “we are created in Him, through Him, and for Him” (cf. Col 1:16)—make us anthropocentric?
Let us remember what Saint John Paul II said about the body, and therefore man, entering through the great door of theology at the moment when the eternal Word of the Father becomes incarnate in the divine person of Jesus of Nazareth, in whom the two natures, divine and human, are united: dogma of the hypostatic union, established at the Council of Chalcedon in the year 451, the Fourth Ecumenical Council of the Church.
The Perplexed Ex-Catholic Lady, in her latest article addressing the topic of the Theology of the Body, published in InfoVaticana on Saturday, January 10, 2026, states that “as a catechetical work, the Theology of the Body is anthropocentric, that is, centered on man, while also personalist, in accordance with the central theme of the Second Vatican Council and the personalist and phenomenological philosophical style proper to Wojtyla.” To this I respond, according to what was said in the previous paragraph, that the Theology of the Body is Christological. And as such, since the eternal Word made man is precisely true God and true man—in whom his purest and immaculate created human nature implies being a fully human body and soul—, then reflecting on man, whose identity and vocation are explained integrally from Christ, does not make the Theology of the Body anthropocentric.
Personalism is another of the philosophies that, because it is posterior to Saint Thomas Aquinas and Scholasticism, is apparently discredited a priori by traditionalists, including Father Christian Ferraro, who in a conference published on the blog Que no te la cuenten, by Father Javier Olivera Ravasi, discredited with absolutist language—and even giving the impression of deep contempt—both phenomenology and personalism.
This is not the forum to enter into these topics now. I only share that the concept of person is one of the great contributions of Catholic thought to philosophy and was coined to try to deepen the two greatest mysteries of the Catholic faith; namely: what God is and who Christ is; that is, the Mystery of the Most Holy Trinity and the Mystery of the hypostatic union in the Incarnation of the eternal Word of the Father.
That there are authors called “personalists” whose proposals do not help Catholic reflection and even move away from the understanding of the faith is beyond doubt. For a very serious and profound reflection on the concept of person, I highly recommend the book by the great German philosopher Robert Spaemann (whom I met personally at the John Paul II Institute in Washington D.C. around 2010-2011), titled precisely Persons: On the Difference Between “Something” and “Someone”.
The Theology of the Body as a «Sign of the Times»
And I would like to propose to you, especially to the honorable Perplexed Ex-Catholic Lady and, above all, to those who call themselves traditionalists, that Saint John Paul II’s Theology of the Body may perhaps be a “sign of the times.” Allow me to explain why I believe this to be so.
It seems to me that you should turn your gaze to the fact that Pope Francis suppressed the Institute founded by Saint John Paul II, to reconstitute it by choosing the sordid character, an aficionado to homoerotic art, Vincenzo Paglia, as grand chancellor of the new institute. In my opinion, abolishing that institute and putting this character at the head of the institute that replaces the one founded by Saint John Paul II constitutes the clearest response to the five dubia presented by the four cardinals in 2016, as a result of the confusing and harmful Amoris Laetitia.
The date of the suppression of the Institute founded by Saint John Paul II—on the anniversary of the first apparition of the Blessed Virgin of Fatima in 1981, and who had chosen who was still a simple monsignor, Carlo Caffarra, as founding president—was September 8, 2017, just 48 hours after the sudden death of Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, with Caffarra’s funeral not yet concluded. Let us remember that the cardinal who most insisted on publishing and demanding a response to the five dubia was precisely Caffarra.
Why did Francisco find the tiny John Paul II Institute so uncomfortable that he had to suppress it in the name of his heretical “anthropological change,” of which he spoke in his lamentable motu proprio Summa Familiae Cura, and found another one so that it would have as its guiding thread for academic programs the Amoris Laetitia, in which he could never utter the word “adultery” and in which he deliberately rejected the teaching of Familiaris Consortio, no. 84 (ratified by Benedict XVI in his Sacramentum Caritatis, no. 29), regarding divorced persons who remarried civilly being able to access the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist, as long as they lived “as brothers”?
Don’t you think that when Francis despised something so much and wanted to suppress it, it was because it was surely something true, sacred, and/or beautiful, as was made evident with his draconian Traditionis Custodes, with which he seeks to gradually and forever suffocate the sacred Roman liturgy with which the Church celebrates Holy Mass—now with restrictions, prohibitions, and even threats and persecution—since around the year 600, as if this sacred and millennial patrimony of the Church belonged to him and he legislated over it at his whim, without caring that Pope Saint Pius V established the Tridentine Missal in perpetuity in 1570 and warned that if anyone altered that Mass, they would incur the wrath of God and of the holy apostles Peter and Paul?
Well, it must be well known that Pope Francis was also very uncomfortable with the John Paul II Institute—the only serious and reliable reference, transmitter and interpreter of the Theology of the Body—to the point of suppressing it and creating a new one with a name as ambiguous and confusing as all his thought.
Why suppress an institute that was founded by a saintly pope on the day he shed his blood in the assassination attempt against his life, while the Church celebrated Our Lady of Fatima? And Francis did so claiming that, quoting verbatim: “the anthropological [emphasis added] and cultural change, which today influences all aspects of life and requires an analytical and diversified approach [emphasis added], does not allow us to limit ourselves to pastoral and missionary practices that reflect past forms and models [emphasis added].”
The past? At what point did what the same successor of Saint John Paul II and immediate predecessor of Francis, Benedict XVI, had noted as so current and had ratified even proposing, in his speech of May 13, 2011, to deepen further in reflection, become “past”?
The anthropological vision of Francis’s pontificate in the Church, what does it consider as the element or elements that, suddenly—or gradually—caused an anthropological change, so that, from some moment, event, or whatever, man ceased to be who he was and now is another? Can we no longer say “and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” because the type of man in whom the Mystery of the Incarnation occurs is something different or diverse from what Pope Francis has in mind?
How does this heretical “anthropological change,” which involves proposing a “new humanism,” relate to the fact that the Church has decided to dialogue with other enemy and heretical religions—considering that their plurality is a blessing with which God created the human race—, but has chosen to take measures of censorship and/or silence toward its own faithful who ask for clarity and response to issues that harm the millennial Tradition of the Church and its perennial doctrinal and moral teaching, ratified and extensively explained in very recent times by Saint John Paul II and Benedict XVI?
It is necessary to remember that the only humanism proper to the apostolic faith of the Catholic Church is Christological. The only true humanism is the one that has come down from heaven and has become incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ, the eternal Word of the Father made man; and only from Him is it possible to look at and explain what and who man is.
Continuing with the interpretation of the discrediting of the Theology of the Body in Francis’s pontificate as a “current sign of the times,” I ask: why did the pro-sodomy heretic Cardinal “Tucho” Fernández not even include a single quote from the Theology of the Body catecheses in his extensive document Una Caro to speak of monogamous marriage between a man and a woman, despite having included 256 bibliographic citations and/or footnotes there?
That one of the characters who has done and is doing the most harm to the Church in current and recent times—author of the most perverted writings that have been written by a priest recently in the Church—does not even turn his gaze to Saint John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, doesn’t it seem to you that this gives many bonuses to the Theology of the Body and, therefore, deserves to be rescued, studied, deepened, and disseminated with modesty, respect, and decorum?
You, Perplexed Ex-Catholic Lady; you, Father Christian Ferraro, and Father Javier Olivera Ravasi; and all of you who truly love the Tradition of the Church, would do much more good to the Church of today—yes, to that post-conciliar Church that in many moments and aspects is gradually approaching more to seem like an NGO than to have the face of the only true Church, which worships, reveres, and follows the path established by the only true God—if you study in depth, rescue, explain, and deepen Saint John Paul II’s Theology of the Body rather than completely discrediting it.
You would do much more good if you positioned yourselves as a counterweight to the entire epidemic of know-it-alls who conduct their Theology of the Body courses and retreats without knowing it well, reducing it to cheap sex psychology, without having solid prior metaphysical formation, and who organize such events in an environment loaded with sentimentalism and emotion, but with very little doctrinal teaching.
Don’t you realize that the Theology of the Body is attacked—we might say— from the right and from the left? On one hand, we have these sex-mystics who dare to affirm nonsense of such proportions as to point to orgasm as an experiential approximation to what heaven will be like; while, on the other hand, traditionalists label it anthropocentric, imbued with phenomenology and personalism, and say that it despises Thomism.
Don’t you think it’s time to recover the great legacy of Saint John Paul II regarding the vocation of marriage as a path to holiness and propose it with all modesty, pudor, modesty, and decorum? Don’t you think it would be advisable to set out to discredit all these influencers who have done so much harm to the Theology of the Body and, instead, for you to propose it to the Church and the world as a genuine “development of doctrine”?
I find nothing better than Saint John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, rightly understood and studied, to counteract the storm unleashed by woke culture and the satanic gender ideology that has taken hold in the Vatican and has permeated the entire Church, in most seminaries, to the point that Pope Francis even mentioned that there was already enough “faggotry” in those places.
To discredit the Theology of the Body—not only from modernist progressivism, but also in the name of a “traditional doctrine”—is the worst mistake: it’s shooting ourselves in the foot. We already have enough problems with so many in the Church who ignore or reject not only the three ends or goods of marriage, but even what the holy pope, destroyer of the Tridentine Mass, proposed in his truly prophetic encyclical Humanae Vitae.
At the moment when the Church ignored human sexuality as the link that unites love and life, it opened the door to where we are now, with a “Tucho” Fernández promoting sodomy and being uncomfortable with the indispensable role played by the Most Holy and Pure Ever Virgin Mary in the Mystery of the Redemption of the human race, and with the power granted to Her from heaven to be the Mediatrix of all graces.
It should not surprise us that Pope Saint Paul VI, just three years after imposing the “new mass” and prohibiting the Mass that had been celebrated with missal in hand since around the year 600, said on June 29, 1972, in his homily for the solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, that the smoke of Satan had entered through the cracks of the Church.
Wouldn’t it be precisely because of having done what Saint Pius V warned so forcefully, ex cathedra, would cause the wrath of God and of the holy apostles Peter and Paul, that Satan found a way to spit his smoke into the Church? The exorcism to expel it has not yet been done, and it does not seem that it is understood as an imperative and priority necessity.
In short, I think I finally must stop here, but I hope to have been able to express my position very honestly and reiterate my gratitude, respect, and admiration for everything you do at InfoVaticana. May God bless you, protect you, and continue to grant you the grace to continue defending the full truth and denouncing the lie and confusion that from Rome have come contaminating the life of the entire universal Church.
But if doing this includes discrediting the greatest contribution in the entire history of the Church regarding the correct understanding of marriage as a path to holiness—which Saint John Paul II transmitted to us in several magisterial documents and in his Theology of the Body—, we will be doing immense harm to ourselves and will continue to allow the terrifying ideologies that continue to take root in our homes, our families, our children, and our Church to grow.
This is the last part of the series of articles dedicated to the Theology of the Body published in part I, part II, part III and this, part IV.
Note: The 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.