Note to Editors: The following is the text of the keynote speech of The Most Reverend John J. Myers, Metropolitan Archbishop of Newark, at the CONFERENCE ON CHRISTIAN SEXUALITY, a national conference sponsored by the organization Family Honor in Charleston, SC, July 19-20, 2002. Family Honor was created in 1987 to provide opportunities for parents and children to learn to communicate effectively on important life values, with a special focus on the truth and goodness of God’s gift of sexuality and the virtue of Chastity. AN
EXAMINATION OF POPE JOHN PAUL II’S If you ever visit Rome, go on a Wednesday. That’s the day that the Pope usually meets pilgrims who have come to the Eternal City. For those of you who have yet to participate in one of those meetings, it will be a memorable event, because the Pope usually spends the better part of the morning with those who have come to visit. Along with the usual greetings and photo opportunities, the Pope prays with pilgrims. Together they share the Scriptures, and then the Pope speaks. Twenty-two years ago, back in 1980, Pope John Paul II -- as has been his style in lots of ways -- started something new. Instead of just speaking about the Scriptural reading of the day, the Pope began a series of talks, starting with the Book of Genesis. Those talks, which examined certain recurrent themes, eventually stretched on for about four years. The individual pilgrim on a given Wednesday morning in Rome may not have noticed it, but he was in the middle of something big. Because when the Pope finished, he had sketched out the theme of this conference. He had laid out his “theology of the body.” For a Christian, the significance of the human body is inescapable and undeniable. Let me repeat that again, lest the point not be clear: one cannot understand Christianity unless one understands the meaning and significance of the human body.For some people, that statement may sound strange. At first glance, some may even consider it strange coming from a celibate Catholic bishop. There is, after all, a certain myth that the Catholic Church teaches what it does about human sexuality because it undervalues sex. The truth is: the Catholic Church teaches what it does about sex because it highly values sex, and it values sex because it values the human body.The meaning and importance of the human body is not, however, some unusual preoccupation of Catholics: I said, after all, that the significance of the human body is inescapable for all Christians. When St. Paul stood up in the Agora to proclaim the truth of the bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ, his hearers laughed him out of the marketplace. Oh, yes, they prided themselves on their broad mindedness: they even had an altar “to the unknown god,” so as not to offend any politically correct deities. But as “tolerant” as they believed they were, surely even Paul understood the latest of “modern” thinking in his day, which held that the body was corrupt and evil. How, then, could this itinerant preacher ask “serious” people like the Athenians to believe in a god foolish enough to rise from the dead in his human body? That was just too foolish to believe! St. Paul, however, understood clearly that Christianity is incomprehensible unless one understands the meaning of the human body. “Every mystery of Christian faith touches upon the meaning of human embodiment.” Central beliefs of Christianity, like creation, Incarnation, redemption and eschatology cannot be understood without reference to the human body. A truly ecumenical Christianity, therefore, should be aware of its own roots. The human body points to the doctrine of creation. God “created them” male and female, and that distinction is most evident at the bodily level. God’s creative act means that women are not “misbegotten males,” as Aristotle erroneously claimed. God intends the difference between the sexes; it is no mere biological accident. Even less is it a mere cultural construct, an artifact of cultural conditioning, a flaw in upbringing. It’s not “gender,” it’s “sex.” “Sex” is not, then, just another word for discrimination. It is not a suspect category, like race, and taking account of legitimate sexual differentiation is not a mark of provincial prejudice. Inscribed into our very chromosomes, sex is not just an irrelevant overlay. It is part of the very gift of creation and an expression of God’s Will. Because our bodiliness is a Divine Gift, it is also a blessing: after all, God only gives good gifts. The refrain Genesis repeats on each day of creation drives that point home: God saw what He made, “and it was good.” When God reflects on the male and female He created, God for the first time declares “it was very good.” The body also points to the doctrine of Incarnation: in Jesus Christ God became a real flesh-and-blood human being. The Gospel of John puts it simply: “The Word became flesh and lived among us.” The late Polish Primate, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, put it tenderly: in Jesus Christ man meets “God in diapers.” As St. Paul quickly learned, the reality of Jesus’ bodiliness was a stumbling block to many. The numerous heresies in ancient Christianity that go by sophisticated theological names like “Arianism” or “Nestorianism” or “Monophysitism” really have one thing in common: they refuse to admit that Jesus Christ was a real human being with a real human body. They attempt to evade the consequences of Jesus’ corporeality. They cannot accept the central truth of Christianity, namely, that God could be found in a human body. The body also points to the doctrine of Redemption. Jesus suffered for us. Jesus died for us. One can suffer in the realm of fear or distress or anguish, but Jesus’ Passion was more than just psychological. He sweated blood on a human forehead. He had his back shredded by leather lashes. He had thorns thrust through his head. He fell “under the weight of the wood” of His cross. He had spikes driven through His arms and legs. Never pass over John’s scrupulous record about water and blood flowing from the side of Jesus without remembering that the Evangelist wrote that to remind us the Jesus was a real human being who suffered in a real human body for our sakes. Jesus died for us. A real human body was anointed, shrouded and put in a grave. And consider the lesson of our language. We do not say “Jesus’ Body died for us” but “Jesus died for us.” Jesus’ flesh is no mere appendage; salvation is more than just a good intention. Jesus’ Identity is bound up with His body. So much is our redemption bound up with Christ’s Body that the Resurrection is a bodily resurrection. Jesus did not conquer sin and death in dying; lots of people—lots of good people—die. Jesus conquered sin and death in rising. Jesus is our Redeemer when “the last enemy, which is death,” is abolished, when His Body, in glory, rises from the tomb. The body also points to the final doctrine of Christianity: eschatology. We Christians say, “we believe in the Resurrection of the body.” We claim that on the Last Day all men and women will rise to be saved or damned, body and soul. This person, body and soul, did good or did evil. This person, body and soul, is rewarded or punished. The resurrection of the body is not, after all, a doctrine that comes out of nowhere. It is not some reward God arbitrarily promises. If we truly believe that Jesus rose from the dead, body and soul, if we truly believe that Jesus is our Savior, then the resurrection of the body must follow. If Jesus is our Savior, he saves us from sin and sin’s effects. From the very first pages of the Bible the primary curse of sin is death: to disobey God, to partake of what He forbids, is to die. If God is Our Savior, He must save us as we are, i.e., as bodily beings. That is, in the end, what belief in the resurrection of the body is about. God is “God of the living,” who opens our graves and raises up our bodies. Because of Christ, no resting place will ever be “final.” The resurrection of the body is nothing more than the reintegration of all things in Christ “when God will be all in all.” If the truths of Christianity do not convince us of the significance of the human body, perhaps an examination of our own experience will. The tangibility and immediacy of our bodies should remind us of the body’s importance. Alas, all too often that significance is lost. All too often some thinkers have degraded the importance of the body. Instead of regarding the body as a constitutive element of whom we are, the body has often been treated merely as a thing, a “tool” that is somehow inferior to the person. This alien anthropology, this false understanding of our bodily being, is simply incompatible with being a Christian. But that has not made it go away. Consider the very way we talk. If I were unexpectedly to hit you right now, you’d probably ask: “why did you hit me?” Note what you said: “Why did you hit me?” You did not say: “Why did you hit my body?” The way we speak testifies to our knowing instinctively that we are bodily beings. We know that to touch my body is to touch me. That is why crimes like assault and battery are crimes against the person, not mere property violations. But this alien anthropology that tries to separate me from my body still presses itself. It is found in the euthanasia movement that urges us to kill the sick and the incapacitated. Knowing the instinctive horror that most people have towards killing another person, advocates of euthanasia invoke the “separate-the-body-from-the-person” strategy by trying to deny the humanity of persons who are sick or handicapped. They cease being persons; they are called “vegetables,” as if some perverse alchemy transformed a human being into a turnip. This false understanding of our humanity, which denies the meaning of the body, is also at work in the abortion debate, ready to claim that the genetically unique bodily being growing beneath his or her mother’s heart is not a person but a “blob of tissue,” or a “mass of cells.” And so, in the “debate” over abortion—and I use that word in quotes because this “debate” is so often one-sided—the reality of the body of the unborn child is almost always systematically censored out of the picture. The tiny heart beating at 25 days, the little brain producing brain waves at 43 days, the little eyes that start forming at 19 days, the tiny fingers that open and close during week 6, all these things are never mentioned in the abortion “debate.” Even less do we hear about the bodily consequences of “choice.” When is the last time somebody talked about the little arms or legs hacked off during vacuum aspiration abortions performed in the first trimester? When is the last time somebody was willing to mention the scalded skin of a body aborted by saline infusion, a procedure used in second trimester abortions? When is the last time somebody was willing to admit that the face in the surgical bucket after a third trimester hysterotomy really looks human? When did you last see a picture of the little fingers on the hands of a child executed during a partial birth abortion, distended as the shock of surgical scissors thrust through the skull ends his life? The meaning of the body is rife with consequences for many contemporary issues, which is why that bodily reality is so often hidden out-of-sight. Sterile intellectual debates about “choice” or “the right to die” have an antiseptic scent on the purely intellectual level. They lose that rarefied scent when the body is up close and personal. There’s a line in the old movie, “The Guns of Navarone,” which captures this idea eloquently. When Keith Mallory, played by Gregory Peck, asks the “Butcher of Barcelona” why he hesitated to kill the Nazi who was only an arm’s length away from him, he gets this answer: “You shoot a man at 200 yards, he’s just a moving target. You kill him with a knife, you’re close enough to smell him. I smell them in my sleep.” Suddenly, in the presence of the real human body, it’s no longer a “moving target,” a “blob of tissue,” or a “vegetable.” And killing no longer smells quite so antiseptic. The body puts people immediately in the presence of being, and that experience has a restraining and often salutary effect on some of our most misguided thoughts and evil urges. The body has an undeniable knack for reconnecting people with reality. The body has the bracing effect of cold water splashed on “the worst laid plans of mice and men.” It was one thing to sit in a nice suburban Berlin villa, acting like government officials, sipping tea and planning the Holocaust. It was quite another to be the Allied soldier who first walked into Dachau, Auschwitz, Majdanek or Buchenwald, catching a waft of the smoke from the crematoria. The difference lies in the body, which reconnects people very directly, very immediately, and sometimes very painfully, with reality. What we have said up to this point about the importance of the body points to the practical importance of the “theology of the body” so eloquently articulated by Pope John Paul II. Rarely, however, have we mentioned his name. That has been deliberate because, no matter how much we are indebted to Pope John Paul II for this “theology of the body,” we must make this theology our own. It is not enough that we study and quote the Pope: the “theology of the body” is not some museum piece, to be gazed upon, examined, and then put away. We must take the “theology of the body” and apply it today, in the myriad circumstances of our lives. There would be no greater tribute to the Pope than that others carry his thought forward; there would be no greater betrayal than that, with an admiring gaze, we simply repeat his formulations like some incantation. Pope John Paul II arguably has been developing a “theology of the body” through most of his academic life, both before and after becoming Pope. While the term “theology of the body” may have caught on after the Pope started devoting his weekly Wednesday talks to the subject, the concerns the Pope voiced there stretch back to the very beginnings of Karol Wojtyla’s academic and priestly life. One can even say they go back fifty years. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of Karol Wojtyla’s very first writings about sexual morality. In 1952, as a young priest, Karol Wojtyla wrote an article, “Instinct, Love, and Marriage,” dedicated to the virtue of purity. Unlike his contemporaries, however, Wojtyla already began developing a positive understanding of purity rooted in his “theology of the body.” Purity is not, says Wojtyla, something negative. Purity is not a “no” (although sometimes it has to say “no”). Purity is primarily a “yes,” a positive response to two things: (1) an understanding of what human being’s sexual instinct stands for and (2) an understanding of what sexual intercourse symbolizes. Man’s sexual instinct, argues the future Pope, does not just have a biological meaning, because man is more than just assorted bones, muscles, organs, and tissues, $3.95 of various elements and a few gallons of water. No, what comes into existence as a possible result of sexual intercourse is a human being. Not a frog, not a toad, not a “mass of cells,” but a human being. Man’s sexualinstinct has more than just a biological meaning: it has an existential meaning, because existence—human existence—is its goal. And that goal is important for two reasons: (1) because the life of a new human being is involved and (2) because the connection between our sexual instincts and giving life was made by God. If we take seriously the doctrine of creation, God only gives good things. At the same time, sexual intercourse is experienced by a man and a woman as a mutual giving and receiving in open self-surrender. That kind of giving and receiving, without reservation, demands the commitment of permanent love. Love demands nothing less from sex. For Karol Wojtyla, therefore, purity is a “yes.” It is a yes to recognizing the goodness of God’s creation, including the share spouses have in that creation through the sexual instinct. It is also a “yes” to the kind of unreserved, permanent commitment of love that sexual intercourse symbolizes and expresses. Purity is demanded not because sex is sullied but because it is sacred: because the “language of the body” which speaks of love and commitment ought to be consistent with the language of the heart and the mind. Purity is bodily truth, making sure that what I say with my body is what lies in my heart, what I think in my mind, and what I proclaim in front of other people. That is why the Pope has been such a defender of marriage. The Pope’s defense of marriage does not come from tradition alone or past teaching alone or even the Bible alone. The Pope’s defense of marriage comes in large part from his “theology of the body.” If sexual intercourse symbolizes the giving and receiving of love—a love open to the possibility of life, of children—then love itself requires certain things of sex and sex already symbolizes certain things about love. Unity—one beloved, one husband, one wife. Exclusivity—this one, this man, this woman. Permanence—love never thinks of itself as being for a moment, an evening, a one night stand. Totality—a complete giving and receiving, no strings attached. Nobody ever got away saying “I love you 85%.” Life-giving—because the language of the body means giving to and receiving from the spouse in the totality of his or her being, including the fact that he or she is a fertile being and can sometimes, through the grace of God, become a parent. The flight from the body has left us with a notion of sex that denies the language of the body. Those who argue for the proposition that “sex-is-between-two-people-and-nobody-else” divorce the body from sex because, in practice, they regard sex as something psychological: what two people have agreed to. Real sex is not, however, primarily a psychic affair (which is why G.K. Chesterton rightly observed that those people who always have sex on the mind have chosen the worst place to have it). And if real sex is not primarily a psychic affair, it cannot escape the meaning and language of the body. Our efforts to do so are the reasons why even “marriage” lacks an inherent meaning to some people. Divorced from the body and reduced to a mental state, why not have “marriage” between two men or two women, as the Québec Legislature practically decided a few weeks ago? Marriage hasbecome just a label, a word whose definition some people feel free to redesign at will. Until it collides with the reality of the body. In insisting on the significance of the body, we Christians are doing nothing less than fighting for human dignity. Already in 1976, when the future Pope John Paul II preached the Lenten retreat for Pope Paul VI, he warned that “we are in the front line of a lively battle for the dignity of man.” Human dignity is not to be found in pseudo-intellectual theories that justify death because they disconnect human beings from their bodies. Pope John Paul II has powerfully sketched out the worldviews currently contending for human hearts, minds, and bodies: a “culture of life” and a “culture of death.” In calling for a new evangelization, the Pope asks all Catholics, all Christians, all people of good will to join in proclaiming the “Gospel of life.” Some may proclaim that Good News out of philosophical commitment to the dignity of the bodily human person and in the name of human rights. Some may proclaim that Good News out of religious commitment to God as Creator and Redeemer, the one who made us and saves us as bodily beings. Some may proclaim that Good News out of naked self-interest: most people are for a “culture of life” when the life in question is their own. For whatever reason that impels us, the Gospel of Life is an example of “practical ecumenism,” a shared vision of human dignity that can be advocated by all people of good will. It should certainly be embraced by all Christians because, despite whatever doctrinal differences may separate us, the issues at stake in the Gospel of Life transcend narrow denominational lines. The Second Vatican Council urged Catholics to attend to “the signs of the times,” aware that the Gospel must be proclaimed in all sorts of difference cultural circumstances. Today’s disciple strives to respond to the demands of the “new evangelization” by proclaiming the Gospel of Life in all those circumstances where a culture of life is threatened by a culture of death. Pope John Paul II reminds us that this task begins, first and foremost, within the basic Christian community of the family itself. “We need to begin with the renewal of a culture of life within Christian communities themselves. Too often it happens that believers . . . end of separating their Christian faith from the ethical requirements concerning life . . . . “ The family should be a “’sanctuary of life,’ . . . the cell of society which loves and welcomes life . . . .” Understanding the language of the body truly “starts at home.” Conferences like this one only bear fruit if we go home recommitted to the truth of the body created by God and rededicated to the task of sharing that Good News with others.Human beings are not abstractions, ideas floating in space. Human beings are bodily beings, and only a philosophy and theology that takes the meaning of the hu man body seriously can protect real human beings and defend their rights. Real human beings created by God. Real human beings saved by their brother in the flesh, Jesus Christ. Real human beings who are called to live, body and soul with God—who is Love --forever. May Mary, who bore the Deity in diapers and thus became Theotokos, she who first exemplified the meaning and significance of the body for her Son, be for us a model and patroness in our efforts. Thank you and God bless you!
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