Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  This ethic did not do away with desire. Rather, it sought to channel our desires “from the heart,” so that those desires were fulfilled as they should be—in the communion of persons which is the image of God.32 “Purity of the heart” is an aptitude, a virtue, the capacity to channel desire toward self-mastery “in holiness and honor.”33 Sexual love lived in “purity of heart” becomes a means of sanctification as the communion of persons is completed in holiness. Christians, the Pope suggests, will find a special motivation for living their sexuality this way, because the human body was the vehicle through which God became man and through which Christ completed the redemption of the world.34

  There is a nobility and dignity to our being male and female because the self-giving of male and female in sexual love is the visible expression of the interior moral “structure” of the human person.35 False humanisms imagine human beings to be infinitely plastic and malleable. A true humanism—and a true freedom—recognizes that, because certain truths are built into the human condition, human flourishing depends on living out those truths.36 Human sexuality, John Paul insists, unveils some of those truths.

  The Theology of Marriage and Celibacy

  In the Gospel of Mark, the Sadducees, who denied the resurrection of the dead, tried to reduce the notion of resurrection to an absurdity, posing the case of a woman who serially marries seven brothers, all of whom die without giving her children. To which of these seven men, the Sadducees ask, will the woman be married after the resurrection of the dead? Jesus replies that, in the Kingdom of Heaven “they neither marry nor are given in marriage” (Mark 12.23). If the resurrection gives men and women the fullness of life promised by God “from the beginning,” doesn’t Jesus’ reply devalue and degrade marriage and sexuality? In the third part of his Theology of the Body, John Paul argues that precisely the opposite is the case.

  Life in the Kingdom of God is life in perfect self-giving and perfect receptivity. It is life “within” the interior life of God, so to speak, a Trinity of Persons who perfectly give and perfectly receive throughout eternity. “Giving” in the Kingdom is the perfect gift of self to God and the perfect reception of God’s self-gift by men and women in their resurrected bodies. “Resurrection” does not mean the loss of our bodies, which would be dehumanizing. It does, in some sense, mean the divinization of our bodies, as we come to resemble the risen Christ, who remains God and man. This “divinization” of human beings is the fulfillment of the nuptial meaning of the human body, an icon of the Law of the Gift built into creation as a reflection of the inner dynamism of God’s own life.37

  Celibacy lived “for the Kingdom” anticipates, in history, life in the promised Kingdom of God, in which there will be “perfect donation” without marriage. Marriage, which has an element of exclusivity built into it, will not be part of a heavenly life in which all the redeemed live in what the Pope terms “perfect intersubjectivity,” a modern philosophical image of what Christian tradition calls “the communion of saints.”38 In the world and in history, marriage is a school in which we become fitted for life in the Kingdom by learning to make a complete gift of self to another. The celibate must also become fitted for the Kingdom by learning to make that complete gift of self. Celibacy should be fruitful, leading to spiritual paternity and maternity, as marriage does through the procreation, rearing, and education of children. Marriage and celibacy are two complementary, “conjugal” ways of living a Christian life. Celibacy, lived “for the Kingdom,” becomes an icon illuminating the condition that awaits all the faithful in the Kingdom, while marriage is the icon of God’s spousal love for his people, Israel, and for the Church.39

  Marriage, John Paul continues, is in a sense the “most ancient sacrament,” for “from the beginning” it was the ordinary reality that revealed the extraordinary fact of creation as an act of self-giving love. In the sacrament of marriage, husband and wife are the ministers of God’s grace, and the “language of the body” in marital love is the way in which a couple carries out the “conjugal dialogue” appropriate to marriage as a vocation.40 For the Christian, conjugal love is also an icon of the redemption, for love between husband and wife has been recognized since New Testament times as an image of Christ’s love for his bride, the Church.41 Marriage gains a new richness of meaning by being understood as the human reality that best mirrors the relationship between the redeeming Christ and the people He has redeemed. God’s purposes in creation and redemption are both revealed in marriage.42 And here the question of divorce, contested throughout Christian history, comes into clearer focus. If a sacramental marriage, an icon of God’s creative and redeeming love, is dissoluble, then so is God’s love for the world and Christ’s love for the Church.*

  The Theology of Marriage and Celibacy ends with John Paul’s most dramatic celebration of marital love. Sexual love, he concludes, is an act of worship. “Conjugal life becomes…liturgical” when the “language of the body” becomes the means to encounter, through an experience of the sacred, what God had willed for the world and for humanity “from the beginning.” The sexual gift of self, freely offered and freely received within the covenant of marriage, becomes a way to sanctify the world.44

  Reflections on Humanae Vitae

  In the fourth cluster of meditations in John Paul’s Theology of the Body, the Pope asks how the good of sexual love is to be used to promote human happiness. How is sexual love to be lived chastely? To bring sexuality within the ambit of the four cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, courage, and temperance, John Paul proposes, is to live a life of sexual love most humanly.

  In dealing with these difficult questions, Humanae Vitae had put the moral challenge of marital chastity in the rather negative context of “endurance.” John Paul’s Theology of the Body repositions the entire question, asking how various ways of living a life of sexual love fit into the iconography of marriage. The challenge is to live out our embodiedness as male and female—to live sexual love—so that sexual love in marriage becomes the most illuminating possible icon of self-giving.45

  The Pope begins by teaching that all married couples are called to “responsible parenthood.” The issue involved is not merely “avoiding another birth.” The truly human challenge is building a family according to the virtue of prudence. Judgments about the number of children they can responsibly raise are judgments a married couple must make “before God” in the tribunal of conscience. Judgments about “fertility regulation” (a better term than “birth control,” in the Pope’s view) are not judgments that anyone else can make for them. There can be “morally worthy reasons” for limiting fertility; given collapsing birth rates in some societies, there can also be morally worthy reasons for having bigger families than might first seem appropriate to a couple.

  If family planning is a grave moral responsibility for everyone living the vocation of marriage, the next question is how to regulate fertility and live responsible parenthood, so that the spouses’ human dignity is protected and the iconography of married love as mutual self-donation is honored. John Paul argues that it is dehumanizing to transfer mechanical and chemical methods, appropriate to humanity’s domination of nature, to the realm of sexual love. Periodic abstinence from sexual activity, using the natural rhythms of the body as the means for regulating fertility, is a more humanistic method of exercising procreative responsibility and living marital love chastely. It is also more in tune with the sacramental character of marriage, for it gives bodily expression to the fact that married couples are the “ministers of the design” that God has built into procreation. Living the virtue of marital chastity, the couple’s relationship to the natural rhythms of fertility is ennobled and, from a Christian perspective, becomes a vehicle of grace.46

  John Paul suggests that what is “natural” is what best conforms to human dignity, to the nature of the human person as an intelligent creature called to maturity through self-mastery.47 Repositioning the discussion of sexual morality within the broader horizon o
f a genuine humanism, the first moral question shifts from “What am I forbidden to do?” to “How do I live a life of sexual love that conforms with my dignity as a human person?” Within that context, some things are still not to be done. But they are not to be done because they demean our humanity and damage the communion of persons which sexual love is intended to foster.48

  Growing into the maturity of self-mastery is not easy. Living marital chastity means thinking of marriage as a vocation to be grown into, as a couple grows in the love “poured into [their] hearts as a gift of the Holy Spirit.” A couple’s maturation into a communion of persons involves sexual expression and sexual abstinence, ecstasy and asceticism. To remove that tension from married life is to empty it of one crucial aspect of its inherent drama, and its humanity. Truth and love can never be separated in the mysterious, ecstatic, ascetic “language of the body.”49

  A Theological Time Bomb?

  The Church and the world will be well into the twenty-first century, and perhaps far beyond, before Catholic theology has fully assimilated the contents of these 130 general audience addresses.50 If it is taken with the seriousness it deserves, John Paul’s Theology of the Body may prove to be the decisive moment in exorcising the Manichaean demon and its deprecation of human sexuality from Catholic moral theology. Few moral theologians have taken our embodiedness as male and female as seriously as John Paul II. Few have dared push the Catholic sacramental intuition—the invisible manifest through the visible, the extraordinary that lies on the far side of the ordinary—quite as far as John Paul does in teaching that the self-giving love of sexual communion is an icon of the interior life of God. Few have dared say so forthrightly to the world, “Human sexuality is far greater than you imagine.” Few have shown more persuasively how recovering the dramatic structure of the moral life revitalizes the ethics of virtue and takes us far beyond the rule-obsessed morality of “progressives” and “conservatives.”

  John Paul’s Theology of the Body has ramifications for all of theology. It challenges us to think of sexuality as a way to grasp the essence of the human—and through that, to discern something about the divine. In the Theology of the Body, our being embodied as male and female “in the beginning” is a window into the nature and purposes of the Creator God. Angelo Scola, rector of the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome, goes so far as to suggest that virtually every thesis in theology—God, Christ, the Trinity, grace, the Church, the sacraments—could be seen in a new light if theologians explored in depth the rich personalism implied in John Paul II’s theology of the body.51

  Few contemporary theologians have taken up the challenge implicit in this dramatic proposal. Fewer priests preach these themes. A very small, even microscopic, percentage of the world’s Catholics even know that a “theology of the body” exists. Why? The density of John Paul’s material is one factor; a secondary literature capable of “translating” John Paul’s thought into more accessible categories and vocabulary is badly needed. The “canon” of Church controversies as defined by the media—birth control, abortion, divorce, women in Holy Orders—is also an obstacle to a real engagement with John Paul’s thought. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body is emphatically not made for the age of the twenty-second sound-bite, or for a media environment in which every idea must be labeled “liberal” or “conservative.” It may also be the case that John Paul II’s theology of the body will only be seriously engaged when John Paul, lightning rod of controversy, is gone from the historical stage. These 130 catechetical addresses, taken together, constitute a kind of theological time bomb set to go off, with dramatic consequences, sometime in the third millennium of the Church.

  When that happens, perhaps in the twenty-first century, the Theology of the Body may well be seen as a critical moment not only in Catholic theology, but in the history of modern thought. For 350 years, Western philosophy has insisted on beginning with the human subject, the thinking subject. Karol Wojtyła, philosopher, took this “turn to the subject” seriously; John Paul II has taken it seriously as a theologian. By insisting that the human subject is always an embodied subject whose embodiedness is critical to his or her self-understanding and relationship to the world, John Paul took modernity’s “anthropological turn” with utmost seriousness. By demonstrating that the dignity of the human person can be “read” from that embodiedness, he helped enrich the modern understanding of freedom, of sexual love, and of the relationship between them.

  THE POPE OF HUMAN RIGHTS

  On October 2, 1979, four weeks after he began his catechetical series on the theology of the body, John Paul II gave one of the crucial public addresses of his pontificate, to the General Assembly of the United Nations at its headquarters in New York. What he had to say about human rights was a direct challenge to the way most UN member states thought about international politics and the pursuit of peace.

  In the Land of St. Patrick

  En route to the New World, John Paul stopped for two and a half days in Ireland, a once intensely Catholic country showing signs of distancing itself from its historic roots, and a politically divided island where the fever of low-grade civil war, putatively in the name of Catholicism and Protestantism, had persisted for generations. The formal purpose of the visit was to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Knock in County Mayo, site of a Marian apparition in 1879. John Paul wanted to remind the Irish that, like the Poles, their history and culture could not be understood without Christ. He also had some things to say about violence committed in the name of Christianity.

  The first Pope to set foot on Irish soil arrived in Dublin on September 29, an unusually sunny day. At the airport arrival ceremony, John Paul expressed his happiness at being in the Emerald Isle through the prayer known as “St. Patrick’s Breastplate.” He was, he told the Irish, “happy to walk among you—in the footsteps of St. Patrick and in the path of the Gospel that he left you as a great heritage—being convinced that Christ is here: ‘Christ before me, Christ behind me…Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me.’” The first papal Mass in Ireland’s fabled Catholic history took place later that day at a site known as the “Fifteen Acres” in Phoenix Park. Public transportation had been suspended for the day, but more than 1.2 million people found their way to the park, where a great cross, 120 feet high, had been raised before a phalanx of sixty flagpoles bearing the white and gold papal banner. In his homily, John Paul challenged the Irish, who had sent so many thousands of missionaries out into the world, to reevangelize themselves: “Be converted!”52

  After a motorcade through the streets of Dublin, the Pope flew by helicopter to Drogheda, thirty miles or so from the Irish Republic’s border with British Northern Ireland. The original plan had been for the Pope, warmly invited by Anglican Archbishop George Simms, to visit the ancient primatial See of Armagh, in Northern Ireland. Fear of violence had made the trip planners settle for a stop in Drogheda, itself a potential tinderbox of historic emotions. There, in 1649, the Puritan conqueror Oliver Cromwell had perpetrated the greatest massacre in Irish history; Drogheda was also the site of the relics of St. Oliver Plunkett, archbishop of Armagh, who was hanged, drawn, and quartered on London’s Tyburn Hill in 1681. Some 300,000 people, many of them from Northern Ireland, came to see and hear the Pope, who made an impassioned plea for an end to sectarian hatred and the killing that had been done in its name.

  Oliver Plunkett, he said, was not a symbol for revenge: for he had preached by word and deed “the love of Christ for all men…. He was indeed the defender of the oppressed and the advocate of justice, but he would never condone violence.…His dying words were words of forgiveness for all his enemies.” John Paul publicly thanked the Anglican Primate for his invitation, which had been “taken up and repeated by…leaders and members of other churches, including many from Northern Ireland.”

  These invitations proved that, popular and media imagery to the contrary, “The Troubles” in
the North were not “a religious war, a struggle between Catholics and Protestants.” “The Troubles,” he suggested, were a struggle between haters, and Christianity forbade hate. There were injustices to be remedied, but Christianity resolutely forbade “solutions to these situations by the ways of hatred, by the murdering of defenseless people, by the methods of terrorism…. The command ‘Thou shalt not kill’ must be binding on the conscience of humanity, if the terrible tragedy and destiny of Cain is not to be repeated.”

  Then, to those Cains who may have been listening, he made his most powerful and personal plea: “On my knees I beg you to turn away from the paths of violence and to return to the ways of peace…violence destroys the work of justice…. Further violence in Ireland will only drag down to ruin the land you claim to love and the values you claim to cherish….”53 Many of the “violent men” of Northern Ireland would ignore that appeal in the years ahead. But some would trace the more hopeful signs of peace that appeared decades later back to John Paul II’s decisive refutation of violence. As elsewhere, the truth of what he said could not be measured by immediate impact, but by the fact that it was the truth.

  En route by helicopter to Galway and a meeting with Irish youngsters on September 30, John Paul stopped briefly in Clonmacnois, a great center of scholarship during the Dark Ages that had sent hundreds of missionaries into Europe. The Pope, more alone than he would ever be in Ireland, stood briefly in the extensive ruins of the monastic city and prayed at the tomb of one of the local saints before flying to the Ballybrit Raceway, where 300,000 young people were waiting for him. He told them the same thing, he said, that he had told the young people of Kraków during his years as archbishop: “I believe in youth with all my heart and with all the strength of my conviction.” Speaking almost autobiographically, he left them with a testimonial: “Sometimes,” he said, “one could have the feeling that, before the experiences of history and before concrete situations, love has lost its power…. And yet, in the long run, love always brings victory, love is never defeated. Young people of Ireland, I love you.”