This podcast completes our look at Pope St John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. Here he shows how Humanae Vitae provides the “premises for the Christian spirituality of the conjugal life and vocation.” (TOB 126:2) That is, Pope Paul VI’s encyclical is not simply a big “NO” to the Pill. It is far more. It is about the power of love.
One of the bigs bugaboos about Humanae Vitae is that it forces couples to choose between procreation and love, as though these are the two ends of married life. But this is not true, argues John Paul II. Love governs the whole of conjugal life, including the practice of conjugal intercourse. The tension that married couples can and do experience is between the desire for physical union and the procreative significance of the conjugal act. This tension is to be resolved not by technology but by love. Love requires virtue, and where sex is concerned the virtue most clearly at work must be continence. Sometimes exercising virtue is hard. (Think of the courage of the soldier in battle or the firefighter in a flaming building.) But love is often hard work. True love is not easy.
At the center of conjugal spirituality stands chastity, not only as a moral virtue but also as virtue connected with the gift of pietas (reverence) from the Holy Spirit. This reverence is manifest in the spouses’ reverence for their bodies and for the act by which they become one flesh and capable of bringing new life into the world. At the root of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical, as John Paul I sees it, is the problem of the authentic development of the human person.
With this we end our study of John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. If you want to see the earlier posts, simply navigate on this page to those posts.
Our next series of podcasts will be devoted to the same pope’s encyclical on moral theology, Veritatis Splendor, which can be found here: https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_06081993_veritatis-splendor.html. I invite you to join us in reflecting on that important work.
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