From everyday unkindness to shocking atrocities, human beings often seem to be diseased in the way they treat each other. At the same time, it appears almost impossible for us to solve these problems, or even find the roots of all the problems. John Paul II tells us that not only is this possible, but there is really one root, and one surprising cure: learning and living the truth of our sexuality.

---

It’s often the case that men and women who have seen a loved one die of cancer, or who have suffered with it themselves, become the most outspoken advocates of research for a cure. They might even devote their own lives to the medical sciences with the explicit goal of sparing others from what they experienced themselves.

Karol Wojtyla is just such a man. He experienced first-hand the deepest horrors of a century riddled with a most vile “cancer.” His beloved Poland was invaded by the Nazis when he was nineteen. Death was all around him. The stench of the burning bodies of his friends and countrymen hovered in the air from nearby Auschwitz. He would have been sent there, too, or shot on the spot, had his clandestine seminary studies been discovered.

Six years later, when the Red Army left Poland, in marched another totalitarian power. As a young man Wojtyla mounted a cultural resistance to Communism that would continue throughout his life as priest, bishop, cardinal, and pontiff.

The Root of it All

John Paul II is such a champion of human life, dignity, and freedom precisely because of the crucible of death, degradation, and tyranny in which he was formed. The horror of his world forced him to wrestle with God in search of answers to the hardest of life’s questions. How? Why? What could lead Man who is bestowed with God-like dignity to drink from the dregs of raw evil?

He was not interested in surface solutions. He wanted to go to the root of it all. He wanted to find the first event in the chain reaction that led humanity here. He wanted to find the cure for this heinous cancer. But the cancer he knew so well wasn’t in the lungs or the bones. It was in the human heart. So he devoted himself not to the medical sciences, but the philosophical and theological.

So where, have you guessed, has his “research” led him? What, in his mind, is the first event in the chain reaction that begets all evil and death? It’s our rejection of God’s plan for life and love stamped in our sexuality.

Our sexuality reveals that we’re called to image God in a life-giving communion of love. And this “is the deepest substratum of human ethics and culture” (General Audience, October 22, 1980). This is the root of it all. John Paul concludes that human life, its dignity and its balance, depends at every moment of history and at every point on the globe on the proper ordering of love between the sexes (see October 10, 1980).

Far from Manichaeanism

Could it really be, as John Paul notes, that all moral disorder ultimately comes from the impurity of a lustful heart (see December 17, 1980; footnote)? This may sound far-fetched to some. But John Paul is convinced, as he states in his 1960 book Love and Responsibility, that confusion about sexual morality “involves a danger perhaps greater than is generally realized: the danger of confusing the basic and fundamental human tendencies, the main paths of human existence. Such confusion,” he insists, “must clearly affect the whole spiritual position of man” (p. 66).

John Paul is in no way saying that sex itself is tainted, much less that it’s evil. This is the thinking of an ancient heresy known as Manichaeanism. He’s saying that because human sexuality is so good and so fundamental in God’s design, that the disorder of the sexual relationship—which is the “first fruit” of original sin (see Gen 3:7)—leads to the disorder of all relationships.

We do not do a disservice to the Church to admit that some of her historical thinkers have been tainted by a Manichaean depreciation of sex. But it would be a terrible disservice to accuse John Paul of the same. His theology of the body intentionally combats such errors. According to papal biographer George Weigel, the theology of the body “may prove to be the decisive moment in exorcizing the Manichaean demon ... from Catholic moral theology” (Witness to Hope, p. 342).

John Paul’s whole point is to show us that the disorder men and women experience in their relationship is not the final word on our sexuality. Behind the fig leaves lies the beauty and splendor of God’s original plan. And, as John Paul emphatically stresses, there is real power in Christ for us, despite our weaknesses, to live it. This is precisely what a Manichaean approach fails to recognize.

The Fountainhead of Culture

John Paul goes so far as to say that by living according to God’s original plan for our sexuality we fulfill the very meaning of our being and existence (see January 16, 1980). But this means the opposite is also true. By failing to live according to the truth of our sexuality, we destroy ourselves.

Here’s another way to understand it. If the family is the fundamental cell of society, then sexual union is the fountainhead of culture. Ordered towards love and life, it builds a culture of love and life. Ordered against love and life, sexual union builds a culture of utility and death.

Welcome to the world in which we live. We’re riddled with cancer. John Paul II’s theology of the body is not simply a palliative treatment. If the world would take it to heart, our cancer would be cured. Let it be, Lord, according to your word. Amen.

To be continued …

Copyright © 2000 Christopher West

Christopher West, M.T.S. works for Archbishop Chaput of Denver as an educator and advisor on issues of human sexuality, marriage, and family life and is the author of the book Good News About Sex & Marriage from Servant Publications.