Post by Peter J. Colosi

I gave this talk in Ireland 2009 at the Second Theology of the Body International Symposium (I will do a separate post soon on those Symposia). TOB stands for Theology of the Body which is the title given to a series of talks that St. Pope John Paul II gave over a four-year period during his Wednesday audiences. Wednesday audiences are when you see the Pope outside in front of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. He drives around in the Popemobile and greets the people and then goes up on the raised platform and gives a 20-minute speech. Pope’s pick different topics to cover. Pope Leo is currently going over the documents of Vatican II. Pope John Paul II picked the topics of love, marriage, family, male/female difference and complementarity and human sexuality. Later the talks were published as a book (I will link to the book in a comment below). Theology of the Body represents a massive undertaking of philosophical, theological and scriptural study to get at the very heart of love, marriage, sexuality and male/female complementarity. It is a beautiful book but also challenging to read. In this talk I discuss Pope John Paul’s approach to the moral question of contraception as answered by understanding the beautiful idea of “the language of the body.” I start with a close reading and explanation of Audiences 118 – 125, and then I offer a discussion of 5 ways to see the beauty of the body/soul unity of human beings. At the end I present a personalistic answer to the question of why the Catholic Church teaches that contraception is immoral. By “personalistic approach” I mean that it is an answer to the question that is rooted in the beauty of the body/soul union and the meaning of love and self-gift. These are the themes that Pope John Paul II uses when explaining this long-standing teaching of the Catholic Church. I also wrote an article on this topic in 2012 during the national debate over the HHS contraception mandate and I’ll link to that below as well.  https://lnkd.in/eUbvHfGA