In the first of a six-part series to run every Monday in this space, “Love, Freedom, and the Person: Sexuality and the Catholic Church,” Arlington Bishop Paul S. Loverde will examine the Church's teaching on the human person as made in the “image and likeness of God.” He will show in this series that the Church's teachings " so often misunderstood as a litany of prohibitions " are grounded in a holistic understanding of the human person and because of this, they open the door to an authentic understanding of love and freedom.
“I believe in the resurrection of the body.” Like an intricate cut of crystal held up to the light, the Nicene Creed has the power each week to impart new insights on our age-old faith. Or, it is like a familiar path along which we have walked for many years, affording new views as we grow older. This past Easter, many of you " like me " probably heard this phrase about the “resurrection of the body” anew.
I invite you in the coming six weeks to reflect with me on how we, as Catholics audacious enough to believe that our human bodies will someday be resurrected just as our Lord and Savior's was, might renew our culture. Ours is a culture profoundly affected by a misunderstanding of the human body and of sexuality. In these weeks, let us carry the joy of Christ's resurrection, so fresh in our minds and hearts, into a reflection on who we are as made in God's image.
To begin, I will cite a few of the many statistics which lay bare our society's ills in the arena of the human body and sexuality:
"¢ Pornography is a $12 billion/year industry in the U.S.
"¢ Daily, 68 million pornographic search engine requests (25 percent of total search engine requests) are conducted by 40 million Americans who regularly visit such sites.
"¢ It is estimated that there are 60 million survivors of childhood sexual abuse in America today.
"¢ Nearly half of all marriages end in divorce.
"¢ 16 percent of men in the U.S. have had vasectomies. Overall, 64 percent of the more than 60 million women aged 15-44 practice contraception.
"¢ The proportion of never-married U.S. teenagers who have had intercourse at least once is approximately 52 percent.
“Ideas have consequences,” wrote one cultural critic. Looking at the above statistics, one cannot help but be pained by the extent to which “bad ideas” about the human body and sexuality have wrought tragic, lasting consequences.
Yet as Catholics, as people convinced that the Resurrection of Christ has real consequences for us, we have a compelling answer rooted deep in our faith. To counter such an epidemic, we can and should vigorously set forth a Catholic vision of sexuality based on love, freedom, and the human person.
This vision, available to each of us, is rooted in the classical Christian understanding of the human person as made in the imago Dei, the image of God (Gen 2:18). It is here we must begin, at what Pope John Paul II calls the “basis of all Christian anthropology.”
“God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Gen 1:27). As men and women created in God's image, in what St. Augustine called the imago Trinitatis, “the image of the Trinity,” we possess a God-given “likeness” and dignity which means that our lives are somehow patterned after Him.
In what way are we “images” " or in the Greek eikon/icon " of God? This question leads us to the Trinity. In the Trinity, we find love " a love which manifests itself in that each Person (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) “surrenders Himself to the others” in a total “self-gift.” Jesus exemplified this when He prayed to the Father, “that all may be one"as we are one” (Jn 17:21-22). The Vatican II Council Fathers wrote, “This likeness reveals that man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.”
The union of wills which we find described in Jesus' Gethsemane prayer and throughout Scripture suggests what the pope calls the “law of the gift.” This “law,” written into our entire person, calls us to find ourselves through “the sincere gift of self.” One scholar puts it this way: “This is what love is: an act of the will to do what another wills.” Or as our Blessed Mother Mary said in her fiat to the angel Gabriel, “Be it done to me according to Thy will” (Lk 1:38).
As icons of the Trinity, as men and women created in the image of God, you and I carry deep within us the call to love as God loves. We are created to know and love God. As we see with Adam and Eve, we are also created not to live “alone” (Gn 2:18), but to live “in relation to another human person.” The pope calls love the “innate vocation of every human being.” The mutual, self-giving relationship found in marriage, the “unity of the two,” mirrors the divine “communion” of love in the Trinity.
This likeness to God which we bear is both a “call” and a “task.”
As we know, “God is love” (1 Jn 4:16). How does God love? Read the creation narrative in Genesis, where God created us out of nothing, and then, seeing that Adam was alone, created Eve. Marvel at the world around you, created by the Lord as a gift for you. Look at yourself, “fearfully and wonderfully made” and “knit together” in your mother's womb by God (Ps 139:13-14). Fall in amazement at the wonder of the Incarnation, when God “emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant” (Phil 2:6-7). Treasure each page of the Gospels, where Jesus demonstrates divine love by uniting His will with the Father " “not my will but yours be done” (Lk 22:42) " in His every action. Meditate on the Passion " where Jesus modeled this “law of the gift” by giving Himself completely for us.
Our culture cries out for a positive, healthy vision of the human person. In the teachings of Scripture and Tradition, we as Catholics have a compelling answer. If we as men and women, created with dignity “in the image and likeness of God” choose to answer God's call to love and live our life as a gift, we shall find life, and “have it abundantly” (Jn 10:10).
Next week Bishop Loverde will examine the theology of the body, to be followed by columns on the dignity of marriage and the family, contraception and natural family planning, homosexuality, and the virtue of chastity.
