Second Sexual Revolution? John Paul’s Time Bomb Starts a New Baby Boom?
St. John Paul the Great’s gift to 2020: Written over a lifetime
“Love begets love,” St. John Paul believed. His sexual teachings are called a “theological time-bomb set to go off with dramatic consequences.”
Pandemic and 9/11 — war against hidden enemies — cut us apart, isolating individuals, slicing communities, and dicing regions into lonely islands. A “new normal,” St. John Paul the Great, makes war-weary people turn to love, and quests for meaning.
More than 75,000 joined a global “virtual conference” on the Theology of the Body May 8–10. Made for More gatherings sell-out. His Theology of the Body has spawned dozens of books, institutes, group studies, and talks.
May 2020, the 100th anniversary of John Paul’s birth, arrived as half the world quarantined, a time when couples reported more frequent sex during lock-down. This “invisible war,” many agree, could inspire a new baby boom.
Born Karol Wojtyła in May 1920, John Paul was formed in a reborn Poland, the “ground zero” of history’s largest conflicts. He overcame the attacks of both Nazi Germany and the communist Soviet Union, ministering to young couples precisely as a similarly war-weary world began a post-World War II baby boom and the sexual revolution, lessons even more applicable today.
Sex is essential food and energizing fuel, John Paul saw early on:
The Bible begins and ends with weddings. The false choice dominating the past half-century?
- Sex Starvation and a steady drumbeat of “don’t.’’ Too many Catholics, he saw, focused on the negative aspects of sexuality, calling for the unappealing “starvation diet” of avoidance.
- Sex as Junk Food. John Paul saw a post-war secular sexual revolution advocating a “fast food diet” of junk, distorting and twisting the beautiful into crude pornography, a false cartoon of reality.
- John Paul offers a third way, sparking a new kind of sexual revolution. Theology of the Body scholar Christopher West explains, “The problem with the sexual revolution was not that it overvalued sex but that it failed to see how astoundingly beautiful it really is.”
Over more than three decades, John Paul developed his teachings reuniting sexuality with pure truth and love. His first book, Love and Responsibility, focused on sex and love in a way clergy had not spoken of sex. The book debuted in 1960 in Poland but it wouldn’t be translated into English until he was pope two decades later. Over those years, he continued his work, developing his massive Theology of the Body manuscript.
The whole world changed in 1978, “the year of three popes,” the year the cardinals chose the 58-year-old Wojtyla to become Pope John Paul II. His biographer, George Weigel, wrote in 1999 that Theology of the Body was his:
“Theological time bomb” that would “would explode within the Church” and “(reshape) the way Catholics think about our embodiedness as male and female, our sexuality, our relationships with each other, our relationship with God — even God Himself.”
Christopher West has devoted his career to dissecting, explaining and disseminating the weighty Theology of the Body text across the Church and beyond, writing a series of books and leading schools on TOB. In his newest 2020 book, Our Bodies Tell God’s Story, West explains the revolution:
“… this little-known Polish bishop was chosen as the first non-Italian pope in 450 years, taking the name John Paul II. Having only recently completed his Theology of the Body manuscript (it was originally intended as a book to be published in Poland), he decided to make it his first major teaching project as pope, delivering small portions of the text over the course of 129 weekly addresses between September of 1979 and November of 1984.
It took some time, however, for people to grasp the significance of what this in-depth Bible study had given the world…While John Paul II’s vision of the body and of sexual love had barely begun to shape the way Christians engaged their faith, Weigel predicted that when it did, it would ‘compel a dramatic development of thinking” about virtually every major tenet of the Christian faith.’”
Was your teenage intuition, right? Is life all about love and sex?
In “Made for More” events, West combines everything from music to funny videos with John Paul’s teachings to show our teenage, gut longings for love and sex are right in-line with God’s Plan. We are parts of the Body of Christ, made for loving relationships with Christ (the head of the body) and with each other.
Decades of the “false choices” of sexuality failed to teach “The body, in fact, and only the body, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and divine. It has been created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden from eternity in God, and thus to be a sign of it,” West writes.
What you believe rather than what you’re against
St. John Paul the Great “shifts the discussion about sex from legalism to liberty,” West explains:
- Much like Pharisees, what he calls the “legalists” of religion ask, “How far can I go before I break the law?” Both the focus on “don’t” and the “anything goes” philosophies alienate people. John Paul’s message is on what’s possible.
- John Paul asks, “What is the truth about sex that sets me free to love?” So “we must ask why God made us male and female in the first place. These are questions that plunge us into the deepest truth of what it means to be human … the full truth of what it means to be human — or, as he puts it, a ‘total vision of man’” coming from Christ.
- God’s version of freedom and being “pro-choice.” West stresses God “gave us the freedom to choose in the first place. But some choices negate our vocation to love. Some choices can never bring happiness. We are ‘free,’ in a sense, to ‘do whatever we want with our bodies.’… human freedom (i.e., choice) is fully realized not by inventing good and evil but by choosing properly between them.”
- Erotic love or eros is “the deepest foundation of ethics and culture when eros leads to the ‘whole moral disorder that deforms both sexual life and the functioning of social, economic and even cultural life.’ Christ wants to save each human person and all of humanity at its roots, and our roots are inextricably linked with eros.”
- “Christ’s first miracle is to restore the wine to eros in superabundance. And he wants us to drink up! “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink” (John 7: 37). Do you know what the goal of the Christian life is from this perspective? It’s to get utterly plastered on God’s wine. What did the crowd accuse the apostles of on Pentecost when the love of God descended upon them? “You guys are drunk!” (see Acts 2: 13–15). And so the gospel invites us to a holy intoxication on God’s wine so that our entire humanity — body and soul, sexuality and spirituality — becomes inflamed with divine love. Christ came to set the world on fire (see Luke 12: 49) — let’s not be afraid to burn!”
- “Fatherhood and motherhood crown and reveal the mystery of sexuality. God’s first directive in Genesis, ‘be fruitful” (Gen. 1: 28), is not merely an injunction to propagate. It’s a call to love in God’s image and thus to “fulfill the very meaning of [our] being and existence.”
- “A man’s body is complete in all of its systems but one. A woman’s body is complete in all of its systems but one. And those respective systems — the reproductive systems — function only in union with the other… Every cell in a man’s body has forty-six chromosomes … except for one. Every cell in a woman’s body has forty-six chromosomes … except for one … Man and woman are meant to complete each other, and in the normal course of events, their reciprocal “giving” enables sperm and ovum to meet, and a “third” comes into existence. As John Paul II expresses it, “knowledge” leads to generation.”
- “God inscribed this call to self-giving love right in our bodies. Think about it: A man’s body makes no sense by itself. Nor does a woman’s body. But seen in light of each other, sexual difference reveals the unmistakable plan of God that man and woman are meant to be a “gift” to one another in spousal love. Hence, in their nakedness, the first man and woman discovered what John Paul II calls “the spousal meaning of the body.”
