Friday, December 14, 2007

Pope John Paul II on the Meaning of Bodily Existence

"This is my body given up for you." These words of Christ represent a call to love by making a gift of our bodies. This thought is "contained" in what Pope John Paul II called the "spousal meaning of the body." This refers, as the Pope expressed, to the body’s "power to express love: precisely that love in which the human person becomes a gift and – through this gift – fulfills the very meaning of his being and existence" (Theology of the Body 15:1).