THE POPE'S THESIS

   The Pope's thesis, if we let it sink in, is sure to revolutionize the way we understand the human body and sexuality. "The body, and it alone," John Paul says, " is capable of making visible what is invisible, the spiritual and divine. It was created to transfer into the visible reality of the world, the invisible mystery hidden in God from time immemorial, and thus to be a sign of it" (Feb 20, 1980).

A mouthful of scholarly verbiage, I know. What does it mean? As physical, bodily creatures we simply cannot see God. He's pure Spirit. But God wanted to make his mystery visible to us so he stamped a sign of it into our bodies by creating us as male and female in his own image (Gn 1:27).

The function of this image is to reflect the Trinity, "an inscrutable divine communion of [three] Persons" (Nov 14, 1979). Thus, in a dramatic development of Catholic thought, John Paul concludes that "man became the 'image and likeness' of God not only through his own humanity, but also through the communion of persons which man and woman form right from the beginning." And, the Pope adds, "On all of this, right from 'the beginning,' there descended the blessing of fertility linked with human procreation" (ibid).

The body has a "nuptial meaning" because it reveals man and woman's call to become a gift for one another, a gift fully realized in their "one flesh" union. The body also has a "generative meaning" that (God willing) brings a "third" into the world through their communion. In this way, marriage constitutes a "primordial sacrament" understood as a sign that truly communicates the mystery of God's Trinitarian life and love to husband and wife - and through them to their children, and through the family to the whole world.

Of course, as the Catechism points out, this does not mean that God is "sexual." God "is pure spirit in which there is no place for the difference between the sexes. But the respective 'perfections' of man and woman reflect something of the infinite perfection of God" (CCC, n. 370). This is why the Pope speaks of sexuality precisely as a sign of God's mystery. Following the Scriptures, he uses the man and woman's union as an analogy by which to understand something of the divine mystery. God's "mystery remains transcendent in regard to this analogy as in regard to any other analogy, whereby we seek to express it in human language. At the same time, however, this analogy offers the possibility of a certain ... 'penetration' into the very essence of the mystery" (Sep 29, 1982).