IEEF 2013 Paris - Book presentation- Oana Gotia
In their book, Called to love, Carl Anderson and Fr. José Granados have created a thoughtful and accessible work on the beauty of love and the splendor of the body inspired by the works and writings of Pope John Paul II. In a series of talks that became known as “the Theology of the body”, Pope John Paul II explained the divine meaning of human sexuality and why the body provides answers to fundamental questions about human lives.
In fact, there are many questions that we ask ourselves today: is it still possible to love one another today? What is the meaning of love? What is the meaning of our body?
1. What are the roots of the present crisis of love?
A few centuries before our culture was impregnated with a dualistic mentality coloured by Puritanism (according to which God is equated with morality and morality with the Law/ the emotions are repressed, since they cannot be healed from within, because they derive from a body that is sinful) and hence the human body has been despised or at least insufficiently esteemed. Romanticism was a reaction against Puritanism, but it equated love with mere emotion and it opposed marriage to love (according to which marriage belongs to the repression of desire, and therefore Romanticism pursues the instant moment, producing concept of love that is not capable of facing the test of time). Therefore, the body was viewed with suspicion and apprehension, as if it were a threat to man’s spiritual nature and destiny. It was neglected or denied in its affective and sexual dimension, as though it were unavoidably fraught with temptations and dangers.
Today we experience the opposite extreme: the worship of the body, exalting it as long as it is beautiful, young, and pleasurable, but then rejecting it when it testifies to its inevitable decline, illness and death. Also a secularization of love (love starts to lose its mystery/separation between God and love/ sexuality - reduction to genitality, lack of symbolism). The Sexual revolution aimed to suppress the family and to oppose it to love (by introducing a separation between sex and life and between love and life). There are thus various modern and post-modern reductive answers to the question of the meaning of the human body: Nietzsche, man’s life is will to power, Freud: it is sexual impulse, Marx: it is moved by economy, Foucault: The body is an oppression, Gender theory: sexual identity is a cultural construct that considers biological sex as an accidental aspect, ecc.
These two positions are in fact only apparently contradictory, since in reality they share the same anthropological reductionism that is unable to integrate the body into the reality of the person and hence incapable of adequately appreciating the body’s subjectivity. The body ends us losing its mystery and is turned into a banality.
A wrong answer from the part of the Church would be silence, because this is exactly the problem, we need answers about the truth of love and sexuality.
Are we powerless to love today? Is sin the last word about human love?
John Paul II, echoing the entire Christian tradition, answers this question with a resounding no! The negative experience of sin does not reach as deeply into the fabric of our being as do the positive human experiences of original solitude, original unity and original nakedness, in John Paul II’s vision, are even more original than “original sin” itself.
This confidence in the goodness of creation is not naive: it has the weight of Christian revelation behind it; the experience of love and grace is the only experience that it totally original, whereas evil came on the scene only afterward, mocking goodness, but never destroying it completely. Man is made in God’s image and likeness, and this truth can never be totally obscured.
Who is man? What is he called to become?
Man is a questioning being, searching for the meaning of his/her identity in this life. An inappropriate sense of mystery is that of a mystery as not having to do with our experience. To the contrary, there is a mystery in our lives that calls to be deepened, because it is not reduced to the reality of objects. The persons that we encounter reveal to us the fact that they are not reducible to functions and utility, but that they open up the mystery of human inter-personal relations.
It is human love, the place of wonder about our identity. Inter-personal love is a mystery, a place of wonder, because it reveals the presence of God in the face of the other. For example, the face of the mother who, for the first time, holds her child in her arms.
Redemptor Hominis 10: “Man”—John Paul II wrote in his first encyclical—“remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love . . . .” (Redemptor Hominis, 10)
Love seems, in fact, to touch all the dimensions of human life: it happens in my body, embracing my instincts and emotions, but it also becomes spiritual, revealing to me the special dignity of the beloved person. In this way love also becomes a guide that leads us beyond ourselves, towards transcendence. Love appears thus as the thread that unites, the only one able to bind together the different compartments into which modern man has divided his life.
Only the experience of love enriches and clarifies the rest of our experiences. In the midst of our experience, Christ has come to us: “The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. . . . Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear . . . ” (GS, 22).
A body made for love
Therefore, the body speaks of God: it reveals His goodness and wisdom. It also speaks of us, of man and woman and our vocation to love. This is a prophetic word, pronounced by the body in God’s name, revealing to us the path to take toward human fulfillment: the way of live, in which the original image imprinted in man and woman can be realized and shine forth in a fruitful communion of persons, open to the gift of life.
Among the greatest gifts John Paul II has bequeathed to the Church and humanity is surely is “theology of the body” which has enabled us to rediscover the full treasure of biblical anthropology and the great Christian tradition, thereby overcoming narrow and marginal perspectives, and to integrate it into a vision consonant with lived experience grasped with new vividness.
For a right appreciation of the body, it is necessary to cultivate a contemplative gaze, one that grasps the body’s mystery in relation to the person and the vocation to live, which is definitely illuminated and fulfilled in the Risen Christ. Hence the importance of this volume: much more than a superficial show of enthusiasm for the novelty of the theology of the body, it sheds light on its anthropological foundations with a language at once simple, poetic and profound.
The authors of Called to love have succeeded in presenting the content of John Paul II’s Great Catechesis on human love in the divine plan, given from 1979 to 1984 (written in Polish, published in Italian) in such a way as to make it accessible without watering it down, Their contribution has certain characteristic qualities that make it original and invaluable:
1. The presentation of the essential elements of “the theology of the body” with the help of Karol Wojtyla’s poetry and texts from great works of the literary, poetic, and philosophical tradition makes for evocative reading that invites comparison with the reader’s own experience (The Acting Person, Love and Responsibility, The Jeweler’s Shop, Radiation of Fatherhood; Roman Tryptich).
2. The insertion of John Paul II’s “theology of the body” in the context of Benedict’s XVI “theology of love” widens the theological horizons of the anthropological approach by founding it in a Christological and Trinitarian vision.
3. The underscoring of its social dimension; the “theology of the body” has in fact demonstrated how the communion of persons constitutes an authentic common good at the foundation of society and makes the civilization of love possible.
4. Its connection with the patristic and theological tradition of the Church is made clear by means of enlightening references. The novelty of the “theology of the body” is therefore put into historical perspective, without separation or opposition. In fact, the true newness of Christianity resides not in the break with tradition, but in the renewed freshness of the beginning, whose truth is continually demonstrated to arouse wonder and to provoke conversion and a more beautiful life.
Called to Love brings to life the tremendous gift John Paul II bestowed on humanity and gives readers a new understanding of the Christian way of love and how to embrace it fully in their lives.
Called to love
Book Structure
PART I:
ENCOUNTERING LOVE: THE EXPERIENCE OF THE BODY AND THE REVELATION OF LOVE
Chapter I: The body manifests the person
Chapter II: Sexual difference: the vocation to love
Chapter III: The nuptial mystery: from the original gift to the gift of self
Chapter IV: The communion of persons as an image of the Trinity
PART II: THE REDEMPTION OF THE HEART
Chapter V: A wounded heart: the fragility of love
Chapter VI: Christ: the Redeemer of the heart and the fullness of love
Chapter VII: Maturing in the fullness of love
PART III: THE BEAUTY OF LOVE: THE SPLENDOR OF THE BODY
Chapter VIII: Loving with the love of Christ: the Sacrament of Marriage
Chapter IX: Witnessing to the fullness of love: Christian virginity and the destiny of the body
Chapter X: The family and the civilization of love
CARL ANDERSON: Supreme Knight, Knights of Columbus
He is the chief executive officer and chairman of the board of the world’s largest organization of Catholic laymen with more than 1.7 million members. Anderson’s Vatican-related expertise includes his appointment by Pope Benedict XVI as a member of the Pontifical Council for the Family (2007) and as consultor to the Pontifical Council for Social Communications (2006). Because of previous appointments by Pope John Paul II he serves as a consultor to the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace (2003) and as a member of the Pontifical Council for the Laity (2002) and the Pontifical Academy for Life (1998). He was the only Catholic layman from North America to serve as an auditor to two recent World Synods of Bishops held at the Vatican appointed by Pope Benedict XVI (2005) and by Pope John Paul II (2001). In 1998, Pope John Paul II appointed him to the Pontifical Academy for Life. Anderson has taught as a visiting professor at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome from 1983 to 1998, and in 1988 became the founding vice president and first dean of the Washington, D.C., session of this graduate school of theology located at The Catholic University of America. Anderson was appointed a consultant to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2002 and reappointed in 2004.
FATHER JOSÉ GRANADOS, D.C.J.M. Vice-President of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Rome, Italy.
He was also an Assistant professor of theology and philosophy of the body at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Father Granados received his doctorate in theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University, with a dissertation on the Christology of St. Justin Martyr (published in Analecta Gregoriana, Rome 2005). He has published several articles on the theology of the Fathers of the Church (St. Justin Martyr, St. Augustine), as well as a translation from Latin into Spanish of the Commentary on Matthew’s Gospel by a 4th century bishop, St. Cromace of Aquileia.Fr. Granados’s current research focuses on how the idea of the salvation of the flesh (salus carnis) held by the Fathers of the second century (Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian) can convey to us new insights into the problems of contemporary theology. Father Granados is also assistant professor of Patrology and Systematic Theology and has a master of science degree in engineering from the Pontifical University of Comillas, Madrid.