By Patrick Neve, Catholic Herald.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, theology of the body was seen as the Catholic Church’s answer to Evangelical purity culture. It was a third way between the sexual revolution’s “sex for pleasure” and the Puritan “sex for procreation”.
Pope St John Paul II believed both of these ideas were utilitarian, using persons as a means to an end. That conviction is an integral part of his book Love and Responsibility, which served as a precursor to his Wednesday audiences that formed the text of Theology of the Body.
Many popular Catholic speakers, most notably Christopher West, took this teaching and ran with it. They started presenting it to young men and women living somewhere between Puritanism and sexual liberation, wondering how their faith fitted in. West presented theology of the body as an answer.
Christopher West has done a lot of good work, but the popular understanding of theology of the body paints an incomplete picture that sometimes does damage to the theology it’s trying to popularise.
The problem with Christopher West, and with pop theology of the body more broadly, is confusion of the sign with the thing.
In Ephesians 5, St Paul draws an analogy between the love of husband and wife and Christ’s love for the Church. When he calls it a “great mystery”, he isn’t talking about the spousal union itself. The great mystery is Christ’s love for His Church (Eph 5:32). The marital union is a sign of that greater reality of Christ’s love for His Church.