The Catholic Church teaches that sex is good. In fact, it was a celibate priest, now St. Pope John Paul II, who helped the Church and the world discover just how beautiful God’s design for human sexuality truly is.
To begin to understand the Church’s positive teaching on sexuality, we will take a look at John Paul II’s groundbreaking contributions commonly referred to as the Theology of the Body. This fresh unveiling of the importance of embracing human sexuality was delivered through 129 talks given by the Pope between 1979 and 1984. As the Pope explains, our bodies and our sexuality are not something to spurn or be ashamed of, and our natural desire for deep intimacy isn’t something to blush at. God designed us with these desires. He made sex, and he made it very good! The problem is the world has twisted God’s design for our sexuality, as we can so clearly see from our own struggles and witnessing the many broken relationships in the lives of those around us. Thankfully, there is hope to reclaim the beauty of God’s design and thus embrace who we were truly created to be.
Let’s start back at the beginning, in the garden of Eden. God created Adam and Eve, and made them husband and wife. We are told they were naked and unashamed. What do you think the couple did with some of their free time? They did what they were told, and they didn’t have to be told twice—they had sex! “Be fruitful and multiply,” God said. So they did. And God called everything he created very good.
God did not make a mistake. He made us male and female, gave us bodies with sexual features, and created strong desires to go accompany his awesome design. John Paul II said, “Every human being is by nature a sexual being, and belongs from birth to one of the two sexes” (JP II Love and Responsibility, 47). Of course, God didn’t create us merely for sex. But, as John Paul II points out, he did make us all sexual, and each person is created either male or female. We cannot know ourselves apart from our sexuality, which means we cannot know ourselves apart from our bodies, which is one of God’s greatest gifts to us.
Our bodies are good. We wouldn’t be human without them. For God made us not as pure spirits without bodies (those are angels), and he did not make us as mere matter without souls (those are rocks and water), and he didn’t make us as irrational creatures with bodies who act only according to instinct (those are animals). He made us in his own image and likeness, with intelligence and free will, and with bodies. We are embodied souls, a synthesis of spirit and body, where our soul is the form of the body and our body is the matter of the soul. We are far from being “trapped” inside our bodies. Our bodies are good and they are integral to who we are.
God made us for intimacy, intimacy with each other and intimacy with himself.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church says, “God has revealed his innermost secret: God himself is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and he has destined us to share in that exchange” (CCC 221). “God is love,” (1 John 4:8) Scripture says, which is to say God is a communion of love, love being shared in the context of relations. God is intimacy, and he created us for intimacy, for joyful, authentic relationships.
Ultimately, we are created for intimacy with God. Our earthly lives are short and eternity is forever. We are made for eternity, to be caught up into God’s eternal “exchange of love.”
The union between God and man is meant to be so intimate that the Bible uses the language of marriage, where Christ is the bridegroom and the Church is his bride (see Eph 5:31-32). Upon marriage of God and man, there are no longer two but one, as God enters and transforms us while we receive and participate in the eternal communion of love. In personal terms, St. Paul puts the union this way, “It is no longer I who lives but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). Notice the penetrating closeness of this image. God is not distant and indifferent but wants to vivify us by entering us completely. Jesus enters us through the heart by faith, transforms us, and gives us new life, which is only possible when we give ourselves entirely to him. This union starts here on earth for the baptized and reaches its full consummation in heaven, when we are deified and caught up into God’s eternal passionate love forever. This is reminiscent of human marriage, or rather, human marriage is an image of the Triune God and our transformative union with him.
John Paul II said, “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” (Theology of the Body, 19:4). God designed all of creation and placed man and women at the center, as the pinnacle of all his physical creation. So his design has a unique and particular purpose. According to John Paul II, this was to reveal the invisible, to be a sign of God, especially by the fact that the Word of God took on a human body. God is revealed to us through his body and through our bodies.
By creating us male and female, God shows us that the sexes are complementary and that we are made for communion. This communion is most clearly revealed in the institution of marriage, which is a reflection of the Trinity, and our hoped for union with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in heaven. And of course, human marriage is not simply a spiritual reality but a physical one. Let’s get specific: among many other things, marriage involves sex, which is very physical and very good. That’s the way God designed it, and I don’t hear many complaints!
John Paul II says, “Every man and woman fully realizes himself or herself through the sincere gift of self. For spouses, the moment of conjugal union constitutes a very particular expression of this” (Letter to Families, 1994). Marriage is a union of one man and one woman which, in a unique way, reveals what we are made for: selfless intimacy, by offering ourselves completely as a gift to our beloved. In marriage, a man and woman give themselves to each other, and as especially seen through the act of sexual intercourse, become no longer two but one. Similarly as to how we are created for union with God, with Christ being the bridegroom and the Church being his bride, we are also created for union with each other. While not all are called to marriage (thankfully, John Paul II wasn’t, otherwise we wouldn’t have benefited from his teaching on sexuality!), this intimacy is perhaps revealed most clearly through the beauty of the sexual embrace of a husband and wife.
Sex is such a great gift that the Church encourages couples to joyfully pray before sex, thanking God for the gift of marriage, sexuality, and the deep union that he designed us for. This may seem strange at first. Someone might wonder, “Why would I want to kill the mood by praying before sex?” My response would be this: “How could sex be better by keeping its Designer out of the equation?” If couples want better and more fulfilling sex, the best thing to do is to pray about it! Sex is not meant for the selfish fulfillment of every extravagant fantasy, and it’s not meant to be a mere physical release of pent-up sexual tension. But that does not mean it’s not supposed to be good—no, great—for both partners. In fact, consider what John Paul II considers as “necessary” to reach the fullness of sexual intimacy between a husband and wife. “It is necessary to insist that intercourse must not serve merely as a means of allowing sexual excitement to reach its climax in one of the partners, i.e. the man alone, but that climax must be reached in harmony, not at the expense of one partner, but with both partners fully involved” (Love and Responsibility, 272). Did you expect this coming from a celibate priest?
Above all, sex is about giving oneself entirely to the other, for the mutual good of the couple, where this particular expression of authentic human love is so powerful that it has the ability to bring forth new life. Sex is a participation in God’s very own creative power, a power that both unites a couple and has the potential to create new life destined to be loved.
So it’s clearly not that sex is bad, it’s that the world’s view of sex is shallow and twisted. As Christopher West, a popular speaker and promoter of John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, likes to say, by untwisting the image of sex that has been crumpled by the world, we can rediscover God’s original design and the true beauty of our sexuality.
The problem with the casual hook-up culture, where bodies are a mere commodity to be used and disposed of to satisfy a fleeting sexual desire, is not that we place too high of a premium on sex, but that our view of sex is far too low. The culture settles on the fast food of casual sex, which feels initially satisfying, but over time leaves us sick and, at the same time, craving for more and more without ever finding lasting contentment. Without realizing there is another option, we keep coming back to the same junk food and become addicted to the very thing that is making us miserable. That goes for every sort of sexual malady that is all-to-common in our culture today. This cycle of cheap sex and inauthentic sexuality has left many of us weary, broken and broken-hearted, and yearning for something more.
The good news is there is an alternative. God didn’t design us to binge on fast food, but to enjoy the sumptuous feast he has prepared for us in the gift of our sexuality, which is expressed in a profound way in the life-long marriage between a loving husband and wife. We long for union, we long for love, we long for friendship and to be truly known. God didn’t create us to frustrate our desires but to fulfill them! Put another way, the Church doesn’t tell us to hold back on sex but to hold on to our true sexual identities, and to find the freedom and lasting fulfillment that is only possible by recognizing the magnificence of the bodies God has given us and embracing our sexuality.
There is hope for everyone, no matter how much brokenness and baggage there may be. Hope in this life with a restored vision of human sexuality, and hope for life in the next, where God and man will no longer be two but one, where the Lover and the beloved will experience the eternal bliss of intimacy greater than anything that could ever be imaged.
