“The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” That’s the heart of the Christmas message. The Catholic faith is incarnational, celebrating and living out the reality of the second person of the Godhead becoming man, born of the flesh of the Virgin Mary. Consequently Catholics hold the flesh, the body, in great reverence.
God created us with bodies and spirits, not spirits alone like the angels. God fashioned Adam from the “stuff” of the earth, and when Adam first saw Eve, he exclaimed, “This is flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone” (Gen 2:23). Our glory as human beings includes being “bodies.”
We should respect, even venerate, our bodies as God created them and for the purposes for which he created them. Every human being should know this as a truth of the natural moral law.
We Christians, however, know an even greater truth about the body. We know that in baptism it is joined to the God-man Jesus Christ and that it is destined to be raised up one day in incorruptible glory. We can know this only through revelation.
Yet, amazingly enough, Christians have always had to fight for these truths about the body. From the beginning some who called themselves Christians didn’t believe that God had come in the flesh. They couldn’t imagine that the perfect, immortal God could ever (or would ever) join himself with imperfect, mortal human beings. So they said Jesus was a spirit who only appeared to be a man.
But St. John countered this false thinking in the strongest language. “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14). He stresses the bodily reality of Jesus: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and our hands have handled…” (1 Jn 1:1).
Unfortunately, this challenge is still there. There are Christians who think the body is a matter of indifference, or worse, a burden. They will talk about it as a prison which keeps us trapped.
Thinking correctly about the body is critically important to bioethics. Sometimes people are tempted to commit euthanasia or physicianassisted- suicide because they believe they are trapped in a failing body and need to be “set free.”
Derek Humphrey, a strong advocate for the legalization of euthanasia, wrote the book Final Exit, as though we merely exit our bodies when we die. Nothing could be further from the truth. When we euthanize people, we kill them. They no longer exist until God raises them up body and soul at the end of time.
Wrong thinking about the body can lead to terrible moral choices. A pregnant mother carries in her body the body and soul of her child. To procure an abortion is to kill her child. What an unspeakable thought for those Christians who daily, with every Hail Mary, proclaim: “Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.” A child in the womb is good, blessed fruit to be venerated.
The pagan physician Hippocrates saw the body as good and repudiated any assault upon the body in his Oath: “I will give no one a deadly poison, even if asked. I will give no woman a pessary to cause an abortion.” Hippocrates had the natural moral law written in his heart. Saint Paul said, “When the Gentiles, who do not have the law by nature, observe the prescriptions of the law … they show that the demands of the law are written on their hearts” (Rom 2:14).
We are also to reverence the procreative potential of our bodies. Through them, we become cocreators with God. Hence we shouldn’t do violence to our bodies or destroy any of their healthy functions (i.e., surgical sterilizations). Christian spouses are called to venerate their respective powers of procreation. Natural family planning methods allow couples to cooperate with God’s plan for having children based on the wife’s fertility cycle.
Further, since our bodies have a God-given purpose, there should be no clamor for the legal recognition of homosexual acts. We have been created male and female to serve God’s purposes and our own good. Each man and woman carries sex cells with 23 chromosomes, which must be joined together to engender a new human being with the full complement of 46 chromosomes.
God created us with bodies for a purpose. He has a plan for the way in which children should come into the world — and for the makeup of families. If everyone properly understood this, there would be no agitation for unnatural unions or a plea for the absurdity of having them recognized by law.
The models for our conduct will always be Jesus, Mary and Joseph: a husband and wife joined in holy matrimony who provided God, in accord with His design, the context, the environment and the family for His own Incarnation — and hence for the salvation of the world.
John M. Haas is president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center and founding president of the International Institute for Culture. He is a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life.