….as both Vatican II and The Catechism remind us,
“Sexuality affects all aspects of the human person in the unity of his body and
soul.” It is not simply biological, as the separatist position says, for we are
a unity of body and soul. John Paul II has always written of marriage as a
total self-donation of our bodies and wills, wherein husband and wife can give
their very selves to the other. Sexual intercourse between the whole person of
the spouses brings about this self-donation in the most intimate way humanly
possible. I am mystified as to why Catholics do not see this teaching as much
more exciting than the separatist view of sex, except to say that for the
reasons which appear in these pages, Catholics have hardened their hearts to
the teachings of Jesus Christ in and through His Church, which sees the
fertility of the husband and wife as a gift from God and the end (telos) of marriage where children are
the fruit of the conjugal love, the total giving of self of husband and wife. In
this, husband and wife procreate; it is God who creates a new and immortal soul
at each conception, a reality of which Vatican II sought to remind the faithful:
All should be persuaded that human life
and the task of transmitting it are not realities bound up with this world
alone. Hence they cannot be measured or perceived only in terms of it, but
always have a bearing on the eternal destiny of men.
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