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Things the Holy Father Never Taught Me:

Unraveling a Common Myth About the Theology of the Body

by Dawn Eden 

Pope John Paul II’s addresses on the theology of the body launched a new era in Catholic catechesis on sexuality and married love. Yet these teachings, popularly known as the TOB, have become subject to interpretations that their author could hardly have envisioned, as some well-intentioned authors and speakers attempt to adapt the late Holy Father’s highly philosophical verbiage into everyday language.

Perhaps no area of the TOB is subject to as much misinterpretation as its teachings on modesty. One common confusion in particular deserves a closer look.

Myth:  Because the human body is inherently holy and decent, the need for women to dress modestly exists only because many men are impure. Those who are tempted by the sight of immodestly dressed women have failed to make the effort to attain mature purity. (It’s not my short skirt, Buster – it’s your dirty mind.)

Who says this? TOB instructors who believe they are accurately conveying John Paul II’s analysis of concupiscence (that is, the quality of embodiedness that causes human beings to desire people or things for their own use, and that, unchecked, can lead to sin).

How do they arrive at this interpretation? Through a method of interpretation that Pope Benedict has called (in other contexts) the “hermeneutic of rupture.” Dr. Jeff Mirus describes the hermeneutic of rupture as an “interpretive technique which severs one or more Magisterial texts (or one or more passages of Scripture) from other texts.” In this case, TOB interpreters are isolating certain statements from John Paul II’s TOB addresses and interpreting them in a vacuum, without taking into account the larger context of the TOB as a whole, the historical teachings of the Magisterium, and John Paul’s pre-papal writings on modesty.

In his TOB, John Paul devotes much attention to Christ’s warning against committing adultery in the heart (see Matthew 5:27-28); he states that man “is not completely determined by libido.” Therefore, he says, it is possible to follow the call of Christ “to rediscover and realize the value of the body, freed through redemption from the bonds of lust.”

Those who extrapolate that modesty is entirely subjective – that the need for it exists only in the minds of those who refuse the call for “redemption from the bonds of lust” – are missing the TOB’s larger message about the dignity of the human body. John Paul stressed that moral progress was measured by an increase in modesty: “If culture shows an explicit tendency to cover the nakedness of the human body, it certainly does so not only for climatic reasons, but also in relation to the process of growth of man’s personal sensitivity. The anonymous nakedness of the man-object contrasts with the progress of the truly human culture of morals.”

John Paul wrote about modest dress at length in his earlier work Love and Responsibility, penned under his given name Karol Wojtyla while he was archbishop of Krakow. Dr. Edward Sri, professor of theology at Benedictine College, writes that Love and Responsibility shows that “modesty of dress is about so much more than helping men avoid falling into sin [and] is not simply a ‘defensive reflex’ protecting women from being used.” In Wojtyla’s own words, “The spontaneous need to conceal mere sexual values bound up with the person is the natural way to the discovery of the value of the person as such” (emphasis in original). Modest dress is necessary in order to enable the value of one’s own personhood to shine through.

It is important to understand that, throughout his writings on sexuality as archbishop and pope, John Paul accepted the foundational Christian truth, taught by St. Paul and articulated philosophically by St. Thomas Aquinas, that concupiscence dwells objectively in the human body. It is an effect of Adam’s sin that is not washed away by baptism (see Catechism of the Catholic Church 2520). Through God’s grace, and the use of our natural reason, we can overcome it, but the struggle against it does not end in this life. If this were not true, there would have been no reason for St. Clare to keep her habit on when St. Francis came to visit.

Where does such a misinterpretation lead? For those who struggle with lust, the idea that the battle against concupiscence may be definitively won in this life can lead to a form of presumption or even semi-Pelagianism – an over-reliance on one’s own efforts rather than God’s grace. Father Thomas Loya advises a man struggling with lust to overcome his feelings by staring at a beautiful woman – “Look at her butt, her breasts ... every aspect of her magnificent femininity” – and offer up the sight in thanksgiving to God. (He does not mention whether the man should also offer up the black eye he may receive from the woman’s husband.)

Equally troubling, a young woman who is told that modesty is purely subjective might then believe that her father’s ordering her to “cover up” shows that he lacks “mature purity.”

Solution:  In addition to reviewing John Paul’s writings on modesty in Love and Responsibility, TOB instructors would do well to study the observations Pope Benedict made prior to his papacy on how the “theology of the body” is linked to a “theology of clothing.” Since the Fall, the naked human body, while retaining its fundamental goodness, can no longer have its original “decency” (a word that in Latin is related to fittingness, honor, and worthiness). Cardinal Ratzinger alludes to this in The Spirit of the Liturgy when discussing the meaning of priestly vestments in light of the hope that St. Paul describes in Second Corinthians 5:

[St. Paul’s] hope is to be not “unclothed,” but “further clothed,” to receive the “heavenly house” – the definitive body – as a new garment. ... Thus the theology of clothing becomes a theology of the body. ... The liturgical vestment carries this message in itself. It is a “further clothing,” not an “unclothing,” and the liturgy guides us on the way to this “further clothing,” on the way to the body’s salvation in the risen body of Jesus Christ, which is the new “house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (2 Cor 5:1). The Body of Christ, which we receive in the Eucharist, to which we are united in the Eucharist (“one Body with him,” cf. 1 Cor. 6:12-20), saves us from “nakedness,” from the bareness in which we cannot stand before him.

Our true goal, then, is not to be “naked without shame,” but, rather, to be clothed in grace.

(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)