This year is the 20th Anniversary of Pope John Paul II's letter on The Role of the Christian Family in the Modern World. We will be sharing excerpts from this letter with you this year with the hope of "supporting, illuminating and assisting families" and the staff of the parish regarding the beautiful teachings of the Catholic Church on Marriage and Family Life.

Man, the Image of God Who is Love

"As an incarnate spirit, that is a soul which expresses itself, itself in a body and a body informed by an immortal spirit, man is called to love in his unified totality. Love includes the human body, and the body is made a sharer in spiritual love.

Christian revelation recognizes two specific ways of realizing the vocation of the human person in its entirely, to love: marriage and virginity or celibacy. Either one is, in its own proper form, an actuation of the most profound truth of man, of his being "created in the image of God."

Consequently, sexuality, by means of which man and woman give themselves to one another through the acts which are proper and exclusive to spouses, is by no means something purely biological, but concerns the innermost being of the human person as such. It is realized in a truly human way only if it is an integral part of the love by which a man and a woman commit themselves totally to one another until death. The total physical self-giving would be a lie if it were not a sign and fruit of a total personal self-giving, in which the whole person, including the temporal dimension, is present: if the person were to withhold something or reserve the possibility of deciding otherwise in the future, by this very fact he or she would not be giving totally."

-- §1 Pope John Paul II, On the family in the Modern World, (Familiaris consortio), 1981.