In a Class by Itself, Part 1

Studying Part Two of John Paul II's theology of the body

05/27/2025

I know some of you daily Mass people are wondering: when will Fr. John start another awesome series of homilies, especially on the theology of the body of Pope St. John Paul II? Well, you are in luck because today your long drought is over. We will now pick up where we left off last year. You will recall we have already covered the first half of John Paul's magnum opus called Man and Woman He Created Them.

That is, following the pope’s lead, we had studied Christ’s three Words about life in Eden, life on earth, and life in eternity. Now we turn to the second half of the pope’s book and take a deep dive into the sacrament of marriage, which John Paul simply calls “the sacrament,” meaning marriage is a sacrament in a class by itself.

I must admit I suffer from sacramental schizophrenia whenever I deal with the sacrament of marriage. As I made mention earlier, I celebrate more weddings than any other priest in Arkansas. So I help a lot of couples “get married”. Ironically, I also work on the marriage tribunal with annulments, and there I help couples “get unmarried”. Coming to me for your marital needs is like “one stop shopping.” I can get you in and I can get you out.

My role on the marriage tribunal is a very limited but important one called the Defender of the Bond, or in Latin, “Defensor vinculi.” That is, I defend the bond of marriage by making sure the other judges on tribunal “cross their t’s and dot their i’s” before someone obtains an annulment. The tribunal should not hand out annulments like a Las Vegas dealer hands out a deck of cards. In laymen’s terms, they call me the “devil’s advocate” who argues why someone should not get an annulment. People really love me.

As we turn from Part One to Part Two in Pope St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, we see that the Holy Father also styles himself a “defensor vinculi” – a defender of the bond. In case you have not been catching on, the pope-saint is unflinching in protecting and promoting the great sacrament of marriage, at times he does so subtly, at other times with a sledgehammer.

Indeed, the general title for Part Two is simply, “The Sacrament.” And it becomes blindingly clear the pope means precisely the sacrament of Holy Matrimony. In other words, for John Paul II, marriage is unquestionably “THE Sacrament”, like overzealous Ohio State football fans like to say “THE Ohio State University.” Or, as tradition refers to St. Paul as THE Apostle. Because the pope esteems marriage so highly, he defends marriage “tooth and nail.”

Like we saw previously in Part One, so too John Paul divides Part Two (the second half of his book) into three chapters. And I propose that we study them in the following homilies. Or, returning to our overarching image of a long walk with Jesus – like the Lord of the Rings was a long walk with Gandalf – so now begin the next four miles.

Let me quickly sketch for you a “mental map” of Part Two and its three chapters, so we can picture the terrain that lies ahead. Chapter One is titled “The Dimension of Covenant and Grace” and runs from pages 465-529 (64 pages), and explores in-depth marriage as a sacrament.

John Paul calls Chapter Two “The Dimension of Sign” covering pages 531-615 (84 pages), providing a rich spirituality of marriage. For those couples looking to enrich their marital spirituality, this chapter has been hand-crafted for you.

And lastly he gives Chapter Three a very nuanced title: “He Gave Them the Law of Life as Their Inheritance,” that is, pages 617-63 (46 pages). Here the Holy Father marshals the entire Theology of the Body as a defense of the Church’s teaching prohibiting contraception.

Let me take you on a two-minute tangent and answer a question that is no doubt burning in the back of your minds. If you’re paying attention to the page numbers I just noted, you might wonder: how does the pope’s book have 663 pages total, if I claimed that the text was in fact only 504 pages long? There are two reasons for this paginal anomaly.

First, Michael Waldstein (the translator) inserts a lengthy Introduction of 128 pages (practically a book itself), thereby ballooning the size of the book. The proper papal material by John Paul does not begin until page 131. Secondly, as we noted, the pope omitted portions of Chapter Two dealing with the Old Testament books of Song of Songs and Tobit in his public addresses.

Thus, in order to harmonize what the pope said with what the pope wrote, Waldstein included several additional shaded pages which again artificially enlarged the original book. Therefore, due to these two additions – the Introduction and the extra shaded pages – the last page in the pope’s tome is now 663, not 504.

Now that we have dealt with these details and disclaimers, we are ready to explore why Pope St. John Paul II considers marriage THE sacrament, standing in a class by itself, and why it deserves that we all should defend it.

Praised be Jesus Christ!