Pope Saint John Paul II visiting Immaculate Conception School in Los Angeles, CA in 1987
As Summer winds down, many of us begin preparing for the upcoming school year again. Events like the beginning of a new school year present a good opportunity for reflection on why we at TOBET do what we do. TOBET creates resources for you to teach your children and students about Pope Saint John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. Our culture is filled with confusing ideologies that distort God’s vision for the human person. TOBET’s solution to this is in our mission statement which is why we do what we do. We do what we do because we believe that knowing the body matters answers everyone’s search for meaning.
In our current culture, people no longer intuit that their body matters. Pope John Paul himself said, “man no longer identifies himself…with his own body.” (TOB 59:3) We can see this truth all around us. People do whatever they please with their bodies, with no regard for the obvious physical and spiritual harm they might bring on themselves and others. Transgenderism, homosexuality, sexual promiscuity, abortion, and pornography all detach us from ourselves and lead us down a path of sin.
Like symptoms of a disease, all of these harmful phenomena share a common underlying philosophy: I own my body the same way I own my car – as property. People with this mindset don’t see themselves as embodied persons made in the image and likeness of a good and loving God. Most parents and educators rightly see these topics as advanced, and wait to teach their children until many of them already have this incorrect view of themselves. This means that when they try to answer their children’s questions about the confusing ideas presented by the world, they struggle to overcome the view that both themselves and their children receive from our culture daily. The solution involves giving our children a proper anthropology – a proper view of who they are as human beings.
Pope John Paul gave us this anthropology in his Theology of the Body. He sought to remind modern humanity of its identity and purpose. He reminds us that we are created in God’s image, and that this fact comes with an inherent dignity that belongs to each human person. He reminds us that each of us is not a soul which controls a body like a kind of ghost in a machine. Each of us is a body and soul fused together as one being called a ‘human person.’ John Paul II reminds us that God created each of us for love. These facts answer the restless questions of the human heart. They guide us to seek God on a more intimate level. They give our life meaning when we view them through the lens of the Gospel.
We do what we do because we love God, because we know you, our friends, love Him too, and because we want you to have the necessary tools to pass that love on to your children.
We’re excited to wish you a happy school year!
Chris Tarantino is the Communications Director for TOBET. He studied History at The University at Texas A&M and has written for the Tennessee Register and Nashville Catholic.
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