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I've been invited to speak this evening on the theology, on St. Thomas Aquinas in the theology of the body.

I presume most of you know what the theology of the body is. When we use

that phrase, we're referring to the Wednesday catechises, the Wednesday audiences that Pope St. John

Paul II, whose feast day is today, gave every Wednesday, almost every Wednesday, from

1979 to 1984. It seems, and we found this out much later, it seems that those audiences,

that the lectures he would give, I mean lectures in using that equivocally, were initially part of a

book that he intended to publish in 1978 or so, but then he was elected Pope.

And so he was basically breaking up that book into sections,

adding a paragraph at the beginning and adding a paragraph at the conclusion

just to make it into a little speech to give every Wednesday.

He did that for every Wednesday, as I say, between 1979 and 1984, except for,

I think there was a Marion year during that period. And of course, you know that he suffered an

assassination attempt. I believe it was in 1983. So there's about 130 different lectures, 130 catechises, and those combined form what's become known as the theology of the body.

My goal, and what's my research focused on, has focused on, is just a relationship of that because it has been somewhat popularized over the last several,

at least couple decades, by a lot of popularizers who don't necessarily know or didn't follow

John Paul II's formation as a priest, his philosophical formation, and its theological formation,

which was in, Tomist.

Now, there's arguments about him in phenomenology, which we can get into later.

But simply to say that my sort of, the thrust of my argument and the thrust of my presentation tonight is that the theology of the body is in fact also to mystic.

That is, it's not invented whole cloth by John Paul II.

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