So thank you for this invitation. I've been invited to speak to you on John Paul II's Theology of the Body, and because this is a Timistic Institute talk, I intend to also connect that to the thought of St. Thomas' Appliance.

To understand why the theology of the body was necessary, or is necessary, why Pope John Paul II came up with it,

we need to begin by recalling that in the middle of the 20th century,

there were a lot of developments both within the church and within society

and a lot of opposing forces about the nature of marriage and the nature of human sexuality.

This all came to a head in 1968, in a number of ways in 1968,

but in the church it came to a head because Pope Paul VI issued an encyclical,

a papal letter called Humane Vite.

And that letter focused on marriage and the nature of human love

and was addressing what had become really the question of the decade.

Could the contraceptive pill be morally used by a couple, a married couple.

Now, historically, what you should know is that the church, Christians, until 1930,

no Christian ever believed that it was okay to interfere with the reproductive processes, ever. And the arguments were rather easy to make,

that there's a natural God-given sanctity to the creation of life and that a couple

participates and works with God in the creation of life. And so that they're intimately involved with God and cooperating in the creation of new

persons.

And so we don't interfere with that process.

Period.

That's what every Christian believed until 1930.

Every denomination, every church.

It was in 1930 that the Anglican Communion at their Lambeth Conference determined that no, the contraceptive pill, could be, in fact, used for some morally

illicit reasons.

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