The Sixth PATHWAYS OF TRUTH Colloquium: “The Realism of the Theology of the Body: A New Horizon in the Face of Today’s Anthropological Challenges”

From February 6 to 8, 2025, the Sixth “Pathways of Truth” Meeting was held in Rome, Italy. About fifty scholars from more than ten different countries participated. In addition to Italy, participants came from Argentina, Austria, France, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Slovakia, Spain and the United States. The theme of the conference was: “The Realism of the Theology of the Body: A New Horizon in the Face of Today’s Anthropological Challenges.”

In his opening speech, Prof. José Granados, President of the Veritas Amoris Project, mentioned some criticisms made of John Paul II’s theology of the body. On the one hand, there are those who argue that the theology of the body proposes too high an ideal, raising expectations that inevitably lead to disappointment. Another criticism, coming from a different direction, is that the theology of the body attributes too much value to sexuality and its practice, giving too much weight to love as a subjective feeling as opposed to the objectivity of marriage.

While more detailed responses to these objections were reserved for individual talks at the Colloquium, Granados opened up some initial avenues, pointing out that John Paul II did not approach the person’s subjectivity in terms of the isolation of the modern autonomous subject, but rather starting from the experience of love that leads human beings to go beyond themselves. Love implies an encounter with the world, with others and with God. It is therefore a relational experience.

Granados then emphasized that St. John Paul II’s view of the body is suitable for overcoming the modern contrasts between progressivism and an archaic vision of faith. For the German philosopher Robert Spaemann, the opposing tendencies of progressivism and reactionism arise from the same cause: the neglect of the logic of the living body, where the objective and the subjective, the past and the future are unified in the same dynamism. Once we neglect the living body, we find ourselves with a past without dynamism and a future without roots. In this perspective, the goal of the colloquium was this: not to limit ourselves to repeating, but to deepen the theory of the body elaborated by St. John Paul II, drawing from its richness and making it speak to our times.

Granados believes that the current historical moment is in fact characterized by a new question: that of what it is to be human. In his opinion, the theology of the body can help us face this new anthropological challenge. According to St. John Paul II, in fact, the theology of the body is intimately linked to an adequate anthropology that starts from the totality of human relational experiences.

Granados then identified what he considers to be the three main anthropological challenges of our time: a crisis of the cultural context, a generative crisis and a crisis of the dissolution of what is specific to human beings in contrast to machines and animals. In all three cases, the body plays a decisive role.

The crisis of the cultural context involves a relational challenge, namely a weakening of relationships, starting with family relationships. The body is no longer the place where these relationships are established. A reflection of these changes is, according to Granados, what Olivier Roy has called the disappearance of culture and the empire of norms. As Roy argues, there are no longer any human contexts that allow for communication and, consequently, it is necessary to impose rules and procedures to govern everything. The loss of the corporal and sacramental fabric, that is, of the cultural context, forces us to discuss rules that, in the end, are intolerable and require exceptions. To address this situation, it will be necessary to return to the body understood as a creaturely and sacramental body, that is, the body as the original context that allows for the development of a culture.

The second challenge is generative, and therefore it implies a crisis of the future. Granados refers to Benedict XVI, according to whom the dilemma of our time is between the pretense of self-generation and the acceptance of being generated. The President of the Veritas Amoris Project proposes to build on this insight and take it a step further. With today’s crisis in the birth rate, the fundamental choice is between self-generation and the acceptance of generating others. Accepting to be generated is a necessary condition for being able to generate others, while self-generation precisely means not generating others. The realism of the theology of the body is, after all, a generative realism, a realism of superabundance and, for this reason, also a realism of the sign. What is present in the body of the creature is also found in the Eucharistic body, which defines the Church and gives it its dynamism.

The third challenge Granados spoke of is that of the dissolution of what is human. Human freedom, intelligence and specific abilities are not denied, yet all these things are dissolved. Today, intelligence is also attributed to machines. Freedom dissolves in the labyrinth of metaverses. Human dignity is emptied of meaning, as it is now also attributed to animals. Granados therefore believes it is essential to address the question of what it means to be human in relation to the language of the body, the body being understood as a place of unity between the internal and the external, between the spiritual and the material. What distinguishes humans from animals and machines is the way in which the body is experienced. Human intelligence and freedom are intelligence and freedom in the body, in the flesh.

According to Granados, the Colloquium, by addressing the realism of the theology of the body, aimed to demonstrate the suitability of the latter to respond to these challenges. Its realism is, in fact, the realism of the sign, understood as a sacramental sign. It is a realism that opens us up to the reality of relationships, of generation and of human identity, thus addressing the crisis of the cultural context, the generative crisis and the crisis of the dissolution of what is specifically human.

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