To hear an audio recording of Fr. Bob Connor's talk on the “Gift of Self as Developed in Love & Responsibility,” along with the discussion that ensued, click here. (You must have RealPlayer installed to hear the recording. Click here to download a copy of RealPlayer, if necessary.)

0:0 to 14:25: Introduction

Father Connor begins his talk by pointing out that through John Paul II, for the first time in the history of thought, the self has been re-discovered as “the privileged locus for the encounter with being.” (Fides et Ratio #83) What the Pope is doing through his pontificate, Father Connor asserts, is no less than launching a new culture, a civilization of love. This is not a Catholic culture per se, but rather a secular culture based on the dignity of the human person achieved by the gift of self.

14:25: The Polish Soul

George Weigel, author of the papal biography Witness to Hope, has defined the seven aspects of the soul of John Paul II. Father Connor takes us through the first two of these, the Polish soul and the Carmelite soul. Father Connor first describes the Pope's Polish soul, drawn in the context of his pre-papal life in Poland. Through hundreds of years of oppression the Polish people steadfastly retained their culture and identity through their language. As an actor, dramatic playwright and organizer of an underground theatre during the Nazi occupation, Wojtyla himself was intensely drawn to language as a means of perpetuating culture. And on first papal visit to Poland in June of 1979, when he spoke to the crowd of two million gathered for Mass in Warsaw's main square, he reminded them of their history and culture as experienced since the year 966 in the Catholic faith. In doing so, he ignited the spark that led to the defeat of Marxism in Eastern Europe.

20:37: The Carmelite Soul

According to Father Connor, the entire development of the mind of the Pope comes from Carmelite philosophy. During the Nazi occupation, Wojtyla joined a secret group called the “Living Rosary” headed by Jan Tyranowski. Tyranowski taught the fundamentals of spiritual life through intense prayer and service to others. He also introduced Wojtyla to the Carmelite theological works of St. John of the Cross. Wojtyla studied and meditated on these writings, especially “Dark Night of the Soul” which said that the truth of the human condition is on the cross. In 1949, Wojtyla wrote his thesis on “Faith According to St. John of the Cross.” In this work, he was trying to give an explanation of what faith meant to St. John of the Cross. Faith is not a series of concepts, creeds or propositions; faith involves the gift of self. Faith is a handing over of one's very self to God. And in that handing over, a splendor veritatis, a splendor of truth, emerges wherein one is enlightened with a consciousness—not concepts—about God. Self-giving, not self-assertion, is the royal road to human flourishing. Self-giving is the way one comes into a knowledge of Jesus Christ.

Based on Emmanuel Kant's second categorical imperative (the human person is a self-determining freedom), Wojtyla began Love and Responsibility with the essential thought that persons are not to be used, and that the only adequate way to deal with a human person is to love him or her (the personalistic norm). The notion of freedom is not choice with regard to this or that, but rather, choice as “determining myself.” The problem, Father Connor says, was that there did not exist a philosophy to explain “determining myself,” aka, the gift of self.

34:23: “Page 96”: Betrothed Love and the Gift of Self

Father Connor points to page 96 of Love and Responsibility as the very essence of the Pope's view on the experience of spousal love. He quotes:

Betrothed love differs from all aspects or forms of love analyzed hitherto. Its decisive character is the giving of one's own person (to another). The essence of betrothed love is self-giving, the surrender of one's “I.” This is something different from and more than attraction, desire or even goodwill. These are all ways by which one person goes out towards another, but none of them can take him as far in his quest for the good of the other as does betrothed love. “To give one's self to another” is something more than merely “desiring what is good” for another.... Betrothed Love is something different from and more than all the forms of love so far analyzed, both as it affects the individual subject, the person who loves, and as regards the interpersonal union which it creates. When betrothed love enters into this interpersonal relationship something more than friendship results: two people give themselves each to the other.

In this text, for the first time there emerges the phrasing “gift of self.” Up to this point in time, the human person has been analyzed as a rational animal: from Aristotle to St. Thomas Aquinas, through to the modern-day, the definition of man and everything about man has been reduced to animalogy, which has been reduced to biology, which has been reduced to chemistry, which has been reduced to physics, which has been reduced to particle physics, which has been reduced to the principle of indetermination… But Wojtyla is saying that the human person is not an animal at all—because of this “gift of self.” People in marriage have the experience of making a gift of self that is so complete that the bond is unbreakable.

40:58: The Original Unity of Man and Woman

Through a series of Wednesday addresses when he first became Pope in 1979, John Paul spoke on the topic of the original unity of man and woman. He presented his interpretation of Genesis, explaining how man and woman entered into a communion of persons so intimate it was like God. Matrimony, then, is an icon of the oneness of God, an icon of the Trinity. The sexual act in matrimony is in fact an act of imaging God, where the husband and wife, through the gift of self, become one flesh.

47:16: Why is Love-making Inseparable from Life-giving?

Prior to the Humanae Vitae's publication in 1968, contraception was viewed as morally wrong because it goes against nature, the nature of sex primarily being to have children, secondarily to have love. Humanae Vitae presented a new reason, setting forth that love-making can never be separated from life-giving. Contraception is wrong because it is love but no life; in vitro fertilization is wrong because it is life but no love. Wojtyla's body of thought on love and marriage was certainly instrumental in the formation of Humanae Vitae but the encyclical did not capture the full power of his message. It never went further to explain exactly why love-making must be inseparable from life-giving. Page 96 of Love and Responsibility (and the series of Wednesday audiences now captured in Theology of the Body) does so.

Does life have to proceed from love? Does life have to come from the self-gift? Life is self-gift, Wojtyla is saying. This is what it means to be a person in God. The body is the person, the person is love, and the person is self-gift. This is what it means to be—to live spousal love to which of us are called (even priests and religious, in a celibate sense ). Therefore one cannot separate life and love in God. This is also the essence of the incarnation, that matter has been divinized, that the sexual act is a holy and sanctifying act.