8 / 45
19:4 and Mk 10:6). The light of Christ illuminates the true beauty and
vocation of the human person, and it is a light to be handed on person to
person, inviting an encounter with the Lord.
2
Created in the Image of God and Called to Love
God created the human person, male and female, in his image and like-
ness, as the crown of creation. Every one of us is a
gift
, with the inviolable
dignity of a person. “I praise you, because I am wonderfully made; / won-
derful are your works!” (Ps 139:14).
Only in Jesus Christ, true God and true man, is the mystery and iden-
tity of the human person fully revealed. “Christ . . . fully reveals man to
[man] himself and makes his supreme calling clear.”
3
In Christ, we recog-
nize that every person is created to be a
child of God
, a son or daughter in
the Son (see Rom 8:14-17). We are each
beloved
by God our Father. This
is the Good News!
“God is love” (1 Jn 4:8), the Triune communion of Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit.
4
Because each of us is created in the image of God, we are
given the call—the vocation—of love and communion.
5
Every human
being is made for a relationship of love with God and with others. Jesus,
in his life, ministry, and ultimately in his saving Death and Resurrection,
shows us the way of love as a sacrificial, fruitful gift of self. Every man and
woman, whether called to marriage or not, has a fundamental vocation to
self-giving, fruitful love in imitation of the Lord.
6
The Gift and Language of the Body
Men and women discover the call to love written in their very bodies. The
human person is a unity of soul and body, and the body shares in the dig-
nity of the image of God.
7
The body reveals or “expresses the person.”
8
It
expresses in a visible way one’s invisible soul and manifests one’s masculine
or feminine identity.
St. John Paul II often referred to the “spousal meaning of the body.”
9
He taught that the body, in its masculinity or femininity, is inscribed with
its own language—a language of gift and of communion of persons. Our
bodies tell us that
we come from another
. We are not self-made or funda-
mentally isolated. Instead, we are each a son or daughter. We are
in relation
3