CALLED TO TRUE LOVE
As the image of God, man is created for love. This truth was fully revealed to us in the New Testament,
together with the mystery of the inner life of the Trinity: “God is love (1 John 4:8) and in himself he
lives a mystery of personal loving communion. Creating the human race in his own image…God
inscribed in the humanity of man and woman the vocation, and thus the capacity and responsibility,
of love and communion. Love is therefore the fundamental and innate vocation of every human
being.” The whole meaning of true freedom, and self-control which follows from it, is thus directed
towards self-giving in communion and friendship with God and with others.
Human Love as Self-Giving

8) The person is thus capable of a higher kind of love than concupiscence, which only sees objects
as a means to satisfy one’s appetites; the person is capable rather of friendship and self-giving, with
the capacity to recognise and love persons for themselves. Like the love of God, this is a love capable
of generosity. One desires the good of the other because he or she is recognised as worthy of being
loved. This is a love which generates communion between persons, because each considers the good
of the other as his or her own good. This is a self-giving made to one who loves us, a self-giving
whose inherent goodness is discovered and activated in the communion of persons and where one
learns the value of loving and of being loved

.
9) Each person is called to love as friendship and self-giving. Each person is freed from the tendency to
selfishness by the love of others, in the first place by parents or those who take their place and, definitively,
by God, from whom all true love proceeds and in whose love alone does man discover to what extent heis loved. Here we find the root of the educative power of Christianity: “Humanity is loved by God! This very simple yet profound proclamation is owed to humanity by the Church.” In this way Christ has
revealed his true identity to man: “Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the
Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling.”
The love revealed by Christ “which the Apostle Paul celebrates in the First Letter to the Corinthians
… is certainly a demanding love. But this is precisely the source of its beauty: by the very fact that
it is demanding, it builds up the true good of man and allows it to radiate to others.” Therefore it is a
love which respects and builds up the person because “Love is true when it creates the good of
persons and of communities; it creates that good and gives it to others.”
Love and Human Sexuality

10) Man is called to love and to self-giving in the unity of body and spirit. Femininity and masculinity
are complementary gifts, through which human sexuality is an integrating part of the concrete
capacity for love which God has inscribed in man and woman. “Sexuality is a fundamental component
of personality, one of its modes of being, of manifestation, of communicating with others, of feeling,
of expressing and of living human love.” This capacity for love as self-giving is thus “incarnated” in
the nuptial meaning of the body, which bears the imprint of the person’s masculinity and femininity.
“The human body, with its sex, and its masculinity and femininity, seen in the very mystery of
creation, is not only a source of fruitfulness and procreation, as in the whole natural order, but
includes right ‘from the beginning’ the ‘nuptial’ attribute, that is, the capacity of expressing love:
that love precisely in which the man-person becomes a gift and – by means of this gift – fulfils the
very meaning of his being and existence.” Every form of love will always bear this masculine and
feminine character.

11) Human sexuality is thus a good, part of that created gift which God saw as being “very good”,
when he created the human person in his image and likeness, and “male and female he created them”
(Genesis 1:27). Insofar as it is a way of relating and being open to others, sexuality has love as its
intrinsic end, more precisely, love as donation and acceptance, love as giving and receiving. The
relationship between a man and a woman is essentially a relationship of love: “Sexuality, oriented,
elevated and integrated by love acquires truly human quality.” When such love exists in marriage,
self-giving expresses, through the body, the complementarity and totality of the gift. Married love
thus becomes a power which enriches persons and makes them grow and, at the same time, it
contributes to building up the civilisation of love. But when the sense and meaning of gift is lacking
in sexuality, a “civilisation of things and not of persons” takes over, “a civilisation in which persons
are used in the same way as things are used. In the context of a civilisation of use, woman can become
an object for man, children a hindrance to parents.

12) The gift of God: this great truth and basic fact stands at the centre of the Christian conscience of
parents and their children. Here we refer to the gift which God has given us in calling us to life, to
exist as man or woman in an unrepeatable existence, full of endless possibilities for growing spiritually
and morally: “human life is a gift received in order then to be given as a gift.” “In fact the gift reveals,
so to speak, a particular characteristic of human existence, or rather, of the very essence of the person.
When God Yahweh says that ‘it is not good that man should be alone’ (Genesis 2:18), he affirms that
‘alone’, man does not completely realise his existence. He realises it only by existing ‘with some one’
– and even more deeply and completely: by existing ‘for some one’.” Married love is fulfilled in
openness to the other person and in self-giving, taking the form of a total gift that belongs to this
state of life. Moreover, the vocation to the consecrated life always finds its meaning in self-giving,
sustained by a special grace, the gift of oneself “to God alone with an undivided heart in a remarkable
manner” in order to serve him more fully in the Church. Therefore, in every condition and state of
life, this gift comes to be ever more wondrous by redeeming grace, through which we become
“partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4) and are called to live the supernatural communion of
love together with God and with our brothers and sisters. Even in the most delicate situations,
Christian parents cannot forget that the gift of God is there, at the very basis of all personal and
family history.

13) “As an incarnate spirit, that is, a soul which expresses itself in a body and a body informed by an
immortal spirit, man is called to love in his unified totality. Love includes the human body, and the
body is made a sharer in spiritual love.” The meaning of sexuality itself is to be understood in the
light of Christian Revelation: “Sexuality characterises man and woman not only on the physical
level, but also on the psychological and spiritual, making its mark on each of their expressions. Such
diversity, linked to the complementarity of the two sexes, allows thorough response to the design of
God according to the vocation to which each one is called.”

The full text of The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality
can be found on the Vatican Website.
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/Pontifical_councils/family/documents