'Answering A 500-year-old Question'
Pauline Sister Helena Burns traveled from Toronto to Evansville – a drive of almost 700 miles in the middle of winter – to explain how St. John Paul II answered a 500-year-old question with his landmark catechesis, the Theology of the Body.
Sister Helena led a parish mission on that teaching at St. Philip Parish in Posey County Feb. 27-March 1. Those who attended needed only a few seconds to experience the passion with which she approaches the subject.
“We have forgotten who we are as human beings,” she said between talks during the mission. “If we look at our world, right now, something’s wrong; something’s off. I believe the Theology of the Body is the solution.
“John Paul II even said that he was answering a 500-year-old question,” she added. “He didn’t just naively stumble upon something and put it out there and think, ‘Well I don’t really know how great this is.’ He knew what he was doing. He answered the soul, body, physical and spiritual split that we’ve been living for the past 500 years.”
He did that with a teaching that spanned 129 talks he gave during his weekly general audiences from Sept. 1979 through Nov. 1984. He expanded upon it in other writings, but those talks are the collective foundation for this groundbreaking catechesis.
“There was a perfect storm of science, philosophy and religion pulling apart the physical and the spiritual in the 1500s,” Sister Helena explained, “and we’ve remained in this kind of broken state ever since. It’s just morphing and morphing and morphing … to the point where we have things like the ‘hook-up culture.’
“You know … ‘my body is going to do something, the most intimate thing a person can do, but my soul is going to be completely detached from it.’
“We can’t live that,” she said. “That’s a nightmare; it has horrible repercussions. So in the name of holisticness and harmony, Theology of the Body teaches us everything that people were kind of looking for in the 1960s. They were looking for freedom, love, happiness and joy … but they were going about it the wrong way.”
Sister Helena’s order, the Massachusetts-based Daughters of Saint Paul, collected St. John Paul II’s 129 weekly talks and published them in 1997 as “The Theology of the Body: Human Love in the Divine Plan.”
“The paradox with love is that it’s not love unless it’s free,” Sister Helena said, “but there’s no such thing as free love. Real love commits. Real love is very expensive … very costly.
“John Paul II said we think that commitment and vows and things like that curb our freedom and kill the spirit of love … and it’s actually just the opposite,” she added. “When we love somebody, we don’t feel like we’re making a sacrifice when we do what they want to do and not what we want to do. We’re happy to do that.
“People will say, ‘I don’t want to be tied down, I want to be free’ … for what? Like, just to be free? Where does that bring happiness? Where does that bring growth? Where does that bring progress in your life?”
Sister Helena provided a concise look at the Theology of the Body during the St. Philip parish mission.
“When you hear it,” she said of the teaching, “you’re just so on fire because, first of all, it straightens out your thinking; second of all, it straightens out your living; and it brings you a joy and happiness.”
