Cult of the Body

BY The Editors

October 7-13, 2007 Issue | Posted 10/2/07 at 8:50 AM

The Catechism of the Catholic Church points to the deeper, hidden reason why end-of-life questions are such a problem in the Western World right now.

Certainly, the aging population has forced the issue.

But that alone wouldn’t be enough to change people’s fundamental attitudes toward the value of human life.

The deeper reason is revealed when the Catechism talks about the necessity of taking care of one’s health.

The Catechism includes a warning: “If morality requires respect for the life of the body, it does not make it an absolute value. It rejects a neo-pagan notion that tends to promote the cult of the body, to sacrifice everything for its sake, to idolize physical perfection and success at sports. By its selective preference of the strong over the weak, such a conception can lead to the perversion of human relationships.”

The Catechism — whose 15th anniversary we mark this year — was prescient.

The way the architecture of health clubs has changed over the past decade seems right in line with the Catechism’s admonition.

In classically designed churches, the physical structure is meant to draw our attention toward God. The architecture directs our attention toward sacred things. Often, the front of the church is like an arrow pointing toward the heavens, or the dome makes the church look like a giant tabernacle, announcing that something profoundly holy waits within.

Today, many new health clubs are designed to draw our attention, too — but what they highlight are the people exercising inside. The exercise machines are placed facing floor-to-ceiling windows so that passersby will see the customers hard at work. This is, in part, an inexpensive form of advertising. But it must also in some way fulfill the desire to see and be seen.

If health clubs in the past were out-of-the-way, workaday buildings, today’s newest health clubs are often on busy central streets, and are adorned with faux columns and a grand appearance.

For some customers, this must feel very odd. For others, it may be a perfectly natural thing — a temple for the cult of the body.

It is ironic that an ideology that begins by over-emphasizing the importance of the physical would end by devaluing it the most. But this is precisely what has happened with the cult of the body.

After all, the characteristics we worship in the body are the very aspects that are fleeting and ephemeral: its beauty, its utility, its ability to provide pleasure. If you deify the body for its youthful qualities, you will be quick to reject the body outright when it is old and suffering.

Christianity puts the body in its proper perspective, as created by God and ultimately to be used for his purposes, not ours. But if the faith starts out by seeming to make the body seem less important, it ends by giving it a far greater value — an infinite value:

“Human life is sacred,” says the Catechism, “because from its beginning it involves the creative action of God and it remains forever in a special relationship with the Creator, who is its sole end. God alone is the Lord of life from its beginning until its end: No one can under any circumstance claim for himself the right directly to destroy an innocent human being.”

Furthermore, in Catholic teaching, human life includes both the soul and body as one unit. “The unity of soul and body is so profound,” says the Catechism, “that … spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.”

If each of our bodies is simply ours, then it isn’t worth much — each is just 1 out of 6.6 billion on the planet. But if each of our bodies is God’s, created by him as a physical and spiritual being in relationship with him, then the worth of each is incalculable.

The society’s fundamental understanding of the worth of each of us is at the heart of what makes us either a culture of life or a culture of death.

That was why last week’s story “Wrong Twin Aborted” garnered so much attention. And that’s why we are beginning a series about the end of life this week.

In last week’s report, a couple in Milan, Italy, went to an abortion business to have one of their two twins aborted. Tests had suggested that the child had Down syndrome. But the abortionist aborted the twin that showed no signs of Down syndrome. When they realized the error, they returned to have the remaining twin aborted.

In this week’s story, a Houston man’s elderly father needed medical care. Son took dad to a new hospital — not the Catholic one he was accustomed to. He told us that the palliative care team immediately began a process of preparing both of them for death, and he says they neglected to properly nourish and care for his father.

By the time he moved his father back to the Catholic hospital, it was too late. His father didn’t recover.

Next week, our series will examine the legislative proposals pitting pro-lifers against pro-euthanasia, or quasi-euthanasia, forces. But before all that, it’s important to remember that another battle is underway. That one pits the cult of the body against the cult of the Creator.

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