It’s never too late to start learning Pope John Paul II’s theology of the body. Nor is it ever too early. So says Lisa Lickona, a mother of five who holds a master’s degree and a licentiate in sacred theology from the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Washington, D.C.

In her forthcoming book from Ascension Press, Where Do Babies Come From? The Mystery of the Gift, she presents the basic principles of the theology of the body — which the late Holy Father developed for a series of general audiences in the early 1980s — to children.

The book is “the fruit of my time at home with my children,” explains Lickona. “It is a very simple book, written in the words that I, a mother, would say to my child to explain to them the mystery of human sexuality and the beginning of a human life.”

Lickona says her title will differ from other remedial “facts of life” books by laying out the Catholic understanding of personhood — which, of course, goes far deeper than mere biology. She hopes parents find it as formative as it is helpful.

“We are gifts,” she explains. “Life is a gift that flows from the love of God. Along with that is the truth that we fulfill ourselves, that we find true happiness, when we give of ourselves.”

The unitive and procreative aspects of marriage are ways “to live and experience and witness to the self-giving love of God,” adds Lickona. “I think that this responds to the deep questions that children pose to us. Children desire an account that is really more than the nuts and bolts of how the body is made.”

She’s not alone in recognizing the need for more, and better, family-friendly information.

Donald Asci, who studied at the John Paul II Institute before earning a Ph.D. in sacred theology at the Pontifical University in Rome, says that — as a father of five and a professor specializing in marriage and family — he sees how his study of the theology of the body has influenced his own family life.

“Children today are constantly bombarded with the message that they are nothing more than a complex animal, especially through evolutionary biology and the environmental movement,” he says. “They are constantly taught that they are just a small part of a big world” — one that’s harmed by the presence of humans.

Asci views John Paul’s thoughts as the basis to teach children just the opposite: They are made in the image and likeness of God, and so is every other human on the planet.

How to get that point across so it sticks? “As children discover their body, constantly remind them how neat it is that God made them in just such a way,” Asci advises. We must drum the message, he adds, that God made each one of us a unique individual.

Or, stated in kid terms: There has never been another person who looked, moved and spoke like you — and there never will be.

Asci believes parents send this message to their children by their day-to-day treatment of them as complete persons, body and soul. “Parents’ care for the bodies of their children should be paralleled in their care for their souls,” he says. “This lays a foundation for the children” so they can grasp “the theme of the unity of body and soul.”

Lickona stresses a concept children readily understand: giving and receiving.

“The starting point of John Paul’s theology of the body,” she says, “is gift — the gift of existence that we are given by God, the gift of his love manifested in Jesus Christ, and our capacity to communicate that love to others in and through the gift of self.”

Parents, she says, must be the first teachers of these truths.

“If a child is wanted and loved, and accepted as a gift from God, the child knows it at a deep and unconscious level,” says Lickona. “The love of God is radiated to the child for the first time when he sees the smile of the mother. She loves him because he simply is.”

Lickona connects this simple and natural fact with the Church’s teaching on the sacraments of matrimony and holy orders. “When a child knows he is loved and wanted, he begins to be able to give himself as a gift to another person in marriage, or to God in the consecrated life,” she explains.

As the years roll along, she points out, reiterating the basics will naturally set up the teaching of wise perspectives on subjects like contraception and abortion.

“In many ways,” Lickona says, “our children’s future depends on our love.”

And that means spouses’ love not just for the children but for one another, too.

“Children see how they are capable of love because they experience their parents’ love as their origin,” says Asci. Children, he adds, “sense the greatness of complementarity, how man and woman really complete each other.”

Lickona concurs.

“Parents can witness to the truth” about connubial love, she says, “through their tenderness and respect toward each other.”

Thoughts Into Actions

Once this sense of awe and respect for the human body is set, children have the basis they need to build a life of purity.

“A firm foundation in the principles of the theology of the body is a remedy” for the problem of promiscuity today, says Asci. “Once chastity is presented as a challenge to the child, they are simply being asked to be true to themselves and remain faithful to the vision of the person they have been presented with all along.” 

Michael Waldstein, a distinguished theologian who last year translated the theology of the body into English — himself a father of eight — underscores the importance of teaching youngsters John Paul’s thinking on the human body as they are able to grasp it. (Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body is published and distributed by Pauline.)

“Theology of the body made me more aware of how important the expression of love through the body is not only between husband and wife, but also between parents and children,” says Waldstein. The teaching “says much about how the communion of persons is built up between man and woman.”

Waldstein says that John Paul II had a great gift for connecting philosophical and theological principles with actual, lived experience.

“John Paul II is not simply a great theologian who has sharp conceptual penetration of the truths of faith, but also a man of profound experience that is the fruit of many years of pastoral work with young — and then, later, not-so-young couples,” he says. “And so my experiences as a husband and father resonated strongly with what he says. It helped me to understand theology of the body and to verify it.”

Niki Kalpakgian writes from

Gaming, Austria.