"Otherness and the Theology of the Body" was the title of the lecture given by the Secretary of the Pontifical Council for the Family, Bishop Jean Laffitte, at the International Congress of the Theology of the Body, held in Philadelphia from July 9th to 11th.
Attentive to the theme: "Love, Mercy and the New Evangelization," the Secretary of the PCF wanted to focus attention especially on the experience of conjugal love, as a privileged way to know the other and oneself:
"After the original sin, the man and the woman will lose the grace and their original innocence. For them, the discovery of the spousal meaning of the body will no longer be a simple reality of revelation and grace. However, that meaning will remain as something to be sought: a commitment required of man by the ethos of the gift, inscribed in the depths of the human heart, like a distant echo of original innocence.
Genuine love for another person is a source of knowledge: on the one hand, the other person is revealed in all his personal being, and not in a partial, reducible act of knowledge. He responds with love to the gift received and, in this way, discovers its potential. On the other hand, however, one who loves is also revealed to himself, to the extent that he is able to discover fully a real knowledge about the beloved.
This kind of love finds its fulfillment in conjugal love, because such mutual giving, of a man to a woman and a woman to a man, requires a long-term, lifelong commitment that is guaranteed precisely by the conjugal type of love."
