From the Apostolic Exhortation--Familiaris Consortio
What would the day be if I allowed it to pass without a word from our dear Pope John Paul II--one of the great and profound thinkers of our age and one of the great teachers of any age.
from Familiaris Consortio His Holiness Pope John Paul II Man, the Image of the God Who Is Love11. God created man in His own image and likeness(20): calling him to existence through love, He called him at the same time for love.
God is love and in Himself He lives a mystery of personal loving communion. Creating the human race in His own image and continually keeping it in being, 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.
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.
Christian revelation recognizes two specific ways of realizing the vocation of the human person in its entirety, to love: marriage and virginity or celibacy. Either one is, in its own proper form, an actuation of the most profound truth of man, of his being "created in the image of God."
