In the late 1990s and early 2000s, theology of the body was seen as the Catholic Church’s answer to Evangelical purity culture. It was a third way between the sexual revolution’s “sex for pleasure” and the Puritan “sex for procreation”.
Pope St John Paul II believed both of these ideas were utilitarian, using persons as a means to an end. That conviction is an integral part of his book Love and Responsibility, which served as a precursor to his Wednesday audiences that formed the text of Theology of the Body.
