The Body

The Winter 2003-4 issue of Image includes an interview with Gil Baillie that includes this nugget: “I’ve been fascinated by John Paul II’s theology of the body, which I think is a tremendously important contribution to the retrieval of God. To me it’s also filled with a marvelous irony. The purported defenders of the body, its great champions from the sixties and seventies, have lately turned on it, emaciating and scarring and puncturing and poisoning it. It’s incredible to see the idol worshipers turn on the idol with such a vengeance. And who shuffles onto the world stage to take up the defense of the body, and especially sexuality? An eighty-something celibate with Parkinson’s disease who can hardly walk.”