§369Man and woman have been created, which is to say, willed by God: on the one hand, in perfect equality as human persons; on the other, in their respective beings as man and woman. "Being man" or "being woman" is a reality which is good and willed by God: man and woman possess an inalienable dignity which comes to them immediately from God their Creator.240 Man and woman are both…

§1605Holy Scripture affirms that man and woman were created for one another: "It is not good that the man should be alone."92 The woman, "flesh of his flesh," i.e., his counterpart, his equal, his nearest in all things, is given to him by God as a "helpmate"; she thus represents God from whom comes our help.93 "Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife…

§1607According to faith the disorder we notice so painfully does not stem from the nature of man and woman, nor from the nature of their relations, but from sin. As a break with God, the first sin had for its first consequence the rupture of the original communion between man and woman. Their relations were distorted by mutual recriminations;96 their mutual attraction, the Creator's…

Chapter 17.—Whether the Bodies of Women Shall Retain Their Own Sex in the Resurrection. From the words, “Till we all come to a perfect man, to the measure of the age of the fullness of Christ,”16341634 Eph. iv. 13. and from the words, “Conformed to the image of the Son of God,”16351635 Rom. viii. 29. some conclude that women shall not rise women, but that all shall be men, beca…

Analysis of the Biblical Account of Creation Last Wednesday we began this series of reflections on the reply Christ gave to his questioners on the subject of the unity and indissolubility of marriage. As we recall, the Pharisees who questioned him appealed to the Mosaic Law. However, Christ went back to the "beginning," quoting the words of Genesis. The "beginning" in this ca…

The Second Account of Creation: The Subjective Definition of Man With reference to Christ's words on the subject of marriage, in which he appealed to the "beginning," we directed our attention last week to the first account of man's creation in the first chapter of Genesis. Today we shall pass to the second account, which is frequently described as the "Yahwist," since it uses…

The Meaning of Man's Original Solitude In the last reflection of the present cycle we reached an introductory conclusion, taken from the words of Genesis on the creation of man as male and female. We reached these words, that is, the "beginning," to which the Lord Jesus referred in his talk on the indissolubility of marriage (cf. Mt 19:3-9; Mk 10:1-12). But the conclusion at w…

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished. Moses now teaches that the work of creation was accomplished not by one continued act, but was distributed through six days, for the purpose of accommodating the work to our capacity. God rested on the seventh day, not because he was weary, but to invite us by his own example to the contemplation of his works. The Sabbath therefore …