"Each Person Is An Icon Of God"

This is a section from an essay, "The Liberating Truth of Catholic Teaching on Sexual Morality", written nearly thirty years ago by Dr. William E. May for Homiletic & Pastoral Review; I think it expresses very concisely and beautifully some of the Church's positive beliefs about what it means to be truly human:

Every human person, moreover, is called to a life of friendship with God himself. God made us to be the kind of beings capable of sharing his own inner life, and to enable us actually to receive this life God himself became, in the person of his only begotten Son, one with us and for us. He came to share in our humanity—a humanity that had, because of original sin, been wounded and rendered impotent even of receiving the gift for which it had been, by God's grace, originally created—precisely so that we might be actually capable of participating in his own divine life. In and through baptism we actually become children of God himself, members of his family, with the right to call him, in union with his only begotten Son Jesus Christ, "Abba," "Father." Thus we are to be his children, intimate members of his divine family, alive with his own life. This life begins in us in baptism, and it is to be fulfilled in the resurrection, when we become fully the persons we are meant to be. Thus it is that the Risen Lord Jesus is now the human being we are called to be. He is the "firstfruits of the dead," living now the life to which we are called and for which we are now capacitated because of him who is "our best and wisest friend.

To be a human being, therefore, is to be a being of incalculable worth, of irreplaceable value, of precious dignity. To be a human being, moreover, is to be a bodily being, living flesh. This means that to be a human being is to be a sexed being, for in the beginning "God created man in his own image . . . male and female he created them" (Gen. 1:27). Every living human body is a person, and every living human body is inescapably a male or a female person, a man or a woman, a boy or a girl, a boy-baby or a girl-baby (born or unborn; cf. Ps. 139:13-14; Luke 1:41-42). And every living human body, every human person, whatever its age or sex or race or condition, is a being of precious worth, irreplaceable and non-substitutable, a being that ought to be wanted. Every human person ought to be wanted precisely because we ought to want what is truly good and valuable, and every human being is, by virtue of being a "word" or icon of God himself, truly good and valuable.

This is the point emphasized by Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) in proposing what he calls the "personalistic norm": "This norm, in its negative aspect, states that the person is the kind of good which does not admit of use and cannot be treated as an object of use and as such the means to an end. In its positive form the personalistic norm confirms this: the person is a good towards which the only proper and adequate attitude is love."

Read the entire essay on the CatholicCulture.org website. Dr. May is the author and editor of several books, including Marriage: The Rock on Which the Family Is Built.