As an author, I find myself writing the sort of books I wish had been there for me at different points of my life. That was the case with my first book, The Thrill of the Chaste, and it is even more so with my upcoming book My Peace I Give You: Healing Sexual Wounds with the Help of the Saints.

My Peace I Give You is for adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, to help them find healing through the examples of saints who bore wounds like theirs, but in a larger sense it is for everyone who suffered from a lack of love while growing up. My parents split up when I was five, and, as I wrote in The Thrill of the Chaste, my young psyche suffered from emotional brokenness on many levels. Because of those experiences, when, in 2005, I made the decision to become Catholic, I was eager to learn the foundations of Church teaching on God’s design for love, marriage, and family. It seemed to me that if I could better understand what had been missing from my young life, I could find the path to adult wholeness.

The teachings that John Paul II called his catechesis on human love, popularly known as the theology of the body, were extremely attractive to me because of the beauty with which he spoke of the family as a sharing in Trinitarian love. That interest led me to attend Catholic young-adult events where speakers attempted to boil down the Holy Father’s highly philosophical catechesis into ordinary language. Although each speaker had his or her own unique gifts, they shared a common and admirable goal. They wanted to show that the Church’s teachings against contraception and abortion, and for marital love and fidelity, were part of a divine plan intended for our happiness—both in this life and in the next.

I learned a lot from those speakers. They helped fuel my desire to research the Church’s teachings more deeply, which led to my earning a master’s degree in theology (and now continuing towards a doctorate). But I also heard something that deeply troubled me. Some speakers, seeking to capture the spiritual meaning of the family’s participation in Trinitarian love, ended up extrapolating beyond John Paul’s words.

John Paul speaks of how God, by enabling spouses to make a loving gift of self to one another, “makes them capable of the greatest possible gift, the gift by which they become cooperators with God for giving life to a new human person.” In this manner, he intimates that the spouses, in the act of procreation, cooperate in God’s creative love.

Many millions of children, however, are the fruit not of procreative love, but of parents’ lust for one another, or their selfish desire to own a child as if it were a possession and not a person. If that were not so, the Holy Father would not have felt the need to explain how human love is intended to be in the divine plan. And it is precisely this point—the failure of so many parents to consciously participate in God’s love—that is missed by some Catholic speakers. As a result, they unwittingly give the impression that not only should children be the fruit of their parents’ mutual self-gift, but also that they must be the fruit of such a gift. Listeners like myself, who come from broken or abusive families, are left with the distressing impression that we were deprived of God’s love in our very origin, our very creation.

Witness, for example, this talk at a conference on John Paul’s teachings, particularly an exchange that takes place during the question-and-answer section:

In the talk, the speaker describes the child as “a sort of physical correlate of the spiritual fecundity of the [parents’] union; it indicates how great the love is, how deep a love it is, that it can actually produce a new human soul” (30:08).

She reinforces her point by quoting John Paul II’s Familiaris Consortio, which describes fecundity as “the fruit and the sign of conjugal love, the living testimony of the full reciprocal self-giving of the spouses.”

“So,” she adds, “I would venture to say that maybe here we have found the most foundational reason that God has given man a human body.

“We can’t create out of nothing. But we can actually share part of who we are in the bodily dimension of our being. And really, insofar as we are our bodies, mother and father, husband and wife, really communicate themselves when they co-create; they infuse themselves into this new being the way the Father and the Son infuse themselves into the being of the Holy Spirit. And now the child is really part and parcel of the love between the parents, which has, in a sense, burst the bonds of the communion; it’s so great that it overflows into the being of a new human person.”

The point made is a theological one. Understood in context, it may be taken as a sincere, academically informed effort to distill John Paul’s teachings. But not every theological point is a pastoral point. Truth is truth, but if we place too much emphasis on one part of the truth—in this case, the parents' sharing in God’s creative love—we risk missing another, more important part: Whether or not a child’s parents intend, in the act that leads to procreation, to make a gift of love to each other, their intention has no effect whatsoever on the spiritual identity of the child who proceeds from their union. “The Church teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God—it is not ‘produced’ by the parents” (CCC 366).

The speaker knows that. But it is not her main point. And so, a pastoral problem emerges. About 55 minutes into the video, a young woman raises her hand to ask a question. Her voice indicates that she is on the verge of tears. The following exchange takes place:

YOUNG WOMAN IN AUDIENCE: “Hi, um—so I’m actually the product of donor conception. My parents never met. I have no idea who my father and my mother—I have no idea who my father was. And I have a little bit of a problem, um, with when your parents were never in love. And, um, in this way, I feel like, breaking it down so that, if—if the couples just love each other enough, they’ll be rewarded with a child. Whereas I think that the parents’ loving each other is really a gift and a necessity for the child. It’s such a torment when your parents never love each other and connect to each other. So, um, I’m having a problem; it’s like the child is the—you know, the little prize you get when you love deep enough.”

SPEAKER: “I’m not sure I see a question there. Would you mind just stating your question again, or ...?”

I don’t want to be too hard on the speaker. She is addressing the audience on an academic level, and is simply not prepared for the effect that her highly romanticized account of Church teachings may have on someone whose conception was bereft of romance. To her credit, after the young woman in the audience restates her question, the speaker eventually (after expounding further on spousal love) acknowledges that “even if the child is conceived outside of a particular act of love, God who is love and the origin of all persons is there, loving this child into existence” (59:00).

My point is that the foundational truth of God’s fatherly love for every human being needs to be the first thing we say when speaking about human conception—not the last. And if we’re handing down John Paul’s teachings, we need to know what the late Holy Father actually has to say to those who suffer what the young woman in the audience suffered—the "torment when your parents never love each other and connect to each other":

I wish to add a further word for a category of people whom, as a result of the actual circumstances in which they are living, and this often not through their own deliberate wish, I consider particularly close to the Heart of Christ and deserving of the affection and active solicitude of the Church and of pastors. There exist in the world countless people who unfortunately cannot in any sense claim membership of what could be called in the proper sense a family. (Familiaris Consortio 85)

John Paul II's message to those deprived of familial love is not that they are somehow less loved by God. Instead, he insists that they are, in his own words, particularly close to the Heart of Christ.

That foundational, fatherly love of the Creator for every human person, the love described by John Paul II, is what I needed to hear about when I sought healing in the Church. It is what I am now seeking to bring to other wounded souls with  My Peace I Give You: Healing Sexual Wounds with the Help of the Saints. Please pray for me as I prepare for the apostolate I am undertaking with the book’s publication in April, and please join me in praying for everyone who seeks to spread and teach the Catholic faith. O Crux ave, spes unica; hail the Cross, our only hope.

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