Made for the Gift: Vocation and the Theology of the Body for Helping Professionals

Every person carries a desire to give themselves to something worthy. John Paul II called that desire eros, and he taught that the whole question of vocation is really the question of where that desire finds its home. In this course, Bill Donahue of the Theology of the Body Institute takes up the second great question of the Theology of the Body — now that I know who I am, how do I live? — and shows why marriage and consecrated celibacy are not a higher and a lower path but two ways of living one spousal love.

For counselors and pastoral professionals, the payoff is practical. Clients arrive stuck at the crossroads of major life decisions, and they usually frame the question as preference or risk. This course gives the helping professional a whole-person way to hear the deeper question underneath — the call to become a gift — and an integrated framework, drawn from John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Divine Mercy University’s own scholarship on vocation as a developmental task, for working with identity and life-direction concerns.

It is the second part of an introduction to the Theology of the Body and stands on its own; no prior coursework is required.