La persona, el matrimonio y la familia en el pensamiento de Karol Wojtyla

Abstract

This dissertation is a critical and systematic study of the thought of Karol Wojtyla on the ethical, philosophical and theological foundations of a suitable anthropology, which seeks to elucidate constitutive factors of human love, marriage and the familial relations, in the context of the cultural, ethical and religious pluralism of contemporary society. The work is developed in three moments: the first one is an approximation to contextualize the anthropological debate in current society, where changes in the way of understanding sexuality, procreation, marriage, the familial relations, paternity and maternity are in evidence; the second one centres on Wojtyla's offer of a "suitable anthropology" that must be understood as personalistic anthropology that has its foundation in the anthropology of communion, and among the topics that are approached here are the dimension of the body, the human drama and the experience of the "gift of self"; the third moment refers to the anthropological elements that lead to understanding the couple and the family as spaces of communion where the man draws his own living portrait through the experience freedom and love. In this dissertation the bibliographical method was in use, working with four types of sources: firstly, Karol Wojtyla texts, principally the philosophical writings and the catechesis on human love; secondly, modern and contemporary, national and international authors who do a critique of the loss of the promises of modernity, placing in evidence an anthropological debate; thirdly, authors who comment or come closer to Wojtyla's thought, a varied literature of authors that enriches the different levels of reflection. The relevant thing in this work is to see that Wojtyla does not try to offer a philosophy of Catholic Christianity, canonizing or restricting it to one philosophical current especially, according to him; every philosophical system has its own method, which makes it independent in relation to the faith or to any religious practice. His anthropological reflection is a reaction to those theses or ideas that distort or idealize the vision of man, denying his relational dimension or communion, which is an important aspect to understand the value of marriage and family in society.