Love and Responsibility

Karol Wojtyła's first published book, an ethical study of love and sexuality, published in 1960 by the Scientific Society of the Catholic University of Lublin, where he taught ethics, while he was auxiliary bishop of Kraków. It grew out of his pastoral work with young people, especially a group of students and young couples who met with him for discussions, prayer and walking and kayaking trips. In his introduction he says it was 'born principally of the need to put the norms of Catholic sexual morality on a firm basis'. Its five chapters are 'The Person and the Sexual Urge', 'The Person and Love', 'The Person and Chastity', 'Justice towards the Creator', and 'Sexology and Ethics'. Its central principle is the 'personalistic norm': a person must never be treated merely as a means, and the only adequate response to a person is love. It analyses attraction, desire, sympathy, friendship, shame, tenderness and chastity, and marriage. It was translated into English by H. T. Willetts in 1981, and in a new translation in 2013. It is the philosophical groundwork of his later theology of the body.