Rethinking Embodiment: Karl Rahner on the Interconnectedness of Humanity and Divinity

While historically many Catholic conceptions of the value of the human person were embedded in the soul, viewing the body as a limiting factor toward union with God, recent feminist, womanist, and Latina feminist theologians have reinforced the significance of embodied experience. Recognition of the importance of individual particularity remains relevant as many contemporary ethical issues center around the interactions, models, uses, and treatments of human bodies. Whether we are considering sexual assault, human trafficking, abortion, discrimination, immigration, or poverty, bodies are at the heart of theological discourse about ethical issues. This article argues that Catholic theological foundations of human dignity must recognize the significance of lived particularity and embodied existence by pursuing greater care, concern, and valuation of human embodiment driven by a Rahnerian understanding that bodies do not separate humans from union with God, but instead allow us to actualize ourselves through acceptance of God’s self-communication in our unique, concrete particularity.

First, I provide a brief overview of Rahner’s understanding of universal human awareness of the mysterious and divine presence, and our situation of guilt, as a basis for understanding his view of human embodiment. Within this framework, I establish that we are born into what Rahner names a situation of guilt, highlighting the structures of sin that exist through abuse, objectification, judgment, and the inequitable valuation of differently appearing bodies. Next, I will agree with Rahner that the proper stance toward our current situation is one of historical pessimism. This situation prompts us to hope that we can transform our current context. Then, further following Rahner, I contend that since we are free individuals, we have a responsibility to move beyond our current situation and toward self-actualization in reflection on decisions made concretely in the world. Through an understanding that humanity and divinity are not separate but intimately related, as epitomized by the person of Jesus Christ, I draw on feminist, womanist, and Latina feminist theological views of the relationship between embodiment and God to highlight how theology must reprioritize lived embodiment, recognizing the concrete impacts on marginalized bodies. Finally, I put forth a call to action that bodies be treated with respect and recognized as the proper medium of our experience of God.

Rahner centers his systematic theology on human experience. Therefore, Christianity is not a set of beliefs or particular actions, but a way of life characterized by the experience of God’s grace and our response to it in everyday life. According to Rahner’s theological anthropology, every human person is oriented toward the “horizon,” which is the mystery of God. This orientation is ontological in nature, meaning that all humans — regardless of their beliefs about God — experience this mystery and have the opportunity to respond to this experience. Thus, each person has both a categorical and transcendental aspect of their experience. The categorical experience can be understood as experience of the material, concrete world, whereas transcendental experience allows us to transcend ourselves through our consciousness, reflecting on our lives and allowing us to alter our actions. Rahner describes transcendental experience as “the subjective, unthematic, necessary, and unfailing consciousness of the knowing subject that is co-present in every spiritual act of knowledge, and the subject’s openness to the unlimited expanse of all possible reality.”^[1] This level of experience exists for Rahner whether the human subject acknowledges it or not. In this way, every human person is presented with the same questions, and Christians interpret these universal questions within a framework of God’s self-communication in the world. Therefore, Christianity is a decision to see the world in this way and live a life that brings God into the world.

The human capacity to experience transcendence, and therefore self-actualize, originates in human freedom. Rahner differentiates transcendental freedom from categorical freedom. Transcendental freedom is the internal disposition that shapes who a person truly is; it expresses one’s deepest self. Categorical freedom is the capacity to make concrete choices in the categorical, or everyday life. While this distinction remains significant, Rahner emphasizes the interconnectedness between the two, arguing that to self-actualize and transcend oneself, one must accept God’s self-communication in concrete decisions made in every moment in categorical experiences which are mediated by the body.^[2] Rahner explains this by saying, “A special ‘intervention’ of God, therefore, can only be understood as the historical concreteness [emphasis added] of the transcendental self-communication of God which is already intrinsic to the concrete world. Such an ‘intervention’ of God always takes place, first, from out of the fundamental openness of finite matter and of a biological system of the spirit towards the history of the transcendental relationship between God and the created person in their mutual freedom.”^[3] Therefore the material and categorical experiences mediate transcendence and provide the concrete context in which self-actualization takes place. In explaining the necessity of decisions made within concrete existence, Rahner’s theological anthropology implicitly acknowledges the significance of embodiment because our experience of the world is inherently embodied.

Once we realize that human beings have both categorical and transcendental freedom, which shapes us with every concrete decision, we must consider who God is to examine the relationship between divinity and human materiality. According to Rahner, God is mystery, meaning that the fullness of transcendence is ineffable. While God is infinite and distinct from the categorical experience, God also bridges the transcendent and categorical experiences, grounding all existence:

We can say without hesitation: a person who opens himself to his transcendental experience of the holy mystery at all has the experience that this mystery is not only an infinitely distant horizon, a remote judgment which judges from a distance his consciousness and his world of persons and things, it is not only something mysterious which frightens away and back into the narrow confines of his everyday world. He experiences rather that this holy mystery is also a hidden closeness, a forgiving intimacy, his real home, that it is a love which shares itself, something familiar which he can approach and turn to from the estrangement of his own perilous and empty life . . . it is this person who experiences himself as one who does not forgive himself, but who is forgiven, and he experiences this forgiveness which he receives as the hidden, forgiving and liberating love of God himself, who forgives in that he gives himself, because only in this way can there really be forgiveness once and for all.^[4]

This passage highlights both the radical unthematic nature of God and the radical closeness between humanity and God through God’s forgiving nature, as God desires to be in communion with creation. This is further shown through Rahner’s understanding that “the difference between God and the world is of such a nature that God establishes and is the difference of the world from himself, and for this reason, he establishes the closest unity precisely in the differentiation.”^[5] For Rahner, God enters the world in mediated immediacy. Every experience of transcendence of the human person occurs in everyday life, therefore God always enters the world through the transcendence and actualization of the human subject, which comes through embodied action. According to Rahner “the finite subject does not disappear into this most immediate manifestation of God and is not suppressed, but rather it reaches its fulfillment and hence its fullest autonomy as subject. This autonomy is at once both the presupposition and the consequence of this absolute immediacy to God and from God.”^[6] Through mediated immediacy, we understand that God is revealed in history. Since human subjects actively transcend themselves, bringing God, who is the fullness of transcendence, into the world, Rahner maintains that salvation begins in history, through the concrete actions of humans, and that history is the mechanism of salvation.

Following from the idea that salvation starts in history, Rahner argues that we are born into a “situation of guilt” which limits our exercise of freedom as the human person is shaped by the world that we enter into and therefore is characterized by sin. Rahner says, “The Christian interpretation of this situation of the free subject says that this situation, determined by his personal world, inevitably bears the stamp of the history of the freedom of all other men, [emphasis added] and this precisely for the individual in his free subjectivity and in his most personal and individual history. Consequently, the guilt of others is a permanent factor in the situation and realm of the individual’s freedom.”^[7] This point emerges from the fact that our categorical exercise of freedom, mediated by the body, actualizes our transcendence. Since every human person is presented with the question to accept or reject God’s self-communication to transcend themself and can freely choose one way or the other, active rejection of God’s self-communication results in a failure to self-actualize and produces an objective manifestation of sin. This sin remains in the world and impacts the freedom of every human subject in making their own decision. This situation of guilt can be similarly understood as the phenomenon of being shaped by the structures of sin that surround us through our culture and society. The idea of “structures of sin” or “social sin” came from liberation theology and was used by Pope John Paul II. The Pope notes that while structures of sin are rooted in personal sin, they tend to “grow stronger, spread, and become the source of other sins, and so influence people’s behavior.”^[8] Just as Rahner recognizes that our concrete contexts and the history of human guilt impact our capacity for transcendence, so too does Catholic social teaching recognize the systems of oppression that become embedded within society.

Now that I’ve considered how being born into a situation of collective guilt limits our capacity for self-actualization, I will outline structures of sin that harm, objectify, and devalue human bodies. We are all born into a society that includes discrimination based on gender, race, and sexuality. A study by the World Health Organization in 2021 found that 30 percent of women — about 736 million women worldwide — have experienced intimate partner violence or nonpartner sexual violence.^[9] The FBI’s 2022 Hate Crimes Statistics report for the United States, release in October 2023, found that crime incidents increased by 794 offenses from the previous year with hate crimes rooted in race, ethnicity, or ancestry remaining the most common.^[10] Incidents targeting members of the LGBTQ+ community recorded their highest totals in the past five years.^[11] In addition to this, the 2023 release of the multidimensional poverty index found that 1.1 billion out of 6.1 billion people (just over 18 percent) live in acute multidimensional poverty across 110 countries.^[12] Furthermore, the US’s current debates regarding the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision eliminating the constitutional right to abortion raises many debates about the use of one’s body. All of these exemplify how we live in a world that continues to objectify bodies, value certain bodies over others, abuse bodies, and judge people for what they do with their bodies. In each of these cases, oppressing, objectifying, and controlling the bodies of other human subjects manifests as a rejection of God’s self-expression in the categorical experience. These actions limit women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and impoverished people from exercising their fullest freedom in relationship to God and the world. Therefore, systems of sexism, homophobia, racism, poverty, and control are structures of sin that, in limiting people’s freedom, hinder them from self-actualization. Additionally, by devaluing, discriminating against, and neglecting the bodies of other humans, those doing so are shaping their truest self as well as the history of salvation. Anyone who enters the world bears the collective guilt of those who cast people out due to their embodiment. Unfortunately, these structures are so ingrained within society and impressed upon us so immediately that they often go unrecognized. These statistics reflect a world that has yet to emphasize the value and significance of the human body to the person and this must be shifted.

A key to Rahner’s call to Christians to reorient their understanding of their relationship with God and the world comes from his recognition that people have become disillusioned by the presence of sin in the world. He writes, “A person today, then, is more likely to have the impression that God must justify the unhappy condition of the world before man, that man is the sacrifice and not the cause of the condition of the world and of human history. This is still true even when the wrong seems indeed to be caused by man as a free subject, but this agent is once again the product of his nature and of his social situation.”^[13] Even over forty-seven years later, this observation remains relevant. The average person today is not bothered in an immediate way by their contribution to sin in the world, viewing God as infinitely merciful and therefore stifling action toward transformation. In contrast, Rahner argues that the proper stance of a Christian toward history is one of historical pessimism, because optimism functions as an opiate of the people. Therefore, to flourish as human beings and grow closer in relationship with God, we are called to recognize the suffering that occurs around us and to seek justice. In other words, because we are transcendental beings, we are beings “characterized by moral struggle, beings with moral demands and with moral responsibility.”^[14] In reflecting upon our actions as subjects and transforming our conduct in the pursuit of saying yes to God’s self-communication within the world, we realize ethical duties and obligations to others. Christianity cannot be passive; it must include active efforts to bring salvation in history. In contemporary contexts, the Catholic Church and the Catholic laity must recognize the current state of sin within our world, specifically the devaluation of human embodiment. Additionally, Catholics must identify that this situation fails to bring God into the world, as transcendence is mediated through the body. Our current culture does not uplift bodies.

Rahner does not end with historical pessimism. Instead, he argues that true hope emerges from the perspective of pessimism. He says that by not giving enough weight to an understanding that we sin, and stand before God in a state of sin, people begin to hold the view that God must justify the condition of the world. Yet, Rahner reinforces that God did not make the current situation or even allow it to happen. The experience of sin, both social and personal, came into the world through a historical manifestation of collective human guilt. Human beings brought this state upon ourselves. While this picture seems initially grim, it acknowledges that since the current landscape is not something predetermined, but altered by human action through freedom, humans can also better our situation. Thus, hope emerges from a realization of the existence of sin and an understanding that this state can be changed. Aligning with Rahner’s basis of Christian life within human experience, freedom, not sin, is what makes us human. Rahner reveals this by saying, “every person in the ultimate depths of his conscience, of his person and of his existence as someone to whom the infinite, nameless and indefinable God, who is the true content of every spiritual life, has offered himself as salvation to the freedom of this person. [emphasis added] And a Christian also knows in his hope that this offer of the absolutely incomprehensible, nameless and infinite God to man’s freedom can be accepted in man’s concrete and unthematic actualization of existence. [emphasis added]”^[15] Through our freedom to transcend, humans have the power to bring God into the world. While Rahner acknowledges that we are socially and psychologically conditioned, he ultimately believes that this is different from who we truly are. We are not reducible to these outside factors, as everyone can move beyond the current situation of guilt and one’s limitations by saying yes to salvation when it comes in every concrete decision made in everyday life, mediated through embodied existence. Through knowledge of the harm done to bodies by structures of sin, one becomes morally responsible for altering this state of being, not only of oneself but for others.

Motivated by hope and informed by the knowledge of our situation, responsibility emerges. Today’s individualism, particularly within Western societies, functions to isolate our focus onto our ego. Awareness that we are sinners becomes a valuation of the self rather than a mere understanding of our radical interdependence which exists due to increasing globalization. In recognizing the historical nature of sin in shaping our true self and the state of guilt that others enter into, care for another also affects the self. In many contemporary arguments about ethical issues, such as environmental degradation or poverty, the moral onus gets placed on institutions. While companies and the government have ethical duties that must not be diminished, this can allow us to place blame outside of ourselves. In reality, buying chocolate or a banana can mean participating in systems of human trafficking. Institutions, especially in capitalistic contexts, follow the desires of customers and constituents.

This brings us to salvation. According to Rahner, when we exercise our freedom concretely, we are making ourselves and exercising our humanity. Therefore, every decision we make and action we take makes us who we are. Further, salvation is not a decision made in one moment at the end of one’s life by an all-powerful being, but “the final and definitive validity of a person’s true self-understanding and true self-realization in freedom before God by the fact that he accepts his own self as it is disclosed and offered to him in the choice of transcendence as interpreted in freedom. Man’s eternity can only be understood as freedom existing beyond time in its real and definitive validity.”^[16] Our decisions not only shape history and the collective guilt that all people are born into but also our salvation, emanating from self-actualization. Responsibility to self and others are intimately connected. Rahner discusses the existence of both an individual and a collective history of salvation saying, “the divinized transcendentality of man, who actualizes his essence in history and only in this way can accept it in freedom, has itself a history in man, and individual and a collective history. This transcendentality, as borne, empowered and fulfilled by the divinizing self-communication of God, this transcendentality takes place; it does not simply exist.”^[17] Emphasis on the fact that transcendentality “takes place” aligns with Rahner’s idea that humans are the event of God’s self-communication. Within this, “the Godness of God as the holy mystery becomes radical and insuppressible reality for man.”^[18] History, human freedom, and salvation are related as the history of salvation “is also a history on the part of man’s freedom . . . [in which] there is never a salvific act of God on man which is not also and always a salvific act of man.”^[19] In this way all individuals have a responsibility to bring about God within the world, seeking justice and shaping oneself for the better, and in turn bringing about the salvation of all people.

Guided by historical pessimism, prompted by hope and personal responsibility toward others, Christians must then consider the status of the body in discussions of self-actualization and salvation. The conception that the body limits one’s potential for salvation is embedded within Christian ontology. Remnants of these views are commonly found within Christian perspectives on the body’s separation from elements of the divine. Rahner presents a contrasting perspective, writing that “in Christ, the authentically human and the divine are not opposed or in competition.”^[20] The body is not something that hinders divinization but mediates it. This relationship is seen explicitly through the person of Jesus Christ. Rather than seeing the human or divine natures of Jesus as conflicting elements or believing that Jesus’s humanity somehow diminishes his divinity, Rahner establishes that the fullness of Jesus’s humanity makes him also fully divine. Just as Jesus’s humanity and divinity are not divorced, Rahner argues that matter and spirit are also mutually related elements, further dismantling the language of distinction between matter and spirit. Rahner explains that “it would be quite wrong and unchristian to conceive of matter and spirit as realities simply existing side by side” as they “have more things in common than things dividing them.”^[21] Through this, we recognize that our perception of the duality between materiality or humanity and divinity or spirit are unjustified and function to limit our self-actualization, hindering God from entering into the world. In perceiving that bodies are different from the soul, divinity, or that which transcends our mortal existence, we see bodies as lacking the same value, allowing and justifying bodily harm and oppression in this life. Discrimination and violence against bodies in the categorical experience actively rejects God’s self-communication and hinders God from coming into the world. This prevents one from transcending oneself and, as Rahner says, hinders oneself from self-actualizing. To emphasize this further, Rahner argues that Jesus becoming incarnate as human and divine in the world “must not be understood as something which distinguishes Jesus Our Lord from us . . . the Incarnation appears as the necessary and permanent beginning of the divinization of the world as a whole.”^[22] Therefore Jesus’s coming not only culminated in the perfect union of matter and spirit but also changed our understanding of what it means to be human for all to come. Rahner’s notion of the mutual relatedness of matter and spirit challenges contemporary understandings that human embodiment and the tendencies that come out of it move us away from the spirit or transcendence.

Rahner lays out a phenomenology of our relationship to Jesus, saying that we have an existential relationship with Christ, revealing our closeness to Christ — the word made flesh — who entered the world in embodied humanity. Arguing that both the dimensions of Jesus in himself and for us are required for an adequate understanding of our relationship with Jesus, Rahner says we must examine who Jesus was himself, not simply what he means for us, as this would be ascribing our meaning to Jesus. In recognizing that Jesus came into the world enfleshed and in himself bore the pain and hardship of embodied reality which in itself brought him closer to his divinity, Jesus’s embodied experience reflects the significance of the body for our own self-actualization and capacity to bring God into the world. This necessitates further awareness of the goodness and spirit that comes through the body. Solidifying this idea, Rahner says that Jesus represents the fulfillment of human consciousness, the fullest affirmation of matter and spirit, and therefore the perfection of our embodied reality. By understanding and accepting this view that Jesus represents the apex of humanity through his fullest self-actualization of the human person which united him with divinity, we can realize that the body and suffering are not “bad” or undivine but actually a part of Jesus’s experience. Therefore God, through Jesus, redeemed the world by taking on a body while suffering in and through that body. This exemplifies how our bodies make us closer to Jesus, bringing us into his lived experience, allowing us to more fully understand the sacrifice that he made. By coming into the world, Jesus transformed and gave meaning to suffering. Even the scriptures discuss Jesus’s bodily pain and lived suffering: “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15).^[23] Further, “Christ had not only to be ‘like us in nature’ so as to be our Redeemer, but with us had to spring ‘from one’” (Heb 2:11). Rahner himself calls Jesus “our brother according to the flesh.”^[24] Thus Jesus’s embodiment makes us intimately close to him and exemplifies the fullness of union with God through embodied existence.

Jesus’s embodiment, characterized by bodily suffering and death and his attention to the embodied suffering of others, expresses the significance of individual particularity and seeking to respect and care for bodies. If we understand Jesus as a fully self-actualized human as Rahner did, we must also acknowledge that as an individual he was beaten, nailed to the cross, dirty, and pierced with thorns in his embodied particularity. Additionally, when Jesus died, his body was resurrected. This aligns with Rahner’s eschatology in that “man is not an absolute unity which can be split up into body and soul . . . [the] fulfillment of the soul and fulfillment of the body are not of such a nature that they could be completely separated from each other.”^[25] Jesus exemplified that all humans in their embodied reality are “really a corporeal person with an absolute and ultimately irresolvable unity of matter and spirit” and therefore there is ultimately salvation of the single and total person.^[26] Rahner identifies the church’s failure to emphasize Jesus’s humanity saying, “Christ’s humanity no longer has any part to play in the theology of the visio beatifica [emphasis in original] . . . theology is only concerned with the One who has become man in so far as he appeared at the historical time of his life on earth as Teacher, Founder, and Redeemer. There is hardly any developed doctrine of his abiding function as man.”^[27] Consequently, further understanding that “the single, concrete person reaches fulfillment when he is fulfilled in God as a concrete spirit and as a corporeal person” must also be reinforced.^[28] Not only did Jesus’s embodiment define his experience; he also paid close attention and tended to those with physical ailments. Whether it was the blind man, the lepers, or the prostitutes, Jesus spent time with, touched, and healed those cast out due to their embodiment. Thus, through Jesus’s attention toward the bodies deemed as less valuable or unworthy, we become aware of the significance of the particularity of the “other.” Both Jesus’s bodily suffering and death, and his care for those seen with bodily impairments or improper ‘use’ of their bodies, reveals the significance of our particularity through our embodiment and recognition of the worth of others’ bodies.

Feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson, womanist theologian Shawn Copeland, and Latina feminist theologian Mayra Rivera build off Rahner, further emphasizing the significance of the relationship of embodiment and divinity, seeking to critique aspects of church teaching and language with the goal of uplifting marginalized bodies. All three apply a hermeneutic of suspicion, which calls for engagement with Christianity through an awareness of how its systems can participate, legitimize, and perpetuate the oppression of historically minoritized peoples. Johnson and other feminist theologians question why women’s experiences have been excluded from theology, critiquing Christian constructions of “woman” as well as problems of speaking of and imagining God in exclusively male terms. Johnson writes that “the symbol of God functions,” defending how language about God shapes people’s lives but also is influenced by the sociocultural context from which it emerges. She criticizes the rigid dualism of medieval times, largely stemming from Thomas Aquinas, which ties men to the soul and intellect and therefore to divinity, relegating women to their bodily “limitation.” Additionally, she argues that through use of exclusively male pronouns for God as well as the privileging of the soul as the “divine” part of the human relationship which gets connected to male bodies, the body is perceived as an obstacle, hindering all, but especially women from achieving union with God. This fails to recognize that the “divine being transcends sexual bodiliness,” highlighting that “patriarchal speech about God is oppressive.”^[29] Johnson professes that “only when the poorest, black, raped, and brutalized women in a South African township — the epitome of victims of sexism, racism, and classism, and at the same time startling examples of women’s resiliency, courage, love, and dignity — when such women with their dependent children and their sisters around the world may live peacefully in the enjoyment of their human dignity, only then will feminist theology arrive at its goal.”^[30]

Womanist theologians consider the oppression of African American women and their experiences. They similarly criticize this dualism, expressing how raced bodies also become seen as “other” and unclean in relation to white bodies, which are seen as more pure and closer to divinity. In parallel with Rahner’s starting point in human experience, Shawn Copeland writes, “the body provokes theology. The body contests its hypotheses, resists its conclusions, escapes its textual margins. The body incarnates and points beyond to what is ‘the most immediate and proximate object of our experience’ and mediates our engagement with others, with the world, with the Other.”^[31] Copeland asserts that all bodies are “marked” through race, sex and gender, sexuality, and culture, which have been interpreted in ways that cause violence to bodies. In highlighting these “marks,” we must seek to dismantle systems enshrined in the church that allow and often perpetuate oppression based on embodiment.

Latina feminist theologians, including Mayra Rivera, add onto Rahner’s view of the sacred elements in materiality and divinity. Using a decolonial lens, Rivera asserts that part of the Latina project is “a rethinking of divine transcendence that does not presuppose completeness or absolute separation, one that is more amenable to the flux and disruptions of the flesh.”^[32] In paying closer attention to particular bodies in which “greed, violence, and enslavement literally [emphasis in original] became incarnate,” people can begin to recognize the effects of embodiment within social structures not only of patriarchy but racism.^[33] Calling for reconstruction, Rivera places bodily experience at the center of her theological anthropology, realizing the many ways in which bodies are treated and understood based on their context and further embracing the worthiness of diversity in bodily experience. Therefore, she says we must “foreground the concrete experiences and material struggles of marginalized people: the poor and the disappeared, of those in pain and hungry, of those persecuted and tortured.”^[34]

Johnson, Copeland, and Rivera follow a similar logic to Rahner in placing the lived experience of people in specific marginalized communities at the center of their theology. For Rahner, bodies are the mediator to accepting God’s self-communication, so too is the body necessary and must be uplifted within Johnson, Copeland, and Rivera’s approaches. Rahner considers the individual and collective parts of salvation and Johnson, Copeland, and Rivera similarly acknowledge how collective church and societal positions affect individuals and their embodied experience. Paralleling the Rahnerian idea that collective guilt shapes each person entering into the world and can manifest as structural sin, Johnson, Copeland, and Rivera emphasize how Christian constructions of “woman,” bodies “marked” with color, as well as unclean and impoverished bodies exemplify the sin of previous generations and church institutions, which function to oppress marginalized people concretely in the here and now. Also aligning with Rahner, these theologians emphasize the responsibility that each person has to others, each arguing in different ways that God, divinity, and divine love are not limited to the privileged and therefore, those who are oppressed must be treated as equally dignified.

In using Rahner’s framework of transcendence through self-actualization within categorical experience, this article reveals how Catholic theological foundations of justice must realize that embodiment does not separate, but brings human individuals closer to God. This will clarify the role of Catholics in approaching ethical issues of embodiment and reshape their understanding of salvation occurring in this life. A call to intentional action must be given that includes the respect and valuation of the body as essential to self-actualization and the deepening of our relationship with God. This approach can serve to inform Catholic social teaching in addressing current human rights issues. Catholics must place embodied experience of oneself and recognition of the bodily suffering of others at the forefront of their pursuit of justice and ultimate union with God. Through recognition of the situation of guilt and the structures of sin that exist within our world which harm bodies, Catholics must realize their responsibility to transform this situation. Further consideration of the relationship between the body and divinity must be understood, foregrounding the lived experiences of human beings in their particularity.