Last rites declaration of Ioannes Paulus PP. II (Karol Wojtyla)
2nd April 2005
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and felt it! But for
this they would need to have intelligence to know it, and good-will to
consent to that of the universal soul. But if, having received intelligence,
they employed it to retain nourishment for themselves without allowing it to
pass to the other members, they would be not only unjust, but also
miserable, and would hate rather than love themselves; their blessedness, as
well as their duty, consisting in their consent to the guidance of the whole
soul to which they belong, which loves them better than they love
themselves.
483. To be a member is to have neither life, being, nor movement, except
through the spirit of the body, and for the body.
The separate member, seeing no longer the body to which it belongs, has only
a perishing and dying existence. Yet it believes it is a whole, and, seeing
not the body on which it depends, it believes it depends only on self and
desires to make itself both centre and body. But not having in itself a
principle of life, it only goes astray and is astonished in the uncertainty
of its being; perceiving in fact that it is not a body, and still not seeing
that it is a member of a body. In short, when it comes to know itself, it
has returned, as it were, to its