National Catholic Register portal reports on Sharon Boies, a Newport Beach dance instructor who claims to teach John Paul II’s “theology of the body” through ballroom dance classes for engaged and married Catholic couples. The article presents her work as a wholesome countercultural alternative to modern dating, describing how couples learn “complementarity” through leading and receiving on the dance floor, accompanied by images of Our Lady of Guadalupe and a Divine Mercy tapestry adorning her studio. What the article never once interrogates is whether the entire theological framework undergirding this enterprise — the “theology of the body” itself — is a modernist corruption of Catholic anthropology that dissolves the supernatural order into a naturalistic philosophy of human self-fulfillment.
The “Theology of the Body”: A Modernist Anthropology Dressed in Catholic Vestments
The article treats John Paul II’s “theology of the body” as an unquestionable font of Catholic wisdom, a body of teaching to be “applied” through dance. This alone reveals the depth of the conciliar sect’s capture of Catholic discourse. The “theology of the body” — 129 general audiences delivered between 1979 and 1984 — represents one of the most significant departures from the Church’s perennial teaching on the human person, marriage, and sexuality. It is not a development of doctrine; it is a corruption of it.
The perennial Catholic teaching, articulated by the Council of Trent and the Church Fathers, holds that the human person is composed of body and soul, that original sin wounded human nature, and that concupiscence — the disordered inclination of the flesh against the spirit — is the consequence of the Fall. St. Augustine taught that concupiscentia carnis (concupiscence of the flesh) is itself the punishment and transmission of original sin, and that even within marriage, the sexual act, while licit for its procreative and unitive ends, remains subject to the disorder introduced by sin. The Council of Trent, Session V, declared that concupiscence “is left for our exercise” and that “this concupiscence, which the Apostle sometimes calls sin, the holy Council declares that the Catholic Church has never understood to be called sin, as truly and properly sin in those born again, but because it is of sin, and inclines to sin.”
John Paul II’s “theology of the body,” by contrast, presents an anthropology in which the body possesses a “nuptial meaning” — a capacity to express self-giving love that is presented as something original and pristine, almost as if the Fall had not fundamentally disordered human relations. The article quotes Boies: “The body is not something to use. It’s a gift.” While this sounds pious, it is a half-truth that omits the essential Catholic teaching: the body is indeed a gift, but it is a gift from a fallen nature, wounded by original sin, and ordered toward supernatural ends that can only be achieved through grace, the sacraments, and the mortification of the flesh. To speak of the body’s “gift” without reference to the Cross, to purgation, to the struggle against concupiscence, is to preach a naturalistic humanism — precisely the error condemned by Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), which rejected the notion that “all the rectitude and excellence of morality ought to be placed in the accumulation and increase of riches by every possible means, and the gratification of pleasure” (Error 58), and by St. Pius X in Lamentabili sane exitu (1907), which condemned the proposition that “the progress of sciences requires a reform of the concept of Christian doctrine concerning God, creation, Revelation, the Person of the Incarnate Word, and Redemption” (Error 64).
The Cult of “Complementarity” and the Erasure of Hierarchy
The article repeatedly invokes the language of “complementarity” — the idea that men and women are equal but different, and that dance expresses this difference through leading and receiving. Aileen Tran is quoted: “We learned the beauty of our femininity and masculinity and how we’re called to live that out fully with confidence, dance being an example of how to do that in relationship with one another.” Quinn Rickard echoes: “I was able to learn about the complementarity of men and women in a different way, not just in theory, but physically through dance.”
This language of “complementarity” is a hallmark of post-conciliar modernism. It replaces the Catholic teaching on the natural hierarchy between man and woman — established by God in creation (Genesis 2:18-24), confirmed by St. Paul (1 Corinthians 11:3, Ephesians 5:22-24), and defined by the Magisterium — with a horizontal, egalitarian model in which differences are aesthetic rather than ontological. The Church has always taught that the man is the head of the wife sicut Christus caput Ecclesiae (as Christ is the head of the Church), and that this ordering is not a cultural artifact but a divine institution. The “complementarity” framework, by contrast, reduces this sacred hierarchy to a choreography — the man “leads,” the woman “receives,” and both are equally validated in their roles. It is democracy applied to the domestic church, and it is foreign to Catholic tradition.
St. Pius X, in Lamentabili, condemned the proposition that “the organic structure of the Church is subject to change, and the Christian community, like the human community, is subject to continuous evolution” (Error 53). The same principle applies to the family: its structure is not subject to evolution or reinterpretation according to the spirit of the age. The conciliar sect’s obsession with “complementarity” is precisely such an evolution — a reimagining of the marital relationship in terms palatable to modern egalitarian sensibilities.
John Paul II: Heretic, Apostate, and False Teacher
The article refers to John Paul II as “Pope St. John Paul II” and “the late Pope” with reverence, presenting his teachings as authoritative and sanctified. This is the gravest offense in the entire piece. John Paul II — Karol Wojtyła — was an antipope of the conciliar sect, a man whose entire pontificate was dedicated to the implementation of the modernist revolution inaugurated by the Second Vatican Council. His “theology of the body” is not Catholic teaching; it is a synthesis of personalist philosophy, phenomenology, and modernist anthropology that has no basis in the perennial Magisterium.
The article quotes Boies: “John Paul II was an artist. He understood that truth has to be embodied.” This is precisely the problem. Truth is not “embodied” in aesthetic experience; truth is revealed by God through His Church and preserved in the deposit of faith. The notion that truth must be “embodied” — that it is accessed through physical movement, through the experience of dance — is a form of modernist immanentism, the very error condemned by St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici gregis (1907), which identified the modernist error as the claim that “revelation was merely man’s self-awareness of his relationship to God” (condemned in Lamentabili, Proposition 20). When Boies says “the body speaks,” she is not speaking Catholic theology; she is speaking the language of the conciar revolution, which has replaced the supernatural order with a naturalistic mysticism of human experience.
John Paul II’s entire pontificate was a systematic assault on Catholic doctrine: his Assisi gatherings of 1986, where he prayed with animists, Muslims, and Buddhists, constituted formal cooperation in false worship; his kissing of the Koran; his promotion of the “theology of the body” as a replacement for the Church’s teaching on marriage and sexuality; his canonization of Maximilian Kolbe — who died not as a martyr of the faith but as a prisoner who volunteered to die in place of another, which does not meet the canonical definition of martyrdom; and his role in the post-conciliar dismantling of the Church’s liturgical and doctrinal heritage. To invoke his name as a source of Catholic wisdom is to reveal oneself as a servant of the conciliar sect.
The Omission of the Supernatural Order
Perhaps the most damning feature of this article is what it does not say. There is no mention of the sacraments as the means of grace for married couples. There is no mention of the Holy Mass — the Most Holy Sacrifice of Calvary — as the source and summit of the Christian life. There is no mention of confession, of the state of grace, of the necessity of mortification and the Cross. There is no mention of the Church’s teaching on the primary end of marriage — the procreation and education of children — or the secondary ends of mutual help and the remedy of concupiscence.
Instead, the article presents dance as the medium through which couples “explore intimacy” and “experience joy through music, food, fellowship and, of course, dance.” This is not Catholicism; it is a naturalistic self-help program with Catholic decorations. The tapestry of Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Divine Mercy image in Boies’ studio are not signs of authentic Catholic faith; they are props in a performance that has substituted human experience for divine revelation.
Pius XI, in Quas Primas (1925), established the Feast of Christ the King precisely to combat the secularism and naturalism that would remove Christ and His law from every aspect of human life. He wrote: “His reign, namely, extends not only to Catholic nations or to those who, by receiving baptism according to law, belong to the Church, even though their erroneous opinions have led them astray or discord has separated them from love, but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.” The article’s vision of Catholic life — dance classes, “wholesome social settings,” “exploring intimacy” — is a kingdom without a King, a faith without the Cross, a Church without Christ.
The “Countercultural” Lie
The article presents Boies’ work as “countercultural” — a resistance to the “coarseness and oversexualization that saturate modern dating.” But this is a false counterculture. True counterculture in the Catholic sense is the radical embrace of the supernatural life: attendance at the Traditional Latin Mass, reception of the sacraments from validly ordained priests, the daily rosary, mental reading of the lives of the saints, the practice of mortification, and the uncompromising rejection of the modern world, the flesh, and the devil. What Boies offers is not countercultural; it is the conciar sect’s version of “relevance” — an attempt to make the faith palatable to a generation formed by the very culture it claims to resist.
The article notes that Boies’ students “were not looking for novelty. They were looking for something applied, a way to live out what they professed.” But what do they profess? If they profess the faith of the conciliar sect — the faith of Assisi, of the “theology of the body,” of “complementarity” and “encounter” — then they profess a faith that is not the Catholic faith. The true Catholic faith is not “applied” through dance; it is lived through the sacraments, through obedience to the unchanging Magisterium, and through the daily carrying of the Cross.
Conclusion: The Abomination of Desolation in the Dance Studio
This article is a microcosm of everything wrong with the conciliar sect. It takes a modernist antipope’s most problematic teaching, wraps it in Catholic imagery, and presents it as a wholesome alternative to the modern world — while never once mentioning the supernatural order, the sacraments, the Cross, or the unchanging Magisterium of the true Church. It is a perfect example of what St. Pius X called “the synthesis of all heresies” — Modernism — which does not deny Catholic doctrine outright but dissolves it into human experience, sentiment, and naturalistic philosophy.
The body does not “speak” the way Boies claims. The body is a temple of the Holy Ghost, redeemed by the Precious Blood of Christ, destined for the resurrection of the just — or, if unrepentant, for the fires of hell. The only “dance” that matters is the dance of the soul in the state of sanctifying grace, moving in harmony with the will of God as expressed through His one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. Everything else is vanity, and vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas (vanity of vanities, all is vanity).
Source:
Dancing the Theology of the Body (ncregister.com)
Date: 18.04.2026