The human person is created out of love, for love and is destined to flourish. God, who is perfect love, has created each person in the image and likeness of God. Each person is unique and equal in dignity to all others. Persons are rational and free beings having both a body and a soul. Human beings are in relationship to all of God's creation. God has made each person in the Divine image and likeness as an inseparable unity of body, mind and spirit. God gifts each individual with absolute and enduring dignity and the unconditional love of God. Through God the human person has the possibility of life lived to the full.

Human beings are bodily beings. Their bodies are part of who they are and who they were created by God to be. God does not create human beings as spirits alone, but as unities of both body and spirit. This 'being a body' is important for the Christian vision of the human person because it means that all human beings, regardless of their physical qualities, are created and loved by God. Moreover, this 'being a body' underscores human interrelationships with the world and with time and history. Each human being is unique and irreplaceable. Each human being grows and changes over time. Each human being depends on and acts in and through his or her relationships in the physical world. It is as bodily beings that we come to know God, that we love and learn to discern what is the right thing to do.

The person is a unity of body, mind and spirit. The body is one with the soul in the human person (embodied spirit, inspirited body). 'The body with its feelings, thoughts, urges and longings is a place of divine revelation rather than something to be feared or an object of shame or something less than the mind or spirit' (McClone, 2011, p.4). From a Catholic perspective, human beings hold a unique place in Creation. On the one hand they are material, like animals, because they are physical, bodily beings, bound by time and space on the planet we call Earth. Humans need food, air and water. Human beings need to engage in sexual intercourse in order to keep their species going. Just as an individual would die without food and water, the human species will become extinct without human sexual activity. On the other hand, human beings are eternal because each is created with a rational, spiritual soul that continues to live beyond physical death in this life. What is important for the Catholic perspective on sex and relationship education is to realise that this bodily dimension, and this mental and spiritual dimension cannot be separated from each other. In other words, the human being is a unity of body, mind and spirit.