Will my body be resurrected?

Father, do we Catholics really believe that our physical human bodies will be resurrected after death and burial?
 
Yes, Catholics profess in the Apostles Creed, “I believe in…the resurrection of the body,…” which means that in the end, not only our souls, but also our bodies, by God’s power, will be raised to heaven or hell for all eternity. 

As you may well know, being a priest provides ample opportunity to be in the presence of the dead. The sight of a dead body can challenge anyone’s faith to its very core. Many of us priests are so familiar with it all that we become friends with those who work at the local funeral homes. In jest, I try to tell them that they are running a dying business, but they quip back that they just keep on finding new customers! As serious and difficult as death is, mixed in with our grief, we find there is some humor. With firm faith in Christ and His Body, the Church, we find many phenomenal reasons to hope for what is to come—yes, even for what is to become of our dead bodies.

A lack of belief in the resurrection of our bodies has a significant toll on humanity. Just think of how many ways blindness to this reality darkens our sense of human dignity and life itself. Such a mindset lends itself to an overt attention to indulge the vices of our flesh here and now—“Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die!” We are blind to what our bodies will become; we indulge our passions with greed, gluttony, lust, anger vanity and pride. Losing our awareness of the ultimate destination of the body leads to the justification of major offenses against the human body such as the horrible atrocities of war or aborting unborn children. As our bodies succumb to weakness, sickness and the frailty of old age, this blindness viciously beckons us to choose suicide, to get rid of the elderly, and to discard our bodies, burn them and dump them in the wind. It leads some philosophers and even false Christians to conclude that only the soul or spirit is good; but bodies must definitely be evil. This blindness needs the truth of Christ’s body.

In Genesis, we see that God formed a body for man and woman and He called them “good” (cf. Gen. 2:7-25). Even though they sinned against Him and thus brought death to the body, the goodness of the human body was only weakened but not completely lost. The body needed redemption and so God sent His only Son, who had been only Spirit, to become a bodily man in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In his Gospel, St. John describes it this way, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Christ’s body itself is a proof of the value of our own bodies. For if the body was completely evil, Christ could not have taken on a human body.
Taking on a poor weak human body was not sufficient for Christ; He wanted to redeem it completely by enduring physical death on the cross and, on the third day, by raising it to new life. 
 
Christ’s Resurrection is at the very center of our Catholic faith. Saint Paul tells us that if Christ is not risen then our faith is all in vain (cf. 1 Cor 15:17). Jesus proved that His body was risen from the dead. Saint Mary Magdalene embraced Him and St. Thomas, the doubter, pressed his finger and hand into the wounds of the risen Christ. If, therefore, Christ’s body was risen from the dead, how can we fail to believe that, we, His followers will not also have our bodies raised from the dead?
 
Saint Paul writes to the Romans in Chapter 8 that the same Spirit Who raised Jesus from the dead will also raise our mortal bodies from the dead. The belief that our dead bodies will rise from the dead like Christ’s body, completely transforms our lives. We see our weak, sinful, dying bodies capable of life beyond this world. At Holy Mass, we receive the Resurrected Body of Christ and begin to taste the new life to come even now. The body of Christ and the body of Mary have already entered the glory of heaven. They long for us, body and soul, to be with them forever in heaven. Let’s live life in our human bodies in a way that leads us to eternal life in heaven.