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Love

Is Self-Love Catholic, or Is It Selfish?

Thomas Teofil · 23 October 2026

A lot of Catholics wince at the word. Self-love sounds like something off a mug, or a magazine cover, or the exact thing the nuns warned you about. So it’s a fair question to ask whether self-love is Catholic at all, or whether it’s selfishness in a nicer coat.

Jesus didn’t seem worried about it. When a scribe asked him which commandment was the greatest, he gave the first one, loving God with everything you have, and then added, “The second is like this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” He said as yourself and moved on. He took it for granted that we’d already be doing it.

What “as yourself” takes for granted

Read the sentence slowly and notice the yardstick. Your neighbor gets measured against you. Self-love is the ground that second commandment stands on, and if you treat yourself with contempt, the commandment has little to work with. A man who thinks he’s worthless, and loves his neighbor the same way, hasn’t kept it.

That’s why self-love and selfishness are so different. Selfishness takes what belongs to someone else. Self-love wants your own good, the way you’d want it for a friend: enough food, enough sleep, a clear conscience, a life you can give away. One shrinks the circle of people you care about. The other is where the circle starts.

People with cancer often meet the opposite problem. They don’t think too much of themselves. They think they’re a burden, they apologise for taking up a chair in a waiting room, and they say I’m fine to the neighbor who brought a casserole. Self-love is the first thing to go, quietly, and nobody notices it leaving. Nobody calls its absence a sin, either, though it quietly makes everything else harder.

Is self-love Catholic? What the Church actually says

Here I should be careful. The Catechism has one short sentence that gets quoted a lot. Paragraph 2264 says: “Love toward oneself remains a fundamental principle of morality.” It’s in the section on legitimate defense, so it comes with a specific job: it explains why you may protect your own life. I wouldn’t stretch it into a whole theology. But the sentence is there, in the official text, and it plainly doesn’t treat love of yourself as a vice.

Add the commandment itself, and the picture is plain enough. Catholic self-love is no invention of the self-help shelf, and it has nothing to do with admiring yourself. It’s wanting what God wants for you, which includes being alive, keeping your dignity, and being allowed to rest. The Church’s own order for the great commandment is God first, then neighbor, with yourself already inside the word as.

Why I put yourself first in the order of the three loves

In the book I list the three loves in a different order: yourself, God, others. I want to be clear that this is my order, a way of arranging the pages, and not something the Church teaches. The Church’s order is the one Jesus gave.

My reason is practical. Illness tends to break the first one. Someone who is sure they’re a burden can’t receive help, because help feels like a debt. Someone who is ashamed of their body can’t easily pray in it. And a caregiver who has cut everything away from their own life has nothing left to give the person in the bed. So when I wrote the ninety days I let them arrive at self-love last, because it’s the hardest one to say with a straight face from a hospital bed, after two months of hearing that God and Jesus love you. In the third month, the sentence over every week is you love yourself, and the book treats it as the second half of the commandment, not as a bumper sticker.

Self-love may come easier to you in a different order. You might find it goes the other way for you. Start with God, or with the person you’re looking after. The point is only that all three belong, and that self-love is one of them.

Can I love a body that let me down?

This is the patient’s question in the third month of the book, and it’s the hardest of the three: can I love this body that let me down? If you’re angry at your body, you’re in good company. It’s the thing that got sick. It has a port in it, or a scar, or a new limit, and it feels like it betrayed you.

I can’t tell you how to feel about it. What I can do is point to what the Church says. Catechism 364 says the human body shares in the dignity of the image of God, and quotes the Second Vatican Council: a man “may not despise his bodily life,” and is obliged “to regard his body as good and to hold it in honour since God has created it.”

What Saint Paul says about the body

Paul asks the Corinthians, “Or don’t you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God?” (1 Corinthians 6:19, WEB). He wrote it to healthy people. It’s no less true of a body that is tired, thin or full of tubes. A temple that needs repair is still a temple.

Self-love in treatment looks small

Mostly it looks small. It’s thanking your body for one thing it still does, today, out loud if you can: that it breathed through the scan, that it held a cup. It’s eating the thing you can eat. It’s letting someone drive. It’s saying to God, I’ve been angry with this body, and you made it, so help me to be gentle with it. The book gives one day in the third month to exactly that thank-you. Nothing grand is needed.

Self-love with a failing body asks for less than people expect. It doesn’t ask you to feel cheerful or grateful on command. Anger at your body isn’t a sin, either. Put it into the prayer with everything else.

Caregivers: are you allowed to rest?

If you’re the one beside them, your question in the third month has a guilty sound to it: am I allowed to rest while they’re sick? The book’s answer is yes. I’d like to say why a Catholic can say yes without flinching.

Look at Jesus. When the apostles came back from their work, tired and hungry, with people coming and going so much that they had no time to eat, he said to them, “Come away into a deserted place, and rest awhile.” (Mark 6:31, WEB). He said it in the middle of a crowd that wanted more. Rest was never a betrayal of the people waiting, and self-love of this plain kind is part of caring for them.

Self-love for the one at the bedside

Practically, a caregiver who never sleeps isn’t a better caregiver for long. You may recognise the afternoon when you sit by the bed with nothing to do and it feels like failing. It isn’t. Being there is the task. And when you need a sister to take a weekend, or a friend to sit in for an afternoon, asking is part of loving the person well. If you want more on the daily work of caring, there’s a longer piece on caring for someone with cancer.

Self-love for a caregiver isn’t a spa day. Mostly it’s sleep, a meal sat down to, and a few minutes of prayer that belong to you. Keep one thing that feeds you. A walk, Mass on a weekday, a coffee with someone who doesn’t ask about the diagnosis. Self-love can be that modest, and it still counts.

A short prayer, and where to go next

Here is a prayer for the patient and for the one beside them. Say it in the car park, or at the kitchen table, or at three in the morning.

God, you made me, and I’ve been hard on what you made. Teach me to see myself the way you see me, and to be gentle with this body and this tired heart. And for the one beside me: let them rest without guilt, and hear you say that sitting here is enough. Amen.

If these questions are yours, the book Let Go into Love spends its whole third month on them, one Gospel passage a week. You can also begin with the free novena and see whether the voice suits you.

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