Pope John Paul II in his teaching on marriage had not limited the issue only to the principle that matrimonial consent makes marriage, but he put a real challenge in front of the canonists stating that the proper understanding of the consent may not be reduced to a certain historical patterns, but must be developed on the basis of anthropological and legal sciences. The article discusses four issues. Firstly, the author engages in the issue of impoverishment of ius in corpus as an essential element of the contract of marriage. Then, she sketches the view of the Second Vatican Council on matrimonial consent as a mutual gift of one person to another. Subsequently, the author deals with the influence of personalism on the legal dimension of marriage. Finally, she presents the personalistic criteria in the Magisterium of John Paul II and its immediate legal dimension.