Attending the Person: Twenty Years after John Paul II

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the death of Pope John Paul II. Regardless of your beliefs—religious or not, Catholic or non-Catholic—his passing is worth commemorating. He was a man in full and a figure of global-historical significance. It is for good reason he has come to be popularly known as Saint John Paul the Great.

His personal story is compelling. He experienced significant loss in his family, attended an underground seminary during the Nazi occupation of Poland, and became an accomplished athlete, playwright, actor, poet, and philosopher who resisted the Evil Empire and served as pontiff for more than twenty-six years—during which time he renewed Catholic moral theology and played no small part in the downfall of the Soviet Union. His was an astounding life. To take but one example, during his first papal trip to Poland in 1979 it is estimated that nearly one-third of Poles saw him in person. Furthermore, within a year of his famous Warsaw speech in which he called on the Holy Spirit to descend and “renew the face of the earth,” Solidarity launched the Gdansk strike, sparking the end of communist rule in Poland and eventually the end of the Soviet Union itself. 

To my mind, however, his legacy is not principally defined by grand public and political events, but by a single word—“person.” 

While a student at the Angelicum he wrote his first thesis under the famous “Sacred Monster of Thomism,” the Dominican theologian Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, who was not supportive of the future pope’s habilitation thesis on the personalism of Max Scheler. But it is personalism—albeit a version far more advanced than Scheler provided—that explains John Paul II’s interventions at the Second Vatican Council as well as his thought and writings as a scholar and pope.

In spite of the long battles about its meaning and implementation, we are actually still in the early days of Vatican II. Some suggest the Council was a major cause of the dissent, confusion, and collapse of vocations and Mass attendance in the decades that followed it; others think it was mistaken about many substantive things, perhaps even erroneous or heretical. Certainly some of its documents read as overly sanguine about the conditions of the world, and too optimistic about the Church’s accommodation of the world. But the idea that the Church was healthy and robust prior to the Council is unpersuasive; more likely it had the appearance of health—numbers—but had been somewhat hollowed out and lacking in heft. If it had been exceptionally healthy, people wouldn’t have so quickly dissented and departed. The Council occasioned a crisis, perhaps, but it did not cause it. And fundamentally, the Council was necessary for the times and the challenges of those times.

The Council recognized a truth, namely, that the history of modernity—Reformation, Enlightenment, liberalism, ideologies, the wars (from the Wars of Religion to the global wars of the early twenty-first century)—had diminished the Church’s institutional power, not only as a political actor in global affairs but even as teacher and mother of her own children. Modernity, for better or worse (I tend to think for better, but some disagree), had recognized and insisted on the dignity of the individual—the so-called “turn to the subject.” The individual understood himself as possessing responsibility and agency, not only with respect to politics but also in knowledge, choice, and religion.

As Servais Pinckaers has documented, for centuries the Church’s moral theology and practice had overemphasized externals and behaviors while overlooking the personal nature of action. Law and will had been explained as if in conflict, where the individual’s will confronted an external law—whether political or divine—limiting and confining the person and his choices. Law and freedom were in tension, with the law imposed and at war with the will. The Church formed and guided her members in a similar fashion, Pinckaers argues, with emphasis on external behavior and external penances: “You did this, well then you must do that in payment.” But this is not adequate to the reality of the individual person or the person’s actions, let alone how persons develop morally or repent.

As John Paul insisted, the very nature of ethics and moral theology is rooted in the following: I ought to do (or not do) x, and the doing (or not) of x does not only constitute good or bad states of affairs in the world, but it also makes me good or evil, righteous or unrighteous. As such, I bear enormous responsibility—for my actions constitute who I shall be, whether just or unjust. The perspective swivels here, away from a distant, detached observation of behaviors and goods and bads in the world “out there”—a third-personal perspective—and to the reasons, intentions, and acts of the person—the first-personal perspective. Now, not only is this a recovery of genuine ethics, which concerns the truth of what ought to be rather than what is, but it properly places the agent—the person—at the heart of the drama of his own existence. As John Paul II noted in his theology of the body, it is true that from a metaphysical or cosmological point of view we are human beings, but from the ethical and phenomenological perspective—the one that matters to us as agents—we are “in search of our essence.” Persons are not static natures or essences (although they have those), but are rather more—agents forming their character.

Persons act and in so doing constitute their characters, thus having responsibility for themselves. From this much follows in the thought of John Paul II. The natural law is not external or imposed upon us from without, nor does it confine our freedom; instead, the law, just as Thomas Aquinas taught, is an internal law—the law of reason—and it leads us to fulfill our freedom in excellence and flourishing. Moreover, since the person is responsible, and his or her reasons for acting define the object of the moral act, conscience attains profound moral significance. Conscience can err, of course, but to act against conscience is an act of dis-integration, and to violate the conscience of another is gravely wrong. That is, religious freedom, which is not religious indifferentism, is a requirement of justice and in keeping with the dignity of the person. 

Even more follows. Ordinary human conjugal love as a union of persons is dignified and embraced as a vocation, not grudgingly accepted as mere weakness of the flesh. And since it is a union of persons, it is a union of equals dedicated to each other in mutuality and self-gift—rather than dominion or power. The fruit of that self-donation—the child—has value and an inviolable dignity, with that dignity inviolable whatever the child’s condition of development, impediment, or decline, from conception to natural death. 

In encyclical after encyclical he reminds us of the meaning of personhood. It is in being a person that value inheres, rather than in our having and doing. Therefore, we ought to value ourselves, to cherish others, to respect the freedom of all, and to proclaim a gospel of life against a culture of death. 

Since personhood infuses all of our actions, John Paul reminds us, ordinary, honest labor and work is dignified—it is a way to provide for ourselves, contribute to the common good, and develop our own person, while requiring just conditions to protect the dignity of all. 

In other words, for John Paul II, the category of “person” relates to everything that matters to the human being. His pontificate, to my mind, is best understood as the pontificate of the person. It also relates to his proclamation of the Gospel. After all, God is a communion of persons, and the “Redeemer of Man, Jesus Christ”—the “centre of the universe and of history”—is also a person, fully divine and fully human. Salvation comes by an encounter with the person and work of Christ, resulting in our personal communion with his divine person and the divine communion of persons. Recalling the humanity of Jesus, we are reminded also of the freedom and dignity of the secular: the Church does not need power over the world and over persons, since the world has its own integrity and competence. 

Those who look with nostalgia on the days before Vatican II overlook these facts. There is a universal call to holiness because the laity are persons—and the secular domain is governed by the competence of the laity, even of those who do not believe, because they too are created in the image and likeness of God and bear full responsibility and competence over temporal matters.

It is unlikely that the Church will ever regain her temporal power. Some consider that a loss, but I do not. Like them, I have sorrow for how few believe in God, for how few adhere to the sound moral precepts articulated by the Church (which are knowable through unaided human reason), for the sufferings that ensue, and for how few Catholics accept the teachings of their own Church. I also take this to be a great opportunity—although I’m not naïve about the difficulty—for evangelizing and proclaiming yet again. But this time it will not be done by decisions of emperors, princes, or institutions; it will be done—as it was in the beginning—by individuals acting in friendship and love, tenderness and compassion, and boldness and daring, as they relate person to person, heart to heart. 

Put another way, Vatican II prepared us for cultural and social reality as it now is, and John Paul II explained and provided the most essential truth needed for life and evangelization under our cultural conditions—for reality as it is, rather than nostalgia for a world that no longer exists. We might not have institutional power, but institutional power is not what is necessary—or even desirable—for the moment. Rather, it is the person that is necessary.

For knowing and teaching us this, he became John Paul the Great. May he intercede for us to God in heaven. 

“Pope John Paul II during a visit to the Baltimore Basilica in 1995.” Image courtesy of Carol M. Highsmith and licensed via Adobe Stock.