The Prophetic Challenge of St. John Paul II

The first time I really thought about Pope John Paul II was when I watched him being ripped to shreds.

Not literally, thankfully, although there was actual ripping involved. I was an Evangelical at the time, a year removed from Bible college and living in Portland, Oregon. One evening, in October 1992, my housemates and I tuned into “Saturday Night Live”, which was notable since I rarely watched television and I had little interest in watching Irish singer Sinead O'Connor perform. But I did watch, and therefore saw her take a photo of John Paul II and angrily rip into pieces while snarling, “Fight the real enemy!” O'Connor's act caused a furor and forever altered her then-promising career.

I had been raised in a Fundamentalist home and had spent my youth mouthing the usual anti-Catholic nonsense about Catholics worshiping Mary, worshiping a piece of bread, and worshiping the Pope. In Bible college, my views began to change, in part due to reading the poetry and fiction of Catholics (Gerard Manley Hopkins, Flannery O'Connor, no relation to Sinead) and Anglo-Catholics (C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, Charles Williams). A host of other topics and questions followed, and around the same time I watched Sinead O'Connor lash out at the pope, I was also reading books on Church history and discovering the writings of the early Church Fathers.

I then began to read some of the writings of John Paul II—and I was instantly hooked. Fight the real enemy? Turns out the enemy, for me, had been a truckload of stereotypes and misrepresentations about the Catholic Church. Among the first of John Paul II's writings I took up was Redemptoris hominis, the first of his fourteen encyclicals. The opening sentence was something that I would not have thought, growing up, a Catholic would believe or state: “The Redeemer of man, Jesus Christ, is the centre of the universe and of history.” That encyclical presented many of the key themes of his pontificate: the centrality of Christ, the Eucharist as source and summit of the Faith, a rich and challenging anthropology, the nature and mission of the Church, the importance of Christian unity and true ecumenism, and the ultimate goal of salvation: communion with the Triune God.

What I found in the thought and witness of John Paul II was a cohesive and grand vision of the meaning of creation, life, and love. It was, of course, the Catholic vision, for the greatness of John Paul II was not found in a radical, new system of philosophy and theology, but in his ability to present the radical, transforming truths of Catholicism in a way that was profoundly biblical and patristic, traditional and modern, philosophical and theological, spiritual and personal. After entering the Church in 1997, I was able to study John Paul II's work in a more systematic, rigorous way in pursuing a graduate degree in theology, reading all of his encyclicals, his “theology of the body,” and various apostolic letters, exhortations, and addresses.

Now, ten years after his death, it is difficult to select a specific point within John Paul II's rich teaching that stands out above the rest, if only because it is such a remarkably rich and cogent whole, a mosaic that rewards repeated study and contemplation. That said, there are two aspects I want to note here, on the tenth anniversary of his passing from this life to the next. The first is his teachings on deification, or (in Eastern terms) theosis. In my 2002 essay, “The Dignity of the Human Person: Pope John Paul II's Teaching on Divinization in the Trinitarian Encyclicals” (originally an academic paper, hence the lengthy title), I wrote:

In Redemptor Hominis, John Paul II refers to Christ as the "one who penetrated in a unique, unrepeatable way into the mystery of man and entered his ‘heart’" (RH 8.2). When the mystery of man is met by the mystery of the Incarnation, they become unified: "For, by his Incarnation, he, the Son of God, in a certain way united himself with each man." The Incarnation is the bridge spanning the gap between man and God. It is the ultimate expression – the final Word – of God’s merciful love.

In Dominum et Vivificantem the Holy Father writes of "God’s salvific self-communication" and "giving" (see DeV 11, 12, 13,14). He states this self-communication gives mankind "the capacity of having a personal relationship with God, as ‘I’ and ‘you,’ and therefore the capacity of having a covenant, which will take place in God’s salvific communication with man..." (DeV 34, see all of 34). This culminates in the Word, whose Incarnate entrance into history "constitutes the climax of this giving, this divine self-communication" (DeV 50.1).

The Incarnation and man’s divinization should be seen as part of a familial reality. Just as the Father sent his only begotten Son (Jn 3:16, Heb 1:5), the Son in turn sends forth adopted sons (Gal 4:4-7). Just as the Son came to do the will of the Father (Lk 22:42, Jn 4:34), adopted sons go forth to do the will of the Son (Jn 15:14-17). This spiritual procreation occurs by the power of the Holy Spirit, the giver of life (2 Cor 3:6, Gal 6:8). John Paul II writes:

For as Saint Paul teaches, "all who are led by the Spirit of God" are "children of God." The filiation of divine adoption is born in man on the basis of the mystery of the Incarnation, therefore through Christ the eternal Son. But the birth, or rebirth, happens when God the Father "sends the Spirit of his Son into our hearts." Then we receive a spirit of adopted sons by which we cry ‘Abba, Father!’" Hence the divine filiation planted in the human soul through sanctifying grace is the work of the Holy Spirit. "It is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ." Sanctifying grace is the principle and source of man’s new life: divine, supernatural life. (DeV 52.2).

By entering into human history and uniting Himself with mankind, God not only restored communion between the divine and the natural, He modeled divine sonship for us. By becoming united to humanity, he demonstrated that man can become one with God. Man can become by grace what the Son is by nature. Put another way, the Son of God became a Son of Man so that men might become sons of God (see CCC 460).

While this incredible truth had not been ignored by John Paul II's immediate predecessors (and it is actually quite prominent in the documents of Vatican II, especially Lumen gentium), he brought it forth in a truly beautiful way, perhaps in part because of his intimate knowledge of Eastern Christian theology; it is a subject within his writings that deserves far more attention than it has been given.

The second is the topic of mercy, which has been much discussed and mentioned in recent years. At risk of over-simplifying, John Paul II situated mercy not only in relationship with justice, but within the meaning of man and within the perfect example of the God-man, Jesus Christ. There are many possible texts to point to, but his 1993 encyclical Veritatis splendor, which focused on the Church's moral doctrine, is a key text. In that work, John Paul II noted that man “always has before him the spiritual horizon of hope, thanks to the help of divine grace and with the cooperation of human freedom.” We can only become fully human through the grace of God—that is, being filled by God's own life—and then cooperating, by our free will, with that supernatural power:

It is in the saving Cross of Jesus, in the gift of the Holy Spirit, in the Sacraments which flow forth from the pierced side of the Redeemer (cf. Jn 19:34), that believers find the grace and the strength always to keep God's holy law, even amid the gravest of hardships. As Saint Andrew of Crete observes, the law itself "was enlivened by grace and made to serve it in a harmonious and fruitful combination. Each element preserved its characteristics without change or confusion. In a divine manner, he turned what could be burdensome and tyrannical into what is easy to bear and a source of freedom".

John Paul II understood, having stared into the face of raw evil many times, that we are tempted to believe that the call to holiness is a burden imposed by a heavy-handed, despotic deity. We are inclined to feel that we must follow our passions in order to be “fulfilled” and to be “authentic,” to use the language of our therapeutically-oriented culture.

But those thoughts and feelings are false. For it is “only in the mystery of Christ's Redemption do we discover the 'concrete possibilities of man.' … Christ has redeemed us! This means that he has given us the possibility of realizing the entire truth of our being; he has set our freedom free from the domination of concupiscence. And if redeemed man still sins, this is not due to an imperfection of Christ's redemptive act, but to man's will not to avail himself of the grace which flows from that act.” And then this essential paragraph:

In this context, appropriate allowance is made both for God's mercy towards the sinner who converts and for the understanding of human weakness. Such understanding never means compromising and falsifying the standard of good and evil in order to adapt it to particular circumstances. It is quite human for the sinner to acknowledge his weakness and to ask mercy for his failings; what is unacceptable is the attitude of one who makes his own weakness the criterion of the truth about the good, so that he can feel self-justified, without even the need to have recourse to God and his mercy. An attitude of this sort corrupts the morality of society as a whole, since it encourages doubt about the objectivity of the moral law in general and a rejection of the absoluteness of moral prohibitions regarding specific human acts, and it ends up by confusing all judgments about values. (pars. 103-104)

There is much more. But it is clear to me that Saint Pope John Paul II was prophetic, and his understanding of the human condition and his insights into the moral challenges of our time are not out of date or only for certain Catholics. They are for the whole Church and the whole world. “Through the moral life,” John Paul II stated, “faith becomes 'confession', not only before God but also before men: it becomes witness.”

The great pontiff from Poland was one such witness, and he challenges us today to be the same.

Carl Olson: The first time I really thought about Pope John Paul II was when I watched him being ripped to shreds. Not literally, thankfully, although there was actual ripping involved. I was an Evangelical at the time, a year removed from Bible college and living in Portland, Oregon. One evening, in October 1992, my housemates and I tuned into “Saturday Night Live”, which was notable since I rarely watched television and I had little interest in watching Irish singer Sinead O'Connor perform. But I did watch, and therefore saw her take a photo of John Paul II and angrily rip into pieces while snarling, “Fight the real enemy!” O'Connor's act caused a furor and forever altered her then-promising career. I had been raised in a Fundamentalist home and had spent my youth mouthing the usual anti-Catholic nonsense about Catholics worshiping Mary, worshiping a piece of bread, and worshiping the Pope.

So begins the typical Protestant-bashing Catholic drivel on FR.

What shall I say of all the initiatives that have sprung from the new ecumenical orientation? The unforgettable Pope John XXIII set out the problem of Christian unity with evangelical clarity as a simple consequence of the will of Jesus Christ himself, our Master, the will that Jesus stated on several occasions but to which he gave expression in a special way in his prayer in the Upper Room the night before he died: "I pray... Father... that they may all be one"18. The Second Vatican Council responded concisely to this requirement with its Decree on ecumenism. Pope Paul VI, availing himself of the activities of the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, began the first difficult steps on the road to the attainment of that unity. - JPII, Redemptor Hominis, 1979

vs.

And here it seems opportune to expound and to refute a certain false opinion, on which this whole question, as well as that complex movement by which non-Catholics seek to bring about the union of the Christian churches depends. For authors who favor this view are accustomed, times almost without number, to bring forward these words of Christ: "That they all may be one.... And there shall be one fold and one shepherd,"[14] with this signification however: that Christ Jesus merely expressed a desire and prayer, which still lacks its fulfillment. - Pius XI, Mortalium Animos, On Religious Unity, 1928

John Paul II understood, having stared into the face of raw evil many times, that we are tempted to believe that the call to holiness

Many RCs saw JP2 as part of the problem. Sugenis being one. From his complaints, JP2:

1. Invited pagans to pray to their false gods.

2. Looked the other way while his clerics raped his children, and ordained faggots to say his Masses

3. Shuffled pedophiles and homosexuals from parish to parish, even giving them safe haven at the Vatican.

4. Subjected those Catholic who dare protest to droning quotes from Vatican I and Lumen Gentium about “submission”

5. Watched scantily clad women dance while Mass was being said.

6. Suggested that hell might not exist.

7. Suggested that the Jews still have their Old Covenant

8. Kissed the Koran

9. Made it appear as if God has given man universal salvation by using ambiguous language in official writings

10. Accepted the tenets of evolution.

11. Wrote a catechism that contained theological errors and ambiguities.

12. Changed the canonization laws: marriage laws, capital punishment laws, laws about women’s roles.

13. Went against the tradition by putting women in leadership positions and dispensing with head coverings.

14. Failed to excommunicate heretical bishops and priests who were spouting heresies.

15. Protected Bishop Marcinkus and his entourage of financial hoodlums in the Vatican.

16. Ignored the pleas of a bishop who was merely trying to preserve the tradition (Archbishop Levebre)

17. Exonerated Luther

18. Allowed the Luther‐Catholic Joint Declaration, signed by a high‐ranking Cardinal, to explicitly state that “man is justified by faith alone.”

19. Disobeyed the Fatima request to consecrate Russia.

(http://www.catholicintl.com/articles/Response%20to%20John%20Dejak%20of%20The%20Wanderer.pdf; http://beggarsallreformation.blogspot.com/2011/04/sungenis-alone.html; cf. http://socrates58.blogspot.com/2011/04/robert-sungenis-embraces-radtradism-and.html)

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