Pope John Paul II

In his first encyclical Pope John Paul II wrote: “Man cannot live without love […] his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own.” (“The Redeemer of Man” §10) Although he had seen hatred and cruelty up close, experienced it personally, and witnessed its destructive effects, John Paul II preached that only love is the right response to the inviolable dignity of every human being.

Born Karol Wojtyła in Wadowice, Poland, in 1920, the future pope was a good athlete, an excellent student, and a true friend to a circle that included both Catholic and Jewish boys. He had hardly begun his studies at 18 in the Jagiellonian University of Krakow when the Nazi’s invaded Poland, closed the university, and arrested the faculty. After his father died, young Wojtyła worked in a quarry while studying secretly for the Catholic priesthood. Life was dangerous for the young Pole. He was once almost arrested in a random Nazi sweep of his neighborhood. Another time, while walking home after work, he was run down by a truck and left for dead. Most of his Jewish friends and neighbors were rounded up and killed in nearby Oswiecim (Auschwitz). Shortly afterwards Cardinal Sapieha secretly moved young Karol into his own residence to study for the priesthood in relative safety. After the defeat of the Germans, Karol Wojtyła was ordained a priest.

As Fr. Wojtyła continued his doctoral studies in theology and philosophy, the Soviets established their own tyranny over the Polish nation. (Poles complain that they lost the same war twice—first to the Germans and then to the Russians.) As a priest and professor at the Catholic University of Lublin, Fr. Wojtyła developed close relationships with the young, often taking youth groups hiking in the mountains and helping couples prepare for marriage. As a philosopher he found himself in an ongoing dialogue with his Marxist colleagues. In these debates, as well as in his teaching, he stressed the central importance of the dignity of every human person, every man and woman. In 1958 Pope Pius XII consecrated him a bishop, and in 1964 Pope Paul VI named him Archbishop of Krakow. Bishop Wojtyła attended every session of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), and he was one of the principal thinkers behind the ground-breaking Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, which challenged Christians to work with others to build a civilization of love. On October 16, 1978, Cardinal Wojtyła was elected the first non-Italian pope since Adrian VI in 1523.

This man, who could have made his mark in the secular world as a scholar or on the stage, directly witnessed and experienced the worst of the Twentieth Century—the vicious hatred of Nazi racism and the brutal dehumanization of Soviet Communism. Within three years of his election to the papacy, he was gunned down in St. Peter’s Square by a Turkish extremist, Mahmet Ali Agca.

All this notwithstanding, John Paul II believed in our human dignity, that we humans are capable of love, because humans are created in the image and likeness of God. he frequently quoted this text from the Gaudium et Spes: “This likeness [to God] reveals that man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.” (§24) This idea—that we fulfill ourselves only by giving of ourselves in love—is the key to this pope’s teaching and activity.

In place of a culture of death, John Paul II has called for a civilization of love, a culture of life. He called married couples to accept children willingly as the full expression of their mutual gift of love. He called the healthy to care for the weak and the sick, protecting human life from conception to natural death. He called leaders of nations to dialogue about their differences instead of resorting to the violence of war. He challenged wealthy nations to turn from empty consumerism and self-indulgence and to help those of the poor south. He encouraged peoples of every part of the world—from his native Europe to Asia to Africa to the Americas—to develop the riches of their cultures, recognizing in their gifts a gift for us all. He himself loved the poor and the sick, making it a special point on his pilgrimages to meet with them and to tell them what a gift they are.

Pope John Paul II taught insistently that our dignity is rooted in our ability to love to give freely and generously of ourselves. Despite all the evil that he has seen—and that our world has seen—he believes it is still possible for us to experience this love, because God gave it to us first in Jesus Christ.

Adrian J. Reimers

For further reading, you might look at my “John Paul II on the Natural Moral Order”, which appeared in the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, Vol 4, No 2 or “Human Suffering and John Paul II’s Theology of the Body” from Nova et Vetera, Volume 2, No. 2.