The Holy Father, RIP

It is amazing to think that Pope John Paul the Second has passed on. He is the only Pope I’ve known and impressed upon me more than any other single figure the grandeur, deep traditions, authority, and catholic nature of the Roman Catholic Church.

His Papacy stands out for at least three major reasons that I can think of. First, his status and history as a nonviolent, moral, and Slavic resister of 20th Century Tyranny put him in the crossroads of the great tragedies and challenges of our time. His elevation to the Papacy shook the moral and alleged historical foundations of Communism in Eastern Europe. He is credited both by Catholics and non-Catholics with invigorating moral and practical resistance to tyranny, while avoiding the fruitless and tragic exercises of physical resistance. Where the Hungarians in ’56 and the Czechs in ’68 failed, the Poles in 1980 ultimately suceeded in bringing down the entire structure of Soviet-imposed Communism. His moral resistance to Communism in the name of human dignity and human freedom resonated deep within the Western Spirit and shamed the Soviets’ whose lip-service to progress and liberation were soon revealed to be mere chimeras.

In this sense, he was the fourth-generation-warrior par excellence. He knew his times and he knew the power of shame, prayer, public image, and nonviolence to disarm great states of their most potent tools. His success and the success of his flock in these endeavors speak for themselves.

His second major legacy bears great similarity. Because John Paul II’s second major contribution as Pope and as a figure in 20th Century history was to remind mankind that unbridled freedom is not enough for happiness, for a complete existence, or for a just society. Freedom, like the state, like nature, like the laws, like material resources is an instrumental good necessary for man to pursue his real end: life as a moral being and life in conformity with the God-ordained good. While the Cold War pitted materialist capitalism against materialist socialism, John Paul II reminded men–both in his encyclical Centessimus Annus and in his preaching–that man was above all a spiritual being and that freedom loosened from self-restraint, from the contributions of civil society and charity, and from sound laws to protect the most vulnerable in society was deprived of its fundamental purpose: respect for human dignity. So, while his encyclicals more than previous sources recognized the fundamentally moral basis of free markets, they also showed how that same moral basis made demands upon individuals and society so that those institutions always served the divinely ordered ends of our individual and collective welfare as human beings.

I had the good fortune to study this encyclical in John Paul II’s native Poland, along with others from Eastern Europe who were emerging from the darkness of Communism into a bewildering set of changes, some salutary and some less so. It soon became apparent that the vulgar materialism of the West was the public face of free markets and the Western way of life. It was and remains important that the moral and philosophical foundations of free markets be taught to these societies, and that they also learn that modest legislation to prevent the worst forms of social evil–starvation due to poverty, exploitation of women–need not be disregarded out of a mechanistic application of free market principles. The ultimate guiding principle must remain respect for the human person and John Paul II, like his fin de siecle predecessor Leo XIII, succeeded in making these teachings plain, relevant, and persuasive where they may otherwise have been unpersuasive and misconstrued out of a misunderstanding of the meaning and purpose of organized society.

I say these teachings were similar to his efforts to resist Soviet Communism because he was effective here–as in the other case–when the naked opposition of the 19th Century Pontiffs were spectacularly direct and spectacularly ineffective. The Syllabus of Errors, railings against Napoleon, and opposition to all things liberal in the 19th Century only made the Church more anachronistic and less relevant at the end of the century than at the beginning. John Paul II, first and foremost the philosopher, proceeded from that great repository of wisdom: ordinary opinion. Speaking the language of modern man, but by guiding him through his errors and ultimately the Divine Source of happiness and knowledge, John Paul II successfully articulated a useful and relevant doctrine of Catholic Social thought that adequately balanced the demands of individual and society.

Finally, and most visibly to Americans, John Paul II reintegrated thinking about natural law and the moral law into our vocabulary. From issues ranging from war, the death penalty, abortion, and gay marriage, John Paul II forcefully argued for respect for God and nature as the proper foundation for just law. He also argued forcefully for how any law, even the criminal law, must not disregard the good of the individual, that his dignity and his benefit as a creature made by God were the proper foundation for legislation and the proper criterion by which to judge the political good. By focusing too much on one or another issue on which one disagrees, his opponents have failed to grasp how this reintroduction of a non-materialistic and non-utilitarian idiom stretching back to the natural law tradition of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas changed the way any of these issues can be discussed in the Western World.

John Paul II certainly meant many other things to many other people and surely accomplished much more than I can possibly convey. He above all lived a holy life that glorified and served God in all things. If he had remained in his small town of Wodawice as a humble parish priest, such a contribution to the universe would have been no less valuable.

Advertisement