For John Paul II, the problem began in the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, when science and reason were divorced from faith and morality.

When Pope John Paul II died last month, the mainstream media launched a barrage of coverage, some of it respectful, some of it inane, and some of it hateful. The media did not understand the Pope during his lifetime and his death has hardly improved their comprehension. Their summary of his life has focused largely on the political side of Pope John Paul II, which has obscured his most important and lasting contributions — his philosophical and moral leadership.

To be sure, the Pope’s fight against communism and other forms of tyranny, his dramatic efforts at reconciliation with Judaism and other religions, his world travels, and the fact that he was one of the major architects of the collapse of communism around the world are all immensely important. Equally crucial, however, was his effort to reform the Catholic Church. An effort that earned him the hatred of the secular Left and the scorn of secularized Catholics, especially in the U.S. As one of the architects of Vatican II, he recognized that wholesale secularization and a compromise with modernity based on materialism would, in effect, destroy the Church. He understood that unless Catholicism remained true to its best traditions and faithful to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, it would die.

Yet, John Paul II’s actions and policies were not created in a vacuum. They flowed from a larger Judeo-Christian vision of philosophy and faith that, by the start of his pontificate, had been largely abandoned by many Western elites. Even before he became Pope he had viewed Western Civilization, and by extension world civilization, as being in deep crisis. When he became Pope, his mission, then, was to rescue Western Civilization.

Even for the head of the world’s largest Christian church, such a goal might be seen as quixotic, mad, or hubristic. After all, with the scarring of our globe from more than a century of war and genocide spawned by the utopian ideologies of both left and right, what was left to save? Was it even worth saving? And how could one person even contemplate such a thing?

John Paul II’s response was based on several key precepts (here greatly simplified):

• Humans possess innate dignity and rights that cannot be taken away by states, courts, or ideologies;

• True freedom is the birthright of all peoples and responsibility “is the summit and necessary complement of liberty;”

• Without Truth, Freedom is impossible;

• Democracy can guarantee freedom and capitalism can guarantee prosperity only when they exist in a culture guided by clear and strong moral beliefs;

• Culture is the driving force of history and the driving force of culture is religious faith.

In sum, cultures that ignore faith and morals can secure neither freedom nor truth and will sooner or later begin to violate the dignity of their citizens. Totalitarian states were the most obvious example of this, but democracies have also fallen prey to the temptations of unrestrained secular ideologies, especially nihilism.

The Pope’s refusal to “go along” with the fads of secular, post-modern society was viewed with rage and amazement. It was, many believed, impossible to stop the historical inevitability of trends embodied by so-called “sexual liberation” and the modern cult of victimhood. This corrosive solipsism has imposed radical feminism, gay rights, abortion, and euthanasia on all western cultures and sought to export them all over the world. (Marxism had made a similar claim to historical inevitability, which the Pope had seen as hollow long before he ascended to the Throne of Peter.) While the secular world saw the Pope as “reactionary” and “standing in the way of progress” his writings and actions have sown seeds of reason, faith, and hope that are now germinating throughout the world. By his stress on the true revaluing of the human person, the Pope has completely undermined the entire ideological framework of contemporary liberalism as preached among secular intellectual and media elites.

Few on America’s college campuses yet understand this. Few have bothered to read the Pope’s writings, even on supposedly Catholic campuses, yet the current intellectual elite instinctively understand that the ideas of John Paul II mean trouble, even if they do not know why. While frantic efforts are being made to keep radical liberal ideologies afloat, such as Marxism on which many of the Left’s assumptions are based, they are sinking.

History Matters

To be sure, the Pope’s own background informed his vision. He possessed the well known stubbornness of the Polish character manifest in the simple refusal to accept the apparently inevitable or the dictates of those with greater power. Being on the edge of Western Civilization, the Poles always saw themselves as the bulwark of that civilization, a fact deeply ingrained in the young Karol Wojtyla. His father served in the Polish army that repelled Lenin’s 1920 invasion of central Europe which was designed to bring communist revolution to Europe at the point of the bayonet. As a youth he had been raised on tales of King Jan Sobieski whose lancers crushed the last major Muslim invasion of Europe. Being on periphery of Western, Christian culture, Poles knew that it could never be taken for granted. The Poles were among the first to suffer and witness the horrors that resulted from the deformation of that civilization — the Nazi invasion, the Holocaust, and Stalinism.

The intellectual elites who viewed the horrors of the twentieth century from the relative safety of Western Europe and North America had no answer but instead retreated further into materialism and relativism. More than a few gave themselves over to extremist ideologies and kept the often tragic effects of those ideologies at arm’s length through rationalization and propaganda. Assertions of objective Truth, especially religious or moral truth, were viewed as reactionary and archaic. Yet, for those living under the Stalinist jackboot and in the very shadow of Auschwitz, the notion that good and evil were relative or outmoded concepts was absurd. It was from this basis that a priest from a “far off country,” of which many in Europe and America still know virtually nothing, set out to save a civilization even for the sake of those who no longer believed it had any value whatsoever.

For John Paul II, the problem began in the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution when science and reason were divorced from faith and morality. Western culture was based on Judeo-Christian beliefs, beliefs which had inspired its greatest art, music, and literature and acted as a brake — albeit imperfectly — on the worst impulses of Europeans and Americans. While the dogma of the Enlightenment places faith and reason as opposites, for John Paul II faith and reason cannot exist apart from each other. To separate them was artificial, because they both find their source in God, and dangerous for it leads to materialism, the belief that there is nothing beyond the here and now, and finally to the conclusion that humans can be reduced to simply a collection of cells.

Ideas Matter

It was this tragic philosophical juncture that lay at the root of the horrors that so marred the twentieth century, for it led to the wholesale devaluation of human life. If humans are not created in the image and likeness of God, and if morality is simply a construct developed by sophisticated apes, then all sorts of crimes against the human person are permissible — from abortion, euthanasia, and medical experimentation to unjust war, genocide, and on and on. The Pope wrote:

Certain scientists, lacking any ethical point of reference, are in danger of putting at the centre of their concerns something other than the human person and the entirety of the person’s life. Further still, some of these, sensing the opportunities of technological progress, seem to succumb not only to a market-based logic, but also to the temptation of a quasi-divine power over nature and even over the human being. As a result of the crisis of rationalism, what has appeared finally is nihilism. As a philosophy of nothingness, it has a certain attraction for people of our time. Its adherents claim that the search is an end in itself, without any hope or possibility of ever attaining the goal of truth. . . . Nihilism is at the root of the widespread mentality which claims that a definitive commitment should no longer be made, because everything is fleeting and provisional.

A yet more significant problem was the way in which modern intellectuals are willing to cede moral responsibility. Morality is to be a private matter, to be determined in the privacy of one’s own head, and it can be changed according to fashion and whim. One person’s morality can not be imposed on another. Each person makes choices and those choices are, for the most part, equally valid. This is a retreat in the face of the century’s horrors, a refusal to face and name the evils that have been unleashed in the world. These evils have resulted from ideologies that were once believed to be the height of enlightened, progressive, scientific, and rational thought.

Having lived through totalitarianism, John Paul II realized that when truth and morality are relativized they no longer transcend the individual and both are up for grabs. They will invariably become the possession of those who have the most power and in the twentieth century, that meant the State. A changeable morality has benefited and was propagated by the powerful that controlled means of communication and coercion and has worked against the weak and the powerless. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union both set themselves up as the ultimate arbiters of truth. The only hope of resisting totalitarianism was a truth and morality that transcended the state, beyond a single individual. If there is no “ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity,” he wrote, “then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power.”

For John Paul II, when intellectuals and elites abandoned the notion of truth, they abdicated their most basic responsibilities. Much of Western Culture had been predicated on the notion that truth exists and that humans have the ability and responsibility to search for and discern it. As the poet Zbigniew Herbert put it, “the fundamental obligation of intellectuals is to tell the truth. Nothing else justifies society’s largesse toward them.”

The Papal counterattack was frequently directed toward intellectuals, writers, artists, and scientists: “Man owes truth to the world,” he told one university audience. “Serve truth! If you serve truth — you serve freedom.” John Paul II put his Church clearly against the relativization that had crept into modern culture and that has damaged many religious denominations, including some corners of American Catholicism.

It was this commitment to the truth that made his peaceful confrontation with communism effective. Anti-communism by itself was not enough. John Paul II called the dissidents of central and eastern Europe to speak the truth and to live as if free. “Be not afraid” to affirm truth even in the face of repression. It was this call to courage that has inspired millions across the world to defy dictatorships, beginning in his native Poland through the Philippines to Ukraine and Lebanon, each democratic movement drew strength from its predecessors, creating a cascade effect of democratization that upset all calculations of realpolitik.

Simply overthrowing dictatorships, however, was not the same as securing freedom. “A democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism,” he noted. Freedom is more than license to do as one will, contrary to the practices of contemporary liberalism. Rather, democracy must order freedom to Truth in order to excel. The concept of freedom as license, without boundaries, is empty and leads to nihilism. To counter the slide towards nihilism, the Pope pointed directly to the ideals of America’s founding fathers:

From the beginning of America, freedom was directed to forming a well-ordered society and to promoting its peaceful life. Freedom was channeled to the fullness of human life, to the preservation of human dignity, and to the safeguarding of all human rights. . . . This is the freedom that America is called to live and guard and to transmit. She is called to exercise it in such a way that it will also benefit the cause of freedom in other nations and among other peoples. The only true freedom that can truly satisfy is … the freedom to live the truth of what we are and who we are before God.

God Matters

Beginning after World War I, intellectuals have increasingly lost their faith in the future and retreated into the opiate of Marxism or, more recently, the increasingly bizarre post-modernist mutations of it, where things have lost all meaning and facts are simply constructs open to whatever interpretation those in power choose to give them. These ideologies have proven a dead end, a mental cul-de-sac with no way out. In proclaiming liberation from tradition and the “structures” of the past, we have, unseeingly, enslaved people to far greater evils.

It is this hopelessness that John Paul II has smashed. The Pope called on the world to have faith in God and to face the future with courage and hope. Citizens and especially intellectuals cannot simply abandon their responsibilities to truth and freedom without inviting a repetition of the horrors of the last century. Without God, there is in the end, only nihilism. (Even atheists need God, if only for something in which to stand in opposition.)

New ideas take time to germinate and secular liberalism will remain with us for some time. But it is an ideology with no future. The rantings of Ward Churchill, the charades of Noam Chomsky, and the chilling amorality of Peter Singer demonstrate that this is a set of ideas that has lost any semblance of coherence and is becoming increasingly and obviously destructive. To be sure, almost no college philosophy or ethics course requires reading John Paul II yet, but he is being read by study groups of young people and by a growing number of intellectuals. The vast wealth of his work is being vigorously discussed and unpacked around the world and not merely among Catholics or Christians. John Paul II’s Love and Responsibility – a remedy to the disasters of the so-called “sexual revolution” — has been described by author George Weigel as a “timebomb” waiting to go off in the twenty-first century.

Although in the wake of his death, many have proclaimed John Paul II great for his actions over the past 26 years, his greatest triumphs have yet to be seen, for in the future his pontificate will be viewed as the moment when Western Civilization began to reclaim its true intellectual and cultural heritage.


John Radzilowski is the author of eleven books and is senior fellow at the Piast Institute.
jradzilow@aol.com
 http://www.piastinstitute.org/
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