October 16, 2023 marks the 45th anniversary of the election of Karol Wojtyła as Pope (now Saint) John Paul II. And, like 45 years ago, the anniversary falls on a Monday.
One could reminisce about the great achievements of the 26-year pontificate of the Polish Pope. I am going to follow the model of Monika Jabłońska’s Pope for All Seasons (Angelico Press, 2023) and reflect on what John Paul II meant to me.
I recall the afternoon of Wojtyła’s election. I was a college sophomore at St. Mary’s College, the now-defunct undergraduate college of the Orchard Lake Schools in Michigan. We were going to have a midterm in American History at 2 pm and some of us were studying for it when one of the priests ran through the building shouting “They elected a Polish pope!”
From the perspective of 45 years, people today might think that natural in a Church that considers itself universal. It may seem that way, after a quarter century of the “Polish Pope” followed by a German and an Argentine.
In 1978, after almost four-and-a-half centuries of Italian popes, it was something wholly new. I guess many people thought someday that trend would end, but not necessarily in 1978—and almost certainly not with a Pope coming from behind the Iron Curtain, from a country imprisoned in the Russian gulag of nations.
We also found that Orchard Lake was discovered! We had a Mass of Thanksgiving at 5 pm, and the media descended on Orchard Lake. Then-Archbishop of Detroit, John Cardinal Dearden, whom I never saw as a freshman, suddenly showed up to announce how much he loved Polish people!
Fast forward three years. I had just entered graduate school at Fordham University in the Bronx, New York. In my first semester, I was enrolled in a “Seminar on Christian Sexuality” taught by Fr. Robert Gleason, S.J. I would have to prepare a seminar paper and deliver a synopsis of it to class.
Those were the days of revisionist theology, when Catholic moral theologians in the United States (including my former professor at Orchard Lake, Fr. Anthony Kosnik of Human Sexuality infamy) were churning out books and articles about how wrong the Church was in this area. (Plus ça change—except today it’s dressed up as “pastorally” dissembling). I had heard that John Paul was a “personalist” yet he defended Humanae vitae: how did he do that?
Apart from that curiosity, it happened by chance (and, as I’ve learned from John Paul, there are no “chances” in God’s Providence) that Fordham abutted the Little Italy neighborhood, where I did my shopping and sometimes went to Mass. Next to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the Daughters of St. Paul ran a bookstore with lots of religious books, most of them priced at levels I could afford. Wandering through there one day, I found a little book, Original Unity of Man and Woman, a compendium of the first year of John Paul’s “theology of the body” Wednesday general audiences.
Long story short, those first audiences became my seminar paper. They exposed me to John Paul’s thinking, which intrigued me for three reasons.
First, unlike Western revisionists who babbled about “personalism” but rejected the integral person, John Paul was affirming the Church’s teaching.
Second, he was a serious thinker: it wasn’t just “obey because the Church said so” but he offered truly deep grounds for that teaching that I wasn’t hearing among those rejecting it. (After Anthony Kosnik, I was convinced a Catholic moral theologian of Polish-American descent could do better).
Third, and maybe most importantly, as hard as it was sometimes to figure out John Paul’s reasoning (there’s an apocryphal story that a priest who once absolved a great sinner assigned him a penance of reading one chapter of Wojtyła’s horribly mistranslated Acting Person) once I did figure him out, I found he was saying in very sophisticated language the basic insights I learned from my mother. Perhaps mom did not go into depth, but the idea that a person is to be loved, not used, was something I heard at her knee first and, I figured, if the Pope and my mother were in agreement with everything the Church taught up until now, it had to be right.
I discovered John Paul had been dealing with these questions for decades, and so began digging into his earlier writings, starting with Love and Responsibility and The Jeweler’s Shop. At a certain point, the translations ran out: the initial excitement of a “pope who writes books” was replaced with “he doesn’t write coffee table picture books.” As a Polish-American kid still needing to learn humility, I figured I had a jump on wading into his writing in the original. In retrospect, I can say two things: thanks to John Paul, I really learned to read academic Polish (a far cry from New Jersey kitchen Polish) and eventually began a friendship with the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin (KUL), where Wojtyła taught, one that’s gone on for 37 years and counting.
That first semester led to one of the first dissertations written in the United States on John Paul and specifically his pre-papal sexual ethics. I’ve concentrated in that area since. I will admit that I diverge from many other writers who focus on digging through what he wrote: my interest has been how that thought remains relevant and can solve moral problems today. I am not so much interested in looking at Karol Wojtyła as a museum artifact, but as a living thinker with something to say to us today.
Take, for example, sexual ethics. John Paul was elected Pope the year the first test tube baby was born. His writings on sexual ethics focused on contraception: people who wanted sex but no babies. By the time he became Pope, those shards were being reassembled in other directions: people who wanted babies but not necessarily through sex. While his pre-papal writings didn’t say much about those eventualities (nor, for that matter, about homosexual sexual activity) his thought provides foundations to address all those issues.
That’s not to say others aren’t advancing the thinking in those directions. On the 50th anniversary of Humanae vitae, then-Paris Archbishop Michel Aupetit was one of the few bishops worldwide to celebrate the encyclical. He even published a book in its defense which, I’d argue, takes a lot of inspiration from Wojtyła. (Again, should it be translated? Yes—and I’ve done it. Now find the American Catholic publisher that wants it.)
When I began working on the thought of Karol Wojtyła, it was sometimes difficult to deal with him because he could not be readily cubby-holed: academe back in the 1970s and 1980s–especially Catholic theology–reacted to interdisciplinary thought like an arthritic to an invitation to a soccer match. Wojtyła was a philosophical ethicist that, for me, already involved some measure of “translating” him into explicitly moral theology categories. (Since plenty of theologians, like Thomas Aquinas, had already done that I forged on). But–like Thomas–Wojtyła’s vision was not barricaded by academic disciplinary borderlines. His ethics/moral theology were inextricably grounded in a theological anthropology as well as in metaphysics. He might have argued theoretically in his Habilitationschrift on Max Scheler as to why phenomenology needed a realistic theory of being behind it, but that was no mere theoretical discovery subsequently confined to the library shelf where that dissertation was stored.
Karol Wojtyła saw clearly—both as a theoretical theological as well as practically pastoral question—that no small part of modernity’s problems lay in its flight from being. “Reality” grounded in people’s heads rather than … reality … may often have little in common with reality, save the label. That is why, contrary to theologians who were searching for “new” thinkers to ground theology, Karol Wojtyła remained firmly anchored in Thomism, at least in terms of the various versions of it articulated by the School of Lublin Thomism. Again, in comparison to the theologians in vogue in my graduate school days (Karl Rahner comes to mind immediately), I never felt the need to recast Catholic theology, because I never thought anybody (except overthinking German academics who overdosed on Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger) had the problems for which theology allegedly needed to be recast.
Regardless, Wojtyła’s ethics/moral theology were never a mere academic exercise for him. They were certainly not severable from a theology and philosophy of the person, which had to be further grounded in an overall understanding of being. It taught me a way of approaching theology that, while not necessarily “interdisciplinary” in the ways currently in vogue, nevertheless provided a fruitful approach to the “study of God” that purely academic exercises sometimes seems to lose.
Thanks to John Paul—and KUL—I also came to know Catholic theology in Poland beyond Wojtyła’s own interests. I find it paradoxical that—contemporary rhetoric about “diversity” and “globalism” notwithstanding—this theology remains largely unknown in the West. Forty-five years of dealing with Karol Wojtyła has taught me that, apart from lip service, interest in bringing the theology of Central Europe to a global audience seems to have limited takers in the West (and especially since John Paul’s death). Simply put, Catholic theology that reaffirms Catholic teaching (even—maybe even especially–when it does so in new or creative ways) is not necessarily welcome in various quarters for different reasons, les extremes se touchent.
I learned that already when I was interviewed for my first teaching job at St. John’s University in Staten Island. The Vincentian dean asked me how I’d explain Humanae vitae to an undergraduate. Boy, was I ready: I’d just written almost 300 pages on that teaching, through the lens of Karol Wojtyła’s pre-pontifical writings. When I finished, he looked over his spectacles to declare, “I see you go in for this new-fangled stuff.” It was probably the only time John Paul and I were both branded “new-fangled.” The question now is whether a Vincentian today would say that with the same meaning.
I’ll conclude my memories of Wojtyła with recollections of the first (and only) time I met him. It was June 29, 1989. I was attending the Summer School of Polish Language and Culture run by the John Paul II Foundation in Rome. Back then, it provided an outlet for KUL to promote that culture in ways more explicitly than it could behind the Iron Curtain: professors would come to Rome to lecture. It was where I met one of John Paul’s former students, Prof. Jerzy Gałkowski, who connected me with Lublin philosophers.
June 29th is the feast of Ss. Peter and Paul, so we all attended the Papal Mass. That afternoon, we were invited to private audiences in the Apostolic Palace. Our director, Fr. Stefan Wylężek, had indicated that one of the program members (me) wanted to present the Pope with a dissertation, so I had the opportunity to meet him in person.
So, to whatever degree I’ve made any contributions to scholarship, I owe it in no small measure to the man elected Pope 45 years ago, whose thought also reshaped my thought. I would honestly say Love and Responsibility is one of the most important books of the 20th century: it certainly is to me.
George Weigel has argued that, someday, John Paul II will be formally acknowledged alongside Leo, Gregory, and Nicholas with the title “the Great.” When one looks at the sheer volume and depth of his work, there should be no doubt about it. But it’s not just the quantity and even quality. It’s three distinguishing characteristics: its anthropology, its Christocentricity, and the centrality of love.
Anthropology. John Paul rightly recognized that the inflection crisis point of the 20th century was the question of the human person. Modernity’s claims to promote the “subject” and to be “person-centric” often flounder because they stand on false anthropologies. John Paul, who experienced life under the two greatest anti-human systems of the modern world—German fascism and Russian socialism/communism—recognized that modernity is a contest for the dignity of man made in God’s image.
Christocentricity. Pace Marxism (but also, to a great degree, Kant), man is not alienated from himself by coming closer to God. The degree of genuine humanity and religiosity stand in direct, not inverse relationship. Man’s dignity is that he is made in the image and likeness of the Triune God. Indeed, as John Paul reminded people from his first encyclical, citing Vatican II: “Jesus fully reveals man to himself.” That is a profound statement. The Pope did not write (though it is true) that “Jesus fully reveals God to man.” The truth humanity today needs to hear is that, if man wants to know who he is, he needs to look at Jesus because there is his answer.
Love. In the end, it all comes back to the question of the greatest and most important commandment that promotes the greatest and most important virtue: love. Man can love or he can use. There is no third way, no via media. But “love” is not just a thing or a concept. It—He—is above all a Person—indeed, a communion of persons—in whose image man is made and who realizes himself the more fully, under Love’s grace, he realizes that image.
There—in my mind—is the lasting significance, the true greatness, of St. John Paul II.
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I knew John Paul II through the faithfulness he evinced to Church teaching. And Francis is no John Paul II.
I totally agree with you. If Pope John Paul II is is honored as the Great. Pope Francis is the Greater!
Whatever may be said about John Paul II, and there is much in favor, even deficiencies in judgment, placing too much trust in favor of human nature regarding appointments [although after the fact judgment may favor his trust], his example of willingness to suffer immense suffering, this in his latter stage of Parkinson’s he exuded Christlike love. Love the essence of his sanctity rightly identified by Grondelski.
Fortunate to be in Rome during that transition from the great communicator of Christian humanness to the humble, suffering servant of God intent on remaining impaled to the cross alongside his Savior. Barely able to enunciate words, at times lapsing into sleep during lengthy liturgy the message he gave to priests was powerful. Love, a word with many variations was manifest in its essence by the pope as he climbed the steps of the altar. Face pained, when he saw priests gathered wearing surplices to receive the ciboriums for the faithful to receive Holy Communion, he smiled at us. There is, in love, our human love a direct assimilation, as Grondelski alludes with the divine reality when we decide to give ourselves to suffering for love’s sake, for the salvation of others. There are some among the faithful, laity as well as the ordained, who have realized the beauty of a love revealed interiorly that is given sans pretense, often secretly in search of nothing other than the glory of God.
Thank you very much, Fr. Morello, for sharing your own experience. Your testimony about the Pope’s love, while in such pain, is very valuable to me.
In his “The Acting Person” the intelligent John Paul II explores phenomenology–how we can grow truthfully through our actions–WITHOUT discounting or denying other aspects of created and fully human reality. As he explains in the Introduction, he isolates higher “anthropology and ethics” in brackets—as is done in algebra—precisely because these dimensions apply to everything he is saying, rather than not at all.
Very much unlike the current mindset and now synodality…
…which sets concrete truth in opposition to concrete circumstances or whatever, such that the chronologically earlier (and higher) can be discounted and even abrogated (“rigid, backwardist”). So, the synodal roundtables struggle with reductionist “tensions” and “polarizations” whereby real contradictions can be steered into a supposedly harmonized two-thirds vote and then melded into summary papers massaged by a backroom species of “experts.”
Who needs artificial intelligence (AI) when you can have the real non-intelligence of squared circles?
‘ The spark to prepare the world for the Second Coming will come from Poland ‘ – Diary of St.Faustina … the Eucharistic Reign of Divine Will preceding same , even if in a rather hidden manner ….
The Diary and related devotion, given much importance by St.John Paul 11 also – bringing the spirituality needed in our times – love as responsibility .
‘Bring them to Me ‘ – sinners , holy souls , non believers.. seeing/ accepting the wounds of others as our own to take them to The Mother, who would plead with The Lord – ‘they have no wine ‘…to pour forth The Spirit ..to free persons from what can alienate us from each other unto bitterness and hardness of hearts .
Pope Francis too in same steps of expounding love as responsibility, as the means for The Church to taste the New Wine of gratitude and joy in oneness in the wounds ..
https://www.gotquestions.org/Uzzah.html – the episode of Uzzah falling dead from irreverence for The Ark – the ‘death spirits’ of related evils afflicting our times at flood water levels, esp. in realm of marriage , which St.John Paul 11 had warned about !
May the Flames of The Sacred Heart and Immaculate Hearts undo all such !
We read: “…the ‘death spirits’ of related evils afflicting our times at flood water levels, esp. in realm of marriage, which St.John Paul II had warned about!”
As with the Synod, under Pope Francis, considering the blessing not of persons butt as coupled in gay “marriages?” The “New Wine” of Cana converted (conversion!) back into water and worse.
in His encounter with sinners, Christ would never deceive them by stating, “If there is a union of a private nature, there is neither a third party, nor is society affected. Now, if the union is given the category of marriage, there could be children affected“, denying our Call to be “Temples Of The Holy Ghost”,and dismissing the sinful nature of private sin.
I chuckled when you noted that JPII and your Mother’s theology corresponded. My mother saw me reading Veritatis Splendor and commented she could never understand it. I quickly quipped that it contained everything she had taught me and my 13 siblings thru daily living. And I was able to give her examples using common sayings she would use to challenge us.
She sounds like a remarkable women. How blessed you are.
I meant to write “woman”. Sorry.
James, thank you for sharing that beautiful reflection about your mom and how she taught you what was contained in the book, and your conversation with her about it! How blessed you and your family are. 13 siblings and an amazing strong mother, and I bet your dad is/was pretty awesome too.
Here is what JPII means to me:
To realistically express what he meant to me will require providing the reader with a little background information.
I grew up in a little German Catholic farm town. Huge families were the norm, not the exception. I grew up thinking I came from a small family because I only had eight siblings. There were children everywhere. I could step outside on a Saturday morning and join the game in progress in our front yard as it had become the neighborhood playground.
As a child the only thing that approached the excitement of finding out on Christmas morning what Santa had brought me was Mom bringing a new baby home from the hospital. As soon as she was ready for visitors, everybody in the neighborhood would come by to see the new baby and rejoice with us. We did the same for our neighbors.
Without anybody stating the fact explicitly, the truth that babies are a great blessing and God’s wonderful gift to us was ingrained into my soul.
Roe v Wade was tyrannically imposed upon us when I was twenty-two years old. I will never forget the response of the retired bishop who said the weekday, noon Mass at the local cathedral. This was shortly after Roe. He began his homily with a declaration made in a booming voice that one could easily imagine was what the voice of God had sounded like on Mt. Sinai as He proclaimed, amidst thunder and lightning, “Thou shalt not kill.” The bishop announced that “The Supreme Court justices have damned themselves to Hell!” You could have then heard a pin drop. He had gotten everybody’s attention and proceeded to obliterate the court’s decision.
I had been following Supreme Court decisions like, I assume, most young adults did at the time, which is to say not at all. Even so, after the bishop’s homily, I knew something truly diabolical had just happened. This was eventually confirmed by a photograph contained in a mailing I received from Jack Willke, the founder of National Right to Life. It was a photograph of late-term abortions, a big trashcan filled with dead babies; these children were larger than some of the newborns I had held in my arms as everyone was rejoicing. This confirmed completely for me that something truly diabolical was indeed taking place.
Imagine how you would feel if the Supreme Court declared that up until a child was three years old parents could decide to “dispose” of toddler “tissue,” if they felt raising a child wasn’t going to work out for them. You would think that was outrageous, insane and diabolical. You would be justifiably angry. That is exactly what the “legal” murder of babies looked like to me. (Although I eventually realized that God could use calm, determined people much more effectively than enraged people. ;o)
In my naivete as a young man, I thought the Church would jump all over this issue, boldly proclaiming from pulpits across the country that Catholics had a moral obligation to use their political freedom, which is a gift of God, to bring this brutal holocaust of innocent children to an end. There would be no need for the Church to name a political party or the names of candidates from the pulpit. The laity could figure that out on their own. The laity would just need to be exhorted to use their political freedom to care for Christ in the least of His brethren. The intensity of such exhortation would be commensurate with the urgency of the situation. If thousands of wiggling, kicking babies being brutally dismembered every day wasn’t urgent then there was no such thing as urgency. Needless to say, I was a young man thoroughly scandalized by the complacency of the Church.
With the above in mind, you can appreciate how much it meant to me in October of 1979 when the national news networks, while covering JPII’s visit to the United States, reported that he had proclaimed that “Abortion was an unspeakable crime.” You can imagine my gratitude and admiration of JPII upon reading his 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, where he makes clear the necessity of the political involvement of Christians to end this holocaust and our obligation to practice civil disobedience when that is required, citing Acts 5:29: “We must obey God rather than men.”
harry, Thank you for sharing your story and relating it to JPII.
JPII’s stance begs us to compare Francis’s. Yes, Francis has called abortionists ‘hit’men. OTOH, he has given repeated and public audience to pro-abort CINO politicians, and Francis has publicly supported and permitted their receipt of Eucharist without addressing their persistent manifest public rejection of Church teaching on the Eucharist and abortion. Abortion is an inherent evil, always and in every circumstance an act of grave immorality crying from the ground for God’s vengeance. We mourn the loss of JPII’s teaching truth while we reasonably rage against the pharisees, hypocrits, and whitewashed bloody robes covering skeletons who walk about Vatican halls and sinodal assemblies.
The lack of thought and inability to reason among one church leader is here displayed:
https://cruxnow.com/church-in-the-americas/2020/12/pope-francis-once-again-enters-abortion-debate-in-argentina?fbclid=IwAR3NBTSc2k0Ej5yEqL2yGztkpwq59e6EMk52NRtsN95rVTbUdc8eGy5wK9U
I’ve often disagreed with Grondelski on relatively minor matters, so I’ll thank him for this beautiful and thoughtful piece. I would not be a Catholic were it not for John Paul, and I will always remain immensely grateful for that gift beyond value.
I believe that is one of the great blessings from Saint John Paul II – he was an effective evangelist and brought many to the knowledge of the truth. He was a balm of Gilead that we so sorely needed and need now. How clearly the truth distilled upon those who would listen to him or read his writings.
1950s and 1960s brought prosperity to the West, and many of us just let the sexual revolution and all its evil fruits swoop over us. Twice I was in the crowd listening to JPII preaching and it truly rattled me and woke me up. I went to a church and prostrated before our Lord and cried for TRUTH. Soon after that I had a powerful conversion and radically changed my life. I know I owe it to Saint John Paul II the Great who kept preaching the truth of Christ tirelessly insisting on chastity, holy matrimony and the value of life. Pray for us John Paul II, thank you forever for your teachings.
Wow. I still remember it 45 years ago growing up in an island in the Philippines at the height of the Cold War and Marcos’s Martial Law. In my hometown we could receive only two national TV and two local AM radio broadcasts. No cable or online streaming news. It was little past midnight, the radio and TV broadcasts were off for the night, I was still awake having just finished high school homework and listened to a Voice of America SW radio news announcing the election of the new Pope. I had no problem rightly getting his chosen papal name and that he’s from Poland but could not get his Polish name clearly given the normal SW radio sound disturbance. I immediately took and consulted The World Almanac edition of that year and checked the list of “The Cardinals of the Catholic Church” verifying which name sounded the closest to the one I heard on VOA. I was so elated to find the name and read it loudly but I doubted whether my pronunciation was correct. Given the available news technology then, it seemed like ions ago.