Ótimo artigo do Kerr sobre o Papa João Paulo II.
Do Popes influence their successors theologically, and if so, to what extent? In past centuries most saw no need to write theology; few had the talent. Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, one an “intellectual”, the other an “academic”, were each successful university professors. They could hardly have followed more different trajectories.
In 1951, Karol Wojtyla returned to the Jagiellonian University in Krakow to complete a second doctorate, this time in philosophy, on the possibility of constructing Christian ethics on the basis of the thought of Max Scheler (1874-1928), famous for his phenomenology of love. Once qualified, Wojtyla taught social ethics at the university, commuting to do so at Lublin as well, even after 1958, when he became Archbishop of Krakow.
In 1969, with the book entitled The Acting Person in the subsequent English version, he made an important contribution to philosophy. One way of approaching this book is to see it as one more effort to overcome the Cartesian conception of self-consciousness, along much the same lines as The Self as Agent (1957) by John Macmurray or Stuart Hampshire’s Thought and Action (1970). Much later, in Crossing the Threshold of Hope (1994), John Paul II repeated this criticism of Descartes, “who split thought from existence”: “How different from the approach of St Thomas, for whom it is not thought which determines existence, but existence … which determines thought.” We are agents, not self-encapsulated spectators.
Besides this, however, with Dr Wanda Póltawska, a Krakow psychiatrist, Wojtyla had set up the Family Institute to educate lay people about sexual ethics. In Love and Responsibility (1960) he argues that neither procreation nor pleasure alone can justify sexual intercourse: rather, rejecting both “utilitarians” such as Freud, who focus on pleasure, and “rigorists” such as the Puritans, who limit sexual activity to procreation, Wojtyla sketches out a high doctrine of sexual intercourse as mutual self-donation.
In comparison, Professor Joseph Ratzinger’s publications were never so ambitious. He received his doctorate in theology in 1953 at Munich for a thesis on the concepts of “people” and “house” of God in St Augustine. Like Karol Wojtyla, he too broke away, apparently with no qualms, from the mandatory neo-scholasticism. Having decided on an academic career, Ratzinger wrote the required post-doctoral dissertation on St Bonaventure’s theology of history, thus distancing him even further from routine neo-Thomism. Indeed, as he has recalled, the dissertation had to be revised to eliminate the allegedly “modernist” tendencies that were suspected by an examiner, Michael Schmaus (1897-1993), the most eminent theologian in Munich at the time.
Ratzinger moved in 1969 to the new university at Regensburg in his native Bavaria. In 1977, with his appointment as Archbishop of Munich, his two decades as a university professor ended. Not yet 50, he had a string of publications to his name but not the major work of which no doubt a professor of theology dreams. But there was other writing to come. It falls to popes to write encyclicals. John Paul II issued 14. The first, Redemptor Hominis (1979), centred almost programmatically on the importance of the human person: this continued the preoccupations of The Acting Person though in an entirely different style.
In 1981 John Paul II commemorated Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII’s famous encyclical on social justice, with an edge to what he said about the conflict of labour and capital and about the rights of workers, no doubt reflecting his own early experience. In 1987 he commemorated Pope Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio with another strong statement of the Church’s social and political concerns. In 1991 he commemorated Rerum Novarum again. In these, and several related interventions, the Pope from Poland had no hesitation in denouncing the liberal-capitalism of the West as powerfully as he attacked the totalitarianism of Eastern Europe.
No doubt whoever was pope would at some point have commended ecumenism: with Ut Unum Sint (1995), however, John Paul II, explicitly recognising the obstacle that the papacy constitutes for many Christians, Orthodox and Protestant, invited everyone to help him to reshape the Petrine ministry to serve as a focus for future reunion.
Again, pastoral concerns might have inspired any pope to examine the health of moral theology and of philosophy in general. But with Veritatis Splendor (1993) and Fides et Ratio (1998), John Paul II’s opposition to what he regarded as utilitarianism in some Catholic moral theology, and his insistence on the place of reason and thus of philosophy itself in all religion, reflect the mind of the professor of social ethics.
In his “theology of the body”, however, John Paul II broke new ground. In what we might call a Christian anthropology of sexual difference and complementarity, he inaugurated what many commentators, particularly in North America, regard as a revolutionary shift in Catholic doctrine and sensibility.
According to George Weigel, for example, it is “a bit of a theological time bomb, something that [will] explode within the Church at some indeterminate point in the future with tremendous effect, reshaping the way Catholics think about our embodiedness as male and female, our sexuality, our relationship with each other, our relationship with God – even God himself” (see his foreword to Christopher West’s Theology of the Body Explained [2003] – an invaluable exposition).
Of course this takes up the concerns of Love and Responsibility. The Archbishop of Krakow (it now seems) had a decisive influence on Pope Paul VI when, in his encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968), he reaffirmed the Catholic belief in the unbreakable link between conjugal intercourse and procreation, thereby renewing the condemnation as immoral of all forms of birth control except the rhythm method.
Since many Catholics were, and remain, unpersuaded by the arguments, which are essentially from natural law ethics, it seems that, soon after being elected Pope, John Paul II decided to undertake a theology of gender difference, which would confirm that contraception in a Christian marriage was sinful. In 129 addresses to his weekly general audiences, between 1979 and 1984, John Paul II developed this “theology of the body”. If marriage has long been an afterthought in Catholic theology it is now at the creative centre.
To put a profound and complex argument much too simply we may say the following: Man exists always as either male or female (Genesis 1:27). The unity of Christ and Church is the “great mystery”, exemplified typologically in the “one flesh” of the original pair, Adam and Eve, and again in any authentic conjugal union (Ephesians 5:31-2). The husband loves his wife as Christ loves his bride the Church – giving himself up for her (Ephesians 5:25). The notion of mutual self-donation is crucial.
Spousal communion becomes the principal analogate of every kind of relationship. Whereas in classical theology, including Thomas Aquinas, we are said to be created in the image of God because of our rationality, the essential datum for John Paul II is sexual difference: “… male and female he created them”. Rationality now becomes communication, communion. The union of the divine and human natures in Christ becomes a wedding of heaven and earth. As the act of Jesus’ self-gift to receptive communicants, the eucharistic celebration is envisaged as analogous with conjugal union. The narrative of salvation history, we might say, runs from the original couple in the Garden of Eden to the descent of the holy city, “… coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Revelation 21:2).
In these cases, and others, the image of Christ as bridegroom opens the way to exploring the whole of reality as exhibiting the relationship of creature and Creator, soul and Saviour, Church and Christ. Of course this picks up images and themes familiar in ancient and modern spirituality but John Paul II’s theology of the body exhibits unprecedented coherence and power.
This theology has far-reaching social and political implications, as John Paul II often insisted. Since sexual difference is fundamental, and conjugality the fullest expression of complementarity, the long-term effects of artificial contraception must be destructive of authentic humanity. The witness of married Catholics has to be radically counter-cultural.
If the nuptial relationship may be regarded as the interpretative key for rethinking almost every Christian doctrine, John Paul II certainly bequeathed a theological legacy which has barely begun to impinge on the sensibility and thinking of most Catholics.
In 1981 Pope John Paul II appointed Cardinal Ratzinger as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). When the Vatican archives are opened in the future, it may become possible to measure how united the two were theologically. Cardinal Ratzinger’s reported coolness about the Assisi interfaith meeting in 1986 might mark a certain hesitation about John Paul II’s enthusiasm for interreligious dialogue.
Again, in 1987, the encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, which condemned capitalism more fiercely than Communism, was read by some commentators as less negative about “liberation theology” than CDF policies under Cardinal Ratzinger. It seems unlikely, however, that during the 24 years in which Ratzinger headed the CDF he authorised any policies that differed in any significant way from what John Paul II was content to endorse.
Even in the few years since he was elected, Pope Benedict XVI has established a theological profile that is different from that of his predecessor. There is no reason to think that he has deliberately distanced himself, to escape from the shadow of such a dynamic, innovatory thinker. His initiatives (like John Paul II’s) often refer back to his earlier interests. With his concern for liturgy it is no surprise that he has mandated use of the old rite and other measures.
For decades professional theologians have worried about integrating historical-critical biblical studies with Catholic dogma: Benedict’s study of Jesus seems what a professor might attempt in his retirement, though, given the predictably negative reactions among professional theologians, it took courage.
Benedict’s three encyclicals plot a more distinctive course. The second half of Deus Caritas Est (2006) reportedly derives from notes left incomplete by John Paul II; the first half, however, places the forms of love known in ancient Greek philosophy (especially eros) in relationship to Christian love (agape).
While of course keeping the two apart, Benedict XVI departs completely from the long Christian tradition of condemning every form of the “erotic”. Having considered love, he turns in Spe Salvi (2007) to hope and faith: the encyclical opens with the story of the Sudanese-born Josephine Bakhita, a slave converted from paganism by hope of redemption. In Caritas in Veritate (2009), Pope Benedict takes up Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Populorum Progressio (1967), vigorously reaffirming Catholic Social Teaching.
More attention was paid to the lecture that he gave at Regensburg in 2006: his allusion to a medieval Byzantine emperor’s contempt for Islam set off protests throughout the Muslim world. But the central point was to insist on the place of reasoning in the quest for God, and on the compatibility between pagan Greek philosophy and Christian faith.
In his Fides et Ratio, John Paul II had extended his perspective far beyond ancient Greece: nevertheless, utterly “European” in their roots, both Popes have insisted on maintaining the union between Jerusalem and Athens to which the West owes its culture and civilisation. It remains possible, however, that John Paul II’s innovative theology of the body may contain an as yet unforeseeably demanding future.
Fergus Kerr OP is the editor of New Blackfriars.
