After the Council:
John Paul and the Laity
by George Sim
Johnston
It is easy to look at the Church today and be pessimistic. There’s an easygoing spirituality among the laity, disaffection and heterodoxy among the clergy, an episcopate that veers between laxity
and damage control, and, of course, the scandals. Looked at in a certain way, post–Vatican II Catholicism would all seem a downward spiral, a crisis from which there’s no obvious exit. But any such pessimism is misplaced. First, as someone once said, the Church isn’t a museum of saints but a hospital for sinners. This includes all of us. Human failure will always be generously spread among the faithful. Christ warned about this explicitly. It isn’t clear that the Church today is any worse off than it was in 500 or 1500. In fact, there’s probably now a higher proportion of good bishops, dedicated priests, and devout laity.
But history has even more important lessons. Christopher
Dawson once identified six great periods of Church history, and each one begins
with a crisis. Nearly all of the 21 ecumenical councils have upset the Church’s
equilibrium. The aftermaths of Nicea and
And just as the Council of Trent was implemented—in fact, rescued—by a few great popes, especially St. Pius V, we now have in the pontificate of John Paul II the council’s definitive interpretation. Catholic dissenters who complain that this pope has “betrayed” the council forget that John Paul was an enthusiastic participant in all four sessions, strongly aligning with the “progressives” against the ecclesial bureaucrats who wanted simply to reiterate doctrine in the accepted neo-scholastic format. And he hasn’t changed at all.
The most extraordinary—and providential—fact of recent Church history is the alignment of Karol Wojtyla and Vatican II. He was ready for Vatican II in a way that few other bishops were: He put a strong mark on the council’s three most important documents—Lumen Gentium, Dignitatis Humanae, and Gaudium et Spes. And as pope he has given us a gloss on the council, starting with those astonishing 130 Wednesday audiences on the “theology of the body,” whose depth and originality exceed anything that has come out of the papacy since Leo XIII, or perhaps even St. Gregory the Great.
Whoever the next pope may be, he won’t have to do much writing. The Church’s middle management has been slow to absorb John Paul’s writings—in many chanceries and seminaries they remain, in Mary Ann Glendon’s phrase, “unopened letters”—but this won’t be determinative. They have touched enough intelligent Catholics, especially among the laity, to change the Church in the long run. This is how the Holy Spirit works. Two thousand years have taught us the Church’s remarkable recuperative powers. And whether it was the sixth or the 16th century, spiritual renewal has always been a matter of grassroots movements inspired by and working with the papacy. The difference now is that whereas for Gregory the Great and Pius V the agents of evangelization were monks or Jesuits, for John Paul II it will be the laity.
The arsenal for this renewal will be the documents of Vatican II and the writings of this pope, which form a perfect continuum. Both are a call to personal conversion—to a maturity in self-giving—that goes far beyond simply obeying laws and commandments. The question for each orthodox Catholic is whether to take up the Magisterium’s challenge or be content with the “fundamental option” of the rich young man, who is more comfortable with a religion based on rules than on self-donation.
The new Christian humanism proposed by the council and John Paul II is the only possible solution to the crisis within the Church. The modern world wants “freedom.” The rebels within the Church want “freedom.” Complaints about the Church are mainly about its moral teachings, which are perceived as putting a lid on everyone’s freedom. This problem isn’t going to be solved by a further insistence on the rules, but rather by a call to holiness and a positive vision of the human person and the uses of his freedom.
This is what the pontificate of John Paul II has been all about. Those who view him as an authoritarian who keeps tightening the screws are not paying attention. This papacy is all about freedom. But the pope insists that authentic freedom is based on the truth about the human person; otherwise, it will be a counterfeit and make us unhappy. Building on the council, he has proposed a sweeping vision of the human person that invites us into depths barely touched by the old scholastic casuistry. Right now, those in the Church who are shaping its future are busy unpacking these teachings.
John Paul’s writings basically try to answer the question, What is man? Having lived under the two worst totalitarianisms that the 20th century had to offer, he’s convinced that the principal philosophical error of modern times is a misreading of the human person. Today, either man is a thing—a chemical accident, a mere collation of atoms—or he’s a Cartesian ghost inhabiting a machine. The first reading leads straight to the concentration camps and abortion mills. If man is no more than disposable biological matter, then disposable biological matter he will be. The second reading, which is that of dissenters from the Church’s sexual teachings, treats the body as an extrinsic object that can be manipulated for whatever purpose. Put another way: It erroneously supposes that what we do with our bodies has little to do with who we are. This led to the sexual revolution.
The pope answers the Darwinian proposal of man as a “thing” by insisting on our mystery and transcendence. Human creativity—everything from the Sistine Chapel to the infield fly rule—cannot simply be a by-product of mere matter. Nor can human love. We are created in the image of a Trinitarian God, three persons in the act of eternal, mutual self-giving. We have the “law of gift” inscribed in our being. There are two sentences from Gaudium et Spes that John Paul quotes repeatedly; they are the leitmotiv of his pontificate. First: Man “can fully find his true self only in the sincere gift of self.” In other words, contrary to our hedonist culture’s notions of happiness, we find our humanity more in self-giving than self-assertion, in relationship rather than self-sufficiency. And the second is like it: “Christ the new Adam…fully reveals man to himself.” The truth about ourselves is ultimately not a proposition but a Person, who Himself is defined by total self-donation.
As for the second modern error about man—the Cartesian ghost in the machine—the pope’s answer is to be found in his voluminous writings about marriage and sexuality. These writings are extraordinarily important. They are the best response to the modern world’s principal objection to the Catholic Church. As early as 1926,
G. K. Chesterton predicted that the “next great heresy” would be an attack on sexual morality, and in recent decades every institution has surrendered except the Church. The Church needs to explain her teachings about sex to the world—and also to herself, since it’s safe to say that three-quarters of American Catholics don’t accept them. This should be the first area of the Church’s self-evangelization, and it is going to be mainly the work of the laity.
First, what’s the position of dissenting theologians regarding sex? They want to baptize the sexual morality of the post-Kinsey culture. How do they get there? By arguing the primacy of conscience (the autonomous self as a little god, decreeing right and wrong); by divorcing personhood from the body (a Cartesian anthropology that posits a free-floating “I” that has nothing to do with one’s concrete acts); and by consulting “experience” rather than nature (which in practice allows the three concupiscences to run on their own program).
The pope’s responses to the dissenters, and to the culture in general, are deep and convincing. First, he argues that the purpose of a conscience isn’t to manufacture the truth but to locate it. Truth is something we discover rather than invent. And once we do find a truth, there isn’t merely an obedient and grudging application, but rather a creative response that translates it into positive virtues. Second, the pope vigorously rejects the idea of man as a vaporous “subject” that happens to have a body. We are our bodies, and we are what we do with our bodies. And when it comes to sex, our body has a language, a nuptial meaning that expresses the “law of gift” written at the core of our being. The pope insists that sex is such a deep and wonderful thing that when you use it improperly inside or outside marriage, making your partner an object, a vehicle of pleasure, the result will be the “culture of death” that’s all around us.
In fact, if Catholic dissenters were serious about consulting “experience,” they would look honestly at the results of the sexual revolution. What they would see are the results of a denial of nature, of the “truth” about our sexuality. The question finally is whether we create ourselves on our own or receive our nature as gift. Adam and Eve chose the first option; their sin was not about an inordinate love of apples but about freeing themselves from the “givens” God put in their nature. It is an impulse shared by heterodox theologians. But we’ve discovered—as did our first parents—that this “liberation” is a false freedom. The pope argues that the human person is truly free only when he acts on truths that are received and not invented. The perfection of freedom doesn’t consist in radical self-creation but in the choice to live in accord with our nature.
One of the hopeful signs in the Church today is that energized laity like Christopher West, Janet Smith, Mary Beth Bonacci, John Haas, and others are out there explaining to audiences the beauty of the pope’s “theology of the body.” There already is some recognition among twenty-something Catholics that the baby boomers didn’t exactly solve the mystery of sex and that it must mean something more than an exchange of pleasure between consenting adults. The pope has the answer: It is an exchange of persons, and its ramifications are never entirely private. The health of the entire culture depends on it. Which is why the pope has spent so much intellectual energy explaining sex to a culture trying to evacuate it of its mystery and transcendence.
But this pontificate is about much more than sex and marriage. It is a clarion call to evangelize the culture, which John Paul II insists is what really drives history. Catholics have to stop being preoccupied with intra-Church issues and recover a sense of having a message for the world. For centuries—maybe since the Treaty of Westphalia [1648]—the Faith has been privatized, so that many Catholics think it’s mainly something you carry around inside your head. Vatican II proposed evangelization as the deepest identity of the Church, but it’s going to require some digging to recover this lost truth.
We need a great relearning guided by the true “spirit” of Vatican II. The Church is going to have to rebuild itself from the bottom up by personal decisions made by Catholics inspired by the rich teachings of the Magisterium. The three most important realities in the Church today are a great teaching pontificate, the lay initiatives at the grass roots, and the new religious orders whose demographics are the reverse of the older ones. History tells us that this is more than enough for a new springtime of faith.
But for the renewal to gain momentum,
there’s one change demanded by the council that has yet to happen: the
retirement of the old clericalism, the idea that priests and nuns constitute
the “real” Church. Most laity still have the odd
notion that they must wait for a signal from the bishop or local pastor to do
anything. The council taught that if you have the Faith, you spread it. John
Paul’s understanding of this point may come from his experience in
Finally, a Catholic restoration will depend on individuals who answer the call to holiness. Cardinal Ratzinger, who has been more sober than John Paul in his assessment of the aftermath of the council, knows his Church history well enough to sense that the legacy of an ecumenical council is always at risk: “Whether or not the Council becomes a positive force in the history of the Church depends only indirectly on texts and organizations; the crucial question is whether there are individuals—saints—who, by their personal willingness, which cannot be forced, are ready to effect something new and living.... [It] depends on those who will transform its words into the life of the Church.”
This generation of Catholics has been given much by the Magisterium. Much should be asked of it.
George Sim Johnston is a member of the Crisis Magazine executive board and author of Did Darwin Get It Right? (Our Sunday Visitor, 1998). Copyright Crisis Magazine © 2004; used with permission. For full text, see: www.crisismagazine.com/julaug2004/feature1.htm