the New Pantagruel

The Lasting Legacy of Pope John Paul II

by Eduardo J. Echeverria

n the wake of the death of our Holy Father, Karol Józef Wojtyla, John Paul II, I’m certain that many things will be written about his legacy to the Church as well as to the world at large. Indeed, much discussion of this legacy has already been taking place both before his impending death and, almost without ceasing, after his dying on Saturday evening, April 2. The rich and varied character of his thought makes it impossible for me here to do it justice. Nevertheless, there are six features of his great papacy that I would highlight as essential to his lasting legacy and without which we would not understand his Catholic worldview.

First, John Paul II revitalized the papacy by recovering its evangelical roots. This is the thesis of papal biographer George Weigel. It means that he recovered the biblical teaching that the Church, and by implication the papacy, has a missionary nature, the great commission to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and this has revitalized the evangelical dynamism of the Church. “Being essentially ‘missionary’,” says John Paul, “does not mean merely that the Church has a universal mission to all humanity, but that, in her constitutive reality, in her soul … she possesses a dynamism that concretely unfolds in preaching the Gospel, in spreading the faith and in the invitation to conversion proclaimed ‘to the very ends of the earth’” (Missionary Catechesis of John Paul II). Hence the evangelical style of John Paul II–an evangelist, surely the greatest evangelist of the twentieth-century, a pastor, and a witness to, and defender of, the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, namely, “The truth … that only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light” (Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes - “The Church in the Modern World”, no. 22).

“St. Michael” (oil on canvas)
by Kay Darling

In this connection, I cannot fail to mention John Paul’s rejection of religious relativism, namely, the notion that “Christianity … is merely one form among many of the generic human reality called ‘religion’,” and its corollary that all religions are hence equally vehicles of salvation. Says the Holy Father, “This is not the message of the Second Vatican Council, which boldly proclaimed the centrality for human history of Jesus Christ and the essential mission of the Church to preach the Gospel to all nations: for ‘there is no other name under heaven given to man by which he must be saved’ (Acts 4:12). “The Church is sent to the world with a proposal,” he adds, “and the evangelical proposal we make is that the world can understand its history and its aspirations most adequately, most truthfully, through the Gospel. If this is the truth we proclaim, then the Church is never marginal, even when she seems weak in the eyes of the world.”

Second, John Paul II has provided an authoritative and authentic interpretation of the teachings of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). In the wake of the Council, there seemed to be a mentality afoot that everything was up for grabs, that the Church’s historic teachings about Christ, salvation, God, the teaching authority of the Church, particularly the papacy, the priesthood, and sexual morality, had radically changed. As Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in his own memoirs about this time, “The impression grew steadily that nothing was now stable in the Church, that everything was open to revision. More and more the Council appeared to be like a great Church parliament that could change everything and reshape everything according to its own desires.”

In response to this mentality of liberalizing Christianity, John Paul has left the Church with a prolific and substantial body of writings–for example, books presenting the rich texture of his Catholic worldview including Crossing the Threshold of Hope and, most recently, Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium; great encyclicals including the “Splendor of Truth,” the “Gospel of Life,” “Faith and Reason,” and the “Mission of the Redeemer,” several apostolic exhortations including the empowering work, “The Vocation and Mission of the Lay Faithful in the Church and in the World;” the Apostolic Letter, “The Christian Meaning of Human Suffering,” which world-renowned Calvinist philosopher Alvin Plantinga rightly called a “profound meditation,” a “seminal work” on the “meaning of suffering from a Christian perspective”; and, last but not least, the Catechism of the Catholic Church—all with the aim of giving direction, restoring clarity about the Church’s historic teaching, and sorting out the critical issue of true and false renewal in the post-conciliar Church.

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