“Brothers and sisters, be not afraid to welcome Christ and accept his power. Help the Pope and all those who wish to serve Christ and with Christ’s power to serve the human person and the whole of mankind!

Be not afraid! Open, throw wide open the doors to Christ! […]

Be not afraid! Christ knows ‘what is in man.’ He alone knows it!”

Thrice in his inaugural homily on October 22, 1978, Blessed John Paul II exhorted his hearers to courage. “Be not afraid” became a kind of motto for his pontificate. But we may ask what he means? What are we so afraid of that the new pope should have told us “be not afraid”? What if we don’t even feel afraid? The answer, I believe, is that we have been afraid of love. But this requires some explanation.

When this practicing philosopher was elected to the papacy—Karol Wojtyła held the Chair of Ethics at the Catholic University of Lublin at the time—we scholars went scurrying to his books to see how this man thought. Trained in Thomism, he had studied phenomenology, especially the works of Max Scheler. In Love and Responsibility he had written about the “personalistic norm,” which is remarkably reminiscent of Kant’s “practical imperative.” In The Acting Person we read of reflective and reflexive consciousness, of self-determination, of horizontal and vertical transcendence. And then there was a whole body of essays and articles, which were slowly being translated into English. Debates broke out. “The new Pope is a phenomenologist.” “No, Pope Wojtyła is a Thomist.” “Aber nein! He is a Kantian.” (This position is still popular among the Germans.) Reading and understanding Wojtyła was a rough go! In the end, however, all of his work points in one direction. Even in his most philosophically convoluted moments, John Paul II centered his attention on the person as the one who is capable of and called to love. With this in mind, let us look at that threefold call, “Be not afraid!”

“Be not afraid to welcome Christ … Help the Pope” to serve Christ and humankind. One of the remarkable, enduring achievements of Blessed John Paul II’s papacy was the tradition of World Youth Days. The tradition started on Palm Sunday in 1986 in St. Peter’s Square and became a tradition of alternating diocesan and worldwide events. The World Youth Day is not so much the Pope’s creation but a papal response to the world’s youth. “The principal objective of the Days,” wrote John Paul II, “is to make the person of Jesus the center of the faith and life of every young person so that he may be their constant point of reference and also the inspiration of every initiative and commitment for the education of the new generations. In young people the Church sees herself and her mission to mankind: with them she faces the challenges of the future, aware that all humanity needs to be rejuvenated in spirit.” In his book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, John Paul II wrote that early in his priestly career, his work with the young (he was chaplain in a university parish) led him to fall in love with human love, with the capacity for love he found in the young.

“Be not afraid! Open, throw wide open the doors to Christ!” Born Karol Wojtyła, a son of Poland, Pope John Paul II recognized the hand of Providence in his election. The Cold War had hung over the world since 1945. Central and Eastern Europe were firmly under the control of an atheistic and inhuman Communist regime. His native Poland had chafed and endured under the dictates of the Soviet state. Within his first year as pope, this “son of Poland” and also Supreme Pontiff personally threw open the doors to Christ in his native land. In his homily in Warsaw for Pentecost Eve 1979 he prayed: “Let your Spirit descend and renew the faith of the land…this land.” Poland responded. Believing that their fatherland was indeed to belong to Christ, as it had for the past 1,000 years, and not to be a “socialist paradise,” the people responded in solidarity to reestablish Polish national life on its Christian spiritual and moral bases.

The following decade saw victories, followed by frustration, hunger and defeat, until exactly 10 years after John Paul II’s first visit, Poland was again free. And with Poland’s freedom came freedom in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic States, Ukraine and all of Central and Eastern Europe. To be sure, President Reagan and his defense policies played an important role in this transformation, but John Paul II saw something deeper. In his encyclical CentesimusAnnus he wrote that the true cause of the collapse of Communism “was the spiritual void brought about by atheism, which deprived the younger generations of a sense of direction and in many cases led them, in the irrepressible search for personal identity and for the meaning of life, to rediscover the religious roots of their national cultures, and to rediscover the person of Christ himself as the existentially adequate response to the desire in every human heart for goodness, truth and life.” If the Pope threw open that door to Christ, then Lech Wałęsa and his Solidarity Union, along with ordinary Polish workers, students, artists, intellectuals and farmers—and dare we forget the martyred priest for the workers, Fr Jerzy Popiełuszko?—kept that door from slamming shut.

“Be not afraid! Christ knows ‘what is in man.’ He alone knows it!” In his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, John Paul II identified what it is that, more than anything else, modern human beings fear: “The man of today seems ever to be under threat from what he produces, that is to say from the result of the work of his hands and, even more so, of the work of his intellect and the tendencies of his will.” We are afraid of ourselves, of what we do. John Paul II explains that we have become alienated from ourselves. We made great progress in the sciences and technology, but he asks, have we made life more “worthy of man”? In his Theology of the Body teachings he pointed to three modern “masters of suspicion”—Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche—each with his characteristic interpretation of the underlying meaning of life. For Marx, we are economic beings, defined by our roles in the cycle of production and consumption. Freud saw us as defined by our sexuality, as egos engaged in uncertain combat with the id, that primordial subconscious urge for sexual fulfillment. Nietzsche exalted the will to power. We can either be the slaves of others or seize our freedom by asserting our own will. Human life is ultimately a power struggle with the other. These are types, in a way, but their significance is that each of them reduces the human person to a form of concupiscence: “You are nothing more than … an economic producer and consumer / a bundle of sexual drives in search of an outlet / either a slave of others or a strong and self-assertive master.”

In that first encyclical John Paul II wrote: “Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it. […] This […] is why Christ the Redeemer ‘fully reveals man to himself.’” Christ knows what is in man—not Marx or Freud or Nietzsche, but also not the market, the advertisers, the political system, nor even our circle of friends and acquaintances. We are beings with deep hearts, capable of heroic love. When John Paul II says, “Christ knows ‘what is in man,’” he is assuring us that we are more than what anyone else, any ideology or any system of thought tells us we are. We need not be afraid because our hearts are bigger than we may ever have imagined.

For us scholars, the careful and thorough study of this man’s thought, from his Lublin Lectures through Love and Responsibility and The Acting Person (preferably the Italian, German or most recent Spanish translation!) to his abundant output as pope, is deeply rewarding. He is a careful and thorough thinker, firmly rooted in the classical philosophical tradition and in the Church’s theological tradition. But in his own eyes and for all of us, too, his scholarship was always subordinate to his vocation as a pastor.

Here’s a closing story. In October 1978, the day he was to leave Kraków for his trip to the Conclave, an elderly woman came to the archiepiscopal offices wanting to see the Cardinal. The conscientious secretary, Fr. Dziwisz (who is now the Cardinal in Kraków), his eye on the clock, tried to put her off, but Cardinal Wojtyła insisted that she come in. There was a grave problem. The woman’s neighbor had stolen her cat. With Fr. Dziwisz calling his attention to the time—“Eminence, you have a flight to catch to Rome”—the Cardinal asked for his car and rode with the woman to her neighbor’s house. After a few minutes he walked out of the neighbor’s home, the cat cradled in his arms. He gave the woman her pet. Then with Fr. Dziwisz he was off to Rome and his election to the Chair of Peter, where he exhorted us …

“Be not afraid!”

 

Adrian Reimers is an adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.