This post is a fragment of the enclical of Saint John Paul II, I consider that we should not forget what his way of thinking and acting, was. It Will alwais be actual.
Redemptor Hominis (Redeemer of Man), promulgated on the 4th March, 1979, was the first encyclical of John Paul II. The Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla had been elected Pope John Paul II in October 1978, after the very brief pontificate of John Paul I (AugustSeptember 1978; Paul VI had been Pope from 1963-1978. John Paul II was the first nonItalian Pope since the early sixteenth century). Like John Paul I, John Paul II chose a name which combined the names of the two Popes of the Second Vatican Council (1962- 65), John XXIII and Paul VI, in order to emphasize that he was committed to the legacy of the Council, in which he had been an active participant. Commitment to Vatican II This commitment is very clear in Redemptor Hominis, in which John Paul II emphasizes the great achievement of Gaudium et Spes, the Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. At the Council, he had also been an important supporter of Dignitatis Humanae, the Declaration on Religious Freedom, arguing that the Church could not insist on its own freedom from Communist oppression unless it extended full religious freedom to non-Catholics in traditionally Catholic countries such as Spain and Portugal. The ‘cold war’ context Karol Wojtyla was born in 1920, had found his vocation to the priesthood during the Nazi occupation of Poland and been consecrated bishop during the post-war Stalinist dictatorship. He had been a professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of Lublin and was Cardinal Archbishop of Krakow at the time of his election as Pope. When Redemptor Hominis was issued, global politics were still bound up with the ‘Cold War’, the tension between the Soviet Union and its satellite states and the United States of America and its allies. The Communist government of North Vietnam had conquered South Vietnam in 1975. Some parts of Portugal’s former African empire had become Soviet-aligned. There was to be a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 1979. Although the end of the ‘Cold War’ was little more than a decade away, geopolitical tensions were high at the time when Redemptor Hominis was issued. The call for human rights The call for human rights was also gaining in strength at this time. The US President Jimmy Carter (in office 1976-80), a devout Baptist, sought to make respect for human rights an important criterion in the foreign policy of the United States. This resulted in tensions between the Carter administration and military dictatorships in Latin America, which had formerly enjoyed more American support. Liberation theology had been 1 gaining influence in Latin America throughout the 1970s, and John Paul’s relationship to liberation theology was to be an important aspect of his pontificate in the 1980s. First visit to Poland – the ‘Solidarity’ movement A few months after issuing Redemptor Hominis, John Paul II made his first pontifical visit to Poland. Attracting huge crowds, he reminded his fellow Poles of the Christian roots of their culture, and affirmed them in their struggle for human rights. In the next year, 1980, the Solidarity movement began to challenge the dictatorship of the Communist Party, and John Paul II was to give it crucial advice and support in the following years of struggle until the end of Communism in Poland in 1989. 2. Executive Summary Christ the centre of history The central theme of Redemptor Hominis is the centrality of Jesus Christ in human history and as the answer to the human search for meaning and identity. Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes was a reflection on the situation of humanity in the mid-twentieth century that constantly returned to Christ as the true meaning of humanity, the one who reveals us to ourselves. Redemptor Hominis takes up this theme and develops it as the charter of John Paul II’s pontificate. The argument with Marxism-Leninism and other ‘materialisms’ The encyclical was deeply influenced by the imposition of Marxist atheism on Poland. In a very important sense, it was a Christian answer to Marxism-Leninism, which had sought to weaken and eventually abolish the Catholic Church. Yet the encyclical does not see Marxism-Leninism as the only enemy of authentic humanity: it is critical of any form of power or set of attitudes that degrades the human person, including other forms of materialism, such as consumer capitalism. Marx’s theory of religious and economic alienation As a professor of philosophy and church leader in the post-war period, Karol Wojtyla had had to resist Communist ideology and Communist power in many different contexts. At the same time, he was eager to debate with Marxist thinkers and to engage with the foundations of Marxist thought. For Marx, ‘the root of man is man himself’(Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1844): in this atheistic world-view, there is no purpose to human existence other than what human beings can shape for themselves through work and historical struggle. Marx had argued that human beings lose their humanity in a multi-dimensional process he called ‘alienation’. In religious alienation (and here Marx drew heavily on the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach), humanity seeks hope and meaning in the false consolation of heaven: rather than realizing that only struggle in this world can liberate us from oppression, human beings become resigned to injustice by 2 transferring or ‘alienating’ all their hopes to the next world. (It is fair to note that the early nineteenth-century Christian response to industrialization gave Marx some evidence for this judgement.) In economic alienation, human beings become enslaved to their own products. Their work and ingenuity is transformed into ‘capital’, the accumulation of wealth, and this capital in turns rules them, making work into drudgery and bondage, rather than the spontaneous expression of the human capacity to transform nature. John Paul II’s response to Karl Marx Karol Wojtyla accepted some of Marx’s insights concerning economic alienation. He was critical of any economic system that deprived work of its human character, that made the products of work more important than the human person, the subject of work. At the same time, he rejected the utopian illusions of Marxism, the belief that the abolition of private ownership of the means of production would usher in a classless society of spontaneous work. In its Stalinist form, it had in fact become a totalitarian dictatorship. John Paul II’s reflections on the meaning of work as a dimension of our humanity were to be developed in his third encyclical Laborem Exercens (On Human Labour) (1981). A foundation of Redemptor Hominis is the rejection of the Marxist idea of religious alienation. Whereas Marx had argued that ‘Communism is the solution to the riddle of history, and knows itself to be the solution’ (Communist Manifesto, 1848), Redemptor Hominis is inspired by the faith that Jesus Christ is at the centre of human history, and that faith in Jesus Christ is not alienating, but rather the true source of fulfilled and joyful human existence. 3. Key Points of the Document Christ, the revealer of the mystery of humanity Redemptor Hominis (RH) is a proclamation of Christ’s central role in human history as the redeemer of humanity. It affirms the highest values of modern humanism - religious freedom and social justice - and seeks to relate Christian proclamation to the universal human search for meaning – to the transcendent dimension of the human person. Its central message is that Christ is the answer to this search. It affirms a key passage of Gaudium et Spes: ‘The truth is that only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light’ (GS 22; RH 8). Drawing on this teaching of Vatican II, Redemptor Hominis proclaims Jesus Christ as the revelation of the meaning of our humanity, the divine manifest in the human. Our redemption takes place within human history, since Christ is present in that history and shares our human condition in all things but sin.
