Professor Weigel: Keywords for John Paul II – Truth, Freedom and Human Grandeur

Msza kanonizacyjna, fot. Autorstwa Jeffrey Bruno from New York City, United States - Canonization 2014- The Canonization of Saint John XXIII and Saint John Paul II, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32427710

“Be not afraid, and never, ever settle for anything less than the moral and spiritual grandeur that the grace of God makes possible in your life.” – this is the most important quotation from John Paul II indicated by Professor George Weigel, a distinguished biographer of the Saint Pope.

The 101^st anniversary of John Paul II falls on Tuesday, May 18^th. On this occasion Professor Weigel emphasised some aspects of the Pope’s teaching that are particularly relevant today. He underlined: “John Paul II understood that the Great Issue for future of humanity in the 21^st  century and beyond was the concept of the human person that would shape culture and society. Are we merely bundles of morally equivalent desires, and is freedom merely the satisfaction of those desires? Or are we created for a nobler exercise of freeom: the freedom to seek the truths built into the world and into us and to live our lives according to those truths?” – said Professor Weigel.

He also pointed out John Paul II’s contribution to the understanding of pastoral care in the modern world.

John Paul II's teaching reflected the conviction, which he helped write into the Second Vatican Council's Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, that, in Jesus Christ, we meet the deepest truths about God and ourselves. That is the central message that the Church must take to the world, if it is to be the Church of the New Evangelization that John Paul II proclaimed, underlined Professor Weigel.

Asked who John Paul II was for him personally, George Weigel said: “A man of God, a brilliant analyst of the human condition, and a thoroughly lovable human being”.