John Paul II on the Good of Life

According to one commentator, the fundamental theme that hallmarks the thought and writings of John Paul II is “the indwelling of God in each human being and consequently in human society” (Donders, 1996, p. ix). The sequential ordering of that indwelling is decidedly important. John Paul’s philosophical approach is characteristically phenomenological and personalist, as a matter of his own history and educational influences. Given his experience as a Polish citizen and churchman, John Paul was well acquainted with the dangers of communism as a collectivist ideology that usurped the central functions of individual freedom and responsibility. John Paul’s advanced education combined Neo-Scholastic methods in moral theology with the philosophical phenomenology associated primarily with Max Scheler. From these influences, he developed a robust ethical vision with the concrete reality of persons at the heart of all deliberations. While John Paul, then, reiterates a characteristically Catholic emphasis on persons as necessarily in community (indeed, sociality is a constitutive dimension of personhood), his own discussion has stressed the concrete requirements of human dignity. Indeed, in his very first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, John Paul enunciates the foundational commitment of his pastoral and theological worldview: “that the human being is the primary and fundamental way for the Church” (quoted in Curran, 2002, p. 62). In his first social encyclical, Laborem Exercens, his emphasis on the priority of labor over capital is best viewed as the practical corollary of his personalist approach: labor, unlike capital, is not merely instrumental, but a reality that expresses the status of the laborer as a free subject, as one made in the image and likeness of God, and therefore as one who bears “an incomparable dignity and the rights that flow from that dignity” (O’Brien and Shannon, 1992, p. 447).