By Tom Venzor
Not even a year into his saintly pontificate, John Paul II proclaimed to the Polish people—but really to all humanity—that Christ is “the key to understanding that great and fundamental reality that is man. For man cannot be fully understood without Christ. Or rather, man is incapable of understanding himself fully without Christ. He cannot understand who he is, nor what his true dignity is, nor what his vocation is, nor what his final end is. He cannot understand any of this without Christ.”
By proclaiming these words during the opening Mass of his pilgrimage to his motherland, John Paul II was echoing the words of the famous 22nd paragraph of the Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes: “The truth is that only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light…. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to himself and makes his supreme calling clear.”
As Catholic Christians it is all too easy to take for granted the meaning of life that Christ reveals to man. More precisely, what I mean is that for most of humanity, life is incomprehensible. Life is experienced as empty. At best, it has a brief meaning that swiftly fades away as evaporating mist. In short, life is lived without a guide to show the way, which leads one to believe that there never was or ever will be a definitive way.
This is particularly true for the “modern man” who has reduced the desires of his heart to the here and now, to the material—only to what the mind can readily comprehend through the senses, with disregard for the transcendent, the truth, goodness and beauty that lay behind every aspect of reality, buried away like a treasure waiting to be discovered if one only has received the map and key, namely, Jesus Christ.
Father Luigi Giussani illustrated this condition of the modern man: “I once saw a man who had been electrocuted in a power station. He had shrunken and become small… about one-third his original size. You see, reason in the modern age, for modern man, has been shocked by a super high-voltage current and has shrunken… because he has defined reason as the measure of reality.”
In describing this reduction of man’s reason, Giussani was not criticizing the capacity of our intellect to set us free to the truth God has inscribed into our hearts and creation, but rather he was pointing out the shortsightedness that can consume our mind. The mind is no longer instructed by the eternal and divine, but by the temporal and mundane.
This everyday mindset naturally—albeit unfortunately—finds its place in politics and the way our society tends to view otherwise rich realities, such as human dignity and the common good.
Rather than viewing each human being as somebody created in the image and likeness of God, our modern mindset views each human being as a disposable thing to be used. Human life is given a meaning that is completely constructed, unsurprisingly in a way that never benefits the human life of the one being discarded. We see this first and foremost in the tragedy that is abortion and assisted suicide. But this view of “human life as disposable” is evident in so many other atrocities, such as genocide, human trafficking, nuclear proliferation and arms trade, and contraception.
Without a mind and heart inspired by Jesus Christ, our politics quickly becomes a power grab whose only aim and purpose is to never consider the indelible mark of love God has stamped on our hearts.
But as the words of John Paul II in that Vigil Mass of Pentecost in Victory Square of Warsaw remind us: It is the Holy Spirit that we must invoke, that we must call upon and invite to “renew the face of the earth, the face of this land.”
Let us pray, through the intercession of Saint John Paul II, that our political and cultural life would find meaning in the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ, King of the Universe!
