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Commentary
Pope
John Paul II: A Personalist Philosopher
by
Gaile Pohlhaus, Villanova University
Karol
Wojtyla was born in 1920 to a former school teacher
and an administrative officer in the Polish army. His
mother died shortly before Karol turned 9 and his brother
died nearly four years later. Karol’s father raised
his son with strict discipline but died before the
future pope was ordained. A brilliant student, Karol
was a philosopher who wrote his habilitation under
Max Scheler, a disciple of Husseral, the father of
phenomenology, which Karol grounded in the philosophy
of Thomas Aquinas. In lay person’s terms phenomenology
is the study of essences as they present themselves
to consciousness using pure descriptions. This led
Karol to formulate his personalist philosophy.
According
to Christopher West, the preeminent commentator on
Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, “personalism
treats ethical questions from this insider’s point
of view; as persons we are conscious of our acts.” And
so the philosopher Karol Wojtyla who became the Pope
John Paul II treated moral life from his own “insider’s” point
of view, the point of view of a young man who grew
up through adolescence without a mother or sister in
his home, in a country first overrun by Nazi’s and
then controlled by Communists and who turned in 1941
to an underground education in the Catholic church
for ordination. Karol Wojtyla was a complex person;
a philosopher who would use pure descriptions to talk
about Love and Responsibility as a philosopher
and Theology of the Body as a pope; a man who
was known for his devotion to Mary of Nazareth under
many titles; and a leader who was beloved by many and
followed completely by few.
In Love
and Responsibility Karol Wojtyla used this personalistic
norm – the only proper response to a person is love;
negatively put a person must never be used as a means
to an end. He would go on to say “personal order
is the only proper plane for all debate on matters
of sexual morality.” However, he would insist that
this would not separate us from objective truth.
This brings us to the Pope’s views on woman. As a
personalist he is looking for the essence which he
then universalizes.
Drawing
from several sources written by the Pope , Christopher
West devotes a whole section of his commentary on the
Pope’s Eulogy of Femininity: (CW, 121)
John
Paul is a man who loves woman with a purity as close
to the beginning as it seems possible to reach in this
life. It can even be said in light of the above analysis
that he is a man who knows woman (in a celibate way,
of course). He knows her distinctive beauty and dignity,
and he stands in awe of the mystery of God’s creative
love revealed in her.
The
Holy Father does not intend merely to state the obvious
when he notes that the “constitution of the woman
is different as compared with the man”(TB, 81). He
believes it is of great significance, and of particular
credit to woman, that God has chosen her body to
be the place of conception, the shrine of new life.
The whole constitution of woman’s body is made for
motherhood. Since the body reveals the person, John
Paul believes that this speaks volumes, not only
about feminine biology, but about the dignity and
nature of woman as a person. This is why he takes
special care to note that the Bible (and subsequently
the liturgy) “honors and praises throughout the centuries ‘the
womb that bore you and the breasts you sucked’ (Lk
:27). These words,” he continues, “constitute a eulogy
of motherhood, of femininity, of the female body
in its typical expression of creative love” (82).
In
her joyous proclamation, “I have gotten a man with
the help of the Lord,” woman expresses the whole theological
depth of the function of begetting and procreating.
Furthermore, in giving birth the first woman is fully
aware of the mystery of creation—of everything we have
been discussing about man’s “beginning”—which is renewed
in human generation. Yes, according to the Holy Father,
the entire mystery, dignity, goodness, vocation, and
destiny of man as revealed “in the beginning” is reproduced
in some sense every time a child is conceived under
the heart of a woman.
Given
this philosophical, personalistic, phenomenolistic
understanding of woman it is not surprising that for
the Pope function follows form. The essential form
of woman is to (potentially) give birth, thus this
is how her life is to be ordered. He says “Feminine
and masculine are different in a way that enables true
community.” “Without the difference of the sexes
an incarnate, life-giving communion would be impossible.” There
is an intentionality that is important in sexual intimacy,
that allows for the male to make a donation to the
female that she willingly accepts. This particular
view of woman reinforces the view of woman as passive.
In Mulieris Dignitatem the Pope stresses the
need for women to be treated equally in the workplace
with respect to wages and dignity as a human being
but he repeatedly focuses in on woman’s first vocation
to be mother either actually or symbolically, a role
he sees modeled in Mary of Nazareth.
In
the end it is the view of woman outlined above that
leads the Pope to assert: “I declare that the Church
has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination
on women and that this judgment is to be definitively
held by all the Church's faithful. ” The form of woman
is different from the form of man and since Christ
was a man, woman cannot properly model him as priest.
This despite the fact that the very first person who
could truly and completely say “this is my Body, this
is my Blood” was Mary of Nazareth.
2 Ordinatio
Sacerdotalis, “On Reserving Priestly Ordination
to Men”
May 22, 1994
Mulieris
Dignitatem, “On the Dignity and Vocation of Women”
August 15, 1988,
Redemptoris
Mater, “The Mother of the Redeemer”
March 25, 1987
Foreshadowed
in the Pope’s very first encyclical : Redemptor
Hominis, “The Redeemer of Man”
March 4, 1979
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