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From Institutions to Anthropology
The Christian Humanism of John Paul II
and the Crisis of Modern Times
F. Russell Hittinger
INTRODUCTIONJohn Paul II was hardly thefirst pope to reckon with modern times. Upon his
election in 1978, he became thefifteenth pope since the French Revolution.
For two centuries, his predecessors experienced and interpreted the social
issues against the background of continual crises: political revolution, indus-
trial revolution, protracted economic depression, ideologies of class and racial
warfare, and two world wars. In the closing decades of the twentieth century,
John Paul II taught that the social question today has become‘a radically
anthropological question’.^1 It cannot be adequately diagnosed or remedied in
the light of man’s external works, such as his laws and constitutions, or his
great global revolutions in medicine and communications. The malaise of late
modernity is not material, but spiritual. For John Paul II, this spiritual crisis
cannot be put simplistically as irreligion versus religion. In late modernity, it is
not God but man who is in the dock. Man has turned his ever-nagging
spiritual doubts upon himself.
In this chapter, I willfirst attempt to identify the crisis of modern times by
comparing the historical and cultural contexts of John Paul II to Leo XIII. In a
second section, I will then describe how John Paul II built on the Leonine
tradition but shifted the focus from institutions as arenas of human action
within which modern issues are addressed to anthropology as the fundamental
premise for social and cultural analysis, and indeed for the life of institutions. In
thefinal, third section, I will conclude by describing the‘negative anthropology’
(^1) Benedict XI,Caritas in veritate§75.