John Paul II diagnoses as the central problem of our modern times and argue
that only Christian anthropology is able to redirect the distorted humanism of
modernity towards its proper Christian humanist roots.
TWO MODERN TIMES, TWO MODERN POPESUsing some rather broad strokes, I want to compare two‘modern times’: the
closing decades of the nineteenth century and the closing decades of the
twentieth. Here stood two great pontificates—that of Leo XIII and John Paul II.
Leo wasfirst pope to be born in the nineteenth century andfirst to die in
thetwentieth (1810–1903). Elected exactly one century after Leo’s election in
1878, John Paul II wasfirst pope to be born in the twentieth century and
first to die in the twenty-first century (1920–2005). The two pontificates
together amounted to fifty-two years. Even more telling is the fact that,
measured from Leo’s birth in 1810 to John Paul II’s death in 2005, the lived
experience of these two men encompass all modern times, both secular and
ecclesiastical—from Napoleon to the iPhone, from the Papal States and the
Austrian Empire (in whose army John Paul II’s father served) to European
union, from Our Lady of Lourdes to Madonna.
Given the contingencies of history, some of the parallels between Leo and
John Paul II are quite uncanny. Thefirst is of paramount importance. They
were conciliar popes. Each was elected in the wake of a controversial Ecumen-
ical Council. In Leo’s case, that was Vatican Council I (1869–70). Vatican I
was ended abruptly by the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in the
summer of 1870. That was the official excuse. The reality, however, was that
the temporal governments threatened to intervene militarily to stop the
Council even before it began. Under political pressure from their home
governments, the bishops solemnly affirmed papal infallibility and the uni-
versal jurisdiction of the Holy See, and then got out of town. After another
very troubled century that included two world wars, the Second Vatican
Council commenced in the fall of 1962.
I call Leo and John Paul II‘conciliar’popes for two reasons. First, because
each in their respective council had the right experience for playing a leader-
ship role. As Archbishop of Perugia, Pecci held his diocese together despite
constant harassment by the laicist Italian government, which confiscated
ecclesiastical properties and sporadically imposed a kind of martial law on
church liberties. Even so, from 1847 until 1878 Archbishop Pecci found the
time to teach philosophy and theology. He was a philosopher bishop. For his
part, Cardinal Archbishop Wojtyla brought to the Second Vatican Council not
only episcopal experience honed under political circumstances under the
communists even more burdensome than Pecci’s, but brought also his training
and experience as a teacher and author of philosophy and theology.
240 F. Russell Hittinger