By DONALD DeMARCO
Fr. Jaroslaw Kupczak, OP, has produced an excellent study on the thought of John Paul II, entitled, Destined for Liberty (2000). On the very last page, the author asks whether history will honor John Paul as “the Great.” This encomium, to be sure, is awarded most sparingly. Only Popes Leo I and Gregory I have been so honored.
Fr. Kupczak quotes George Weigel, who has informed us that both of history’s “Great” Pontiffs had one thing in common that was a claim to their distinguished title. Each was successful in resisting the threats of barbarians. Leo turned Attila the Hun back from Rome; Gregory effected a truce with the invading Lombards and then set to work converting them to orthodox Christianity.
Weigel proposes that John Paul’s claim to greatness has much in common with his towering Predecessors. “This time,” Weigel argues, “the barbarians are the modern and post-modern ‘masters of suspicion,’ whose radical deconstruction of reason poses a grave threat to Western civilization.”
John Paul makes reference to the “Masters of Suspicion,” borrowing the expression from philosopher Paul Ricoeur, in his Theology of the Body. These “suspicious” characters are Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, who are staunch and influential advocates of the Deadly Sins of Pride, Envy, and Lust, respectively.
The new barbarians, therefore, are intellectuals who have invaded the precincts of the human mind with deadly ideas. The modern world has trouble identifying them because it has stereotyped barbarians as being uneducated, unsophisticated, and illiterate roughnecks.
Those who are included in the broad ambit of “The Masters of Suspicion,” including the vast horde of Nietzscheans, Marxists, and Freudians, and more, are, as a matter of fact, well educated, sophisticated, and highly literate.
The old barbarians attacked the body; the new barbarians attack the mind. We must broaden our understanding of what it means to be a barbarian, for today’s barbarian has undergone a complete fashion change, or, in popular parlance, “a total makeover.” The new barbarian is clothed in sheepskin and is a cunning strategist.
The word “barbarian” originated when ancient Greeks heard people speaking in languages other than their own. Naturally, they found these alien tongues to be utterly incomprehensible. But they ridiculed what they could not comprehend, derisively referring to foreigners as simply mouthing “bar-bar.” The irony here, of course, is that it was those who did the ridiculing that were the barbarians, not necessarily the foreigners.
Barbarism, therefore, is attacking or dismissing what we do not understand simply because we do not understand it. When Stanford University students chanted, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western civ has got to go,” it should be clear who the barbarians were.
Dr. Carl Henry, in Twilight of A Great Civilization (1988), writes: “A half-generation ago the pagans were still largely threatening at the gates of Western culture; now the barbarians are plunging into the . . . mainstream. As they seek to reverse the inherited intellectual and moral heritage of the Bible . . . we are engaged as never before in a rival conflict for the mind, the conscience, the will, the spirit, the very selfhood of contemporary man.”
It is as if the new barbarians are suffering from an advanced form of semantic aphasia, no longer able to comprehend the meaning of marriage, motherhood, fatherhood, morality, conscience, person, rights, duties, virtue, good, evil, truth, beauty, and the very meaning of life. But in rejecting their intellectual and moral inheritance, they cover themselves with the mantel of barbarism.
It appears that the new barbarians, lost in a fog of relativism, paralyzed by political correctness, and submissive to the demands of self-centered students, myopic administrations, and meretricious publishing houses, have quietly slipped into barbarism without even noticing the transmo-
grification they have undergone. The beautiful butterfly has reverted to being a crawling caterpillar.
Against the new barbarians, John Paul has provided a solid, consistent, comprehensive, down-to-earth description of the human being. He has enlisted the insights of literature, art, philosophy, history, psychology, and theology to shed light on human nature.
As the Pope’s retort to the new barbarians, Fr. Kupczak concludes, “John Paul II created his Christian anthropology.” This is his “personalism,” his “anthro-
pological realism,” his concerted effort to provide an understanding of who we are as human beings so that we will have a firm basis on which to direct our moral lives. Unless we know who we are, we will not know what we are supposed to do.
Nowhere is contemporary barbarism more evident than in the life issues, especially with regard to abortion. Advocates of abortion have changed language to suit their ideology. The unborn child is merely a “fetus,” abortion is a “termination” or “a second chance to practice contraception,” the abortionist is a “health-care provider,” and so forth.
John Paul’s language is direct and unvarnished. Accordingly, the Holy Father states, in Evangelium Vitae, that democracies which deny the inalienable right to life of any human being from conception to natural death are “tyrant states.”
“Abortion and euthanasia are,” he boldly asserted, “crimes which no human law can claim to legitimize.”
He reminds his readers that the Commandment concerning the inviolability of human life is clearly stated in the covenant of Sinai: “You shall not kill” (Exodus 20:13); “Do not slay the innocent and righteous” (Exodus 23:7).
The New Testament is a refinement of these negative commands and emphasizes the positive: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Romans 13:9-10).
Consequently, “the deepest element of God’s commandment to protect human life is the requirement to show reverence and love for every person and the life of every person.”
Evangelium Vitae, therefore, is essentially a positive document, urging the building up of a Culture of Life based on love. It is also one that reaches out to a wide spectrum of humanity, to “all people of goodwill.”
Kenneth Woodward, former religion editor of Newsweek, in 1995 hailed it as “the clearest, most impassioned and most commanding encyclical of John Paul’s pontificate.” He believed that it would be the Holy Father’s “signature statement” in history.
The claim can be justly made that the now sainted Pontiff is, if not John Paul the Great, then surely the greatest Apostle of Life who has appeared on the modern stage.
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