John Paul II's Vision for Vatican II

By Cardinal Robert Sarah

To understand Pope Saint John Paul II, we will begin with a brief examination of the office of the papacy. All popes are called to the mission of the office, but how they live out that mission will be particular to the unique circumstances of history in which they serve. So, we will examine the post-Vatican II milieu in which John Paul was elected, to show how this defines his legacy.

The Role of Peter

John Paul II’s whole mission as pope was to be the visible sign of the unity of truth as a witness to love, which he both taught and personified. To explore his own understanding of the papacy, let us turn to a 1993 General Audience. Herein John Paul II spoke about the essential mission of the Pope as “doctrinal.”¹ He said, “As universal pastor, the Pope has the mission to proclaim revealed doctrine and to promote true faith in Christ throughout the Church. This is the integral meaning of the Petrine ministry.” In other words, the Pope’s most primary task is safeguarding and sharing the deposit of faith. And it is in service of the doctrinal that the pope acts most pastorally, or as John Paul II put it: as universal pastor.

He continued, “the mission of Peter and his successors is to establish and authoritatively confirm what the Church has received and believed from the beginning, what the apostles taught, what Sacred Scripture and Christian Tradition have determined as the object of faith and the Christian norm of life…in this way the Bishop of Rome’s Magisterium indicates to everyone the way of clarity and unity.” Here we see another crucial role of the Pope that is closely related to the primary task of safeguarding the deposit of faith: he faithfully transmits the teaching handed down through the centuries, proclaiming these truths unambiguously.

Finally, this is all in service of relationship to Christ. John Paul wrote, “The teaching of Peter’s successor contains, in essence, a witness to Christ, to the event of the Incarnation and the redemption, to the Holy Spirit’s presence and action in the Church and history…. [I]ts relationship to the living truth, Christ, has been, is and will always be its vital force.” The Church witnesses to truth as a means of bringing all into relationship with Jesus; for the more we integrate the fullness of the truth that is Christ, the more deeply we experience the love and life of the Trinity.

This reflection of John Paul II highlights the role of Peter: to be the universal pastor of the visible Church who protects and proclaims the truths of the faith as a means of bringing all people into relationship with Christ and, thereby, the Trinity. While all popes are entrusted with this great mission, John Paul II was called to be universal pastor amidst the turmoil of the post-Vatican II Church.

John Paul II’s Papacy

Pope Saint John Paul II’s impact was vast, but his legacy is best understood as an authentic interpreter of Vatican II. At the Council, the young Bishop Karol Wojtyla played a significant role by partaking as a Council Father and drafting its documents, particularly Gaudium et Spes, one of the four constitutions of Vatican II. In the wake of the Council, he argued for proper interpretation and implementation for “the enrichment of faith.” In Sources of Renewal: The Implementation of the Second Vatican Council Wojtyla explained its two complementary aspects: (1) the enrichment of the content of the faith, which is dogmatic and objective; and (2) the enrichment of the believer’s life of faith, which is pastoral and subjective.² Whereas some were and still are tempted to set the two against each other, favoring their individual preference, Wojtyla recognized the doctrinal and pastoral as two sides of the same coin. He wrote, “The doctrine of faith and morals is the content of the teaching of the pastors of the Church, so that on the one hand doctrinal acts of the Magisterium have a pastoral sense, while on the other pastoral acts have a doctrinal significance, deeply rooted as they are in faith and morals.”³

This service to the truth expressed doctrinally and pastorally took on new importance when Wojtyla was elected pope in the wake of Vatican II. John Paul II was faithful to clarity in teaching—a central role for any pope, as discussed above—yet he also had unique gifts that were extraordinarily creative and fruitful for the Church. Deepening the Church’s understanding of magisterial teaching in several areas, John Paul II’s theology was dynamic yet still rooted in the deposit of faith.

Let us look more closely at John Paul II’s legacy in authentically interpreting Vatican II through three particular dimensions of his theology: 1) his Christocentric vision; 2) his anthropological vision; and 3) his ecclesiological vision.

Christocentric Vision

In John Paul’s theology, everything begins and ends with Christ. His first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, opens with the affirmation that “Jesus Christ, is the center of the universe and of history.”⁴ In many respects this sentence defines his entire pontificate, and it echoes Vatican II, which called Jesus “Lord of human history as well as of salvation history.”⁵

Man is fallen and needs a savior, and salvation history is the story of how God enters history to draw man back to himself to the point of sending his son, God as man, to do for man what man cannot do for himself.

From the very beginning of his pontificate John Paul pointed to Christ. As he famously proclaimed in his inaugural homily as the newly elected Holy Father, “Be not afraid. Open wide the doors for Christ.”⁶ He announced this in the context of personal conversion but also within the context of politics, economics, and culture. As the Council Fathers phrased it, “The Gospel of Christ constantly renews the life and culture of fallen man,”⁷ and so it must be the lens through which we view culture, politics, sociological developments, and everything that relates to the human person.

Ethics must be rooted in who Jesus Christ reveals man to be. Man is not able to choose for himself what is good and evil. Nor is he a tool to be used for economic or political gain. Man is not simply a consumer of goods as too many political systems treat him. Rather, man is called to imitate Christ in building a society that pursues justice and the proper end of man. Technology is to be channeled toward that which is properly good for man, rather than a tool to be made bigger and stronger regardless of its impact on the human person and a just society. And only Christ reveals what that order should look like.

John Paul’s great encyclical Veritatis Splendor was another unique contribution to the Church’s theological conversation. It opens with the proclamation that Jesus Christ is “the true light that enlightens everyone,”⁸ and leads men to freedom in truth. The Pope’s encyclical mirrored Vatican II’s desire that “by these ideals may Christians be led, and all mankind enlightened, as they search for answers to questions of [great] complexity.”⁹ What does this look like practically? John Paul addressed an errant approach that became popular after Vatican II: moral theologians and pastors suggesting conscience could supplant objective truth. He condemned attempts to “legitimize so-called ‘pastoral’ solutions contrary to the teaching of the Magisterium, and to justify a ‘creative’ hermeneutic according to which the moral conscience is in no way obliged, in every case, by a particular negative precept.”¹⁰

We see this also in perhaps John Paul II’s greatest gift to the Church, the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Its teaching is incredibly clear while the text is thoroughly pastoral: throughout the four pillars of the Catechism, we are invited into the beauty of the faith that draws man back to God and offers him participation in divine life.

For Catholics there is no greater form of worship than participation in the Mass, the source and summit of our faith, as Sacrosanctum Concilium noted,¹¹ and the devotions flowing from the Divine Liturgy. In an age when popular devotions were often treated dismissively, John Paul reminded the Church that Christ reveals himself through popular piety, especially those centered in Christ. This is why the liturgy, while an act of the community, must express the beauty of Christ’s salvific action. It is not an expression of the community, but a re-presentation of Christ’s love for us within the community.

John Paul’s Marian devotion, as well, is famous in part because it revealed his total self-gift of himself to Christ. It was not a sentimental devotion but a deeply personal devotion that led John Paul to the foot of the cross, surrendering himself completely to the will of the Father for his life. Always concerned to show how the doctrinal illumines the pastoral, John Paul II’s beautiful reflection on suffering, Salvifici Doloris, honored all who “suffer and give their lives for the truth and for a just cause”¹² and lit a path forward through redemptive suffering.

Anthropological Vision

John Paul II’s Christological vision permeated his anthropological vision. According to Revelation, man is created in the image and likeness of God and is endowed with dignity that makes him unique from all other earthly creatures.¹³ This anthropological vision is best described in the now well-known passage from Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes #22, “Christ reveals man to himself.”

Christ is the door to understanding the human person. Christ is the perfect man, but he also reveals who all of us are created to be. This Christian anthropology is at the heart of Vatican II, which took on life under John Paul’s pontificate.

In his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, John Paul laid out a vision of the faith based on this notion that man has a sublime dignity. “The truth is that only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light…. Human nature, by the very fact that it was assumed, not absorbed, in [Christ], has been raised in us also to a dignity beyond compare.”¹⁴ This dignity is rooted in man’s capacity to love. As he goes on to say, “Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible to himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it.”¹⁵

This love is not a superficial fulfillment of passing desires or emotions. Rather, it is a participation in the self-gift of God’s own life. It is the love between the three persons of the Trinity revealed to us in Christ to which, through grace, we are called.¹⁶ God is love and we are all made for this love.¹⁷

This is the key to understanding John Paul II’s vision for the human person: we are made to freely participate in the love of God, which is ordered to that which is true. In this respect, truth is not a limit to our freedom but the path to authentic freedom.

This basic anthropology, rooted in the revelation of Christ, was extraordinarily fruitful throughout John Paul’s pontificate. It shaped his social encyclicals, his engagement of the political order, his challenge to the clergy, religious and laity, his outreach to the young, and his personal witness to the call of Christian witness.

John Paul II’s Theology of the Body is just one example of his creative and truly original insights based on this Christian anthropology. Through his series of 130 general audiences that became what we now know as his Theology of the Body, John Paul developed a response to the sexual revolution of the 1960’s and 1970’s that wrecked the cultural landscape of the West. At the heart of this philosophical and Scriptural catechesis was his reminder to us that we are subjects of God’s love, and we should treat others also as subjects for love, not objects to be used. Theology of the Body is the incarnation of Vatican II’s call that the teaching office of the Church “is not above the word of God, but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on, listening to it devoutly, guarding it scrupulously and explaining it faithfully.”¹⁸ What a gift this is for the Church!

With the challenges of profoundly anti-human developments in technology of our own time, like artificial contraception or the transgender movement, there is a desperate need to build on the principles of Christian humanism today to save man from himself. This is a gift the Church offers to the modern world and there is no better model of how to respond to the challenges of the modern world than the “new humanism”¹⁹ Vatican II saw burgeoning and the Christian humanism proposed by John Paul II.

Ecclesiological Vision

Finally, we see so much of this expressed in Pope Saint John Paul II’s ecclesiology. The Church is not a closed community building walls to protect it from the modern world, but the mystical body of Christ who invites all men and women into communion with him through the life of the Church. John Paul’s vision of the Church was clearly shaped by Vatican II’s Constitution, Lumen Gentium.

In many respects Lumen Gentium finished the work of Vatican I by expanding the notion of the Magisterium to include more than the Supreme Pontiff. The Magisterium includes the bishops around the world who are united with the Holy Father, and even the faithful as they express the sensus fidelium, which is always rooted to the Deposit of Faith. John Paul II lived out this teaching by calling six ordinary synods that convened bishops from the universal church to discuss pressing issues and one extraordinary synod to examine the implementation of Vatican II twenty years after its conclusion.²⁰

Lumen Gentium also makes clear that the Pope does not govern the Church independently from bishops, the faithful and, importantly, Sacred Tradition. Whereas some have been tempted to alter parts of Sacred Tradition in the belief that this will lead more people to Christ, John Paul II saw that the Church’s missionary dynamism comes from “professing and proclaiming in its integrity the whole of the truth transmitted by Christ.”²¹ Everyone and everything in the Church finds its source in Christ and exists to draw men and women to him. As John Paul said at the beginning of his pontificate, “The Church wishes to serve this single end: that each person may be able to find Christ, in order that Christ may walk with each person the path of life, with the power of the truth about man and the world that is contained in the mystery of the Incarnation and the Redemption and with the power of the love that is radiated by that truth.”²²

The Church, for John Paul, is not a political platform or a sounding board. Rather, it is the means through which Christ enters the world. She might fail from time to time in this mission, but this is why the Church exists: to bring people to Christ. The Church is, as Lumen Gentium called her, “the universal sacrament of salvation.”²³

John Paul was unafraid to be creative in how the Church fulfills this mission. His famous openness to new movements or new initiatives allowed for a springtime in the Church. New movements flourished under his leadership, as did creative initiatives like World Youth Day and The World Meeting of Families, all a part of his understanding that the Church is more than the hierarchy or static structures. The Church is a dynamic reality that animates the world with the presence of Christ.

Conclusion

Through the challenges of a Church divided in a post-Vatican II world, John Paul II melded an uncompromising commitment to the deposit of faith with a dynamic, living understanding of that faith. By staying centered on the truth who is Christ, the pope strove for the enrichment of faith through the doctrinal and the pastoral. And he lived this by his witness. He delivered the call to total self-gift inherent in Church teachings with such love that it attracted countless people to the faith. I know personally of many priests who were drawn to the priesthood because of the example of John Paul II. The massive turnout of young adults at World Youth Days throughout his pontificate also shows how his bold proclamations of the fullness of faith were not a deterrent but a magnet.

Today we desperately need a Church that is a witness to the truth of the human person; that engages in the public square but is not political; that upholds the lifegiving witness of the saints and their uncompromising commitment to the truth; that is unmoved by the ever-changing zeitgeist of secularism; that honors Church law as a gift through which the Holy Spirit works; that unifies around the person of Jesus Christ who is the Way, the Truth and the Life; and that is not afraid to proclaim that the Church is the mystical body of Christ. This is our faith. This was the work of Pope Saint John Paul II, and is the work of the Holy Father, any Holy Father. Through John Paul the Great's intercession, may his good work continue through all his successors.

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Robert Cardinal Sarah was born in Guinea, West Africa. He is Prefect Emeritus of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments and serves as a member on several Vatican Dicasteries. He has written several books, including God or Nothing and The Power of Silence. This article was abridged from an address given at Christendom College in 2024.

1. General Audience, March 10, 1993.

2. Sources of Renewal: The Implementation of the Second Vatican Council (New York: Harper & Row, Publications Inc, 1980), pp. 15–18.

3. Ibid., p. 17.

4. Redemptor Hominis, 1.

5. Gaudium et Spes, 41.

6. Homily, October 22, 1978.

7. Gaudium et Spes, 58.

8. Veritatis Splendor, 1.

9. Gaudium et Spes, 46.

10. Veritatis Splendor, 56.

11. Sacrosanctum Concilium, 10.

12. Salvifici Doloris, 22.

13. Genesis 1:26.

14. Redemptor Hominis, 8.

15. Redemptor Hominis, 10.

16. See Redemptor Hominis, 1.

17. 1 John 4:8.

18. Dei Verbum, 10.

19. Gaudium et Spes, 55.

20. “Synods Since Vatican II,” Zenit, September 30, 2001.

21. Redemptor Hominis, 4.

22. Redemptor Hominis, 13.

23. Lumen Gentium, 48.