JPII, profs defined ‘full human person’

By Cathy Tilzey
As a young priest and faculty member at the University of Lublin, Poland, Father Karol Wojtyla sought to develop a sense of the whole person with dignity and human rights. As Pope John Paul II, he wrote extensively on the subject, including what is known as “theology of the body,” James Hanigan, Ph.D., told a large audience Feb. 26 at Carroll College.
A moral theologian and professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pa., Hanigan said the sense of the whole person needed to be developed. The future pope and the Polish university’s philosophy faculty defined the “full human person” concept.
“It was no accident of history,” he stated, “no casual or secondary afterthought, that led Pope John Paul II to become the most recognized, forceful and outspoken defender in the world of the human dignity and human rights of all the earth’s people.”
Hanigan spoke first on John Paul II’s understanding of the human person and human dignity, then on his teaching on conjugal love and marriage, views of marriage and family, and of the relationship between conjugal love and procreation.
In his first encyclical letter in 1979, the pope wrote what he later described as the charter or program for his papacy. He offered the Church and the world his vision of the Church’s mission and his own version of Christian humanism as he found them articulated in documents of Vatican II.
Twelve encyclical letters followed, as well as many exhortations, catechetical talks and homilies, continuing the theme of the human person’s centrality through the Church’s mission, Hanigan said. They sought to explain the foundation and meaning of human dignity, to defend from contemporary political, economic and cultural attack various aspects of human dignity and the rights of people in the world. Also, the pope exhorted fellow humans to a greater respect for the dignity of all.
The passion to defend the truth and dignity of people was also the motivation behind the catechetical talks now known as the theology of the body. Written before he became pope, and revised for Wednesday audiences, the talks were crafted to defend and develop the teaching of Pope Paul VI in “Humanae Vitae.”
He had a great respect for Paul VI, Hanigan said.
Pope John Paul II’s understanding of the human person was philosophical and theological. His theological richness came in the form of a biblical meditation in three stages – the past, present and future.
Hanigan said the past refers to creation, or the prehistorical phase of human existence, what John Paul II called the beginning. The present is the time after the fall of Adam and Eve until the period when people struggled with concupiscence. And the future looks to eschatological destiny, life in the kingdom of God.
He quoted that dimension, “to share in the divine life of the Trinity, to enjoy the perfect freedom of the children of God.”
Human nature by the very fact that it was assumed, not absorbed in him, has been raised to a dignity beyond compare, Hanigan said. By his incarnation, the son of God in a certain way united himself with each man.
The same man also experiences himself as divided, as wanting and not wanting to receive the gift of human existence, as a gift and as a call. he immediately finds himself called up in the mystery of sin, faced with the need to respond to the gift of existence with a yes or a no, to choose between good and evil, both of which attract and lure him. Inevitably, the human person must ask questions about the meaning of life, about the significance of choices, and about the meaning of actions, to what end they are to be directed and what purpose they are to serve.
“Dependent upon God and his fellow human beings for existence, the human person cannot live without love,” Hanigan said. “He will remain incomprehensible to himself; his life will lack meaning if love is not revealed to him.”
For John Paul II, participation in love was the human dimension of the mystery of redemption, and of entry into the mystery of the Trinity. John Paul said man finds again the greatest dignity and value that belong to his humanity. Humans find a creative restlessness, a deep longing for fulfillment, that reflects what is most characteristic and the deepest truth of being human – what John Paul II called the transcendent dimension. “A sense of personal responsibility for truth is fundamental to human dignity and human freedom,” Hanigan said. “That requires human persons to recognize they are neither the creators nor arbiters of the truth but servants of the truth, truth created and revealed by God and discovered by both faith and reason.
“Without this recognition and respect for truth, human freedom is and can only be an illusion. Where the truth of the human person is lost, freedom will be lost – something John Paul II had learned all too clearly from his earliest days in Poland.”
Following the example of Christ, this dignity expresses itself in a readiness and ability to serve others. Jesus came to serve, not to be served. This form of service, John Paul II noted, requires considerable spiritual maturity to serve others worthily and effectively. People must be able to master themselves and possess virtues to make mastery possible. For John Paul II, “this self-mastery is basic to human dignity, is made possible by the Holy Spirit, and is closely tied to every sphere of both Christian and human morality,” Hanigan explained.
In his 13th and last encyclical letter, when John Paul II returned to the important question of a relationship of truth and freedom in the modern world, his focus was on the eschatological dimension of human life.
The basic truth about the human person is the search for universal and absolute truth. The question the pope posed to people was about human dignity, and illustrates what Hanigan thinks is the term’s meaning. Where do we stand in regard to truth? … Do these truths set us free …?
A whole series of such questions could be asked, the professor said, “but frankly, folks, it all comes down to this question: Do we really know what it is to be a human being? And for John Paul II, it meant to be an acting, self-determining, embodied personal subject. And all of those words are important.”
On the subject of conjugal love of marriage, Hanigan said that according to John Paul II’s understanding of human life, a person is “called into being through love and made for love.”
Because people are made in the image and likeness of God, love must be understood in the light of God who is love. So “love needs to be understood as both a gift and a calling, both something received … and given to others through an act of self donation. The goal of such mutual self-giving is interpersonal communion,” Hanigan added.
If understood as spiritual and physical, love is something a person chooses to do, chooses to realize and is always to some degree a giving or communicating of oneself to the other, he explained. It is always a specific relationship between persons.
Love also has a moral character, and always seeks is the good of the beloved. In the mutual self giving and receiving, a man and woman come to know the truth of who and what they are, and what they were made for.
John Paul II views the person … interacting the personal subject, we are initiators of action. But of course he can’t deny, doesn’t deny the fact that we’re also material beings, we’re also acted upon in the world. So there are dimensions to all our human activities, of subjectivity and objectivity. How do you put those together?
The pope derived his understanding of the body in sexuality from the creation stories in the book of Genesis, and particularly from what he called the beginning, so his vision of human sexuality and human love can at first seem quite unreal. But he insisted that the human person cannot adequately be understood unless we return to the beginning and see the human person as what God intended from the beginning.
“What stands between us and the beginning is sin,” Hanigan said.. “Hence John Paul II’s reflections on sin and its consequence – concupiscence – can perhaps further clarify his theology of the body.”
Sin by introducing concupiscence into the world of human experience limits and distorts for human beings the nuptial meaning of the body, their recognition of the body’s capacity to express love as pure self donation through the gift of self. Concupiscence manifests itself in human sexual experience as lust.
The pope was very insistent that marriage and family are a true vocation.
On conjugal love and procreation, John Paul II was a vigorous defender of teaching on artificial contraception as propounded in “Humanae Vitae” before his election as pope. He wrote two books on it that were rumored to have deeply influenced Pope Paul VI when he wrote “Humanae Vita.”.
“Hence for John Paul II, there is here a whole spirituality of marriage that is connected with the Church’s teaching on birth control,” Hanigan said.

Published in The Montana Catholic, Vol. 23, No. 3, March 23, 2007.