St. John Paul II

Philosopher. Pope. Saint. (1920–2005)

[St. John Paul II @JP2Daily]

As the family goes, so goes the nation, and so goes the whole world in which we live.

[St. John Paul II @JP2Daily]

Cardinal Camillo Ruini has died in Rome at 95.

For 17 years he was John Paul II’s Vicar General of Rome, entrusted with the Pope’s own diocese, and from 1991 to 2007 he led the Italian bishops. John Paul made him a cardinal in 1991. Few men stood closer to the governance of the Church in those years.

His motto was “Veritas liberabit nos.” The truth will set us free.

Requiescat in pace.

[St. John Paul II @JP2Daily]

On Conversion

He believed no one is ever finished, that the door to begin again is always open, and that confession is not a courtroom but the place where a person is quietly handed back their life.

(Reconciliatio et Paenitentia, 1984)

[St. John Paul II @JP2Daily]

Worth knowing that Schnell gave this on the 25th anniversary of the U.S. rollout of John Paul II’s Ex Corde Ecclesiae (1990).

His constitution on Catholic universities already assigned the bishop “the right and duty to watch over the preservation and strengthening” of their Catholic identity. The mandate has been there all along.

[St. John Paul II @JP2Daily]

On Solidarity

The word that named a Polish union was also the core of his social teaching: that we are each, truly, responsible for all. Not vague pity, but a firm commitment to the good of everyone, because we are bound together whether we admit it or not.

(Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, 1987)

[St. John Paul II @JP2Daily]

On the Feminine Genius

It took John Paul II to put a name to it. Against an age that often measured women by how closely they resembled men, he insisted the world owes an immeasurable debt to the particular genius of women, and he meant it as praise, not consolation.

(Mulieris Dignitatem, 1988)

[St. John Paul II @JP2Daily]

On Culture

A nation survives not by its armies but by its culture, its language, its songs, its faith. He had watched Poland kept alive that way under occupation, and he told the world at UNESCO that to defend a people's culture is to defend its soul.

(Address to UNESCO, 1980)

[St. John Paul II @JP2Daily]

On Peace

“War is always a defeat for humanity,” he said. Peace is never merely the silence of guns but the fruit of justice and of forgiveness, the slow work of treating even your enemy as a person.

(Address to the Diplomatic Corps, 2003)

[St. John Paul II @JP2Daily]

Pure John Paul II and he helped draft the text beneath it. At Vatican II he shaped Gaudium et Spes, then spent his pontificate returning to its §24: man “cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.”

Losing yourself to find yourself was, for him, the law of the gift.

[St. John Paul II @JP2Daily]

On Christ and Man

The first encyclical of his pontificate made a startling claim: that you cannot really understand who you are apart from Christ. Take God out of the picture, he argued, and the human person becomes a riddle no one can solve. (Redemptor Hominis, 1979)

[St. John Paul II @JP2Daily]

@Bozka24P @Pontifex I know. My post paraphrased, the quoted words are Leo’s. The paraphrase, though, is nearly the original: Fides et Ratio begins, “God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth.”

[St. John Paul II @JP2Daily]

@EWTNVatican Pure John Paul II. At Tor Vergata in 2000, before 2M+ young people, he gave this exact idea its sharpest form. Christ stirs in you "the desire to do something great with your lives." Faith as a life, never a label.

[St. John Paul II @JP2Daily]

@EWTNVatican No pope had ever set foot in Spain until John Paul II in 1982, and he went straight into the crowds, city after city. Leo's doing it in the same streets.

[St. John Paul II @JP2Daily]

39 yrs ago today he returned to a Poland still under communist rule. The heart of that visit was the Eucharist, which is what he carries through the street in this photograph.

Days later he stood in Gdańsk, the cradle of the crushed Solidarity movement, and handed a beaten people back their courage, 2 yrs before that regime fell for good.

[Instytut Pamięci Narodowej @ipngovpl]

🗓️ 8 czerwca 1987 roku Papież Jan Paweł II rozpoczął III pielgrzymkę do Polski. Podczas tej wizyty odwiedził Warszawę, Lublin, Tarnów, Kraków, Szczecin, Gdynię, Gdańsk, Częstochowę, Łódź.

📰 Dowiedz się więcej ze specjalnego portalu #IPN: https://t.co/WPtVSArfCg

[St. John Paul II @JP2Daily]

On Conscience

Follow your conscience, yes, but he added the part most people skip: a conscience can be wrong, and so it carries a duty to be formed in the truth, not merely obeyed in whatever it happens to feel. (Veritatis Splendor, 1993)

[St. John Paul II @JP2Daily]

@Pontifex John Paul II said exactly this, and named the danger: once dignity depends on consensus, the consensus starts deciding who has it. (Evangelium Vitae)

[St. John Paul II @JP2Daily]

On Sunday

In a world that never stops working, he begged people to keep one day free. The hours you give to God, he wrote, are not lost. They are what keep you human. (Dies Domini, 1998)

[St. John Paul II @JP2Daily]

If you want the single idea beneath everything John Paul II taught, it is this:

A human being is never a means to someone else’s end. Every person, he insisted, is willed by God for their own sake, and so can never be used, traded, or thrown away for being inconvenient.

From that one conviction came all the rest.

> His defense of the unborn and the dying.
> His stand against both communism and unrestrained capitalism.
> His teaching that love is self-gift, not use.

He had watched two regimes treat human beings as raw material, and he spent his life arguing there was another way.