By George Weigel

John Paul II, the philosopher Pope, faces two totalitarianisms. The experience cemented his faith in the transcendence of human reason.

The most Visible Pope

Twenty years ago the College of Cardinals stunned the world by electing the first non-Italian pope in 455 yeas and the first Slavic successor to St. Peter ever. But even the more adventurous cardinal-electors in 1978 could not have imagined the impact that John Paul II -- the most visible pope and,arguably, the most visible human being, in history – would have on his times.

Catholic Church: Defender of Human Rights

John Paul has made the Catholic the world’s premier institutional defender of basic human rights: Central and Eastern Europe,Latin America and parts of East Asia are very different places today because of his critiques of totalitarian and authoritarian governments and his proposals for building the free and virtuous society. The pope’s insistence that freedom must be linked to truth and fulfilled in goodness has helped shape the public debate in established democracies. At a time when many figures on the world stage seem smaller than their responsibilities demand, he has continued, even amid physical limitations, to be an unavoidable reference point.

Nazism and Communism

Both John Paul II’s global activism and his teaching on virtually every aspect of the church’s life have been shape by his trenchant analysis of contemporary culture. As a young man personally familiar with the terrors of both Nazism and communism, Karol Wojtyla came to the conclusion that the crisis of the 20th century had to do with ideas. Humanity was risking self-destruction because of a crisis in the very idea of the human person – a crisis that was at the root of the century’s destructive economic and political systems.

Springtime of Human Spirit

Why had a century that had begun with the confident proclamation of humanity’s coming of age produced, in short order, three totalitarianisms, two world wars, and technologies that threatened humanity’s very existence? The mountains of corpses and the oceans of blood, the Holocaust and the Gulag Archipelago, were all, Wojtyla believed, the lethal products of false ideas about human nature, human community, human history and human destiny. In this crisis of world civilization, it was the church’s task to challenge the new barbarians – be they fascists, communist or utilitarians who reduced human beings to objects for manipulation – in the name of human dignity and human freedom. In proclaiming a true humanism and a genuine freedom, the church was fulfilling its ancient mission and, as he told the United Nations in 1995, helping to prepare a “springtime of the human spirit” after a long, dark winter of suffering.

Faith and Reason

Pope John Paul II extended this defense of the inalienable dignity of every human being in his recently issued 13th encyclical, Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason). Now he challenges those among his fellow philosophers who claim that human beings cannot know the truth of things. In doing so, he has positioned the Catholic Church as the defender of human reason in a season of new irrationalities. In most prestigious university philosophy departments today, the majority of philosopher’s have convinced themselves that human reason cannot, as they put it, “get to” truth. John Paul describes this profound skepticism, rather gently, as a “false modesty” and urges philosophers to rediscover their singular vacation.

Think About Truth

Many contemporary philosophers have declared the great question of the human condition – why is there something rather than nothing, what is good and what is evil, what is happiness and what is delusion -   out of bounds. The Pope asks them to take up those questions again, with a new openness to the possibility that theology might be an insightful conversation partner. Religion that cuts itself off from reason deteriorates into superstition. But philosophies that prematurely foreclose the question of truth (including transcendent Truth or God) so drastically limit what John Paul calls their “horizon” that they fall into the trap of solipsism: thinking about thinking about thinking about thinking, rather that thinking about truth. In both cases, the human project suffers. For when reason is suspect, technology trumps moral truth, human dignity is threatened, freedom risks captivity to someone’s will to power.

Recovering Intellectual Riches

The ancient Greeks and the masters of early Christian thought they knew better, John Paul writes: They knew that reason could know the true, the good and the beautiful, even if it grasped them incompletely. Thus the path to a more humane 21st century, he suggests, lies in recovering our nerve by recovering some of the great intellectual riches of our civilization. It is a challenge wholly consonant with two decades of the teaching and public witness of John Paul II, the pope of Christian humanism.

There’s More to Do

The most peripatetic of popes has already visited 117 countries, held live audiences on the internet, published a bestseller and blessed more people that his 263 predecessors combined. Perhaps no other leader – religious or secular – has reached out so effectively across so much of the globe. But as he enters the third decade of is reign, the 78 year-old leader of the world’s 1 billion Roman Catholics is defying age and infirmity to tackle unfinished business as ambitious as what he has already achieved. High on the agenda is a pilgrimage to the biblical lands of the Middle East and a summit meeting there with leaders of Judaism and Islam – monotheistic faiths that, like Christianity, trace their roots to Abraham. And healing the 1, 000 year-rift between the Vatican and Orthodox Christianity is a priority.

John Paul is also plotting a journey through time: a year-long celebration in Rome to greet Christendom’s third millennium. And in the countdown to 2000, he is demanding repentance for sins committed by Christians down through history in over zealous defense of their faith.

The mountains of corpses and the oceans of blood, the Holocaust and the Gulag Archipelago, were all, Wojtyla believed, the lethal products of false ideas about human nature, human community, human history and human destiny.