What it means to be human

The Theological Anthropology of St John Paul II

A talk given to the students of the University Catholic Society, Canmore 12.02.2020

Introduction

Thank you for your introduction. I’m afraid you’ve still left me with a question though:
What on earth am I doing here?
What on earth am I doing here?
What on earth am I doing here?
What on earth am I doing here?
What on earth am I doing here?
and what on earth am I doing here with you?

Well that’s pretty much taken care of the questions of anthropology: what it means to be human, the human person in activities and context, alone and with others. (Anyone studying anthropology?) It is essential, not because we all need to study anthropology as an academic discipline, – we don’t, – but because the understanding of the human person is at the root of all thought systems, as well as all our own personal choices, goals and means and our social and cultural life. This will become clearer as we continue. You are a very divers bunch and it is quite likely that some of what I am going to say will be old hat to some people in some places, and incomprehensible in others. I suggest that if you get lost you attract my attention and I will make a mark in my text and take that up later. Things may become clearer as we progress. If it’s just a particular word or something, do give a shout, but probably save the questions, and I hope you will have some, for the end.

What is theological anthropology?

Specifically theological anthropology is not concerned with the study of the religious activities of individuals and cultures – which would come under social and cultural anthropology : rather it looks at the meaning of the human person in the light of theism.

For Christianity the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, Resurrection and Pentecost give the fundamental base to the meaning of human life and the human person, but this doesn’t exist in isolation from the understanding of the human person gained in biology, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, cultural studies, the humanities and natural sciences in general. The truth given in Revelation is unchanging, but theological anthropology develops, because theological anthropology concerns the whole human person and therefore must include components of biological, social, and cultural knowledge – and these have developed and changed beyond all imagining over the centuries. For example, we heard a couple of weeks ago from Prof Biello about a connection between the insights of theology and the empirical findings of neuroscience. Theological anthropology interacts with numerous other fields of study to their mutual enrichment contributing to our understanding of them, and, crucially, this understanding of the human person informs our choices in areas of politics, economics, culture and ethics. Myself, I’m currently working with Professor Karin Fierke in International Relations trying to understand the importance of theological anthropology in different faiths in order to try to understand its impact on political theory and political practice. (If you happen to be obsessed with terrorism studies – you know who you are! – hello there!)

Pope John Paul II explicitly stated that the gospel is always preached by contemporary persons to contemporary persons. As Fr MJ mentioned in the sermon on Sunday, this is not a sell out to the extremes of subjectivity and relativism (this is my experience, this feels fine to me, true, right, good and claims for objective norms are unconvincing and at best dodgy) but a recognition that we can neither be understood nor understand nor receive or proclaim the Gospel except within our context and experience. I want to introduce something of the breadth of application of John Paul’s theological anthropology, so although some of you are familiar with, or aware of, his Theology of the Body, but I will not be concentrating on that, both because it is something with which you are more likely to be familiar, and also because it is often read for its explanation of one particular aspect of human life and I want to give you an appreciation of his wider thought.

Karol Wojtyła

Looking very – I mean very – briefly at the life of Karol Wojtyła, Pope John Paul II we can see some of the experiences and practical realities which pushed his theological and philosophical thought. He lived at a time when the experience of being human emerged from and collided with some of the greatest horrors known to the human race, as well as some of the greatest technological advances. What did it mean to be human in the light of this experience, and how did humans come to develop and implement such situations in the first place?
Karol Wojtyła was born in Poland in 1920. (When Dr King, who spoke to us a couple of weeks ago, was born, Karol was a toddler.) He had an older sister who died in infancy before he was born, his mother died before his ninth birthday and his older brother died when Karol was twelve. He was himself profoundly affected by it and if anyone has lost a sibling or parent, you in particular may resonate with this. He matriculated in the Jagiellonian University in 1938 spending his first undergraduate year studying Polish literature and philology, hoping to spend his life as a poet and actor. (anyone reading literature or language? involved in Mermaids?) He returned for his second year of studies, but the Nazis arrived in about week 2 of the semester followed 2 weeks later by the Soviet Stalinists. The university was closed down, the faculty among the hundreds of thousands immediately imprisoned and soon executed or deported. (We’re in week 3 of the semester now, so about this stage of the term , though it was the first semester. You may have seen the film Katyn.) The country was first divided between the two occupying forces, before the Soviets were expelled and the Nazis took sole control. This was a situation of horror which we might not even want to imagine. The occupying forces firmly intended to destroy the very existence of the country, appropriating its territory and wiping out its people, language, culture and any possible shred of Polish identity. Although the universities did continue underground in some form, it was illegal to meet together in any way, punishable by instant execution even to read poetry together, even merely to chat with a group of friends, have discussions, read poetry. Would you risk a concentration camp to study in private, or summary execution to meet friends in Canmore? There was death, starvation, total humiliation and degradation. Nearly 6 million Poles, along with millions of others, were killed. And there was also heroism in efforts to help, to save, to do good for others, and to retain faith and belief, to retain some semblance of dignity amidst the murders, the destitution and the shame. Karol meanwhile had transferred to the study of theology in the underground seminary and was ordained priest in 1946, shortly after the end of the war, and was then sent to Rome, leaving his native country for the first time, (as some of you will have done). He was further exposed to the turmoil and confusion associated with the convulsions and turmoil which had swept Europe. His doctorate was on St John of the Cross, the 16^th century Carmelite mystic whose spirituality had been massively important to Karol since he was introduced to it during the war.

Post War Experience & Some History of Philosophy

When the universities were reopened in Poland after the war it was to the philosophy lectures that the returning students came in droves, packing out the lecture theatres and the corridors outside them. (Think Buchanan with students crowding the foyer and spilling out into Union St, or Physics Theatre A with the entrance area packed out with students. ) The crucible of war and totalitarian communism tore from the hearts of those who endured them the most profound questions of the meaning of life.
How to understand this experience of hideous brutality and the heroism? What was the cause of this particular evil which they had experienced? Original sin, yes, but that has always been present and why did this specific catastrophe happen? The world had been convulsed by the atrocities carried out in the name of ideologies, of ways of thinking about society and the human person in society and individually. How to understand the human person after this? What was man that he could descend, – and ascend – to such depths and such heights?
On his return to Poland from Rome Wojtyła spent a brief spell in parochial ministry, which he loved, before he was ordered by his bishop to undertake a habilitation thesis (like a second doctorate which would enable him to teach at university level). He turned to philosophy and thus began a career as a philosopher which he sustained even after returning to pastoral ministry.
Wojtyła came to attribute the source of the evil they had each experienced proximately to philosophical error, believing that ‘philosophies of evil’, which he identified in Communism, Nazism and Fascism more widely, which he identified as implicated in the ‘eruptions of evil’ in twentieth century Europe. [1]

(We should note that in his later writing capitalism came in for severe criticism too.)

These philosophies of evil: we need to backtrack a bit
After the development of the empirical sciences from the discoveries of Galileo (1564 – 1642), the emergent Cartesian rationalism (1596 – 1650), Newton (1642 – 1726) and Newtonian physics a shift occurred in the western world of philosophy. The post-Newtonian world, with its belief that the empirical sciences would one day be able to explain all, was pre-occupied with examination of concrete matter. That which could be demonstrated and experienced became primary and displaced the transcendent, – that which is beyond experience and scientific demonstration, – as a source of knowledge. Acknowledging this is most emphatically not to pit science against theology or philosophy but to tease out the path which philosophy took. It was inevitable and necessary that philosophy should develop alongside the physical sciences and neither science nor philosophy in itself can be blamed for the distortions with which philosophy proceeded.
You will have heard the famous quote from Descartes, I think therefore I am. This basically means I’m thinking. My thoughts may be wrong, but the fact that I am thinking is certain, and shows that I actually do exist and am alive. We are already learning a huge amount from science. We know that there are scientific explanation to things we didn’t understand before, and we will eventually find the scientific reasons for everything. We were ignorant of many things before, so I can, and may, doubt all that seems to be fact and simply stick with the undeniable experience that I am currently thinking about something (even if I am ignorant or wrong). To this I think, I am conscious, therefore – (this proves that) – I am, Wojtyła respond saying I am, therefore I am conscious; or to put it in philosophical language, it is being which constitutes consciousness and not consciousness which constitutes being.[2]
The attitude of Descartes centres man on his own consciousness – I experience myself because I am thinking therefore I actually am, and shifts all self-awareness away from both the objective and the transcendent, that which is beyond myself. Human interiority becomes centred on the self and cut off from the transcendent, the non-material beyond the experiencing self. Closely correlated with this comes a philosophical attack on the possibility of a transcendent, self-revealing God.[3] There could be an idea of God, but not the God who was the source of being, existing of himself, and especially not revealing himself in any way beyond science. The philosopher and the scientist, according to this trajectory of learning, in so far as they might chose to accept a ‘god’, could not accept a God of Revelation, beyond both scientific experiment and human thought, hence Christianity could no longer be a fruitful source for philosophy. Losing both the fundamental understanding of the human person created in the image of God, and the possibility of learning from that which is beyond the tangible and demonstrable, strikes at the very root of human self-understanding for the Christian. [4]
The understanding of the individual exists in parallel with understanding of social life and the place of the individual in his or her context. In the C19th in particular much of the necessary analysis of social life, economic life, and so forth, developed in the furrow ploughed by philosophies lacking the insights of Revelation and hostile to it. Nevertheless, there are aspects of the analysis of the material conditions of society and the life of ordinary people made by Marx (1818 – 1883) and Engels for example, which are undoubtedly correct and fully in keeping with the Gospel, recognising injustice, inhuman conditions, wrong relationship to work, wealth, the unjust structures of society, and these insights were appreciated and respected by Wojtyła. He attributed the failures of these philosophies, these “evil philosophies,” to their exclusion of God and of the image of God as constitutive of the human. Ultimately, he said, the human person is ‘degraded and pulverised’ through false philosophies, be it through fascism, soviet communism or even the materialistic priorities of capitalism. Marx saw the overthrowing of capitalism through class struggle, and subsequent forms of Communism proposed violent rebellion and war as the way to do this. Fascism builds on the age-old tendency to attribute superiority to a particular group and condemn others as less than human or unfit to live, which insidiously took fresh inspiration from the belief in an exclusively scientific explanation. If, for example, congenital physical or mental problems as they apparently limit the human person could be explained by science (and some of them certainly can) but without reference to an understanding of the human person which transcends science, then there can be apparently every justification for science simply ending these lives. Any understanding of the human person which allows for the conclusion that some people are not fully human, or not useful for any reason, can look benevolently on a programme of ethnic cleansing, mass extermination, euthanasia, abortion, social injustice and indifference to those who suffer. Christian theological anthropology, on the other hand, must work equally well for every single human person: a definition of the human person or human life which makes any person an exception, which excludes fully or partially any human person whatsoever, ultimately cannot stand up. The very same dignity as a human person has to be found in someone fit, healthy, successful, (whatever that is), as the disabled, in the beggar on the street outside Tesco, the elderly person robbed of so much that we call humanity by Alzheimer’s, as in the successful business person or professional etc etc etc (Practical theology and disability have a huge contribution to make here, and theological anthropology has a foundational place in this.)
Wojtyła stood firm in the commitment to listen to the trends of social analysis, political commentary and philosophy in order both to deepen and promote Christian understanding and to forge tools to articulate the truth about the human person; to facilitate philosophical and theological conversation, and be pertinent for life. You can see the absolute imperative of having a sufficiently coherent account of God’s gift of life that we are able to listen and speak to those with questions, problems, profound suffering and real anguish; to speak to them of the divinely given gift of life with the coherence of God’s revelation, in the profound complexities and struggles of the world in which we live. This is evangelisation.

Finding the Self

So what is the human person? There is a passage in the document Gaudium et Spes of the Second Vatican Council which Wojtyła frequently quoted, especially in his papal writings.

… the Lord Jesus, when He prayed to the Father, “that all may be one. . . as we are one” (John 17:21-22) opened up vistas closed to human reason, for He implied a certain likeness between the union of the divine Persons, and the unity of God’s sons in truth and charity. This likeness reveals that man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself. (Cf Lk 17: 33)

These words, he wrote, ‘can be said to sum up the whole of Christian anthropology’.

This statement explicitly states that ‘vistas closed to human reason’ concerning the meaning of the human person, that is, things that we can’t work out through unaided reason or scientific proof, are opened to man in the Trinitarian prayer of Christ, in the divine revelation of the inner life of God. This gift of revelation doesn’t simply present reason with a new fact that it may now easily grasp even as the fact that there is a form of words which we can recite doesn’t enable us to grasp intellectually the inner life of the Trinity. We learn that God is One and undivided. We know that God is Three Persons who exist in pouring out life to each other. This is something which should really grab our attention: whatever is this? I’m reliably told that many priests often dread having to preach on the Trinity and I suspect that many Christians sort of put it to one side. Yet not only is it the heart of faith, but it is also the key to our understanding of the human person, of our selves, your self, my self, because there exists a ‘likeness between the union of the divine Persons, and the unity of God’s sons in truth and charity ’.

However, there is a very real tension within the passage I just quoted from Gaudium et Spes, John Paul goes so far as to describe it as ‘an apparent contradiction’: On the one hand God wills each person, each one of us, for his or her own sake: -‘ man, … is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself,’ I may never be used as a means to an end, you may never be used as a means to an end, and neither you nor I may ever use each other or any other person as a means to an end. This is explicit and central in the work of John Paul. He recognises the similarity to this of Kant’s in the second categorical imperative. (If you don’t know what on earth that is, don’t worry it: I’m just signalling it for the Philosophers here will recognise it.) This is massively important in personal ethics, in business, in economic systems, political systems: it is entirely consonant with the anger of Karl Marx at the alienation of the worker from the fruit of his labour, the worker as a means to the profit of the owner. The profound injustice, however, is not merely in inequal distribution, but far more radically, in the use of some human beings for profit of other without care for their inalienable dignity. On the other hand of the apparent contradiction, the human ‘cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.’ I am not a means to an end: I exist in my uniqueness because God has loved me in to being for me, out of love for me, who I am in myself, and God saw that I, you, was very good. But … I can only find myself, exist for myself, through not existing for myself.

Pope John Paul II takes up this ‘apparent contradiction’:

This might appear to be a contradiction, but in fact it is not. Instead it is the magnificent paradox of human existence: an existence called to serve the truth in love. Love causes man to find fulfilment through the sincere gift of self. To love means to give and to receive something which can be neither bought nor sold, but only given freely and mutually.

So far this is actually merely a comment stating that this is not a contradiction – a difference or disagreement between two things which means that both cannot be true – but a paradox- a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement. He continues, first making the paradox more acute by including in it the gift of a sharing in God’s own divine life as the consummation of human life:

In God’s plan, however, the vocation of the human person extends beyond the boundaries of time. It encounters the will of the Father revealed in the Incarnate Word: God’s will is to lavish upon man a sharing in his own divine life. As Christ says: “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (Jn 10:10). Does affirming man’s ultimate destiny not conflict with the statement that God wills man “for his own sake”? If he has been created for divine life, can man truly exist “for his own sake”? [8]

Think about this: We are created ultimately to share in the life of God, yet, he says, doesn’t that in itself meant that we are created as a means to an end, albeit the astonishing end of sharing in the life of God? No, he says. Within our being, our hearts, as the crucial, identifying characteristic of the human person, that which makes us what we are, is a restlessness for God: He quotes St Augustine:
Saint Augustine provides us with the answer in his celebrated phrase: “Our heart is restless until it rests in you”. This “restless heart” serves to point out that between the one finality and the other there is in fact no contradiction, but rather a relationship, a complementarity, a unity. By his very genealogy, the person created in the image and likeness of God, exists “for his own sake” and reaches fulfilment precisely by sharing in God’s life. The content of this self-fulfilment is the fullness of life in God, proclaimed by Christ (cf. Jn 6:37-40), who redeemed us precisely so that we might come to share it (cf. Mk 10:45).[9]
The content of self-fulfillment is sharing in God’s life: we are not used by God for God’s pleasure, we ourselves will come to our unique fullness, a fulfilment which constitutes who and what we are as human persons, through sharing in God’s life. That we exist for ourselves and that we exist for God is not a contradiction but a complementarity. The human person does not exist only if and when this union is achieved, making the individual person merely a by-product of God’s self-knowledge, nor do we cease to be when the yearning of our heart brings us to God. On the contrary, the human person is created to come to the fulness of being human ‘precisely by sharing in God’s life.’
Gaudium et Spes §24 includes a footnote reference to Luke 17:33: ‘Anyone who tries to preserve his life will lose it; and anyone who loses it will keep it safe.’ This Lucan reference brings as a component of the image of God in man the laying down of his life: the outpouring of love and life within the Trinity constitutes the basis of the Redemption; this too is constitutive of the fulfilment of meaning in man. As the Trinity is revealed in the Incarnation of the Word, in his prayer and his salvific death, so too man is revealed – and revealed to himself – in laying down his life for the abundance of divine life.
Pope John Paul reflects on Christ on the Cross in the encyclical letter Evangelium Vitae. ‘By his death,’ the Pope says, ‘Jesus sheds light on the meaning of the life and death of every human being.’[10] He reflects on the moment when Christ bows his head and breathes out the Spirit. Herein, he says, lies the revelation of the meaning of the life and death of every human being:
It is the very life of God which is now shared with man. … He who had come “not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mk 10:45), attains on the Cross the heights of love: “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (Jn 15:13). And he died for us while we were yet sinners (cf. Rom 5:8).
In this way Jesus proclaims that life finds its centre, its meaning and its fulfilment when it is given up. …We too are called to give our lives for our brothers and sisters, and thus to realize in the fullness of truth the meaning and destiny of our existence.[11]
At the death of Christ, ‘the very life of God is now shared’: the death is not an ending, nor is the laying down of the life of the disciple. It is the continuing moment in which something new happens. The giving up of life is made possible and animated by the gift of the Spirit, the gift of a new and pure heart:
This will only be possible, thanks to the gift of God who purifies and renews: “I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you” (Ezek 36:25-26; cf. Jer 31:34). This “new heart” will make it possible to appreciate and achieve the deepest and most authentic meaning of life: namely, that of being a gift which is fully realized in the giving of self.[12]
The human person, made in the image and likeness of God, in imitation of Christ, and animated by the Spirit given up by Christ on the Cross, finds himself through the gift of himself. In this gift of the self for others, the self is not destroyed but is given and received in mutuality from God. An element of sacrificial donation, modelled on that of Christ in obedience to the Father and animated by the Spirit, is a core element of the understanding of the human person in the image and likeness of God.

Conclusion

We have seen the very heights of theology, of the unique creation of each and every human person given by God the gift of life. This life while unique and utterly valuable in itself is nevertheless incomplete until the human person lays down that very life and shares in the life of God and so ‘finds’ himself, herself, myself. : who am I? what am I?, what am I? How am I to be? these questions are answered in the prayer of Christ. I have alluded to Wojtyła’s appreciation of the injustices and sufferings of individuals and people within unjust systems, and the ‘evil’ of some ideologies which attempted to address these wrongs.
So here’s a conclusion: humanity, individuals, are suffering both huge wrongs and the evil effects of mistaken attempts to forge a new way of life which fail to respect and serve the very lives they claim to support. St John Paul sees at the heart of this evil serious errors in the understanding of the human person and he dedicated his philosophy to a gospel understanding of the human person.

If we turn to the gospel passage of St John 17 we read:

May they all be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.
May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.
I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one—
I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity.
Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

This is from the prayer of Christ in which, according to the Second Vatican Council in a document in whose creation Bishop Wojtyła was much involved, we learn the true meaning of human life, yours, mine, the man begging outside Tesco, other students in the BOP, the lab, the lecture theatre or in Canmore; those with disabilities, the confused and the sick, the refugees strewn like debris across the world; the unborn, the terminally ill, – all categories of people who have been condemned to extinction by ‘evil ideologies’; the rich too, and the successful and the happy, those striving for a better world and those who are indifferent. If we approach our own lives and decisions in the context of this theological anthropology, we also hear Christ praying for us, his disciples, to spread His gospel, His good news precisely through living according to this meaning of life. This is generally achieved through leading lives thoroughly embued with the understanding of our call to share the union of life of the Trinity, so that all our endeavours, whether political, business, or entrepreneurial; our family lives and education of our children; our relationships with colleagues, employers or employees; work towards the goal of human fulfilment for each and every individual and group in the image of God.

[1] Pope John Paul II, Memory and Identity, Personal Reflections (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005)., See Chapters 1-3 in particular.
[2] Karol Wojtyła, “The Person: Subject and Community,” in Person and Community Selected Essays (Peter Lang Pub Inc, 2008). 226.
[3] God was reduced to an element within human consciousness; no longer could he be considered the ultimate explanation of the human sum. Nor could he remain as Ens subsistens, of ‘Self-sufficient Being’, as the Creator, the one who gives existence, and least of all as the one who gives himself in the mystery of the Incarnation, the Redemption and grace. The God of Revelation had ceased to exist as ‘God of the philosophers’. All that remained was the idea of God, a topic for free exploration by human thought John Paul II, Memory and Identity.,10–11.
[4] Thomas D. Williams, Who Is My Neighbor? : Personalism and the Foundations of Human Rights (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2005)., 110.
[5] Second Vatican Council, “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium Et Spes,” (Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1965)., §24. Pascal Ide did a study of the occurrences of this passage from Gaudium et Spes as a preparatory work for the study of the theology of gift in John Paul II. While I have found references to his work on gift in von Balthasar, I am not aware of any further published work of his on gift in Pope John Paul II. Pascal Ide, “Une Théologie Du Don. Les Occurrences De Gaudium Et Spes, N. 24, § 3 Chez Jean-Paul II,” Anthropotes 17/1 (2001), p. 149-178 et 17/2 (2001), p. 129-163.
[6] Pope John Paul II, “Dominum Et Vivificantem : Encyclical Letter of the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II on the Holy Spirit in the Life of the Church and the World,” (Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1986). , §59.
[7] “Letter to Families from Pope John Paul II, Gratissimim Sane ” https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/letters/1994/documents/hf_jp-ii_let_02021994_families.html. §11.
[8] Ibid. §9.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Pope John Paul II, “Evangelium Vitae, Addressed by the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II to the Bishops Priests and Deacons Men and Women Religious Lay Faithful and All People of Good Will, on the Value and Inviolability of Human Life,” http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_25031995_evangelium-vitae.html. §50-52. The literature on Evangelium Vitae tends to concentrate on the Pope’s condemnation of murder, abortion and euthanasia: it is not frequently examined for the theological anthropology which forms part of the context of the condemnations. ‘Man is called to a fullness of life which far exceeds the dimensions of his earthly existence, because it consists in sharing the very life of God. The loftiness of this supernatural vocation reveals the greatness and the inestimable value of human life even in its temporal phase. Life in time, in fact, is the fundamental condition, the initial stage and an integral part of the entire unified process of human existence. It is a process which, unexpectedly and undeservedly, is enlightened by the promise and renewed by the gift of divine life, which will reach its full realization in eternity (cf. 1 Jn 3:1-2).’ ibid. § 2
[11] Ibid. §52.
[12] Ibid. §49.
[13] Second Vatican Council, “Gaudium Et Spes“, §24. Pascal Ide did a study of the occurrences of this passage from Gaudium et Spes as a preparatory work for the study of the theology of gift in John Paul II. While I have found references to his work on gift in von Balthasar, I am not aware of any further published work of his on gift in Pope John Paul II. Ide, “Une Théologie Du Don. Les Occurrences De Gaudium Et Spes, N. 24, § 3 Chez Jean-Paul II,”

Ide, Pascal. “Une Théologie Du Don. Les Occurrences De Gaudium Et Spes, N. 24, § 3 Chez Jean-Paul II.” Anthropotes 17/1 (2001), p. 149-178 et 17/2 (2001), p. 129-163.

John Paul II, Pope. “Dominum Et Vivificantem : Encyclical Letter of the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II on the Holy Spirit in the Life of the Church and the World.” Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1986.

———. “Evangelium Vitae, Addressed by the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II to the Bishops Priests and Deacons Men and Women Religious Lay Faithful and All People of Good Will, on the Value and Inviolability of Human Life.” http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_25031995_evangelium-vitae.html.

———. “Letter to Families from Pope John Paul II, Gratissimim Sane ” https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/letters/1994/documents/hf_jp-ii_let_02021994_families.html.

———. Memory and Identity, Personal Reflections. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005.

Second Vatican Council. “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium Et Spes.” Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1965.

Williams, Thomas D. Who Is My Neighbor? : Personalism and the Foundations of Human Rights. [in English] Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2005.

Wojtyła, Karol. “The Person: Subject and Community.” In Person and Community Selected Essays, 219 – 26: Peter Lang Pub Inc, 2008.