St. Alphonsus Parish, Deerfield at 222 Carey Street, Deerfield, MI 49238 US - Pope John Paul II

Many will want his name to enter the history books as “Pope John Paul the Great”. He well deserves the title when one considers what he has given us. Many analysts will provide us with dazzling insights into this great world leader is erudite and arcane prose. What can we make of it all? Karol Wojtyla was an intellectual’s intellectual, giving us a way of peering into Reality using his preference for philosophy infused with God’s Revelation in the framework of Christian Tradition. All of these intellectual disciplines are analogous to flashlights that pierce the surrounding darkness with their directed beams of light. It’s much like navigating through a forest in nighttime. Perhaps there is a moon and stars occasionally visible, but we must rely mainly on the flashlight we hold out in front of us. Philosophy is one such source of seeing “what’s out there”. Theology is another. We can adjust them to have narrow spotlight beams, or broad floodlight beams. Their energy sources can be likened to AC current or DC current. Both, however, give us energy to enlighten the path in front of us along which we navigate through life. There are many such philosophical “flashlights” we can use in order to enlighten our ways long life’s paths, and they all have names such as “Aristotelianism”, “Thomism”, “Essentialism”, “Existentialism”, “Humanism” and “Anarchism.” (the latest and most modern philosophical fad). We have socio-economic systems we can use to structure our world, and they, too, have names such as “Feudalism”, “Capitalism”, “Socialism”, “Fascism” and “Communism”, Some present use with images of reality that are frozen and static.. They arrest aspects of life as it is lived and give us sort of insta-matic and frozen in time pictures of what’s out there. People, places and things are revealed in static terms so our minds can pick them apart and analyze what they “are” in themselves. Other insightful systems present reality as it moves, as it moves in time and in relation to other realities. We are invited to “see” things dynamically, not statically. This was Pope John Paul II’s gift to us. He combined AC and DC light-energy sources to us in one vision of reality, a vision that saw people in terms of their relationship to God, nature and other persons. His was a Christian humanism that saw human nature’s “essence” in terms of its dynamic relationship with God, others and our surrounding natural world. His vision was anything but simple. And yet it was. Albert Einstein’s “e=mc2” is an utterly simple arithmetic equation. But what a mind it took to present it to us. Pope John Paul II’s mind and methodology is analogous. And both are men not only of the Twentieth Century but also of the Second Millennium. For the next thousand years men and women will be delving into the images and realties revealed in the light of their intellectual beams. Their lights pierced into the surrounding darkness in order that we might see, pursue and come to the Truth that truly liberates us and frees us from the chains of chaos and darkness that always seek to imprison our souls.

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