The Next Pope and the Crisis of the West

In February 1968, Cardinal Karol Wojtyła wrote Father Henri de Lubac, S.J., about a project in which the cardinal was engaged: a philosophical explanation of the uniqueness and nobility of the human person. The idea of the human, Wojtyła suggested, was being degraded, even pulverized, by ideologies that denied the deep truths built into us. The response could not be “sterile polemics.” Rather, the Church should counter-propose a higher, more compelling view of “the inviolable mystery of the person.” 

That project eventually became Wojtyła’s major philosophical work, Person and Act. And while his immediate target was the communist “disintegration” of our humanity, Wojtyła likely intuited that other disintegrating forces in Western culture might prove even more threatening, over time, to “the inviolable mystery” that is every human person.

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