Today is Karol Wojtyła’s/St. John Paul II’s 126^th birthday. He was born on Tuesday, May 18, 1920.

It is hard to believe that, after a 26-year pontificate supplemented by eight of the Ratzinger pontificate, the teaching and focus of the Wojtyła papacy as a lens to view the proper implementation of Vatican II seems to have been lost. The pseudo-narrative being propagated is that it took until the Bergoglio papacy for the “true” renewal focus of the Second Vatican Council to be rediscovered, and we are now on a new adventure in Conciliar implementation.

Such an idea is risible for two reasons. First, Wojtyła was a Council Father. Ratzinger was a distinguished peritus. Wojtyła wrote a full-length book, Sources of Renewal, on implementation of the Council. Bergoglio wasn’t even ordained a priest until four years after the Council ended. Who, then, more likely understood what the Council’s intentions were? Given the “experience”-heavy approach we have seen pushed so strongly under Bergoglio, it’s at least questionable how the combined 33 years of Conciliar experience of these papal participants’ implementation is suddenly far less compelling.

Second, many of the new “insights” are hardly new at all. Many are rethreads of bad ideas from the 1970s that have been warmed over and served up again, this time with the garnish of “synodal discernment.” Admitting adulterers to the Eucharist was an idea Walter Kasper and others in Germany were pushing in the 1970s and 1980s. This time they coupled it with a 20^th century version of Gallicanism: a local church knows better how to be “Church,” which results in sin-by-geography. Synodality in many ways is a reheated version of sensus fidelium, which, in its revisionist version, never explained how it was anchored to the logically prior requirement of sensus fidei, i.e., hermeneutical continuity with the faith. And, please, when Our Lord sent His disciples back to the Upper Room to wait and pray for the Holy Spirit, I do not believe His idea of “conversations in the Spirit” was a one minute moment of silence followed by stream-of-consciousness opining.

I accept and affirm the Council. I do reject continuing efforts to festoon the Council with ideas borne of “the spirit of the Council” which lack any clear foundation in the Conciliar texts and are often contrary to previously received Church teaching. Yes, I understand the difference between doctrine and discipline, but that does not mean that the Catholic Church started in 1962-65. The inseparability of the procreative/unitive nexus of the conjugal act, for example, is not a “disciplinary” matter nor up to “discernment,” “revision,” or even practical subversion by a “pastoral” theology that disconnects doctrine from practice.

What further concerns me on Wojtyła’s birthday is a loss of the true Christian humanism that the Polish pope put at the center of his pontificate. The problem for the Church today is the problem of man. On the one hand, efforts to accommodate and “accompany” the Zeitgeist often accommodate the things which undermine human dignity. Then there’s a counterreaction from some in the “traditionalist” movement that somehow think focus on the dignity of man detracts from the centrality of God — forgetting that man is made in God’s image. As Protestant thinker Carl Trueman points out in his new book The Desecration of Man, to attack authentic human dignity is also, in some sense, a sacrilege, because it deforms the image of God present in that dignity.

When I was more actively involved in academe, I was concerned that many studies of Karol Wojtyła were “backward” looking, i.e., what did he say? That’s important, especially for so dense a thinker as John Paul II. But perhaps today is more critical function looks to build on the framework of his thought and investigate what he would say about contemporary matters.

In some sense, paradoxically, Wojtyła better reflected the “open windows” approach of Vatican II’s engagement with the world than our contemporary moment. He took seriously modern thought and engaged with it — starting all the way back with his habilitation on phenomenology and the whole Lublin Thomism project of engagement with and pushback of Marxism. That was engaging the world “where it’s at,” i.e., in its thought categories and trying to bring them back to Christ. Contrast that to the kind of internal, self-referential ecclesial navel-gazing that has marked the Church particularly in the past dozen years or so. That is arguably not the vision of Vatican II, with its focus on “the Church and the modern world” — not for modernity to “reform” the Church but, in light of the Great Commission noted in yesterday’s Gospel, for the Church to “teach all nations” and make disciples of them.