Letter to the Holy Father

John Paul II shows an esteem for the human rarely found in other personalities of our times, who hold power and yet are dissatisfied with what they have; human intelligence and will are in fact burnt away by the power that seems to fill and satisfy their research. In John Paul II, this is not the case: in his figure, Christianity defines the human condition; it is the road for the fulfillment of man’s happiness and it expresses man’s lordship over things.

Following the Pope’s life over these past 25 years, what is most noticeable is that Christianity tends to be truly the realization of the human. All his travels, like a long march toward death, have had as their reason the evident unity that corresponds to the genius of Christianity: “Gloria Dei vivens homo.” The glory of God is man who is alive … in the truth of light: God present in the history of mankind. Man who is alive, as the Pope witnesses to before us, finds its rationality in the identification of Christianity with the human: Christianity is man realized! Our Lady is the prime example of this realized humanity and this is why John Paul II is right in the affection he has for Mary of Nazareth.

The importance of this Pope lies in the fact that for a quarter of a century he has spoken of Christianity and this is why he has a polemic relationship with the whole of post-eighteenth-century culture, especially with that founded on the French Revolution. In an era of defeats, he has spoken of Christianity as a victory over death, over evil, over unhappiness, over the nothingness that looms in every human whisper, and he did it by documenting how his Christian faith pivots on a well-motivated rationality; faced with the collapse of a world produced by ideology, he has given the faith an explanation full of rationally persuasive evidence. He has documented His faith with clear reasons, so much so that the enthusiasm of many, of millions of persons who have listened to him, cannot find in arguments on which they can dissent the pretext for diminishing admiration for him.

Your Holiness, I wish you as long a life as possible, so that you go on being a coherent witness of this supreme form of challenge that, out of love for Christ, you represent for the whole world. And the more this word, Christ, is heard, and heard again, the more it will show its persuasive capacity.

John Paul II’s Christianity reflects all the “secular” essence of the Christian message; in other words, an identity between humanity and Christian faith. “Each man confusedly perceives a good/ in which his soul can be at rest / and he desires it and strives to attain it.” (The Divine Comedy, Purgatory XVII). Dante is the perfect definition of a rational existence. And the greatest and most evident sign of this humanity, of this identity between humanity and Christian faith, the sign that not even all the distortions and forgetfulness have deleted from the human heart, the most complete and universally known sign is marriage.

In the Pope’s teaching, woman for man and man for woman are the visual, visible aspect of triumph, of the flower that “germinated,” as Dante says in his “Hymn to the Virgin”: the identity between humanity and faith. The beauty and the capacity for goodness of this unity is revealed in that sacramental act that most values the human: marriage, and is documented in John Paul II’s speeches.

So love is man’s greatest value, and therefore the example of the man and the woman is the formula that represents the ideal. The Pope carries this ideal, in which man lives only in love, in a true love. The human becomes true in love, so much so that it’s hard to agree with, for example, the Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jimenez, when he writes, “Now it is true. But it has been so false that it still goes on being impossible.”

In John Paul II’s thought, humanity is realized in a real love, that has no fear of desperation–what Dante sings in his Vita Nova: “When love finds me close to you it makes me so bold and confident that I change into someone else.” It is interesting to note that, like Dante, when the Pope looks at human love he is conscious of that approximation to the ideal that is there in every human moment. So man, in his earthly life, has a piece of him that is in expectation, but this never prevents him from recognizing, even with anguish, that nature (or the Creator?) lives for the ideal accord, as the verses of Vita Nova express it: “A gentle spirit full of love… keeps telling the soul: Sigh.”