{"id":5503,"date":"2006-01-13T08:50:53","date_gmt":"2006-01-13T08:50:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/01\/john-paul-and-marxism.html"},"modified":"2006-01-13T08:50:53","modified_gmt":"2006-01-13T08:50:53","slug":"john-paul-and-marxism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/01\/john-paul-and-marxism.html","title":{"rendered":"John Paul and Marxism"},"content":{"rendered":"

A look at an early, unpublished work, in The Tablet<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

The ability to dissect Marxism and reassemble it in a Christian form made Karol Wojtyla a potentially significant Catholic thinker. It would take him another two decades to perfect this approach in The Acting Person (1969) \u2013 a book that was studied, much to Wojtyla\u2019s satisfaction, not only by Catholics but also by Communists, and is still widely seen as his most distinctive pre-papal philosophical work. <\/p>\n

But Catholic Social Ethics<\/em> served as a prototype for Wojtyla\u2019s later efforts. When it was bound in Lublin in just a few copies, he had not yet found a coherent philosophy of his own. But he had thought out ways of reapplying Marxist concepts of alienation and parti-cipation in a Christian context. <\/p>\n

Wojtyla had also set down the master concepts that would recur in his sermons in the Eighties. One was the need for \u201csolidarity\u201d, which became the name of the Polish movement that helped to bring Communism to a peaceful end in the 1980s. <\/p>\n

Catholic Social Ethics<\/em> confirms that the Church\u2019s latter-day struggle with Communism was largely the Pope\u2019s personal achievement, since it drew on insights and intuitions born in his own head. Previous popes had feared the potential of spontaneous social movements. By contrast, Wojtyla saw them as important forces whose creative energy could be directed for godly purposes. He saw Communism less as an enemy than as a misunderstanding \u2013 a misdirected turn towards a false conception of the world and humanity. To correct any mistake, one had first to understand it, to turn its illusory values into real ones. Despite his Christian interpretation, though, Wojtyla clearly empathised with Marxism\u2019s analysis of capitalism, as can also be seen from the margin notes of his personal books in the Krakow curia. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A look at an early, unpublished work, in The Tablet: The ability to dissect Marxism and reassemble it in a Christian form made Karol Wojtyla a potentially significant Catholic thinker. It would take him another two decades to perfect this approach in The Acting Person (1969) \u2013 a book that was studied, much to Wojtyla\u2019s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nJohn Paul and Marxism - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/01\/john-paul-and-marxism.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"John Paul and Marxism - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A look at an early, unpublished work, in The Tablet: The ability to dissect Marxism and reassemble it in a Christian form made Karol Wojtyla a potentially significant Catholic thinker. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5503\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}