A Way For The Church

As he took the Chair of Saint Peter, Saint John Paul II challenged all people to open wide their hearts to Christ, for it is His “perfect love” that “casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). It is His love that gives man life. In his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, the late Holy Father wrote:

Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it.

St. John Paul II taught us much about this love that man cannot live without, and we remember this in our permanent exhibit: A Gift of Love: The Life of Saint John Paul II.

The sainted pontiff showed us this love by visiting his people. Early in his papacy, he made pilgrimages of love to the faithful in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and other places throughout the world.

Christ, The Redeemer of Man

The Redeemer of man, Jesus Christ, is the center of the universe and of history.

These are the first words of Saint John Paul II’s Redemptor Hominis, the encyclical that set the stage for the late Holy Father’s entire pontificate. Released in March 1979, this letter covered Christian anthropology, addressing the Incarnation and what it reveals about God and man: 

Through the Incarnation God gave human life the dimension that he intended man to have from his first beginning; he has granted that dimension definitively—in the way that is peculiar to him alone, in keeping with his eternal love and mercy, with the full freedom of God—and he has granted it also with the bounty that enables us, in considering the original sin and the whole history of the sins of humanity, and in considering the errors of the human intellect, will and heart, to repeat with amazement the words of the Sacred Liturgy: “O happy fault...which gained us so great a Redeemer!”

It is through Christ’s Incarnation and Redemption that God, in His loving mercy, made it possible for man to live out his highest calling: to be one with the Lord, who made us for Himself. He reconciled us to Himself, and He gave us His Son, who revealed to us what we are called to be.