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The Holy Seers

Two churchmen-one Polish, one German- transform the throne of Peter.

Dec 7, 2009, Vol. 15, No. 12 • By RYAN T. ANDERSON
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The Modern Papacy

by Samuel Gregg

Continuum, 162 pp., $130

In The Modern Papacy, Samuel Gregg offers a quick intellectual history of the key moments in post-Reformation Roman Catholicism before launching an in-depth study of the thought of the most recent pontiffs--Karol Wojtyla-John Paul II and Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI. This volume is published under Continuum's Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers series, and Gregg is an international expert on the intersection of religion and economics. Yet the text is almost exclusively focused on a seemingly abstract philosophical question: the proper relation of faith and reason.

The question might seem abstract, but it flows directly out of Wojtyla's and Ratzinger's lives. Coming of age during the Second World War, both entered seminary (Wojtyla underground) during this time, and both came to see the crises of the 20th century--world wars, totalitarian regimes, genocides, and labor camps--as results of an atrophied rationality and man's closing himself from the transcendent. They concluded with the French theologian Henri de Lubac that "atheistic humanism," in its attempts to liberate man by abolishing God, resulted solely in chaining man to the whims of the powerful.

Wojtyla, trained as a philosopher, embraced Thomism, the mystical theology of John of the Cross, and the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler. Ratzinger, trained as a theologian, found the Thomism of the manuals to be dry and impersonal, and was drawn instead to the historical -theology of Augustine and Bonaventure with its emphasis on love. Both played major roles at the Second Vatican Council.

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