Teachings of the Catholic Church - Questions     

Pope John Paul II, Veritatis splendor, “Freedom and Law” (sections 31-50):

1. According to Pope John Paul II, the human issues most frequently debated and differently resolved in contemporary moral reflection are all closely related to a crucial issue.  What is it?

2. According to the Pope, people today have a particularly strong sense of freedom.  This is a positive development, he says, when this sense of freedom results from a heightened sense of the dignity of the human person and of his or her uniqueness.  When does it become a problem, however?

3. This problem, says the Pope, is connected to another one: what the Pope calls a “crisis”?  What is this crisis?  How are the two problems related?

4. In section 33, the Pope notes that, ironically, side by side with the modern world’s exaltation of freedom, is another tendency. What is it?

5. According to the Pope, we must not lessen or deny the dependence of freedom on what?  (See section 34.)  How does this point relate to what the Pope says in the same section about the freedom of conscience?

6. In section 35, the Pope talks about “some present-day cultural tendencies” that “would grant to individuals or social groups the right to determine what is good or evil.”  “Human freedom would thus be able to ‘create values,’” he claims, “and would enjoy a primacy over truth, to the point that truth itself would be considered a creation of freedom.”  And again, in section 46, at the paragraph beginning: “Other moralists, however, in their concern to stress the importance of values, remain sensitive to the dignity of freedom, but they frequently conceive of freedom as somehow in opposition to or in conflict with material and biological nature, over which it must progressively assert itself,” the Pope discusses the supposed antagonism between freedom and human “nature.”  At the end of this paragraph, he concludes by saying: “This ultimately means making freedom self-defining and a phenomenon creative of itself and its values.  Indeed, when all is said and done man would not even have a nature; he would be his own personal life-project.  Man would be nothing more than his own freedom!”  Compare the Pope’s comments with those taken from the selection by the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.  How does it change one’s view of human life – at least according to Sartre (who is, as Thomas Merton has said, one of the modern world’s most honest philosophers) if “God is dead,” if man is not thought to be in His image, and indeed if man is thought not to have any stable nature at all?

7. The Pope comments on the image of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis 2.  What does revelation teach us by means of this imagery, according to the Pope?  What does the Pope mean when he says, toward the end of section 41 that, “Law must therefore be considered an expression of divine wisdom: by submitting to the law, freedom submits to the truth of creation”?

8. According to section 42, the dignity of the human person requires “man to act through conscious and free choice, as motivated and prompted personally from within, and not through blind internal impulse or merely external pressure.”  What sorts of “blind internal impulses” and “external pressures” might he have in mind?  Are you ever affected by “blind internal impulses” or “external pressures” when you make important decisions?

9. How, according to the Pope, is the human person supposed to distinguish good from evil?  What term does the Pope use to describe “the light of natural reason, whereby we discern good from evil”?

10. In section 45, the Pope talks about the “New Law.”  What is the New Law?  What two effects does it bring about?

11.  In sections 48, 49, and 50, the Pope takes up the controversial issue of the “the place of the human body in questions of natural law.”  In one sentence, what is his position?  How are Catholics supposed to think about the human body?

12.  What does the article on “The Magic of Touch” tell us about the importance of the body to human well-being?  Alternatively, what do the selections from Bill Moyers’ book Healing and the Mind tell us about the importance of the mind to human well-being? [Note, in the first case, we have the importance of the body for the mind.  In the second, the importance of the mind for the body.]

13.  Compare the view of the human body which we find in Dr. Leon Kass’s article called “Thinking about the Body” with the Pope’s view in Veritatis splendor.  What is similar?  What is different?  (On this please also see the Reading Questions that deal specifically with this article.)
 
 

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