JP II, Ubi Es Tu?

By
John Paul Meenan, Editor
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I had trouble at first believing it, but I just checked, and it’s true: the English translations of Pope Saint John Paul II’s Wednesday audiences have been deleted from the Vatican website:

This is rather personal to me, for I use much of his teaching in my classes, and the Vatican webpage as a source. It seems his encyclicals and other writings are still up there in English, but who’s to say that’s going to last?

This curiously coincides, with John Paul II’s teaching, especially on the principles of the moral life, being largely ignored in this Magisterium, as Father de Souza points out in an article. We had Amoris Laetitia, one of the longest papal documents in history, much of it on sexual ethics and marriage, with not one citation to JP II’s Veritatis Splendor, and this masterful and landmark encyclical has not been cited since, to my knowledge. Then there is the wholesale ‘transformation’  – we might as well say evisceration – of the Institute for Marriage and Family in Rome, which was very close to John Paul’s heart. Father de Souza makes the claim that the recent Dignitias Infinita is some implicit rehabilitation of the former Pope’s moral teaching, for it links freedom – dare we say it – to the objective truth of our human nature, including one of the main themes of Veritatis. Oddly, however, Veritatis, again, the ghostly elephant in the room, is not cited. Were I to assess the document as a student essay – with all due deference – I would question such an omission, and wonder why. Only the author(s) of these documents must know what they are ignoring, for reasons known only to them. But they are known to God.

We should all recall that warning of Christ, about taking away the key of knowledge (Luke 11:52). The truth is for all, and all for the truth.