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The one-hundredth anniversary of Albert Einstein's birth provided the opportunity for Pope John Paul II to make an appropriate statement or take some appropriate action on Galileo's trial. The account of the Galileo affair was clearly the dominant theme of the Einstein centennial speech. The Pope said that the Galileo affair supported the harmony between science and religion. Walter Brandmüller also worked on a more general and interpretive work on the Galileo affair whose key theme was the “right to make mistakes.” Cardinal Paul Poupard stressed the theological error committed by Galileo's opponents and judges: they failed to grasp that Scripture is not a scientific authority. The chapter then investigates how the Pope responded to Poupard's report and what he said and did to close the case. John Paul did not explicitly endorse Poupard's report.

During the last three papacies, Catholic social teaching (CST) has become particularly sensitized to the danger of capitalist economism, a tendency to reduce the whole of life to economic matters. A concern with economism enters with John Paul’s first social encyclical, continues when Benedict XVI links the error of economism to his criticisms of economic utopianism, and matures when Pope Francis criticizes the contemporary dominant manifestation of economism, which he calls by various names, including “unfettered capitalism,” “the faceless economy,” “the economy that kills,” and “neoliberalism.” The chapter ends by discussing how neoliberalism has been made to seem friendly to Catholics by neoconservatives who distort CST by ignoring the continuity between the three most recent popes regarding opposition to economism.

This chapter examines priesthood in the Catholic Church in America. Despite a shortage of priests, the recruitment process follows strict rules to ensure that recruits are not merely joining the calling on a whim or during a down time in their lives. The priesthood offers a list of daunting obligations including to be celibate, to obey a bishop, and to make a lifetime commitment. In his 1992 papal document, Pope John Paul II suggested that becoming a priest is beyond words, an inexpressible dialogue between a man and God.

This chapter discusses how the Thomistic philosophy survives, looking into the lives of Desiré Joseph Mercier and Jacques Maritain, and the doctrine of Pope John Paul II. As a scholar, Mercier was strongly committed to the idea that all of the sciences could work together with philosophy to form a unified, rational whole. His heroic stand against the Germans during the First World War made him an international celebrity. Leo's defense, like Mercier's, was based on natural right and justice. In 1882, Jacques Maritain was born in Paris. Maritain was perhaps one of the strongest Catholic defenders of democracy in his day. He was convinced that this form of government was best suited to protect the dignity of the human person. The strongest defender of natural law since Leo XIII was Pope John Paul II. His most comprehensive statements appeared in the 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor.

This chapter examines the fallout from the First Vatican Council, as the Orthodox continued to deny the council’s claims that the pope’s universal jurisdiction and infallibility were contained in both Scripture and Tradition. However, during the mid-twentieth century the first signs of a thaw began to manifest themselves, as a “dialogue of love” began that blossomed during and after the Second Vatican Council. The 1964 meeting of Pope Paul VI (1963–78) and Patriarch Athenagoras (1948–72) paved the way for further encounters and began a process that allowed both sides to examine the biblical and historical evidence for the primacy with more objectivity than previous centuries would have allowed. After centuries of polemics, Catholic and Orthodox theologians began producing studies of the papacy that exhibited both a genuine ecumenical spirit and a level of consensus undreamed of only decades earlier.

This chapter examines a particularly illuminating case with regard to interreligious relations and apology: the exchange between some Muslims and the Vatican in response to Pope Benedict XVI's lecture to the faculty at the University of Regensburg in late summer 2006. It reflects on the place and meaning of apology, intellectual humility, and interreligious relations by examining both the general “nonapologies” of Pope John Paul II and the specific “nonapologies” of Pope Benedict XVI. Reflecting on and analyzing these cases, it concludes with a suggestion about the place of apology in an intellectually humble interreligious encounter.

This chapter explores Pope John Paul II's denunciations of antisemitism. Since his election in 1978, John Paul II has repeatedly broken new ground in relations with the Jewish community. As the texts on Jews and Judaism compiled under the title Spiritual Pilgrimage by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) show, his writings, homilies, and speeches on Jewish themes represent a remarkable contribution to the historic dialogue between Jews and Catholics today. This ‘spiritual pilgrimage’ culminated in his becoming the first Roman pontiff to visit a synagogue in the Eternal City (or elsewhere) in 1986, followed seven years later by the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Vatican and the state of Israel. Nor has any previous pope been as consistent, firm, and unequivocal in condemning antisemitism as John Paul II.

At the time of the bombing, Nagai Takashi—a convert Roman Catholic and medical doctor specializing in radiation—was getting ready for class at his medical school. Though severely injured, he miraculously survived, while his wife had died at home from the heat and blast. After the bombing, friends asked Nagai if the bomb was punishment from God. Nagai answered that, on the contrary, the bomb was a blessing from God. Because of the bomb, the war ended; those who were killed by the bomb were “sacrificial lambs,” worthy enough to be offered to God; those who survived were in fact failed to be chosen. While Nagai's interpretation was widely embraced among Nagasaki Catholics, Pope John Paul II clarified that war is an act of human upon his visit to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1981. Three years later however, John Paul issued an encyclical on theodicy entitled Salvifici Doloris, part of which is not far from Nagai's understanding of the atomic bombing. Nagai's critical self-reflection, resonates with that of kōji, contributes to the hibakusha ethics of not retaliation, but reconciliation on the one hand, it still leaves a question of moral accountability of individuals, the topic of the next chapter.

This chapter reveals how an undergraduate course on the history of American Catholic women provides students with an array of new perspectives from which to view women's experience in the Catholic Church. The course introduces students to forms of gender analysis that illuminate uniquely Catholic phenomena employing methods drawn from a range of fields that support an interdisciplinary practice of Catholic Studies. Topics include sainthood, women religious, family, ethnicity, devotional life, Catholicism, and transformations in the Church and society. The semester ends with a discussion of Catholicism and its relationship to contemporary feminism and anti-feminism. The discussion includes documents mentioned in an earlier discussion of Catholic gender ideology, such as those pertaining to Pope John Paul II and the “new feminism.”.

The future Pope John Paul II’s intellectual development was shaped by his experience in communist Poland, a context very different from Western Europe, Latin America, and the United States, where the main strands of Catholic social thought had emerged. As archbishop of Krakow, Karol Wojtyła developed a philosophy centered on the concepts of praxis and participation, which laid the groundwork for his later social teaching as pope. This chapter looks at this early philosophical work, as well as his first two social encyclicals, Laborem Exercens and Sollicitudo Rei Socialis. In particular, it looks at the issues of human work, structures of sin, and liberation. John Paul II’s early teachings represent the beginning of a new framework for Catholic social teaching, the communio framework, which emphasizes the distinctiveness of Christian revelation in the midst of the contradictions of modernity.

The dark tone of otherworldliness in 19th-century Polish Catholic sermons was reflected in the teaching that the poor should quietly endure their lot, looking to heaven for an end to their suffering. There was little space in this worldview for talk of social reform. But this message would change with surprising rapidity, and by the mid 20th century, Polish Catholic politicians, social activists, and priests were almost unanimous in their the hostility to the socio-economic status quo. Phrases like “social injustice” and “exploitation” became commonplace in Catholic rhetoric even before WWII, eventually congealing into a comprehensive social vision that challenged both the market economies of the West and the state planning of the Soviet Union. The intellectual foundation for what is sometimes called “social Catholicism” was in fact well established in Poland very early in the 20th century, no later than elsewhere in Europe. Translating this into a meaningful social movement was another matter, though even in this regard Catholicism equipped many Poles with a vocabulary of social criticism that helped them make sense of—and propose solutions for—a wide variety of grievances and injustices.

This chapter focuses on the Common Declaration signed by Pope John Paul II and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew at the Vatican in 1995. They encourage dialogue, not only between the Christian churches but also with the various religions and, above all, with those that are monotheistic. All this doubtless represents a contribution to and a presupposition of the strengthening of peace in the world, for which Churches pray constantly. They declare, without hesitation, that they are in favor of harmony among peoples and their collaboration, and pray for the full realization of the European Union, without delay, and hope that its borders will be extended to the East. At the same time, they make an appeal that everyone will make a determined effort to solve the current burning problem relating to ecology, in order to avoid the great risk threatening the world today due to the abuse of resources that are God's gift.

The history of diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Israel can be analysed on three levels: the relations between the Holy See as the center of the world's Catholicism and Israel as the center of the Jewish world; the relations between the Vatican as the center of Catholicism and Israel as a political entity; and the relations between the two states. Thus far, between the Jewish world — Israel included — and the Christian one, there has been a lack of mutual knowledge. This is mainly due to the gap created by hatred, antisemitism, persecutions, crusades, and inquisitions that have left suspicion and fear in the Jewish world. The signing of the Fundamental Agreement between Israel and the Holy See in 1993 established and laid the framework for cultural exchanges, education, the fight against antisemitism, freedom of religion, and pilgrimage. However, it was the vision and courage of Pope John Paul II which helped formalize the relations between Christians and Jews in 1994.

John Henry Newman is without a doubt one of the founding Doctors of the Church. The Roman Catholic Church however, would not declare him as such unless he had first been canonised as a saint. This conclusion would come to fruition in 1991, when Pope John Paul II declared Newman to be “Venerable” or a figure to be venerated for the “heroic virtues” that he displayed in his life. This formal papal recognition followed the completion in 1986 of a thorough study of his life and writings conducted by a historical commission established by the diocese in which he lived and worked following his founding of the Birmingham Oratory. The formal recognition by the Pope of Newman as “Venerable” still required divine confirmation of beatification in order for him to reach the next rung in the ladder to sainthood.

In 1970 Germain Grisez published a paper criticizing St. Thomas's view of the legitimacy of capital punishment. Grisez rejected Thomas's fundamental conception of political society and indeed, the absolute primacy of the common good. Grisez taught that no one, not even the political authority, could ever licitly intend the death of a human being. Gerard Bradley, in a paper for a Grisez Festschrift, argues that Pope John Paul II, in his encyclical letter Evangelium vitae (EV), tends to agree with Grisez. In so doing Bradley recalls some of the contentions of Grisez in his criticism of Thomas. This chapter reviews passages of Thomas on capital punishment to show the shortcomings of the Bradley criticism. It focuses on two lines of discussion found in Bradley and shows that there is a misrepresentation of the implications of Thomas's doctrine. It starts with the point that for Thomas capital punishment is in keeping with the fundamental human dignity of the criminal.

Polish Marianism gains much of its power from the way it links seemingly contradictory models of femininity together within a nationalist framework. On the one hand, Mary is a powerful, sometimes militant protector of Poland; on the other hand, she is an exemplar of feminine domesticity. She guides the nation to victory even as she demonstrates how to sustain the national hearth and home. Polish national rhetoric has shifted over the years back and forth between geopolitical ambitions and the disciplining of social relations, and Polish Marianism has smoothly shifted along with it. In Poland, Mary’s function as a model of obedience, domesticity, and compassion became a central component of her modern visage, but her royal power continues to be evoked in the struggle against the nation’s enemies. The Virgin provides an image of authority and power which poses little challenge to traditional norms of femininity—indeed, she is frequently called upon to fortify those norms. Marianism thus provides some of the glue that helps hold together two otherwise distinct strains of Polish national thought, one focused on maintaining sharply delineated gender relations and the other on attaining victory against the enemies of God and the Fatherland.

This chapter describes the Christian humanism of Pope John Paul II, who exemplified the two central features of Christian humanism, namely a Christological anthropology and the synthesis of faith and reason. The chapter first attempts to identify the crisis of modern times by comparing the historical and cultural contexts of popes John Paul II to Leo XIII. A second part shows how John Paul II built on the Leonine tradition but shifted the focus from institutions as arenas of human action within which modern issues are addressed to philosophical anthropology as the fundamental premise for social and cultural analysis and amelioration. The concluding section describes ‘negative anthropology’ and argues that only Christian anthropology is able to redirect the distorted humanism of modernity towards its proper Christian humanist roots.

If one of the serious ethical challenges facing Christians in the 21st century is having personal stories that tell Christians how to be caring and compassionate, then a similar challenge exists as Americans think about themselves collectively. For believers and non-believers alike, there need to be heroes, public figures, role models at the collective level who can exemplify the nation's highest ethical ideals. These “contemporary saints” are likely to be different in the 21st century than the ones we admire today. Men and women of compassion have always been included among the heroes and public figures we most admire. Prominent examples are Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Albert Schweitzer, Martin Luther King, Jr., Coretta King, Pope John Paul II, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. These people are not only compassionate but also individualistic. We see their goodness and try to draw lessons from it. We also see their individualism, emphasizing it above many of their other qualities, and take comfort from it.

Many people were disappointed or dissatisfied with the process of the ending of Pope John Paul II's rehabilitation of Galileo during the period 1979–1992. The case which was closed by Pope John Paul in 1992 was the process he had himself had started in 1979, which is merely a subepisode of the cause célèbre studied in this book. The business of the Galileo affair is indeed unfinished in more ways than one. Pietro Redondi claimed that the charge triggering the 1633 trial was that in The Assayer (1623), Galileo held and defended the doctrine of atomism. The relevance of Dava Sobel's book Galileo's Daughter is mentioned in this chapter. Despite its popular success, many readers criticize Sobel's book for being more about Galileo than about his daughter. Redondi's Galileo Heretic and Sobel's Galileo's Daughter reinforce the modest conclusion about the unfinished business of the Galileo affair.

This chapter examines the way American Catholics relate to the formal teaching authority of the Catholic Church. It first considers the nature of the church's claims to authority in general and how it rises or falls throughout historical periods by looking at four surveys carried out between 1987 and 2005, with particular emphasis on Pope John Paul II's advocacy of the church's teaching authority. It then proceeds with a discussion of the widening chasm between conservative and progressive Catholics in the United States, paying special attention to some of the major events that have helped to undermine what used to be a largely unchallenged church teaching authority prior to Vatican II. It also asks whether the church's authority is accepted by Catholics today, how Catholics perceive the locus of moral authority on issues involving sexual morality.