Good Work: Christian Ethics in the Workplace

By Esther D. Reed, 129 pages, baylorpress.com.

While certain strains of Christianity, within both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, have inspired many of the worst aspects of modern capitalism, Christianity holds the answers to the problems caused by the modern economy. Reed's well-balanced discussion displays none of the anti-Christian rhetoric common to many such works, as she is herself a theologian and writes from within the religion.

She finds hope in Orthodox icons, the writings of John Paul II, Protestant writers, and the Bible. Getting back to the heart of the tradition will reorient Christians so that their economic activity will serve Christ. She does not argue for an immature escapist position whereby Christians should somehow head into the woods and avoid gainful employment.

First, from Orthodox icons she reminds readers of the transformative, transfigurative aspect of Christianity. Through Christ we mysteriously participate in the life of God. This practice can make us less predisposed to participate in today's mindless, ever-growing consumerism. Icons, by giving us a glimpse of heaven, remind us that our work, rather than being about money, worldly success, and acquisitiveness, carries eternal meaning. What we do has a spiritual dimension.

Reed highlights the thoughts of John Paul II that are more critical of capitalism. The late pontiff emphasized the dignity of the human being, and showed how work was a reflection of this dignity. He obliged business owners to respect that dignity by ensuring, for instance, that working conditions were not abusive. Yet he reminded his readers that the Church's task was not to outline a specific economic model. Christians were called to live their lives in the marketplace, and this would transform the economy.

From the Bible, St. Paul's tent-making ministry can inspire Christians. He did not see his trade as a vocation in itself, importantly, but as a way to live his higher vocation. Working Monday to Saturday enabled him to preach Christ on Sunday: "the normality of daily life is taken for granted by Paul and is not elevated by him to the level of a vocation or particular call."

Reed repeats a major theme of her book, which is that many Christians have gotten carried away with equating their work with their vocation. She warns that this can put a spiritual gloss on demeaning or mindless work. While all Christians can have a vocation, and "Vocations are not reserved only for the clergy," not all work is vocation.

Corporations, Reed warns, are turning the work-as-vocation into an excuse to turn us all into workaholics. They promise that through a spiritualized work we can actualize ourselves. Companies spiritualize what is in reality a "fiercely competitive workplace ethic." Importantly, she concludes, "Christian discipleship does not necessarily place a theological or spiritual obligation on believers to seek their vocation in the workplace." Christians can relax, and stop forcing themselves to be super achievers.

Though Christianity got us into this workaholic mess by claiming that work was vocation, by challenging many assumptions and reading the biblical and patristic sources closely, and listening to the wisdom of John Paul II's encyclicals Laboren Exercens and Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, we can begin to define better our real Christian vocations and put our paid work into perspective.

A timely book for our workaholic society.

Meet John Paul II: The People's Pope

By Janel Rodriguez, 156 pages, Servant Books.

Meet John Paul II begins with the story of a French nun who believes she was cured of Parkinson's through the intercession of the late pontiff. After the pope's death, she and her sisters in their hope asked the pontiff to pray for her healing, something that happened. The story of John Paul II is the story of hope.

This simple book spends a little time on the pope's childhood, though unlike fuller biographies of the man, it fails to give a sense of the deeply traditional, rural, slow-moving, and Catholic culture in which he grew up. It does show to some extent the major male mentors in his first few decades, including his father, several priests, and pious laymen. As in any traditional culture, mentoring through the generations played a vital role in the maturation of the young man. Such a supporting environment that reinforced Catholic spirituality enabled the pontiff to grow into the faithful and strong leader so needed by the Church.

Though Rodriguez leaves much out of this short biography, she explains the central pillars of John Paul II's philosophical and theological outlooks exceptionally well: “Karol used phenomenology as a way of explaining ethics and the reality, meaning and importance of morality. Morality, he believed, is not a learned set of behaviors but the truth about how we are structurally made to be. Therefore, moral choices and actions are what give people the most emotional, spiritual and physical ... satisfaction.”

Rodiguez also makes the important point that as a university professor in Poland he avoided lecturing his students, and “instead engaged them in debates and discussions.” Echoing his leadership as Archbishop and eventually pope, his unique style originated from his deep-rooted belief in the dignity of humans, something reinforced by Vatican II.

John Paul II the Marian pope credited Our Lady of Fatima with saving his life in 1981 from Turkish gunman Ali Agca. As is well known, the bullet that so terribly damaged him is now in Fatima, in a twist of irony.

In addition to this prophet-like faith in God's protection, John Paul wrote about contemporary society, criticizing the Culture of Death in weighty, influential encyclicals such as Evangelium vitae. He had prophetically reached out to AIDS sufferers in the 1980s, when many were afraid of even touching them.

Most readers of Meet John Paul II already need no convincing of the greatness of the pontiff, though they are also reminded of his outreach to Jews, Orthodox Christians, and people of other religions, such as at the World Day of Prayer in Assisi. He continues to influence the Church and the world through the World Youth Day, which he began in 1984, and through his interpretation of Vatican II. With this last project, he strove to end drift and excessive experimentation. He reminded Catholics that Vatican II did not call for endless reformations and renewal for renewal's sake. Rodriguez briefly touches on all of these elements in her book.

While Meet John Paul II adds nothing new to the scholarly and biographical information on Pope John Paul II, it is worthwhile because much written about the late pontiff is excessively academic and philosophical, and therefore of little interest to casual readers.

Stories of Karol: The Unknown Life of John Paul II

By Gian Franco Svidercoschi, Liguori, 150 pages.

[O]ne could say that Karol Wojtyla summed up in himself, in his person, in his life, the collective destiny of twentieth-century humanity,” writes Svidercoschi.

The continuing fascination with the early life of the late pontiff probably has to do with just this: That his difficult and sometimes very sad life (he lost his mother at the age of nine) contained so much of the suffering of humanity. The mystery of his life is how he kept his faith and turned it into such an inspiration for millions of people.

How did this early suffering make him mature beyond his years at such a young age and push him into becoming such an effective witness to the gospel? Though journalists can speak to countless of his early friends, this inner life remains beyond our understanding.

The author thus uses his imagination to give the reader a sense of Father Karol's early life, such as his first experience as a parish priest: “That day, July 28, 1948, Karol had set out early in the morning, full of curiosity and, above all, intensely excited. Niegowic is fifteen miles from Cracow, located a little way past the salt mines of Wieliczka; but the trip would have lasted an eternity. The bus took quite a while to get to Gdow. And at Gdow the bus line ended, and one had to continue on foot.”

These above words express the lost world into which the late pontiff was born and grew up. At Karol's high school, for instance, there were two Greek professors. Greek, Latin, Polish, and history would have been the core curriculum, and “natural science” would have been of secondary importance.

Svidercoschi intertwines the evil geopolitics of the Nazis and Communists with this small-town personal life. At the time of the Nazis, and around the time of his father's death, Karol Wojtyla the university student made the acquaintance of a genuine mystic, Jan Tyranowski, who had a profound impact on many pious young men, including Karol: “The God that Jan showed them—bearing witness with his words and his conduct—was not the God of theological discourses or books by priests, Instead, he was a God with whom a person could live day by day, but he happened to be the God of which they were not yet aware.”

The chapter on Tyranowski exemplifies the importance the author gives to the people Karol Wojtyla had met. Wojtyla became a priest because of certain pious people: his father, Tyranowski, a favorite priest to whom he monthly went for confession, and the archbishop of Krakow, Adam Sapieha.

The young Wojtyla was also bookish, and “began to devour the books that Jan had given him, especially in the factory, sitting by the boiler, in the breaks at work.”

Stories of Karol does not offer any new information about the late pontiff, but is a small and charming book nonetheless. It is an easy read and its characters display the warmth and humanity of a bygone, pre-technocratic era. In this sense it is important for understanding the romantic view of Poland Pope John Paul II had.

John Paul II & St. Thomas Aquinas

Edited by Michael Dauphinais & Matthew Levering, 259 pages hardcover, Sapientia Press.

John Paul II & St. Thomas Aquinas is a collection of scholarly essays by different authors. It makes a very important contribution to the understanding of John Paul II's teachings. One writer in the book notes that the encyclical Evangelium vitae “with its biblically centered argumentation, draws upon Aquinas's theology of law at the very hinge of its discussion.”

Avery Dulles writes that in Love and Responsibility, John Paul's pre-papal book on sexuality, “From Aquinas he takes over the idea that love is ordered to that which is objectively true and good. He formulates a personalistic norm to the effect that one may never use other persons as means to an end...Wojtyla grounds this principle in the metaphysical insight that the person has inviolable intrinsic dignity.”

Dulles thus highlights the bridges that John Paul made between Thomism and personalism. This is important because central to Catholic thinking is the constant connection of its theology and traditional philosophical methods with modern ways of thinking. John Paul succeeded in tying a medieval thinker, Thomas Aquinas, with a most modern philosophy.

Pope John Paul II was schooled in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas and the centuries of development of the philosopher's thought, known as Thomism or neo-scholasticism. The pontiff was also schooled in more recent philosophy, especially personalism, which emphasized the importance and dignity of the human individual, though personalism often differs from Western individualism by often emphasizing spiritual values over materialistic ones.

Thus the late pontiff's writings are usually a mix of Thomism and personalism. He emphasizes the eternal, unchanging truths of the Church, in the style of Thomism, but applies these truths to the individual, and strives to show how they amplify the dignity of the person. His Theology of the Body is the best example of his mixture of the eternal truth with the individual human.

John Paul II & St. Thomas Aquinas reaquaints us with John Paul's major books and encyclicals by taking this philosophical reading of them. The book reviews and deepens our knowledge of writings that we think we've already digested.

Dulles writes of Veritatis splendor that it “invokes the authority of St. Thomas in maintaining that natural law is a participation in the eternal law of God...Although he speaks of natural law and divine law, he avoids all legalism. He accepts from St. Thomas the idea of natural law as the light of natural reason imprinted upon our minds by God.”

This book does more than unearth John Paul's links with Aquinas. It also places the late pope within the history of modern philosophy by discussing phenomenology, personalism, utilitarianism, Plato, and medieval scholasticism.

Michael Sherwin in his essay sums things up best: “John Paul did not speak of truth and freedom in only one way, but followed the Gospel of John in applying the terms analogically.”

John Paul II: My Beloved Predecessor

By Joseph Ratzinger / Benedict XVI, 121 pages, $19.95, Pauline.

“What can this sick, suffering, tired old man say, who in moments of physical fatigue speaks with visible weariness?” These words were written by then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (present Pope Benedict XVI), a close associate of Pope John Paul II, concerning the late pontiff's controversial visit to France in 1996.

John Paul II's rich theological and spiritual legacy only continues to grow. My Beloved Predecessor brings together a collection of writings on John Paul, his work and ministry, by Ratzinger, then Prefect of the Doctrine of the Faith.

Ratzinger the theologian writes with such clarity that his thoughts on John Paul's teachings help us understand the late pontiff, including some of the difficult-to-understand philosophical pillars of John Paul II such as phenomenology and personalism.

Ratzinger sums up the workings of these two closely-related philosophical schools on John Paul's ideas: “This precision in seeing, this comprehension of man beginning not from abstractions and theoretical principles, but seeking to grasp his reality with love, was – and remains – decisive for the pope's thought.”

Because this collection comes from writings in reaction to or in support of teachings and events during the pontificate of John Paul II, they contain a freshness and simplicity that clarifies and keeps to the original feeling and intent.

The funeral homily remains the most powerful statement on John Paul's pontificate: “The Holy Father was a priest to the last, for he offered his life to God for his flock and for the entire human family, in a daily self-oblation for the service of the Church, especially amid the sufferings of his final months.”