John Paul II and the Revitalization of Western Civilization

John Radzilowski has an excellent article entitled John Paul II and the Revitalization of Western Civilization. Mr. Radzilowski is the author of eleven books and is senior fellow at the Piast Institute.

This is the kind of article that you wish was required reading for every reporter and commentator in the MSM. Of course... they would probably still get it all wrong. I quoted a couple of paragraphs, but frankly don't waste your time; go straight to the entire article (after you finish here, of course).

For John Paul II, the problem began in the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution when science and reason were divorced from faith and morality. Western culture was based on Judeo-Christian beliefs, beliefs which had inspired its greatest art, music, and literature and acted as a brake -- albeit imperfectly -- on the worst impulses of Europeans and Americans. While the dogma of the Enlightenment places faith and reason as opposites, for John Paul II faith and reason cannot exist apart from each other. To separate them was artificial, because they both find their source in God, and dangerous for it leads to materialism, the belief that there is nothing beyond the here and now, and finally to the conclusion that humans can be reduced to simply a collection of cells.
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A yet more significant problem was the way in which modern intellectuals are willing to cede moral responsibility. Morality is to be a private matter, to be determined in the privacy of one’s own head, and it can be changed according to fashion and whim. One person’s morality can not be imposed on another. Each person makes choices and those choices are, for the most part, equally valid. This is a retreat in the face of the century’s horrors, a refusal to face and name the evils that have been unleashed in the world. These evils have resulted from ideologies that were once believed to be the height of enlightened, progressive, scientific, and rational thought.