Twenty years after John Paul the Great went home to the house of the Father, I’ve noticed that many of his teachings have still not been received.
It’s not that Catholics have entirely forgotten the remarkable, world-shaping pontiff who led the Church for nearly twenty-seven years. It’s that much of the world has shrugged and moved on from the life-giving vision the man from Poland proposed.
First, a brief history lesson.
When he was elected to the throne of Peter in 1978, Cardinal Karol Wojtyła became the first Slavic pope and the first non-Italian in 455 years.
During his pontificate, he became not only one of the most prolific pontiffs in history, but also the most visible. John Paul holds the distinction of being the most seen human being in history, having visited 129 countries during his papacy. More than a billion people saw him at the Vatican and around the world.
He was an athlete, scholar, and polyglot (he spoke as many as eleven languages fluently), and he had a decidedly sharp sense of humor. He gave us the revised Code of Canon Law, the first universal catechism in 426 years, World Youth Day, the Luminous Mysteries, the New Evangelization, and 482 new saints—more than all popes of the previous 500 years combined.
With a résumé like that, you might think he changed the world so profoundly that apologetics and catechesis would be largely unnecessary today.
As it turns out, we still have work to do.
1. Theology of the Body: Known by Few, Needed by Many
It seems clear that our culture has yet to absorb much of the Polish pope’s teaching—especially on human sexuality.
Even before his election, Wojtyła diagnosed a deep misunderstanding of the human person. His 1960 book Love and Responsibility anticipated the Sexual Revolution and offered a Christian anthropology ordered to authentic love.
That confusion erupted in dissent from Pope Saint Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae among bishops, clergy, and laity alike. Seeking to place that prophetic document on solid anthropological footing, John Paul II launched a series of 130 catecheses, beginning on September 5, 1979, later known as the Theology of the Body (TOB).
TOB presents an integrated vision of the person, especially in the realm of sexuality. The body, he taught, has a nuptial meaning: it makes visible an invisible reality, revealing both God and the truth about ourselves. Marital love, read through Christ’s love for the Church, is a total self-gift that demands sacrifice.
“Man, whom God created male and female, bears the divine image imprinted on his body ‘from the beginning,’” he said in 1980. “Man and woman constitute two different ways of the human ‘being a body’ in the unity of that image.”
This is luminous teaching—widely embraced in faithful homes and schools, yet largely unknown elsewhere. Surveys of younger adults suggest growing comfort with post-Christian sexual norms, which means many never even encounter the freedom that Christ and his Church propose. A 2019 GLAAD study found that 45 percent of Gen Z (ages 18-34) were comfortable with all LGBTQ-related scenarios.
2. Truth and Freedom: Moral Absolutes vs. “My Truth”
Reception of John Paul’s sexual ethics has been limited; likewise, parts of his moral theology are contested—or quietly ignored. The noisy dissent on sexual morality that followed Vatican II has receded, but a softer, more pervasive resistance has settled into Church life in many dioceses.
John Paul answered that resistance with clarity. He insisted that moral theology must be rooted in the dignity of the human person, oriented to truth, and ordered to holiness—uniting moral absolutes with a deep respect for freedom and responsibility.
Truth and freedom, he argued, stand or fall together because both are found in Jesus Christ. “There is no liberty without truth,” he said during Vatican II. He would later open Fides et Ratio in 1998 with the line “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth,” because God has planted in every heart the desire to know him.
In Veritatis Splendor, he called truth “the light of human reason” that “enlightens man’s intelligence and shapes his freedom.” Sin darkens the mind, but hearts opened to God find truth compelling.
At World Youth Day in 1997, he said Christ “has called you . . . to live in the freedom of the children of God. Turn to him in prayer and in love. Ask him to grant you the courage and strength to live in this freedom always. Walk with him who is the way, the truth, and the life!”
Interestingly, a Barna research study last year found that nearly two thirds of Gen Zers say they pray at least weekly. The study also found that 57 percent of them agree that there are facts we can know about scientific questions, but religious or moral questions require treatment that goes beyond just the technical or empirical.
That conviction about objective moral truth was not abstract; it was forged in a century when regimes tried to erase it. During the Soviet era, two Americans—Ronald Reagan and Bishop Fulton Sheen—stood out for warning the world about socialism and communism. The Stalinist regime that ruled John Paul’s home country forced him to be guarded in his criticism. But when he was elected to the See of Peter, the gloves were off.
3. Socialism Rebranded: Why His Warning Still Applies
Sadly, many of the warnings Reagan, Sheen, and John Paul gave us have gone unheeded. Young people continue to seek Utopia. Earlier this year, a Cato Institute/YouGov poll reported that 62 percent of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds hold a favorable view of socialism.
John Paul argued that Marxism misjudges the human person. In his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus, he said Marxist socialism’s “fundamental error” is anthropological—it turns persons into cogs, undermines freedom and responsibility, and rejects private property.
Because socialism builds on Marx’s atheism, “the denial of God deprives the person of his foundation.” Socialism, he said, necessarily deprives human beings of their value.
His analysis wasn’t just academic. As a young man, he experienced both Nazi and communist regimes ruling his homeland. His firsthand witness of both flawed ideologies gave rise to his firm defense of the inalienable dignity of each human person, created in God’s image and likeness. That defense is woven like a golden thread throughout John Paul’s teaching from the time he was a bishop in Poland.
Given the challenges to authentic Church teaching John Paul gave us, what would he say from heaven about the state of the world and the Church—and about his great New Evangelization?
The answer is simple: we still have much work to do.