Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

Listen, when cadences of knocking hammers so much their own I transfer into our inner life, to test the strength of each blow— Listen: electric current cuts through a river of rock— Then the thought grows in me day after day, The whole greatness of this work dwells inside a man.

the mission of converting the world while putting the great human aspiration to freedom on a firmer spiritual and moral foundation.

Each of us, he came to understand, lives in a dramatic situation, for we live each day in the gap between the person-I-am and the person-I-ought-to-be. Understanding that, we come to grasp that life is never dull or repetitive; living in such a way as to close the gap between who-I-am-now and what-I-aspire-to-be is inherently dramatic, adventurous,

his soul had been formed by a different experience, an experience of the Church as the bearer of the most potent vision of human possibility on offer.

Work, with all its rigors and hardships, was a participation in God’s creativity, because work touched the very essence of the human being as the creature to whom God had given dominion over the earth.

that a man who has been seized and transformed by the “more excellent way” can bend the curve of history so that freedom’s cause is advanced.

his fundamental conviction has remained constant: the horrors of late twentieth-century life, whether Nazi, communist, racist, nationalist, or utilitarian in expression, are the products of defective concepts of the human person.

As fiction, the story would be too sensational for all but the most romantic tastes. What, then, are we to make of the story as fact? And how can we understand this thoroughly modern man who insists that “in the designs of Providence there are no mere coincidences”?

Much of late modernity assumes that dependence on God is a mark of human immaturity and an obstacle to human freedom.