Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

Karol Wojtyła began to understand that all true Christian devotion to Mary is Christocentric and Trinitarian: Mary’s role in the history of salvation is not as some sort of independent, feminine “principle” but as the first witness to Christ, her son—“Do whatever he tells you,” as she instructs the waiters at the wedding feast in Cana in the second

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

To be human is to be a moral agent. That, in turn, meant that we live in a human universe the very structure of which is dramatic. And the great drama of any life is the struggle to surrender the “person-I-am” to the “person-I-ought-to-be.”

In his dissertation, Wojtyła emphasized the personal nature of the human encounter with God, in which believers transcend the boundaries of their creaturely existence in such a way that they become more truly and completely themselves. This encounter with the living God is not for mystics only. It is the center of every Christian life.

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.

John Paul II held a different view. He refused to submit to the tyranny of the way things are. And because of that, he could ignite a revolution of conscience throughout Central and Eastern Europe that would eventually cut through the seemingly permanent and impermeable Berlin Wall.

“As a Christian, my hope and trust are centered on Jesus Christ . . . [who] is for us God made man, and made a part of the history of humanity. Precisely for this reason, Christian hope for the world and its future extends to every human person. Because of the radiant humanity of Christ, nothing genuinely human fails to touch the hearts of Christia

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.

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.