Never, ever settle, he would say in many variations on a common theme, for anything less than the spiritual and moral greatness that the grace of God makes possible in your life. And when you fail—as we all do—don’t lower the bar of expectation. Get up, seek forgiveness, be reconciled to God and others, and then continue the great dramatic

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”?

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 secular argument for human freedom, launched almost three centuries ago under the rubric of “natural rights,” has often been reduced to a calculation of probabilities: democracy and the personal freedoms it protects are good not because they have an inherent moral superiority over other forms of organizing society, but because they are the

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,

Given the intensely personal nature of the encounter with God, the human person must enjoy freedom, for an authentic relationship of mutual self-giving can only be entered freely. The certainty that emerges from that relationship is not the kind achieved by completing an algebraic equation. It is the certainty that emerges from the human heart,

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.

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.

That refinement was only possible, however, because of the original perception. Rather than being a hideous cruelty or an absurdity, the self-sacrificing death of Jesus Christ—which was then vindicated by his resurrection into a new and superabundant form of life—is the axial point of human history. Here, in the death and resurrection of Christ,