Unprecedented? At the council of Ephesus, Mary was proclaimed to be the Theotokos -- the Birthgiver of God.
...for instance, the subtitle that begins paragraph 25 is "Mystery of Christ, mystery of man." He then says that the Rosary has "anthropological significance," and he claims, as he already did at the very beginning of his pontificate in his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, that Christ's life reveals "the truth about man."
Well if Christ is not the truth about man, then there is no truth. Christ explains man's existence, his purpose, his end. Christ is man's destiny because Christ is not only Alpha but Omega, and man's sole hope for survival is in the Logos Who imparts meaning to creation.
"It was Athanasius, echoed by Aquinas, who said that "God became man so that man might become God."
You don't get the import. It's all about Gaudium et Spes--that the Modern World is the measure of truth, not the other way around, that the Church must follow Man, not Man the Church. It is all ass backwards and has already had disastrous practical consequences.
Here is what JPII has said: "this man is the primary route that the Church must travel in fulfilling her mission: he is the primary and fundamental way for the Church, the way traced out by Christ himself."
Think about it. He's not saying Jesus became man and ennobled us thereby. He is saying Man himself is the primary path that the Church has to travel. Does he say this path is Christ? No. He's saying this path is the path Christ traced out--and somehow everybody's on it, the whole human race. He makes no distinctions among those who walk this path, none whatsoever between nature and grace. And he's saying the Church has to follow this path PRIMARILY--apparently even before it follows divine revelation. And whereas Jesus invited all to follow him, indicating that some would be saved and some would not, the Pope takes a lyric leap from the fact that the Word became flesh to the fact that we are all automatically somehow Christified, regardless of faith, by virtue of the Incarnation. So it's no wonder he presides over prayer festivals of all religions. By his way of thinking we're all somehow members of one big ecumenical religion where the Archbishop of Canterbury rubs shoulders with the pope and the pope prays with animists in the Togo Forest and Hindu priests pray to their gods at Fatima.
This is not Catholicism, it's heresy.