Fair enough. Very few Catholics have spent the lifetime of study it takes to study the full scope of the thought of St. Augustine and St. Thomas. A lesser thinker like Pope John Paul II is a tall order.
I tried to get through a few of his encyclicals--not to mention Crossing the Threshold of Hope, which I found interminable and impenetrable. I detest his kind of writing--the deliberate vagueness, the incessant qualifications, the inability to express a thought simply and clearly.
It's true that he lacks a direct or pithy style. He is practically the first Pope, at least since Innocent III, to attempt to do original theology while in office.
Take just the paragraph I posted. What the heck does it mean to say Man is the way for the Church to follow?
Again, it has to be placed in its full context - that Christ chose the way of man, i.e. Incarnation, to redeem man and that the Church which is Christ's mystical Body must follow in the Redeemer's footsteps.
I'll point out that in the original Latin "homo" is not capitalized.
You make a noble try, putting this in traditional terms, saying as you do that by means of the Incarnation God has ennobled us and taught us to be charitable. But that is not exactly what JPII is saying.
Well, it's only part of what he's saying.
If it were, he would have focused on Jesus.
Again, read the encyclical before making this blanket statement. The entire encyclical is about Christ as He is Incarnate. To say that the encyclical is not focused on Jesus is facile.
But it suggests instead pretty much what Gaudium et Spes had advocated--a rapprochement with the Modern World and an acceptance of its systems of thought and discovery.
Again, this is not a path that is unique to Vatican II. The early Church did not confine itself to Jewish methods of inquiry and investigation but embraced the Neoplatonism of the Greek world it encountered. The great Fathers of the Church spoke in an idiom which was not invented by the Church, but adapted.
Likewise, St. Thomas baptized an Aristotle which had been heavily tainted or modified by Arabic and Jewish interpretation.
We need to creatively confront unChristian methods and assumptions now as then.
It is this that is fraught with danger--especially when the Pope argues such a path it is the PRIMARY way the Church must take.
The encyclical does not say that the Church must take the path of modernity - it says that the Church must follow the steps that Christ traced.
This is dangerous talk. It is not at all the stuff of tradition. It is Vatican II-speak, a path that has so-far led, not to the promised land, but to the edge of a very steep cliff.
I agree that Vatican II has been a notable failure and that its policies are deeply flawed. This does not mean that we simply abandon the outside world and turn inward - it means that we need to find better methods.
"The encyclical does not say that the Church must take the path of modernity - it says that the Church must follow the steps that Christ traced."
The minute the Pope says something like "man is the primary way the Church must follow", he is speaking gobbledegook. In fact, it is God who shows the way. But he doesn't say this or seem to mean it. He doesn't say Jesus is the way. He says just the opposite, that Jesus himself followed OUR way. He is saying it is our own humanity in its diverse relationships that must PRIMARILY show us the way. But this is nonsense. Such a course would mean that the blind would be leading the blind.
Think about it for a minute. Here's what he says: "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." So it's us, not God; WE'RE supposed to lead the Church--this is the literal sense of the passage.
But JPII doesn't speak literally, he speaks in circumlocutions at best. What he really seems to be suggesting is a variation of Gaudium et Spes, that human institutions and rational systems of thought must guide the Church. Fine. It's done so in the past. But this way requires being clear about where we ourselves have been and where we are going. We have to know who we are as a Church and be rooted in our own Tradition. I don't see that with this Pope. I see him launching out into new territories--without any indication he knows where he's going.