Latest / Claymore: Become Who You Are / #765 Saint John Paul II: The Man And His Mission. "Be Not Afraid!"

Transcript

#765 Saint John Paul II: The Man And His Mission. "Be Not Afraid!" · Claymore: Become Who You Are

0:00
SPEAKER_01: I'm glad you're joining me.
0:01
SPEAKER_01: This is a special day for the John Paul II Renewal Center.
0:04
SPEAKER_01: This is the feast day of John Paul II.
0:08
SPEAKER_01: Today's October 22nd, and he's the person that changed my life and the reason we have the John Paul II Renewal Center.
0:15
SPEAKER_01: So I want to do a reflection today on John Paul II, the man and this mission.
0:20
SPEAKER_01: But I also want to convey that what he's brought down to us, these gifts are life-changing.
0:26
SPEAKER_01: In fact, the the Claymore Battle Plan Handbook, that whole battle plan is all based on his writings and his teachings to come down so we can get a comprehensive idea of really this battle that we're in today between good and evil.
0:39
SPEAKER_01: So this comprehensive way to look at the world, first of all, putting a basin for our own hearts, right?
0:44
SPEAKER_01: Answering those big questions.
0:45
SPEAKER_01: Who am I?
0:47
SPEAKER_01: What's the meaning and purpose of my life?
0:49
SPEAKER_01: Why were we created male and female?
0:52
SPEAKER_01: What has that got to do with human happiness?
0:54
SPEAKER_01: How do I find happiness here in this life?
0:56
SPEAKER_01: What makes a person happy and joyful to live out their life?
1:00
SPEAKER_01: How do I find love, which is so important, right?
1:03
SPEAKER_01: Not only uh for a moment at time, but forever.
1:06
SPEAKER_01: And so those that's the base.
1:08
SPEAKER_01: And then we go out and we take those values once we get our hearts back.
1:11
SPEAKER_01: And you can only get that back united to Jesus Christ.
1:14
SPEAKER_01: And then you go out and restore the culture, and you become a patriot that forms a nation that also respects those values of the individual human person, marriage and the family, religious liberty, all those things that our country is based on.
1:27
SPEAKER_01: And you start to understand how important it is, right?
1:30
SPEAKER_01: I'm thinking about the November 3rd elections coming up, how important it is to vote and to go out and make sure that we don't just give ourselves over to uh radical atheists, to people that that are really on the other side of this battle, which are always an attack of marriage and the family and religious liberty.
1:49
SPEAKER_01: Why?
1:49
SPEAKER_01: Because this is a spiritual battle.
1:52
SPEAKER_01: You know, when you see uh people out bringing evil into the world, uh you have to remember that most of those, that evil in the world is not just that person, but that person who's given themselves over their minds, their bodies, their souls to an evil force in the world.
2:08
SPEAKER_01: You know, when you were exploded onto the stage called your life, you didn't come into neutral territory, did you?
2:14
SPEAKER_01: You came into a world at war.
2:16
SPEAKER_01: And if you weren't baptized, some people I'm still meeting today that weren't baptized, you know, you've never received that grace, right?
2:23
SPEAKER_01: To be able to lean into Jesus Christ, that opening of that window is very important to get ourselves, our kids, our friends baptized if they haven't been.
2:31
SPEAKER_01: Too many people wandering around today, too many young people, and you could see the mental illness, anxiety, depression, all kinds of things.
2:38
SPEAKER_01: Okay, you've I've talked about all those things before, but I just want to show you how important it is, right, to grasp what we're gonna be talking about today.
2:47
SPEAKER_01: To start out, I want to play a little clip.
2:49
SPEAKER_01: John Paul II was speaking to American youth.
2:52
SPEAKER_01: And don't forget that John Paul's first language is not English.
2:56
SPEAKER_01: So he's reading because he's got to get the words right.
3:00
SPEAKER_01: You know, if I have to go speak to a French crowd, I can't just go off the top of my head sometimes.
3:04
SPEAKER_01: You have to be careful what you're saying, right?
3:06
SPEAKER_01: Get the words right.
3:07
SPEAKER_01: So, with that said, uh, it's really a beautiful message, and you see John Paul II uh in person.
3:13
SPEAKER_01: So let me let me play that clip.
4:26
SPEAKER_01: Then you know, as he relaxes into the talk, you start to see the twinkle in his eye, he starts to get his English back.
4:32
SPEAKER_01: There are certain people who enter our lives even briefly and leave an impression that never fades.
4:37
SPEAKER_01: John Paul II was such a man.
4:40
SPEAKER_01: He was certainly that man for me, uh, and the others that founded the John Paul Tourino Center, but he should be for you.
4:46
SPEAKER_01: You know, the Claymore uh Battle Plan Handbook is all that message.
4:51
SPEAKER_01: You know, go to go to that website again, Claymore Militas Christie.com.
4:55
SPEAKER_01: It'll be in the show notes.
4:57
SPEAKER_01: Read the outline there.
4:58
SPEAKER_01: The outline you can just you can just read right on your computer screen if you want to.
5:03
SPEAKER_01: Very short, give you the whole idea behind this.
5:06
SPEAKER_01: But this this is taking his teaching and distilling it down to something we can immediately use today and share today.
5:13
SPEAKER_01: So again, to see John Paul II in person, even on a television screen, was the sense that you were in the presence of someone who truly embodied the gospel of Jesus Christ as the most widely traveled pope in history.
5:26
SPEAKER_01: John Paul II was more than a figurehead of the Catholic Church.
5:30
SPEAKER_01: And why did he travel so much?
5:32
SPEAKER_01: He saw even the, and this is important for all of us, especially if you're Catholic, he saw the you know what Pope Paul VI described as the smoke of Satan even within the church.
5:42
SPEAKER_01: And he said, these are going to be uh very difficult times as we go through history here.
5:48
SPEAKER_01: And I'm gonna relate some of the things that he already had seen, and he prophetically saw what was going on, and he knew that we were in quite a battle, right?
5:58
SPEAKER_01: So he said, I want to go into the world, I want to proclaim Jesus Christ the gospel so that everybody has this teaching, right?
6:05
SPEAKER_01: And so whether he's addressing millions of people gathered in the public square or speaking quietly with a single person, he possessed an extraordinary ability to connect with that with the person's human hearts.
6:17
SPEAKER_01: You know, he could look over a vast crowd, but yet somehow make each person feel that he was directly speaking to them.
6:25
SPEAKER_01: And he spoke as the gospel describes Jesus as one who has authority.
6:30
SPEAKER_01: Yet his authority was never cold or distant.
6:33
SPEAKER_01: He was a shepherd who proclaimed the truth with mercy and love and compassion, often with a twinkle in his eye, a smile on his face.
6:41
SPEAKER_01: There was something wonderfully natural about him.
6:44
SPEAKER_01: He seems completely comfortable with who he was, a beloved son of God.
6:49
SPEAKER_01: There was no facade, no artificial distinction between the man and the office that he held.
6:54
SPEAKER_01: And Pope Benedict XV, who came after John Paul, he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before, had written John Paul II, my beloved predecessor, and in there he reflected on this extraordinary harmony between the person of Kirotiva, who became John Paul II, and his mission as the Pope.
7:16
SPEAKER_01: Cardinal Ratzinger understood that John Paul II's deeply personal union with Christ that he calls all of us into, it allowed him to exercise his sacred ministry with remarkable freedom and authenticity.
7:30
SPEAKER_01: His personality was not hidden behind the papal office, nor did his personal identity overwhelm the sacred responsibilities entrusted to him.
7:38
SPEAKER_01: Rather, the man and his mission were so perfectly matched that his ministry became a natural expression of who he was.
7:46
SPEAKER_01: This remarkable unity between the person and his vocation offers a beautiful window into the life of Saint John Paul II and perhaps helps explain why his witness continues to touch hearts more than two decades after his death.
8:02
SPEAKER_01: How does such a man come to be?
8:05
SPEAKER_01: Ah, it's a heart formed in the school of suffering.
8:09
SPEAKER_01: Carol Tiwa was born on may eighteenth, nineteen twenty in Vodowica, Poland, into a loving Catholic family, and a nation whose identity, listen to this, had been forged through centuries of suffering, foreign occupation, yet they always held on to their Catholic faith.
8:28
SPEAKER_01: They were invaded over and over through history.
8:31
SPEAKER_01: For the Polish people, then, and this is so important for us to understand today.
8:36
SPEAKER_01: So remember this the Catholic social teaching like a triangle in front of you, faith in Jesus Christ holding up one end, marriage in the family holding up the other end, and then we go out into the culture, and our freedom is based on that freedom and dignity to be a human person, and the freedom to be a person of love and bring love into the world.
8:56
SPEAKER_01: See, the Polish people understood that, and these were not abstract ideas, but treasures worth defending, even at tremendous personal cost.
9:05
SPEAKER_01: Young Kiro Wotiwa would come to understand this firsthand as sorrow and hardship entered his life at an early age.
9:13
SPEAKER_01: His mother died when he was only eight years old.
9:16
SPEAKER_01: His beloved older brother, Edmund, became a doctor, got scarlet fever there and died when Kiro was only twelve years old.
9:24
SPEAKER_01: By the age of twenty, his father also died, leaving him without any surviving immediate family.
9:31
SPEAKER_01: So here he is alone.
9:32
SPEAKER_01: And then what happens?
9:34
SPEAKER_01: Right away, these personal losses if they're not enough.
9:37
SPEAKER_01: The world around him was descending into darkness.
9:41
SPEAKER_01: We see this in France again, you see this in Europe again, this darkness coming in.
9:46
SPEAKER_01: So listen to this.
9:47
SPEAKER_01: In September nineteen thirty nine, Nazi Germany invaded Poland.
9:52
SPEAKER_01: What happened?
9:53
SPEAKER_01: Universities were closed.
9:54
SPEAKER_01: Intellectuals and priests were persecuted, and the occupying regime sought to destroy the cultural and spirituality of the Polish people, to destroy the culture.
10:05
SPEAKER_01: The culture remembers the soul of the nation.
10:07
SPEAKER_01: I want to take this down.
10:08
SPEAKER_01: Your statues, your history, your reminders.
10:11
SPEAKER_01: They want to just destroy this over there, take out religion, and then they can attack marriage and the family and get to the individual person and indoctrinate them.
10:19
SPEAKER_01: We see this in in the United States, which is this external force in Poland, became an internal force, if you understand it, this internal force of Marxism, and then Neo-Marxism has come into the United States, and you can see this battle, internal battle going on.
10:35
SPEAKER_01: So when the Nazis came in to avoid being deported to forced labor, he he started to work in the stone quarry, hard labor in the stone quarry, and later at the Sol Bay Chemical Plant near Krakow.
10:48
SPEAKER_01: That way he could stay in the same area there.
10:51
SPEAKER_01: Imagine this young man now having lost his mother, brother, father, and actually he lost his an older sister before that, working under the shadow of Nazi occupation while quietly wrestling with the great questions of human existence, looking around.
11:07
SPEAKER_01: Why do we suffer?
11:09
SPEAKER_01: What is the meaning and purpose of our lives?
11:11
SPEAKER_01: You know, what is freedom?
11:13
SPEAKER_01: People taking it away from us.
11:15
SPEAKER_01: What is that?
11:16
SPEAKER_01: What is the dignity of the human person when you're forced into forced labor and the dignity is trying to be stripped away by the evil forces in the world?
11:24
SPEAKER_01: And where is God among such terrible evil?
11:27
SPEAKER_01: Why does he allow this to happen?
11:29
SPEAKER_01: So for Kira Watiwa, these are not merely questions to be debated in a classroom.
11:33
SPEAKER_01: They demanded answers in the concrete reality of everyday life.
11:37
SPEAKER_01: This is why it was so important to me when we uh learned John Paul's theology, the body.
11:43
SPEAKER_01: They're not just information.
11:45
SPEAKER_01: These help us with the concrete realities of our lives, our own hearts, our relationships.
11:50
SPEAKER_01: This is what we're doing.
11:51
SPEAKER_01: This is practical.
11:52
SPEAKER_01: This isn't just intellectual, it actually changes your heart, right?
11:57
SPEAKER_01: So it was during these years then that his vocation to the priesthood started to mature.
12:02
SPEAKER_01: He was an actor.
12:03
SPEAKER_01: He was thinking about getting married and a family, but then these forces, these evil forces came in, and he started to understand as he pursued his intellectual and spiritual formation, he part then participated in underground cultural activities, the rhapsody theater, he would go quietly, this small group of people into different houses and apartments there underground, trying to keep the culture alive, how important that was.
12:28
SPEAKER_01: So eventually, though he understood he was called to the priesthood, and he had to go underground, the clandestine seminary in Krakow, and he encountered the profound writings of St.
12:38
SPEAKER_01: John of the Cross, and he discovered that the deepest mysteries of the human person are revealed through, this is so important, through an interior life transformed by grace.
12:48
SPEAKER_01: We're a body and a soul.
12:50
SPEAKER_01: Print out the Clamore battle plan outline right on our website, and you'd see this formula.
12:56
SPEAKER_01: We have an interior life.
12:57
SPEAKER_01: We all know this, but we have to be cognizant about it.
13:00
SPEAKER_01: We have to understand we have an interior life.
13:02
SPEAKER_01: In order to get in touch with that interior life, we have to contemplate, we have to be quiet, we have to listen, we have to go into prayer and get in touch with that.
13:12
SPEAKER_01: If we don't do that, we live on the surface of things.
13:14
SPEAKER_01: We're a body and a soul.
13:16
SPEAKER_01: And a body and a soul without grace, without this interior life of being open to the grace of Jesus Christ.
13:22
SPEAKER_01: And we He has to, God has to give us this grace.
13:25
SPEAKER_01: But if we don't, we're just a body and a soul that's in a default position of sin and death.
13:32
SPEAKER_01: In order to overcome that, you have to be filled with grace.
13:35
SPEAKER_01: And then you have the potential for human flourishing, potential for human freedom.
13:40
SPEAKER_01: And then we act, right?
13:42
SPEAKER_01: We become persons of love.
13:44
SPEAKER_01: And so this is what John of the Cross taught him, and this is what I'm talking about with you today, that the human person has to be in touch with this interior life, transformed by grace to understand who we are, even.
13:57
SPEAKER_01: And you go, oh, I'm called to something way, way more.
14:02
SPEAKER_01: So something extraordinary was happening in Kirowaltiva's heart then.
14:06
SPEAKER_01: The suffering that might have driven another person into bitterness had become through this grace then, a school of love, to go out and bring love into this dark world.
14:16
SPEAKER_01: His experience of evil was deepening his conviction that the human person possesses a dignity.
14:22
SPEAKER_01: No human power can bestow, and no earthly power has the right to take away.
14:27
SPEAKER_01: The young man who had experienced such profound personal loss was being prepared to become a spiritual father to millions.
14:34
SPEAKER_01: Now let me just say that again.
14:36
SPEAKER_01: What did he realize?
14:38
SPEAKER_01: That he has a personal dignity.
14:39
SPEAKER_01: You have a personal dignity.
14:41
SPEAKER_01: No earthly power can be stole.
14:43
SPEAKER_01: No earthly power has the right to take away.
14:45
SPEAKER_01: Does that remind you of anything?
14:47
SPEAKER_01: It should, if you if you're an American.
14:49
SPEAKER_01: It should remind you of the Declaration of Independence.
14:52
SPEAKER_01: This is what makes our country different.
14:55
SPEAKER_01: We laid this foundation in our country.
14:57
SPEAKER_01: You know, we could get into open borders and why that's not good.
15:01
SPEAKER_01: Because the people of this country have to understand this basis.
15:05
SPEAKER_01: You have to be connected to a Christian faith.
15:07
SPEAKER_01: When we were formed, we were a Christian people.
15:10
SPEAKER_01: And when you take that away, what would hold all these people from all different countries?
15:15
SPEAKER_01: You know, we're the most uh homogenous uh country in the world.
15:19
SPEAKER_01: Every race is here, every color, every culture we bring in.
15:23
SPEAKER_01: Well, how do we hold that together?
15:25
SPEAKER_01: There's only one force that's strong enough.
15:27
SPEAKER_01: And this is the force of Jesus Christ, it's the force of God and grace coming into our lives.
15:32
SPEAKER_01: And then we're infused with that.
15:34
SPEAKER_01: So don't forget what united us was our faith.
15:36
SPEAKER_01: Even if if you know Italians living in an Italian neighborhood or Poles living in a Polish neighborhood, when I was a kid, they were sectioned off in different groups, right?
15:45
SPEAKER_01: They could keep that cultural tradition because underlying that was Christianity, right?
15:51
SPEAKER_01: And so this is why the evil forces today wants to take religion out.
15:55
SPEAKER_01: You see that in the culture.
15:56
SPEAKER_01: We already did that the last couple of decades, right?
15:59
SPEAKER_01: Then it's the attack on marriage and the family, the gender ideologies, um, the indoctrination in schools.
16:06
SPEAKER_01: So here's the country.
16:07
SPEAKER_01: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they were endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
16:18
SPEAKER_01: And to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
16:27
SPEAKER_01: That's the key to the whole thing.
16:29
SPEAKER_01: That the human person possesses a dignity no earthly power can bestow, and no earthly power has the right to take away.
16:36
SPEAKER_01: This is what we have to remember.
16:38
SPEAKER_01: This is what our government was formed on.
16:39
SPEAKER_01: This is where you get your freedom from.
16:42
SPEAKER_01: You know, freedom isn't just a license to do anything.
16:45
SPEAKER_01: Freedom is to live out the truth.
16:47
SPEAKER_01: What is true?
16:48
SPEAKER_01: What is good, what is beautiful.
16:49
SPEAKER_01: You follow us in your interior life, and then in the teaching, of course, that comes passed down to us to form us.
16:55
SPEAKER_01: This again is the Claymore Battle Plan Handbook.
16:58
SPEAKER_01: Get that handbook.
16:59
SPEAKER_01: You're going to be taken through all of this in one place.
17:03
SPEAKER_01: Teaching of John Paul distilled down, give you a good formation upon which to continue.
17:10
SPEAKER_01: So what happened then?
17:12
SPEAKER_01: This young man who had experienced such profound personal loss was being prepared then to become a spiritual father to millions.
17:19
SPEAKER_01: This is why he went out.
17:21
SPEAKER_01: He said, This is a battle for the human person.
17:23
SPEAKER_01: I want to go out and proclaim Jesus Christ to get your freedom back.
17:26
SPEAKER_01: See, when the Nazi occupation ended in Poland, Poland didn't regain its political freedom, did it?
17:32
SPEAKER_01: No, the communists came right in and followed, bringing in another ideology.
17:37
SPEAKER_01: These are all these ideologies disconnected from our faith, disconnected from our hearts, disconnected from marriage and the family to destroy this cultural and enslave you.
17:47
SPEAKER_01: And again, don't forget ideologies are enslavement to evil.
17:51
SPEAKER_01: They allow evil to come in.
17:53
SPEAKER_01: They subordinate the human person to the power of the state.
17:57
SPEAKER_01: This is what socialism is.
17:59
SPEAKER_01: This is what communism is.
18:01
SPEAKER_01: This is what these young people don't understand.
18:04
SPEAKER_01: Kirotiva now had witnessed two totalitarian systems Nazism, communism.
18:11
SPEAKER_01: Socialism is just a stepping board to communism.
18:15
SPEAKER_01: Kirovativa had now witnessed those two systems, the Nazi systems and the communist systems.
18:22
SPEAKER_01: They were different in important respects, but they shared a fundamental error, and this is the important thing to understand.
18:28
SPEAKER_01: They come at it a slightly different way, but both attempted to organize human society while denying or radically distorting the truth, the truth about who we are.
18:39
SPEAKER_01: What is the truth of things?
18:41
SPEAKER_01: He came to understand that beneath the political and economic struggles of the modern world lay a deeper crisis, one that was fundamentally anthropological.
18:50
SPEAKER_01: What is anthropology?
18:51
SPEAKER_01: The study of us, of human beings.
18:54
SPEAKER_01: What does it mean to be human?
18:56
SPEAKER_01: Are we merely the products of material forces, economic systems, political structures, and biological impulses here by accident, and atoms hitting atoms, hitting atoms?
19:08
SPEAKER_01: People just take power over everybody else and dominion over everybody else?
19:13
SPEAKER_01: Or are we persons created in the image and likeness of God?
19:16
SPEAKER_01: Those are your only two choices.
19:18
SPEAKER_01: And if so, we're endowed with reason.
19:20
SPEAKER_01: What is reason?
19:22
SPEAKER_01: Reason is always seeking the truth.
19:23
SPEAKER_01: What is the truth of things?
19:25
SPEAKER_01: What happens if your reason is cloudy?
19:27
SPEAKER_01: If it's not informed by grace, you become unreasonable.
19:30
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to trans my kid.
19:31
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to show pornography in school systems, right?
19:35
SPEAKER_01: Because if you're not informed with reason, you become very unreasonable.
19:40
SPEAKER_01: You see women applauding a governor who says, look, we can we can kill this baby up to the minute it's born.
19:46
SPEAKER_01: And even if it's born by by accident, we're trying to abort it.
19:49
SPEAKER_01: We can destroy it then.
19:50
SPEAKER_01: And they're clapping, yay! I mean, we become unreasonable, right?
19:55
SPEAKER_01: Our freedom then becomes licensed to do whatever we want, which is even to destroy the next person.
20:00
SPEAKER_01: It always becomes the powerful over the weak, right?
20:04
SPEAKER_01: The powerful over those that are vulnerable, whether you're young, old, et cetera, et cetera.
20:10
SPEAKER_01: Right?
20:11
SPEAKER_01: Our consciences are not formed.
20:13
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you can't be formed, it's just that cold.
20:15
SPEAKER_01: You're living your life like that, where you can just destroy other people.
20:19
SPEAKER_01: The capacity to love is gone.
20:21
SPEAKER_01: What is love?
20:22
SPEAKER_01: You cannot even love a child within you or an old person that gave you life, maybe an older parent.
20:29
SPEAKER_01: You know, all of these things are destroyed.
20:31
SPEAKER_01: We put a person in an old person's home and just leave them there.
20:34
SPEAKER_01: So John Paul understood that if we get that human person wrong, we'll eventually get everything else wrong.
20:41
SPEAKER_01: If I don't see that person, what else is gonna get wrong?
20:45
SPEAKER_01: Again, look at this system that we're talking about here.
20:47
SPEAKER_01: Marriage and the family, we're gonna get that wrong.
20:50
SPEAKER_01: We're gonna get religion wrong, right?
20:52
SPEAKER_01: We're gonna say we don't want that in in our lives or in our culture.
20:55
SPEAKER_01: Now the whole thing starts to crumble.
20:57
SPEAKER_01: Education gets gets infiltrated with these ideologies.
21:02
SPEAKER_01: Then economics and politics, they they all just become power hungry, right?
21:09
SPEAKER_01: How much money can a corporation take?
21:11
SPEAKER_01: How much power can a politician take?
21:13
SPEAKER_01: This is the battle that we're in right now, right?
21:15
SPEAKER_01: The very meaning of freedom.
21:18
SPEAKER_01: You know, we're sold this bill of goods.
21:20
SPEAKER_01: Socialism, communism is going to make you free, give you free stuff.
21:24
SPEAKER_01: Come on, please, if nobody produces anything, what is their free to have?
21:28
SPEAKER_01: You starve to death all through history.
21:30
SPEAKER_01: John Paul went through all of this.
21:32
SPEAKER_01: So see when he's out preaching and talking, he knows this and he sees it all around, the battle going on between good and evil.
21:40
SPEAKER_01: So this conviction would shape his entire pontificate, which was a long time, 27 years.
21:47
SPEAKER_01: So this is so important.
21:48
SPEAKER_01: His first encyclical, Redemptor Hominus, the Redeemer of Man, Jesus Christ, he said, I brought this with me from Poland, and that's why it was his first encyclical.
21:58
SPEAKER_01: He knew again we need to be in.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: With grace.
22:01
SPEAKER_01: If we're infused with grace, it changes everything.
22:03
SPEAKER_01: You gotta have to have an interior life.
22:05
SPEAKER_01: And it returned repeatedly to the mystery of the human person.
22:10
SPEAKER_01: Everybody here today, the mystery, you you have no idea.
22:13
SPEAKER_01: If you become who you are, you would light the world on fire.
22:17
SPEAKER_01: Everything changes, right?
22:18
SPEAKER_01: And the burning love of God coming into a person's heart.
22:22
SPEAKER_01: You need the Redeemer to come into your life.
22:25
SPEAKER_01: So he returned repeatedly to the mystery of that human person, of who all of us are, insisting that each one of us is so important, insisting that humanity then cannot be understood, though, apart from Jesus Christ.
22:39
SPEAKER_01: You don't get it.
22:40
SPEAKER_01: Just look out at the world.
22:41
SPEAKER_01: Man and then Redemptor Hominist number 10, he writes this so beautiful.
22:46
SPEAKER_01: Because why?
22:47
SPEAKER_01: Because man, men and women cannot live without love.
22:50
SPEAKER_01: God is love.
22:51
SPEAKER_01: He remains a being then, a man that's that's divided, right, separated from God.
22:56
SPEAKER_01: He becomes incomprehensible for himself.
22:58
SPEAKER_01: His life is senseless.
23:00
SPEAKER_01: If love is not revealed to him, God is love.
23:04
SPEAKER_01: Consider the significance of those words.
23:06
SPEAKER_01: The human person is not simply a problem to be solved, a consumer to be satisfied, a worker to be exploited, or an individual whose freedom consists of doing whatever I want to do.
23:17
SPEAKER_01: No, we were made for love, and not just any love, but the self-giving love revealed in Jesus Christ.
23:24
SPEAKER_01: This understanding of the human person would illuminate John Paul II's teaching on marriage and the family, the dignity of work, self-education, religious liberty, the security of life, and this magnificent theology of the body.
23:38
SPEAKER_01: All of it is right here.
23:39
SPEAKER_01: This is why I wrote the handbook.
23:42
SPEAKER_01: So you can have all this in one place because I don't think we have enough time for you to spend the next eight or ten years like I did, you know, putting all this together.
23:52
SPEAKER_01: I wanted to put it all in one place in a story that's digestible for all of you guys.
23:58
SPEAKER_01: So you'll have this whole framework there.
24:00
SPEAKER_01: Then you can go out and build upon it.
24:02
SPEAKER_01: Everything's referenced there.
24:03
SPEAKER_01: You can spend the rest of your life just with the resources that I listed in this book, right?
24:09
SPEAKER_01: But you'll actually have a framework that you can go out, and this is what John Paul II gave us.
24:14
SPEAKER_01: When I took all of those categories that John Paul talked about, that's where this framework came from.
24:19
SPEAKER_01: Delectiamici, those of you who know that, right?
24:22
SPEAKER_01: They came out of that apostolic letter that John Paul wrote when he was going to launch World Youth Day.
24:27
SPEAKER_01: What do I want to speak to all of the young people, to all the people over the next World Youth Days?
24:33
SPEAKER_01: And he put those categories together, and that's how he built this out again.
24:36
SPEAKER_01: The dignity of work, marriage in the family, getting your heart back, religious liberty, the sanctity of life, right?
24:43
SPEAKER_01: He recognized then the great battle of our age would ultimately be fought over this, over the meaning and dignity of the human person and the attack on marriage in the family next.
24:53
SPEAKER_01: And we throw out religion.
24:54
SPEAKER_01: And when you throw out religion, you lose your heart.
24:58
SPEAKER_01: So this is what's going on.
25:00
SPEAKER_01: You lose God, you lose the person.
25:02
SPEAKER_01: And how urgently we need that wisdom today, don't we?
25:05
SPEAKER_01: On october twenty second, nineteen seventy eight, a fifty-eight year old Polish Pope stood before the world at the inauguration of his pontificate and proclaimed, Be not afraid.
25:18
SPEAKER_01: Think about the man who spoke those words.
25:21
SPEAKER_01: He had experienced the loss of those closest to him.
25:24
SPEAKER_01: He lived under Nazi terror and communist oppression, and witnessed the attempted destruction of his nation's faith and culture.
25:32
SPEAKER_01: And also don't forget he was an attempted assassination.
25:36
SPEAKER_01: He was shot twice, two or three times.
25:39
SPEAKER_01: Yet standing before the world he did not proclaim despair, resentment, or fear.
25:45
SPEAKER_01: He proclaimed hope and invited the world to open wide its doors to Jesus Christ.
25:50
SPEAKER_01: Jesus Christ.
25:52
SPEAKER_01: These were not the words of a naive optimist who had never encountered evil.
25:57
SPEAKER_01: They were the words of a man who knew that evil was real, but who also knew that Jesus Christ had conquered sin and death.
26:05
SPEAKER_01: And then it's up to us to go out into the world and bring that renewed freedom and power of grace into the world.
26:12
SPEAKER_01: John Paul II understood something that our own generation desperately needs to rediscover.
26:18
SPEAKER_01: Christianity is not simply a collection of moral rules or religious customs, but an encounter with the living Jesus Christ, who reveals the truth about God and the truth about ourselves.
26:29
SPEAKER_01: His courage would help inspire the peaceful resistance to communist domination in his beloved Poland and contribute to the transformation of Eastern Europe once that wall came down in 1989.
26:41
SPEAKER_01: Yet his mission was never merely political.
26:44
SPEAKER_01: He wanted to open the hearts of men and women to Jesus Christ and help the world discover the dignity of every person.
26:51
SPEAKER_01: In other words, he wanted those walls to come down.
26:53
SPEAKER_01: He worked with Ronald Reagan to get those walls down, but he didn't want to do it just for a political reason.
26:59
SPEAKER_01: He wanted to do it to free those people.
27:01
SPEAKER_01: And the only way you were really going to be free is if Jesus Christ came back.
27:06
SPEAKER_01: And that's what he did.
27:07
SPEAKER_01: He brought Christ back into those countries, right?
27:10
SPEAKER_01: One of the most beautiful dimensions of John Paul II's pontificate was this extraordinary love for young people.
27:17
SPEAKER_01: He understood their longing for friendship, belonging, adventure, truth, beauty, goodness, and love.
27:25
SPEAKER_01: What is love, right?
27:27
SPEAKER_01: David had the desire like we all do for love.
27:30
SPEAKER_01: And he recognized that young hearts were searching for something greater than the shallow promises offered by this materialistic culture.
27:37
SPEAKER_01: We're finding that in Claymore.
27:39
SPEAKER_01: This is so exciting.
27:40
SPEAKER_01: Yet he refused to lower the demands of the gospel in order to win their approval.
27:44
SPEAKER_01: Instead, what did he do?
27:46
SPEAKER_01: He challenged them to greatness.
27:48
SPEAKER_01: Through World Youth Day, his teaching on love and human sexuality, his countless encounters with young people around the world.
27:55
SPEAKER_01: He invited an entire generation to discover the adventure of holiness.
28:00
SPEAKER_01: He knew that young people did not need to water down Christianity.
28:04
SPEAKER_01: They needed Jesus Christ, the person of Jesus Christ, not just information, but the person to experience him.
28:11
SPEAKER_01: He also understood that freedom is not simply the ability to choose between competing desires, the license to do whatever you want, but it's the capacity to choose what?
28:21
SPEAKER_01: What is true, what is good, what is beautiful, especially the beauty of authentic love, and ultimately to make a sincere gift of ourselves and love to others we find ourselves when we give ourselves away.
28:33
SPEAKER_01: How relevant this message is today when so many young men and women struggle with loneliness, anxiety, broken relationships, pornography, confusion about their identity.
28:44
SPEAKER_01: You see all those things come up when you take God out of your life?
28:48
SPEAKER_01: The loss of any clear sense of meaning or purpose, this is what I want you to see when you look out into the culture and say, what is wrong with everybody?
28:56
SPEAKER_01: Ooh, it's this infusion of grace, redemptor hominists, huh?
29:00
SPEAKER_01: John Paul II would remind all those people, the young people and all of us, that their lives are not accidents.
29:07
SPEAKER_01: That they're created.
29:09
SPEAKER_01: There are only two ways, right?
29:10
SPEAKER_01: You're either an accident of history, you can do whatever you want with your life, indulge it, trash it, end it even, or you're created if you're created.
29:17
SPEAKER_01: What is the meaning and purpose of that?
29:19
SPEAKER_01: This is what we're talking about.
29:20
SPEAKER_01: This is what John Paul said.
29:22
SPEAKER_01: If you want to know the meaning and purpose, meet Jesus Christ.
29:26
SPEAKER_01: We're not accidents.
29:28
SPEAKER_01: We're not defined by our wounds, our failures, or the labels.
29:32
SPEAKER_01: Oh, the culture loves to put labels on you.
29:34
SPEAKER_01: You're an L, a G, a B, a T, or you're a drunk, or you're a porn addict.
29:39
SPEAKER_01: No, no, no.
29:40
SPEAKER_01: We may have those attractions or addictions or whatever, but that's not who we are, right?
29:46
SPEAKER_01: We're not defined by our failures.
29:48
SPEAKER_01: We're not defined by those labels that the world imposes on you.
29:53
SPEAKER_01: Labels are so important because when you slap a label on somebody, the culture and the world knows, the devil knows, that you'll start to live out that label, right?
30:02
SPEAKER_01: I'm gay, I'm trans.
30:04
SPEAKER_01: You see how they defend themselves.
30:05
SPEAKER_01: Your reason becomes unreasonable.
30:07
SPEAKER_01: You know, if I've had an abortion, then I then I have to stand and clap for for abortion because otherwise I'm gonna have to go into my own heart and I and I can't go there.
30:16
SPEAKER_01: But John Paul would say, yes, go there.
30:19
SPEAKER_01: You're not defined even by that.
30:22
SPEAKER_01: God wants to shed his mercy on you, right?
30:24
SPEAKER_01: Divine, the image of the divine mercy, Jesus, I trust in you.
30:28
SPEAKER_01: All of us can be forgiven, all of us are sinners.
30:31
SPEAKER_01: So we've been created by love, by lover, for love.
30:37
SPEAKER_01: And Jesus Christ reveals to them the greatness of their calling.
30:41
SPEAKER_01: This is the message that inspired the founding of the John Paul II Renewal Center and continues to animate our Claymore mission today.
30:48
SPEAKER_01: Become who you are.
30:50
SPEAKER_01: Not the person the culture tells you to become, nor the person your fears or weaknesses persuade you that you must remain, but the man or woman God created you to be.
31:00
SPEAKER_01: I want to end this way.
31:02
SPEAKER_01: Final chapter in the life of John Paul II that may reveal more about the man than almost anything else.
31:08
SPEAKER_01: We remember the young, athletic pope, right?
31:10
SPEAKER_01: Skiing in the mountains, hiking with young people, traveling the world, and standing courageously before enormous crowds.
31:17
SPEAKER_01: But we must also remember the elderly pope, weakened by Parkinson's disease and other illnesses, struggling to walk, struggling to speak, and eventually struggling even to appear at the window of the apostolic palace.
31:30
SPEAKER_01: The world watches this once vigorous young man became increasingly frail, and yet something extraordinary happened.
31:39
SPEAKER_01: His witness did not diminish.
31:40
SPEAKER_01: In many ways it became even more powerful.
31:43
SPEAKER_01: Here was a man who had spent his life defending the dignity of every single person, including the unborn, the disabled, the elderly, the sick, the dying.
31:54
SPEAKER_01: Now through his own suffering, he was living the very truth that he had proclaimed.
31:59
SPEAKER_01: He was showing the world that human dignity is not measured by just my physical strength, my intellectual achievements, my productivity, beauty or independence, my license to do whatever I want.
32:12
SPEAKER_01: No, our dignity comes from who we are, beloved sons and daughters of God.
32:18
SPEAKER_01: As you age, you lose us.
32:20
SPEAKER_01: My dad's a hundred years old.
32:21
SPEAKER_01: And he lost, he laughs sometimes.
32:23
SPEAKER_01: He says, I lost everything, but I didn't lose Jesus Christ.
32:27
SPEAKER_01: The man who had once captivated the world with the strength, who was now teaching the world to his weakness.
32:34
SPEAKER_01: The Pope who had proclaimed, be not afraid, was showing us what those words exactly meant when confronted with suffering and death.
32:42
SPEAKER_01: He saw this early in his life.
32:44
SPEAKER_01: He saw it later on in his life.
32:46
SPEAKER_01: He went through the suffering, and he lived out his life, seeing that suffering and bring this message of hope.
32:53
SPEAKER_01: He was not merely teaching us how to live, but how to suffer, how to trust, and ultimately how to die in the arms of Jesus Christ.
33:01
SPEAKER_01: And here we return to Cardinal Ratzinger Ratzinger's extraordinary insight.
33:06
SPEAKER_01: The man and his mission had become inseparable.
33:09
SPEAKER_01: Even when John Paul II could no longer travel, preach, or communicate it as he once had, his life continued to proclaim the gospel.
33:17
SPEAKER_01: His very suffering had become a sermon.
33:21
SPEAKER_01: On april second, two thousand five, Saint John Paul II returned to the Father's house.
33:27
SPEAKER_01: Twenty one years later, his witness continues to speak to the world increasingly confused about the meaning of freedom, love, marriage, family, human dignity.
33:37
SPEAKER_01: Aren't these the basic questions even today?
33:40
SPEAKER_01: Certainly he possessed remarkable intellectual gifts.
33:44
SPEAKER_01: He was a philosopher, theologian, poet, playwright, gifted communicator with an extraordinary capacity to connect with people across cultures and generations.
33:53
SPEAKER_01: But none of these qualities alone explains the man.
33:56
SPEAKER_01: The deepest explanation for who he is is found in his relationship to Jesus Christ.
34:02
SPEAKER_01: It's the same for all of us.
34:03
SPEAKER_01: The young Keroltiva, who had lost nearly everyone he loved, became a spiritual father to millions.
34:09
SPEAKER_01: The man who had witnessed some of the darkest chapters of the twentieth century became one of the greatest messengers of hope.
34:16
SPEAKER_01: The philosopher who wrestled with the mystery of the human person became the shepherd who reminded the world that we cannot understand ourselves apart from Jesus Christ.
34:25
SPEAKER_01: And the Pope who once traveled the globe, proclaiming the gospel, continued to proclaim it to the silence and suffering of his final days.
34:34
SPEAKER_01: His life reveals something essential about the Christian vocation.
34:38
SPEAKER_01: Holiness does not mean becoming someone other than ourselves.
34:42
SPEAKER_01: It means allowing the grace of Jesus Christ to come into our hearts and transform us so completely that we become fully the persons God created us to be.
34:52
SPEAKER_01: That's the remarkable harmony Cardinal Ratzinger recognizing John Paul II.
34:57
SPEAKER_01: The man and his mission were one.
34:59
SPEAKER_01: And that's the invitation John Paul II extends to each one of us today.
35:04
SPEAKER_01: Our world does not need more spectators just posting on social media, do we?
35:09
SPEAKER_01: It needs men and women willing to open their hearts to Jesus Christ.
35:13
SPEAKER_01: Discover the truth about yourself, and then carry that message that he gives us into the world, the message of love.
35:20
SPEAKER_01: In a world that's desperately searching for meaning.
35:24
SPEAKER_01: It needs fathers and mothers who understand the sacredness of their vocation, young men and women willing to pursue truth, goodness, and beauty, families who become schools of love, and Christians who have the courage to bring the light of Christ into the darkness of our age.
35:39
SPEAKER_01: And it is dark out there.
35:41
SPEAKER_01: John Paul II showed us the way, and perhaps his greatest legacy is not simply what he taught, but how he lived.
35:47
SPEAKER_01: This is what he's calling all of us to do, become one with Christ and then just go out into the world, right?
35:53
SPEAKER_01: A life that became an extraordinary witness to the transforming power of God's love.
35:59
SPEAKER_01: That's what John Paul was.
36:00
SPEAKER_01: We're all called to do that in our own way.
36:03
SPEAKER_01: On this feast day, let us ask for his intercession, that we might too discover the mission entrusted to us and then have the courage to embrace it.
36:13
SPEAKER_01: Be not afraid.
36:15
SPEAKER_01: Open wide the doors to Jesus Christ.
36:19
SPEAKER_01: John Paul II, pray for us.
36:21
SPEAKER_01: Hey, God bless you.
36:22
SPEAKER_01: Thanks for being with me today.
36:24
SPEAKER_01: Bye bye.