On the eve of the 20th anniversary of his pontificate today, Pope John Paul II yesterday released his 13th encyclical, Fides Et Ratio ("Faith and Reason"), which presented to the massed ranks of the world's media in the Vatican by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, President of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Holy Office).
Although the Pope and a number of Catholic theologians have been working on this encyclical since 1986, the original idea goes back even further, a point underlined yesterday by Cardinal Ratzinger.
"As far back as 1982 when I began to work in close collaboration with the Pope, he had a document like this in mind, a development of his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, looking at the communications breakdown between faith and reason . . .", Cardinal Ratzinger said.
Given that the encyclical has been released in this anniversary week, commentators have tended to see it as the "definitive" encyclical, summing up much of what has gone before both in the previous 12 encyclicals and in the whole thrust of Pope John Paul II's teachings.
Cardinal Ratzinger confirmed that analysis yesterday, commenting: "The providential date of this encyclical says much about its importance since it reflects some of the most profound pre-occupations of this pontificate in that it addresses all the problems, hopes and fears of modern man's relationship with faith".
Concerned as it is with the relationship between faith and reason, this encyclical offers a reflection of great philosophical and theological breadth, a reflection that is inevitably not immediately accessible. The very opening words of the document set the tone for much of what is to come in the following 150 or so pages.
"Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth - in a word, to know himself - so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves," he says.
Central to the encyclical is Pope John Paul's belief that, on the eve of the new millennium, mankind has gone down a cultural impasse in which faith and reason, theology and philosophy have been separated.
"At the present time in particular, the search for ultimate truth seems often to be neglected," he says. "Modern philosophy clearly has the great merit of focusing attention on man . . . Complex systems of thought have thus been built, yielding results in the different fields of knowledge and fostering the development of culture and history . . . Yet the positive results achieved must not obscure the fact that reason, in its one-sided concern to investigate human subjectivity, seems to have forgotten that men and women are always called to direct their steps towards a truth which transcends them." Reflecting how in different parts of the world and in different cultures, there arise the same fundamental questions about human life, about its purpose and meaning and about evil and life after death, the Pope cites Confucius and Lao Tze, Tirthankara and Buddha, Homer, Euripides and Sophocles, Plato and Aristotle as men united in "the quest for meaning which has always compelled the human heart".
Not surprisingly, however, the Pope suggests that the Christian faith provides the answers to those launched on that quest, writing in the opening section of the encyclical: "From the moment when, through the Paschal mystery, she received the gift of the ultimate faith about human life, the Church has made her pilgrim way along the paths of the world to proclaim that Jesus Christ is "the way, and the truth, and the life". By the end of the encyclical, the Pope warns that, "at the end of this century, one of our greatest temptations is to despair".
The Pope adds: "I ask everyone to look more deeply at man, whom Christ has saved in the mystery of his love, and at the human being's unceasing search for truth and meaning. Different philosophical systems have lured people into that they are their own absolute master, able to decide their own future and destiny in complete autonomy, trusting only in themselves and their own powers. But this can never be the grandeur of the human being, who can find fulfilment only in choosing to enter the truth, to make a home under the shade of Wisdom and dwell there . . ."