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Pope JohnPaul II

Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium Hardcover – March 22, 2005

by Pope John Paul II (Author)

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In conversations with two Polish philosophy professors, the Pope offers his views on recent history and politics, evil, freedom, democracy, the moral status of modern Europe, and related topics, including the attempt on his life.

Print length

192 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Rizzoli
Publication date

March 22, 2005
Dimensions

5.6 x 0.83 x 8.4 inches
ISBN-10

0847827615
ISBN-13

978-0847827619
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

When the world remembers Pope John Paul II, what themes from his papacy will come to mind? In this philosophical meditation, the Holy Father reflects on values he deems critical to the destiny of humankind, with freedom and the value of life underlying all others. Pope John Paul IIs theological understanding of evil and suffering was forged in the crucible of Nazism and communism in his native Poland, as was his belief in the importance of cultural identity. He points out that "evil, in a realist sense, can only exist in relation to good, and in particular, in relation to God, the supreme Good," which underlies even the darkest moments in history with the promise of redemption and hope. His encounters with those dark moments lend credibility when he writes, "All human suffering, all pain, all infirmity contains within itself a promise of salvation, a promise of joy…"

He champions freedom, yet cautions the faithful that when freedom in no longer linked with the truth, it sets the premise for "dangerous moral consequences." The West must overcome its moral permissiveness, he exhorts, listing divorce, free love, abortion, contraception, euthanasia, and genetic engineering as evidence of its degeneration. He also issues a plea for the church, a repository of historical memory, to remember its primary mission: to proclaim the Gospel.

The world will remember Pope John Paul II for espousing many of the convictions he expresses here: that good is ultimately victorious, life conquers death, and love triumphs over hate. --Cindy Crosby

From Publishers Weekly

The pope's 1994 book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, sold some 20 million copies in more than 30 languages. Both that book and this one grew out of interviews conducted in the early 1990s, but the differences between them are significant. The interviewer for Threshold was an Italian journalist who focused on questions Catholic laypersons might ask; the interviewers for Memory were Polish professors of philosophy. Though advance publicity has focused on the pope's description of the 1981 attempt on his life and on several comments on abortion and homosexuality, most of the book is devoted to rigorous discussion—laced with quotations from the Bible, documents of Vatican II and his own poetry—about the nature of evil, especially as seen in Nazi and Communist regimes; the nature of freedom, with its concomitant responsibilities; and the challenges facing post-Enlightenment, secular Europe. Praising the medieval church and Thomist philosophy, condemning Cartesian self-sufficiency and modern "unbridled capitalism," the pope upholds tradition (memory) as the basis for individual, religious and national identity. His conclusion is characteristically optimistic: "The evil of the 20th century was... an evil of gigantic proportions, an evil which availed itself of state structures in order to accomplish its wicked work." But "there is no evil from which God cannot draw forth a greater good. There is no suffering which he cannot transform into a path leading to him." (Mar. 27)

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Rizzoli; 1st U. S. Edition (March 22, 2005)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 192 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0847827615
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0847827619
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.5 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.6 x 0.83 x 8.4 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #791,227 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #698 in Christian Popes
- #8,982 in Christian Inspirational
- #96,214 in History (Books)

Customer Reviews:
45 ratings

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Kathleen J.

A Book to be Read in any time in History

Reviewed in the United States on September 30, 2005

Verified Purchase

"Conversations at the Dawn Of the Millenium,"is a book to be read and savored,at any time in History.It covers the rise of Christianity in Europe,going back to the early disciples of

Christian thought.

Much is devoted to the Popes native land of Poland.Both the

Nazi's and the Communists set out to destroy the culture of

John Paul's native land.Poland was a Western nation,as was

Czechoslovakia.Their religions and culture was Western.

Although,people growing up in the the 21st Century,saw many

of these countries as satellites of Russia,such was not the case for the people who lived in them.They stuggled to protect

their identidies,which were being eroded in this century.

Pope John Paul ll,lived through the Nazi invasion.He saw the

Jewish ghettoes and the persecutions within the walls.When

the Nazi's left,they were overrun by the Communist Russians.

Through all this, he witnessed the evil of their ideologies.

Their taking away of the indivual's human basic rights

I enjoyed reading about the philosophies in this book of

Wisdom.

All of the books,written simply for the public,explain a true legacy of love toward humankind and his great forgiving

soul.

Also, I wanted to mention"Crossing the Threshold of Hope"

written in 1994 and a best seller.

These two books,have so much in them,they could be compared to a work of Art.You feel you must return and learn and reflect

more.Each time there will be something you did not grasp before,but you do after a second reading.The Pope at a young age witnessed much suffering.Yet his optimimism regarding the human race and individualism was infectious.

I look forward to reading more of his wisdom.He surely had one of the most brilliant minds of the past century and shared it with us whether we be of the Christian Faith or not.The Pope saw the dignity of every person created.John Paul ll was truly 'the people's Pope.

7 people found this helpful

Helpful

Seeker of Truth

Ontological Optimism

Reviewed in the United States on March 16, 2008

Verified Purchase

It is appropriate to call ontological optimism the essential message of this book because, according to the author, there are two limits that God has imposed upon evil: 1) Creation and 2) Redemption. All of this means that there is a primacy of good over evil since the beginning of the world and this primacy is once again reaffirmed with the death and resurrection of Christ: the definite victory of good over evil that is at the root of our Christian hope. We may get saddened by all the evil that we see in and around us but we should never lose our hope because both our deepest identity and that of our world are rooted in God. "The Paschal Mystery confirms that good is ultimately victorious, that life conquers death and that love triumphs over hate." (p. 55)

My favorite quotes are:

1) Yet it is hard to forget the evil that has been personally experienced: one can only forgive. And what does it mean to forgive, if not to appeal to good that is greater than any evil? This good, after all, has its foundation in God alone. Only God is this good. The limit imposed upon evil by divine good has entered human history, especially the history of Europe, through the work of Christ. (p. 15)
2) Freedom is properly so called to the extent that it implements the truth regarding the good. Only then does it become a good in itself. If freedom ceases to be linked with truth and begins to make truth dependent on freedom, it sets the premises for dangerous moral consequences, which can assume incalculable dimensions. When this happens, the abuse of freedom provokes a reaction which takes the form of one totalitarian system or another. This is another form of the corruption of freedom, the consequences of which we have experienced in the twentieth century, and beyond. (pp. 42-43)
3) In 1994, at Castel Gandolfo, a symposium was held on the theme of the identity of European societies (Identity in Change). The discussion focused on the changes brought about by the events of the twentieth century in the way European identity and national identity are understood in the context of modern civilization. At the beginning of the symposium, Paul Ricoeur spoke of remembering and forgetting as two important and mutually opposed forces that operate in human and social history. Memory is the faculty which models the identity of human beings at both a personal and a collective level. In fact, it is through memory that our sense of identity forms and defines itself in the personal psyche. Among the many interesting things I heard on that occasion, this struck me particularly. Christ was acquainted with this law of memory and he invoked it at the key moment of his mission. When he was instituting the Eucharist during the Last Supper, he said: "Do this in memory of me" (Hoc facite in meam commemorationem); Lk 22:19). Memory evokes recollections. The Church is, in a certain sense, the "living memory" of Christ: of the mystery of Christ, of his Passion, death, and resurrection, of his Body and Blood. This "memory" is accomplished through the Eucharist. It follows that Christians, as they celebrate the Eucharist in "memory" of their Master, continually discover their own identity. The Eucharist highlights something more profound and at the same time more universal--it highlights the divinization of man and the new creation in Christ. It speaks of the redemption of the world. (pp. 144-145)
4) The demise first of Nazism and then of the Soviet Union signaled a failure. It revealed the utter absurdity of the large-scale violence that formed part of the theory and practice of those systems. Will we be able to learn from the dramatic lessons of history? Or will we be prey once more to the passions at work in the human spirit, yielding yet again to the evil promptings of violence?
Believers know that the presence of evil is always accompanied by the presence of good, by grace. As Saint Paul wrote: "The free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man's trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many" (Rom 5: 15). These words retain their relevance today. Redemption is ongoing. Where evil grows, there the hope for good also grows. In our time evil has grown disproportionately, operating through perverted systems which have practiced violence and elimination on a vast scale. I am not speaking here of evil committed by individuals for personal motives or through individual initiatives. The evil of the twentieth century was not a small-scale evil, it was not simply "homemade." It was an evil of gigantic proportions, an evil which availed itself of state structures in order to accomplish its wicked work, an evil built up into a system.
At the same time, however, divine grace has been superabundantly revealed. There is no evil from which God cannot draw forth a greater good. There is no suffering which cannot transform into a path leading to him. Offering himself freely in his passion and death on the Cross, the Son of God took upon himself all the evils of sin. The suffering of the Crucified God is not just one form of suffering alongside others, not just another more or less painful ordeal: it is an unequaled suffering. In sacrificing himself for us all, Christ gave a new meaning to suffering, opening up a new dimension, a new order: the order of love. It is true that suffering entered human history with original sin. Sin is that "sting" (cf. 1 Cor 15:55-56) which inflicts pain, wounding man mortally. Yet the passion of Christ on the Cross gave a radically new meaning to suffering, transforming it from within. It introduced into human history, which is the history of sin, a blameless suffering accepted purely for love. This suffering opens the door to the hope of liberation, hope for the definitive elimination of that "sting," which is tearing humanity apart. It is this suffering which burns and consumes evil with the flame of love and draws forth even from sin a great flowering of good.
All human suffering, all pain, all infirmity contains within itself a promise of salvation, a promise of joy: "I am now rejoicing in my suffering for your sake," writes Saint Paul (Col 1:24). This applies to all forms of suffering, called forth by evil. It applies to that enormous social and political evil which divides and torments the world today: the evil of war, the evil of oppression afflicting individuals and peoples, the evil of social injustice, of human dignity trodden underfoot, of racial and religious discrimination, the evil of violence, terrorism, the arms race--all this evil is present in the world partly so as to awaken our love, our self-gift in generous and disinterested service to those visited by suffering. In the love that pours forth from the heart of Christ, we find hope for the future of the world. Christ has redeemed the world: "By his wounds we are healed" (Is 53:5). (pp. 166-168)

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