*Article* **The Main Philosophical Inspirations in the Teaching of John Paul II during His Pilgrimages to Poland**

**Ryszard Zaj ˛aczkowski**

Department of Philosophy, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, 20-950 Lublin, Poland; rzajac@kul.pl

**Abstract:** The article focuses on the philosophical aspects of John Paul II's teachings during his pilgrimages to Poland. The pope, as an academic and philosopher, often discussed, in his teaching, topics that had also previously been part of his scholarly philosophical studies. Therefore, the philosophical legacy of Karol Wojtyła serves a significant context that enriches the papal teachings. This way, a complementing light is shed on his teachings, the terms he was using gain a deeper meaning and one can observe a deeper sense in his message. Under the influence of the statements of John Paul II during his pilgrimages to Poland, an unmistakable impression arises that they form a logical and comprehensive moral teaching firmly rooted in his pre-pontifical theological and philosophical thought, developing ideas (especially in the theological dimension) and giving them practical expression. The philosophical work of Karol Wojtyła is an important pillar and source of inspiration for the theology of John Paul II, especially in his teaching about the human person, laying the foundations for Christian anthropology. At the end of the paper, a specific aspect of the papal teaching in the Polish context is stressed.

**Keywords:** Karol Wojtyła; John Paul II; pilgrimages; dignity of the person; truth; freedom; conscience; Poland

#### **1. Introduction**

Many works are devoted to the pilgrimages of John Paul II to Poland (Jackowski et al. 2009). Researchers have analysed various aspects of the papal pilgrimage, such as the historical (Polak et al. 2019), political (Klima 2014; Wnuk-Lipi ´nski 2017), psychological (Biela 1980), sociological (Mach 2009; Ruszkowski et al. 2006), cultural (Skrzypczak 2019), aesthetic (Mrowi ´nski and Przestek 2020), linguistic (Bartmi ´nski 2000; Puzynina 2002), geographic (Jackowski et al. 2009), mediatic (Baczy ´nski 2011; Pieniak 1997; Mydlarska 2019), evangelization-related (Adamiak 2020) or theological (Baczy ´nski 2007) aspects. Less frequently, attention is paid to the philosophical message of the pope's teaching. The reason for this probably lies in the fact that John Paul II—although he was a philosopher—tried to formulate his statements as simply as possible during his meetings with the faithful. At the same time, there is no doubt that, when he took over the papal ministry, he brought, to his teaching, a rich philosophical message and deepened the ethical analysis of the phenomena he spoke about. At the end of the paper, a specific aspect of the papal teaching in the Polish context is stressed.

#### **2. Resources and Method**

This study focuses on selected academic and pastoral statements by Karol Wojtyła/John Paul II. In the article, I make reference to the pope's homilies and speeches made during his nine visits to Poland between 1979 and 2002 (Jan Paweł II 2012), as well as to some of his academic works from when he was active in Lublin and Krakow from 1949 until 1978. Both groups of texts form a coherent whole, albeit of a decidedly different character. Knowledge of Wojtyła's philosophical opus deepens our understanding of his pastoral message as pope. The statements of John Paul II during his visits to Poland include

**Citation:** Zaj ˛aczkowski, Ryszard. 2022. The Main Philosophical Inspirations in the Teaching of John Paul II during His Pilgrimages to Poland. *Religions* 13: 106. https://doi.org/10.3390/ rel13020106

Academic Editors: Mariano P. Barbato and Greg Peters

Received: 30 October 2021 Accepted: 18 January 2022 Published: 21 January 2022

**Publisher's Note:** MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

**Copyright:** © 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

many texts and focus on numerous themes of his teaching. They are also a testimony to exceptional philosophical sensitivity, shaped by the environment, especially the Lublin Philosophical School (Lekka-Kowalik and Gondek 2019; Duma 2016, Seifert 1981). The main philosophical texts by Karol Wojtyła are also analysed. The article focuses on the thought background of the papal message, thus deepening his message. Whoever wants to competently learn the content of the papal teaching (not only during pilgrimages to Poland) must go deeper, transcend the superficial meaning of words, reach their meaning in the pope's language and, at the same time, accept an invitation to meditate with Wojtyła in the name of seeking the truth about man and the world (Grabowski 2005, 2011). Of necessity, the article focuses only on the most important philosophical themes of Karol Wojtyła/John Paul II. He undertook only a few of them, but those to which he devoted his attention absorbed him for many years, which resulted in new, more mature and complete depictions. At the core of this thought, there are concepts such as the dignity of a person, truth, freedom and conscience. These issues appeared in various ways in his philosophical works and fell within the scope of papal teaching.

The pope did not visit any other country so often (apart from Italy, of course) and, in no other country, did he leave such rich teaching. His visits to Poland covered a period of 23 years marked by many important changes. The first pilgrimage (perhaps the most important, from today's perspective) took place in 1979 (Balon 2019; Gawin 2005–2006; Bösch 2020). The next ones were held in four-year intervals (1983, 1987, 1991 and 1995) and the last three in 1997, 1999 and 2002. (Podbilska 2008, pp. 145–50; Skibi ´nski 2005, pp. 166–224). The pope visited almost all Polish dioceses (except for the Swidnica diocese) ´ (Nabywaniec 2008, pp. 82–87) and met with representatives of many social groups. Foreign observers treated John Paul II's pilgrimages to Poland mainly as political and media events. However, they overlooked the message contained in the papal homilies and speeches incidentally, always addressed to an exceptionally large assembly of the faithful. Yet, this message deserves attention for at least two reasons. First, the papal teaching in Poland is extremely broad; it spans a long era marked by significant events in Poland and central and eastern Europe. Secondly, when studying papal statements in Poland today, one might form the impression that they were composed in such a way as to cover as many issues as possible, arranged as a well-thought-out whole. In this way, the pope left Poles (and not only) with a comprehensive moral and religious message. Few of these statements are commonly known. They are rarely mentioned nowadays in Poland (and if they are, this is mainly via Radio Maryja and TV Trwam) and are almost unknown abroad. A non-Polish readership can access them mainly in Italian (and Polish) on the Holy See's website.

Wojtyła's academic works are also obscure. Many of them (articles in particular) have not been translated into English, let alone other languages. Meanwhile, as a theologian and, especially, a philosopher, Wojtyła left a large academic output, especially in the field of philosophical anthropology and ethics. These publications are often written in difficult prose, referring to various philosophical trends, and reading them requires specialist academic preparation. Nevertheless, one ought to remember that the range of issues covered by them also encroached upon papal teaching, although in a popularised form. Often, it acquires depth only when the meaning of the terms used by the pope is expanded to include statements from before October 1978 included in the books *Miłos´c i odpowiedzialno´s´c* (*Love and Responsibility*) and *Osoba i czyn* (*Acting Person* or *Person and Act*). Many problems that John Paul II dealt with as an academic and lecturer found expression and development in his papal teaching (e.g., theology of the body, human dignity and the relationship between faith and reason).

It is worth noting that, thus far, there has been no study on how Wojtyła's academic work inspired his papal teaching. In Poland, this is probably due to the fact that researchers were particularly interested in the philosophy of the author of *Acting Person* and his papal documents, treating the statements made during pastoral visits as less important, occasional, or even politically motivated. Nor did foreign researchers undertake such analyses, if only because of the language barrier.

The aim of the article is to show the relationship between the teaching of John Paul II during his trips to Poland and his previous academic thought, especially in his main books and selected articles. Over the years, Karol Wojtyła worked over the foundations of his philosophical anthropology and personalistic ethics. The juxtaposition of Wojtyła's philosophical reflections from the pre-papal period and his teaching during the pilgrimages to Poland allows a deeper reading of his papal message to be obtained, which can be perceived superficially or even completely misunderstood, especially by readers from outside Poland. This approach is allowed by Wojtyła himself, who was very sensitive to the precision of concepts, the mystery of the person and the revealing of deeper layers of reality (Pilu´s 1980). The concepts selected for analysis most often occur in John Paul II's texts delivered during the pope's pilgrimages to Poland and are also present in his earlier academic studies, in order to maintain a sense of coherence. The objective throughout is to rationally gather and explore the concepts used in various contexts by Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II. Whereas his academic work is known to have broached a limited number of topics, he worked on them for a very long time, which resulted in an original and mature approach. The article ends with an attempt to explain—on the basis of historical and political circumstances—what specific aspect of Wojtyła's philosophy found expression in his papal teaching to Poles, what was particularly important in this message and why.

#### **3. Excerpts from the Academic Biography of Wojtyła**

In 1946, Wojtyła was sent to Rome, where he studied for two years at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas (the Angelicum). He ended this period by writing the dissertation on *Faith According to Saint John of the Cross* in Latin (*Doctrina de fide apud S. Ioannem a Cruce*) and, in 1948, he obtained a doctoral degree in Cracow (Kiwka 1999, pp. 65–74). The aforementioned work, although of a theological nature, was of significant importance for the formation of his philosophical anthropology; indeed, it gave it a unique shape and encouraged to deepen his search towards building the so-called integral anthropology (Kupczak 2011). Dealing with the legacy of St. John of the Cross became the starting point for Wojtyła for the fullness of human experience (Galarowicz 1986; Półtawski 2013, p. 7). After returning to Poland, the young priest combined pastoral, didactic and philosophical activities. The result of these activities can be found, for example, in little-known earlier dissertations *Rozwazania o istocie człowieka ˙* [*Considerations on the essence of man,* 1999] and *Katolicka etyka społeczna* [*Catholic social ethics,* 2018]. The first work, a series of lectures for the academic youth of Cracow, dates 1949, while the second one includes lectures for students of the Jagiellonian University in 1953/1954 and then for the seminarians of theological seminaries in Cracow (Zaj ˛aczkowski 2020, pp. 120–24). Both studies prove that, already then, the philosophical issues important to the author came to the fore. In 1953, Wojtyła received his habilitation at the Jagiellonian University based on the dissertation *Ocena mozliwo´sci zbudowania etyki chrze´scija ´nskiej przy zało ˙ zeniach systemu Maksa Schelera ˙* [*Evaluation of the Possibilities of Building Christian Ethics on the Principles of Max Scheler's System*]. Soon he began lectures at the Catholic Univerity of Lublin (Wojtyła 1986). In 1960, his dissertation *Miło´s´c i odpowiedzialno´s´c* [*Love and Responsibility*] devoted to sexual ethics was published and, in 1969, the continuation of this book and the most important work in his philosophical achievement, *The Acting Person*. An important origin of Wojtyła's thought is the spirituality of St. John of the Cross, but the foundation of his philosophising is also undoubtedly the traditional trend of the philosophy of being—Aristotelianism and Thomism—which the author extends to the achievements of the modern philosophy of consciousness, providing new and effective instruments of cognition (Acosta 2016; Havranek 1993; Jaroszy ´nski 2021; Podgórski 2016). In his view, this leads to changes in and enrichment of both the philosophy of being and the philosophy of consciousness, which puts Wojtyła "in the position of a translator, trying to translate the concepts of Thomism into concepts of phenomenology and vice versa" (Wojtyła 1973, p. 306). Certainly, the knowledge of contemporary philosophy made it easier for Wojtyła to communicate efficiently with today's world, while placement in the Thomistic philosophy was a guarantee of defending traditional values in

the changing reality (Gałkowski 2017, p. 75). Rocco Buttiglione, an excellent researcher of the thought of John Paul II, emphasized that it is impossible to understand the teaching of the Polish pope without drawing on and constantly using the philosophical achievements of Karol Wojtyła. The great themes of his encyclicals matured in the pages of philosophical works before his pontificate (Buttligilone 1982, p. 98). Andrzej Półtawski shared a similar view, noting that "Karol Wojtyła's philosophical views are also an important key to fully understand the teachings of John Paul II" (Półtawski 2013, p. 14).

#### *3.1. A Man Is a Person—A Unique and Eternal Value*

Already in the 1940s, Wojtyła wrote, "a man is a person—a unique and eternal value" (Wojtyła 1999, p. 97). The phenomenology of the mystical experience of St. John of the Cross from the very beginning led the author to the irreducible centre of the person and pointed to the necessity of self-transcendence of the person towards the truth that is God Himself (Rembierz 2014). Later, his focus on man remained at the centre of his philosophical and pastoral activity. In the 1960s, reporting, in a letter to Henri de Lubac, on the philosophical issues that interested him, Wojtyła wrote, "I use very rare free time for work, close to my heart, devoted to the metaphysical meaning and mystery of the PERSON. It seems to me that today the debate is taking place on this level. Evil in our time consists primarily of some kind of degradation, even destruction, of the fundamental uniqueness of every human person. This evil is even more in a metaphysical order than a moral one. Instead of sterile polemics, we must oppose this disintegration, sometimes planned by atheistic ideologies, with a kind of »recapitulation« of the inviolable mystery of the person ..." (Weigel 2000, p. 223). Man's way of existence is radically different from the way of existence of things. Man has reason, the ability to think conceptually, as well as a transcendence from within. All these inner qualities, objectively existing, make up the special, exceptionally valuable inner good of man, that is, his dignity—an inalienable quality. Dignity is the inner, innate and natural mark of man. It assigns him a central and unique place in nature and culture. Society and history do not give man dignity but, instead, have a duty to respect and protect it. Recognizing the dignity of a person is also an experience of the absolute obligation to affirm it; *persona est affirmanda propter se ipsum* (Crosby 1984). On the one hand, the dignity of a person significantly determines the basic vision of man in Wojtyła's work and, on the other hand, it is a criterion of morality, in a sense, a determinant of the moral value of human action. On the basis of this good, Wojtyła formulated the so-called personalistic principle and norm, which is the basic norm of morality—"a person is such a good that only love constitutes a proper and wholesome reference to it" (Wojtyła 1982, p. 42). In an important essay, even the title of which is very eloquent, *Subjectivity and the Irreducible in Man*, the author speaks of the need to "objectify the problem of human subjectivity" (Wojtyła 1978, p. 107), reminding, at the same time, that, in order to understand man, one should focus on that "which is irreducible" (franc. irréductible) and which makes it impossible to speak of him otherwise than as a person. Thus, "one has to stop in the process of reduction that leads us towards understanding man in the world (cosmological type of understanding) to understand the man in himself. The latter type of understanding could be called personalistic" (Wojtyła 1978, p. 112). The personalistic norm can also be formulated as a prohibition against disregarding the mystery of a person in oneself or in others, which implies a prohibition on treating a person as an object (Aquas 2009). In the book *Love and Responsibility*, the personalistic principle is created by reading the basic truth about man and his goodness in opposition to utilitarianism that treats reality in terms of utility, i.e., only as an object of use and as a means to an end (Wojtyła 1982, p. 42), although, at the same time, the utilitarian principle is not rejected, subordinated to the personalistic norm, because "everything fair and useful to a person is included in the commandment of love" (Wojtyła 1982, p. 43).

Wojtyła emphasizes more than once that man must not be reduced only to an object of use and performing a socially useful function by him. This leads to a further important conclusion; human dignity, although inseparable from him, is not an unchanging state with regards to its subjective dimension (Duchli ´nski 2008; Koterski 2006). It requires human effort, cooperation with God in the process of grasping and developing the truth. Wojtyła discovered the so-called integral anthropology, the basic thesis of which is that man, with his personal structure, is inscribed in the supernatural (Biesaga 2016; Crosby 2019; Ignatik 2021, pp. 85–92). An integral anthropology, which provides the full truth about man, is the result of cooperation between faith and reason, philosophy and theology (Drozd˙ z˙ 2011a; Grabowski 2004; Mruszczyk 2010, pp. 25–32, 76–94). It contradicts all naturalistic reductionisms that generate the so-called "anthropological error" (Drózd˙ z 2007; Zwoli ´nski ˙ 2012) which has devastating consequences for humans in the form of various kinds of reification, which leads to totalitarianism.

#### *3.2. Truth–Freedom–Conscience*

The reflection on human dignity has a strong metaphysical foundation in Wojtyła's writings (Dec 2008, pp. 14–17). Already as the pope, he wrote, "It must not be forgotten that removing the problems of existence into the shadows inevitably leads to a loss of contact with the objective truth and, consequently, with the foundation on which the human dignity is based" (John Paul II 1998, No. 90). It is metaphysics that allows us to explain the concept of a person's dignity, pointing to its spiritual nature. The constantly developed and deepened philosophical reflection of Wojtyła was primarily aimed at the truth and revealing its ever deeper layers, especially in terms of the mystery of man. Learning the truth in realist philosophy is a man's reconciliation with an objectively existing reality. As part of the experience of the normative power of truth, the subject learns the truth about the bonum honestum and realizes it in the second stage of the ethical experience, i.e., in the experience of morality. While practicing assertion, thus experiencing the normative power of truth, a person discovers a categorical command to respect it. Thus, man, as a cognitive entity, discovers a moral responsibility. For Wojtyła, "responsibility is an experiential form of dependence on truth, which governs a person's freedom" (Wojtyła 1969, p. 190). The power to accept the truth can only come from within the human being, from the freedom that is the property of the will and is realized through the truth. Freedom is itself to the extent that it is realized by truth for good (Tarasiewicz 2004). Freedom is an ethical category that finds its fullest realization in the commandment to love God and one's neighbour. By choosing and realizing good in personal, family, social and global life, man realizes his freedom in truth, thus in a perfect way (Mizdrak 2011).

For Wojtyła, the distinguishing trait of freedom is "the transcendence of a person in act" (Sroczy ´nski 2019, p. 89). This is also the title of a chapter from *The Acting Person* devoted to the issue of freedom. It highlights the foundation of freedom; man is free not only and not primarily because he can undertake various actions, but, above all, because he can guide and shape himself, for man "is not only the originator of his action but also its creator" (Wojtyła 1969, p. 119). If deeds have their source in man's personal *esse*, then man is shaped by accomplishing them. Through them, he becomes morally good or bad. "To be morally good"—Wojtyła writes—"means to be a good person, to be good as a person. To be morally bad—it means to be a bad person, to be bad as a human being. Man becomes morally good or morally bad through his actions" (Wojtyła 1969, p. 125). The transcendence of a person in the act is not only self-dependence, or dependence on oneself. The fullness of freedom is not manifested in discretion, or in making one's fate and action dependent only on one's own will, but by subordinating to the truth (Šlužaite 2014). Only this subordination allows a person to rule over the world, himself and evil and to create good (Wilk 2007). If freedom ceases to be related to truth and makes truth dependent on itself, it creates morally harmful ideologies (Kupczak 2011, pp. 107–21; Tarasiewicz 2019).

The place where what is given is translated into what is ought to be is conscience. In the view whereby the fundamental and advancing changeability of the human situation and the face of ever faster emergence of new life problems in the moral dimension, special care is needed to strengthen the human conscience in its function of cognitive recognition of the moral value and its leading function, particularly in sensitive places of the human existence. Without taking conscience into account, which flows from knowing and recognizing the truth, the description of the moral experience is incomplete and, ultimately, inadequate. Wojtyła writes, "Man is not unquestionably rooted in good, nor is he sure of his freedom. This is what the ethical aspect of a person's contingency and at the same time the meaning of conscience are based on" (Wojtyła 1969, p. 161). Conscience reveals the dependence on truth inherent in human freedom and provides its normative force. However, above all, it presents to the subject the truth about himself and hints at what contributes to his development and—also through free choice—to his undoing. A choice that does not correspond to the truth he has learned contributes especially to the moral ruin of a man. Such a choice undermines what defines and distinguishes a man as a person, his rationality. For Wojtyła, a conscience is an act of knowing the truth, a judgment in a logical sense; the apparent exaltation of freedom by its "release" from the truth leads, in practice, to the enslavement of man by "subhuman" forces over which he has no power. Conscience understood holistically is, according to Wojtyła, an altogether peculiar effort of a person aimed at grasping the truth as a value. It is first seeking this truth and investigating it before it becomes a certainty and a judgment (Wojtyła 1969, p. 167). The decision is the final stage in the process of conscience. Wojtyła wrote, "this effort of conscience (...) is closely related to the specific structure of the will as self-determination, and at the same time to the structure of the person itself. There are two Integrated Aspects here: the cognitive aspect—referencing to truth, and the aspirational aspect—referencing to human purposefulness. Only together do they fully constitute the conscience. It is in conscience that the subordination of action to the truth takes place. It is possible only because man is internally complex, and at the same time, because he is internally superior, that is, transcendent to his powers, both cognitive and aspirational. A man is also superior to the objects of his pursuit, he is "greater" than them or remains at a certain distance from them.

Thus, conscience is nothing but a centre point of this holistic transcendence (Wojtyła 1976, p. 31). Therefore, conscience is also placed in the field of reflection; it is a personal "dominion", "being above" the content of one's cognition and awareness. It is also "being above" one's extra-cognitive, extra-conscious dynamism, above the will and all the other extra-conscious and cognitive dynamisms. Naturally, conscience constitutes the central point of transcendence, but, as an expression of "I", it is, at the same time, a certain integrating centre of all of these dynamisms. It is the crown of human transcendence. Conscience, through "dependence on the good in the truth, in a way creates a new reality within the person. It is a normative reality" (Wojtyła 1969, p. 163). Man, by referring to the moral norms mediated by conscience, which is showing the truth contained in these norms, can reach fulfilment not only in the ontological dimension but also in the moral dimension, i.e., the most profoundly humane dimension. He can fulfil his human vocation and achieve the state of happiness. However, the respect for conscience, its inviolability and the right to self-judgment require that it does not only reflect the interior of a person, but also that it remains righteous and genuine, that it continues to look for the truth in the form of reconciliation with reality and that it submits to it. Moreover, "a righteous conscience is [...] a vital condition for the fulfilment of not only a man but also of the entire community in which he lives" (J ˛edraszewski 2015, p. 21).

#### *3.3. Philosophical Message of Papal Pilgrimages*

The homilies and speeches of John Paul II delivered during his pilgrimages to Poland reflect the atmosphere of those times and the places visited. Therefore, they have a great historical value and are significant for the Polish people. However, it is easily noticeable that his speeches are also of universal character and are relevant for our times. The pope's speeches carry a message relevant to the entire Church and the world. The pope was a philosopher by education, specializing in ethical issues. It is no surprise that these issues were particularly prevalent in his speeches.

#### 3.3.1. Discovering the Dignity of a Person

Already during the first pilgrimage, John Paul II reminded his listeners of the deep dimension of the human being. He said then, "The human being [...] must be measured by the measure of conscience, by the measure of the spirit which is open to God. Therefore, man must be measured by the measure of the Holy Spirit" (Jan Paweł II 2012, p. 27). The human being is an entity endowed with dignity, that is, a value incomparable to anything else in the world outside the world of persons. During his pilgrimage to Poland, the pope repeatedly emphasized that the human being has always been and is a sovereign entity in relation to the rest of the world and holds a superior position over whatever surrounds them. "Human dignity has no price," he recalled, reminding of the testimony of the first Polish martyrs of the 11th century (Jan Paweł II 2012, p. 903).

During his third pilgrimage in 1987, in his speech to the authorities, he spoke of human dignity as the measure and basis of political actions, because "communities, societies, nations, states live a truly human life, when the dignity of the human being, any human being, does not cease to set the direction on the basis of their existence and activity. Any violation and disregard for human rights is a threat to peace" (Jan Paweł II 2012, p. 383). Due to the dignity that characterizes the human being, they cannot be reduced to the role of an object in sexual relations, to a "tool of production "or an object for the "benefit of science". In a 1997 speech at the Jagiellonian University, the pope gave a prophetic warning against the consequences of an anthropological error flowing from and adopting an incorrect concept of the human being. A flawed concept leads to the formulation of flawed rules of conduct and production. The anthropological error appears both on the grounds of the Orphic–Platonic and Aristotelian concept of the person, providing deformed theories of the human person towards its "deification" (Platonic sources) or "animalization" (Aristotelian sources). It must lead to a crisis of the culture founded in this way; "A deformed or incomplete vision of the human being causes science to transform easily from a blessing into a serious threat to humans. [ . . . ] Nowadays, the human being often becomes an object or even a "raw material" instead of a subject and a goal: it is enough to mention genetic engineering experiments, which raise great hopes, but also considerable fears for the future of mankind"—said the pope in Kraków in 1997 at Jagiellonian University (Jan Paweł II 2012, p. 988).

According to the pope, the "human–subject" paradigm is a remedy for technocracy, consumerism and various forms of totalitarianism. In a similar vein, John Paul II also spoke in 1999 during his visit to the Polish parliament; "Today, in this place, we are particularly aware of the fundamental role that a fair legal order plays in a democratic state, the foundation of which should always and everywhere be the human being and the full truth about the human being, their inalienable rights and the rights of the entire community, which constitutes a nation" (Jan Paweł II 2012, p. 1081). Therefore, human dignity should be the source of rights and the guiding principle in the creation of the common good. The whole order of truth and goodness is inscribed, for the human being, in God's commandments. Any action which contradicts this order inevitably strikes the human being who, in turn, discovers their place in the world most fully through their relationship with Christ, because He showed mankind the deepest truth about God and man at the same time. The dignity of a person is ultimately rooted in the mystery of salvation and redemption (Schmitz 1993, p. 82).

#### 3.3.2. In Defence of the Truth

Another very important and universal theme of papal statements concerned truth (Drozd˙ z 2011b). During his second pilgrimage in 1983, the pope, in an address to the ˙ episcopate, reminded that "the truth is the first and fundamental condition of social renewal" (Jan Paweł II 2012, p. 289). A few days later, he argued that truth leads to trust and trust builds community—all the way from family to humanity. The subject of truth was most often reiterated during the pope's meetings with people of science, i.e., those who are especially called to its research and dissemination, for example, during

a visit to Jagiellonian University in Kraków (1983), Catholic University of Lublin (1987), or Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toru ´n (1999) (Przybiecki 2001, pp. 81–89). The pope rejected the accusation that it was impossible to learn objective truth. The defence of truth should oppose tendencies that promote a sense of meaninglessness, makeshift cognition, subjective opinion, changeability and relativity. It is dangerous, because "the fragmentariness of knowledge and the fragmentation of meaning destroys the inner unity of the human being" (Jan Paweł II 2012, p. 1048).

In his speech to the rectors of Polish universities, the pope also repeated, after *Fides et ratio,* that "Faith and reason are like 'two wings on which the human spirit rises to contemplate the truth" (Jan Paweł II 2012, p. 1048). Therefore, in science and philosophy, there is a need for a sapiential dimension consisting in the search for the overall meaning of human existence (Tarasiewicz 2016) . For truth is not only an intellectual "adventure", but it has an existential character and life without it would be meaningless. According to the pope, the defence of truth is a defence of human dignity and the normativity of ethics and it actually protects human freedom. The human being is called to seek the truth and make judgements according to it, so that their life would not be only a constant struggle to create a convenient space of maximum freedom. According to the pope, truth contains the source of the human being's transcendence towards the universe. You reach the truth not only on your own, but also through dialogue with others (Modrzejewski 2016).

The pope often combined the philosophical, moral and religious dimensions of truth. Searching for it on every level and shaping one's life according to it has ultimately a salvific value; "And from this truth that the human being implements, with which they try to shape their life and coexist with others, a path leads to the Truth, i.e., Christ. It leads to the freedom for which Christ has liberated us" (Jan Paweł II 2012, p. 607). Martyrs bear special witness to the truth. In his speech at the end of the Congress of Central and Eastern Europe Theologians in 1991, the pope emphasized that "The testimony (*martyrium*) constitutes exceptional *locus theologicus*, not only by virtue of the mystery of God, in which it expresses and presents itself, but also on account of the truth of the human being, which becomes exceptionally expressive through this testimony. [ . . . ] The status of the witness (one who bears witness to the truth) is the basic status of the human being. This is a statement of fundamental importance, not only in the dimension of Christianity as faith, but also Christianity as culture, as humanism" (Jan Paweł II 2012, pp. 824–25). The pope also emphasized the primary importance of the truth in ecumenical activities. During the ecumenical service in Drohiczyn in 1999, he quoted the following fragment of his encyclical *Ut unum sint*: "love of the truth is the deepest dimension of the authentic pursuit of full communion between Christians" (Jan Paweł II 2012, p. 1076). The main threats to truth are scepticism, agnosticism, nihilism and ethical relativism. The latter, allied with democracy—as the pope noted in his speech to Polish parliamentarians—"deprives the life of the civil community of a permanent moral point of reference, depriving it, in a radical manner, of its ability to recognize the truth" (Jan Paweł II 2012, pp. 1084–85).

#### 3.3.3. Freedom—But Not Absolute

The issue of freedom was of great importance in the pope's pilgrimages to Poland right from the start. In the 1970s and 1980s, the very presence of the Holy Father reminded us of the nation's aspirations for freedom. The theme of freedom recurred during every pilgrimage (Karasi ´nski 2007). The pope always proclaimed that freedom is a gift from God, but it can be misused, as "Freedom is given to the human being as a measure of their dignity. However, it is also entrusted to them. 'Freedom is not a relief but a hardship of greatness'—as the poet expresses (Leopold Staff, *Oto twa pie´s ´n (Here's your song)*). For freedom can be used well or misused by people" (Jan Paweł II 2012, p. 272). This issue became particularly important with the introduction of martial law in Poland and then with the revival of society's aspirations for political and economic transformations. The pope was constantly associated with the desire for freedom of Poles and supported the trade union "Solidarity", which was dissolved upon introduction of martial law. During

the pilgrimages in 1983 and 1987, the participants of meetings with the pope often held banners reminding of the existence of "Solidarity". The pope, in turn, repeatedly referred to the issue of freedom, thus showing support to those who struggled with the communist regime in various ways; "There cannot be a healthy society if the issue of freedom, personal freedom, community freedom, national freedom is not resolved fully, honestly, with a full sense of responsibility" (Jan Paweł II 2012, p. 449)—he said in 1987. The situation changed drastically during the fourth pilgrimage in 1991. Its slogan "Thank God, do not quench the Spirit" marked the joy of regained freedom, but also anxiety about how it would be nurtured and used to overcome the socio-economic and moral crises of the Polish society. It was during this pilgrimage that the pope most often spoke about freedom and did not limit himself to capturing it in political terms. Indeed, he pointed to the need of educating for mature freedom, which presupposes a moral order, an order in the sphere of values; "May we refrain from trying to take shortcuts in our efforts to shape a new economy and new economic systems, omitting moral signposts" (Jan Paweł II 2012, p. 646)— the pope exclaimed in 1991 in Białystok. His teachings covered all dimensions of freedom, including its false varieties. On the verge of Polish transformations in 1991, the pope even spoke of an "exam in freedom". The truth is difficult, but also "Freedom is difficult, you must learn it, you must learn to be truly free, you must learn to be free so that our freedom does not become our own slavery, internal enslavement, or a cause of enslavement to others" (Jan Paweł II 2012, p. 699). During his fourth pilgrimage, in his speech to the laity, the pope touched upon, among others, issues of the freedom of speech in the work of social reconstruction, explaining that "Our word must be free, it must express our inner freedom. You cannot use any means of violence to impose any theses on a person [...]; in today's world, even the media can become means of violence if there is some other violence behind them" (Jan Paweł II 2012, p. 670).

In a sense, John Paul II considered the struggle of Poles for freedom in the 1980s to be an example. In the land on the banks of the Vistula River, a special form of the theology of liberation took shape; "It should be said—the pope said in 1991 to theologians from Central and Eastern Europe—not only because of the fight for the most basic human rights (freedom of religion—freedom of conscience and others), which was waged here—using the radically 'poor' means in the clash with the violence of a totalitarian state. It should also be stated because of the evangelical authenticity of liberation itself, which was the underlying motivation of this fight" (Jan Paweł II 2012, p. 826). On each subsequent occasion, the pope added something on the subject of freedom. During the period of political changes, he always warned against its improper use, emphasizing that it was both a gift and a challenge. This is evidenced by, for example, the words addressed to Polish bishops in 1999, at the prospect of Poland's accession to the European Union, which sounded prophetic; "Poland enters the twenty-first century as a free and sovereign country. This freedom, if it is not to be wasted, requires people who are conscious not only of their own affairs, but also of obligations: self-sacrificing, animated by the love of the Homeland and the spirit of service, who want to build the common good and develop all levels of freedom in the personal, family and social dimension" (Jan Paweł II 2012, p. 1097). It was always characteristic of the pope that he clearly demonstrated the relationship between freedom and truth as well as with Christ which, in modern times, has often been negated (Kupczak 2011). "Beyond truth, freedom is not freedom. It is only apparent. It is even enslavement" (Jan Paweł II 2012, p. 670).

According to the pope, freedom can never only be possessed, but "it must be constantly acquired and created" (Jan Paweł II 2012, p. 718). Political freedom is important, but, first of all, the human being must be free and should not become a slave to instincts, passions, pseudo-values, easy success, consumerism, possessions, economic systems, etc. Over the years, these exhortations recurred in the pope's teaching. The erroneous concept of freedom consists in its absolutization. Analysing the spheres of human life particularly exposed to the temptation of improper use of freedom, John Paul II pointed out that the value that can properly direct our "freedom" path is the love for God and one's neighbour, and

"the greatest fulfilment of freedom is love, which is materialized in devotion and service" (Jan Paweł II 2012, p. 1086). That is why the pope encouraged his countrymen not to forget about the heritage of solidarity—solidarity with another, often weaker person, and solidarity exceeding class barriers and ideological barriers (Jan Paweł II 2012, p. 1083). He reminded of the principle that was widely accepted in the 1980s whereby "there is no freedom without solidarity"; its fullest expression is the joint effort put into building the "civilization of love". "The ultimate destiny of human freedom is holiness" (Jan Paweł II 2012, p. 1010)—this is the message that the pope left after his pilgrimage in 1997, during which he officiated two beatifications and canonizations. The teaching about freedom which was given by John Paul II in Poland is an important voice on this subject, to which the pope often returned in his various documents (Dulles 1995, pp. 36–41).

#### 3.3.4. Conscience Formed by the Objective Truth

The concept of conscience appeared for the first time during the third pilgrimage of the pope to Poland in 1987, during the reflections for the youth gathered at Jasna Góra. John Paul II commented on the content of the Jasna Góra Appeal—the traditional Polish evening prayer; "What does it mean that 'I am vigilant'? It means that I am trying to be a man of conscience. That I neither obscure nor distort it. That I call the good and the evil by their real names, not blur them. I work out the good in myself and I try to remove badness by overcoming it in myself. It is a fundamental matter that can never be diminished or pushed to the background. No. No! It is everywhere and always remains in the foreground. In fact, it is all the more important since more and more circumstances seem to favour our tolerating evil and to easily ask for absolution. Especially, if this is how other people act as well. [ . . . ] You must demand of yourself, even if others do not have demands" (Jan Paweł II 2012, pp. 263–64). The pope considered freedom of conscience as one of the fundamental human rights that was defended by the martyrs.

The greatest cry for people of conscience was the homily delivered by John Paul II in 1995 in Skoczów on the occasion of the canonization of Jan Sarkander. The homily developed the theme of martyrdom as faithfulness to the voice of one's conscience. "It is our inner guide and the judge of our actions at the same time. Therefore, it is very important that our consciences are righteous and that their judgments are based on truth; that they call the good and the evil by their true names" (Jan Paweł II 2012, p. 843). Then, the pope explained what it means to be a man of conscience today, i.e., not to silence the voice of conscience, but to "engage in good and multiply it inside and outside of yourself, to never take on the evil", "to demand from oneself and to rise from one's failures", "to courageously take responsibility for public affairs; to care for the common good, and not close our eyes to the poverty and needs of our neighbours in the spirit of evangelical solidarity" (Jan Paweł II 2012, p. 844). Two years later, the pope asked a rhetorical question which also referred to the testimony of many martyrs whose attitude gave witness to the pre-eminence of the conscience, i.e., "Is the dignity of conscience not more important than any external benefits?" (Jan Paweł II 2012, p. 904). During his next pilgrimage, the pope added, "Let us do everything to sensitize our consciences and protect them from distortion or numbness" (Jan Paweł II 2012, p. 1034). People of science, who do not disregard the criterion of truth and goodness from their studies, bear a great responsibility for conscience (Jan Paweł II 2012, p. 1049). The pope also associated the dignity of work with conscience, since "Whoever has lost the righteous judgment of conscience can turn the blessing of work into a curse" (Jan Paweł II 2012, p. 1150). He saw the great role of the Church in shaping human consciences in terms of sensitivity for the world of work.

#### *3.4. The Papal Message and Polish Context*

One might ask what specific aspect of Wojtyła's philosophy found expression in his papal teaching to Poles, what was particularly important in this message and why. One ought to bear in mind that the future pope practiced philosophy in a post-war Poland that still vividly remembered the oppression of Nazism and, since 1945, had been enslaved by the communist system. At the same time, he was the bishop of Krakow, had actively participated in the Second Vatican Council and then implemented its teaching in the Polish Church. Finally, from Rome, he observed the changes taking place in Poland and strongly supported the movement for freedom that took place, in particular, under the banner of "Solidarity". It was this political and church context that significantly influenced the message he left for Poles.

In the autobiographical book *Dar i Tajemnica* [*Gift and Mistery*], John Paul II wrote, "[...] the two totalitarian systems which tragically marked our century—Nazism on the one hand, marked by the horrors of war and the concentration camps, and communism on the other, with its regime of oppression and terror—I came to know, so to speak, from within. And so it is easy to understand my deep concern for the dignity of every human person and the need to respect human rights, beginning with the *right to life.* It is also easy to understand my concern for the family and for young people. These concerns are all interwoven; they developed precisely as a result of those tragic experiences" (Jan Paweł II 1996, p. 20).

In his teaching addressed to Poles, on the one hand, John Paul II emphasised topics related to guarding human beings from death and enslavement (hence the protest against abortion and euthanasia, as well as various practices of marginalising the social life of people who demand respect for their subjective rights), which may arise as a consequence of various totalitarian practices. The pope was vehemently opposed to forms of social praxis that harmed human dignity. He stressed that the circumstances of alienation are created by both a totalitarian society that subordinates the individual to its collective aspirations and a liberal capitalist society that loses its hierarchy of objective values—hence the focus on freedom conditioned by truth. Freedom finds its fulfilment when it is used correctly—i.e., in the light of truth, which, however, should be understood more deeply than in the Greek-intellectual tradition. This is truth gleaned from an existential point of view—in particular, a religious and moral truth, ultimately, the truth whereby God sets man free. A personal relationship with God as the highest truth is the culmination of the mature freedom of man. Therefore, in his message to Poles (especially after 1991), the pope clearly exposed the myth of the twentieth century whereby man has been attributed the power to constitute his own essence and to define what is morally just or unjust.

On the other hand, the pope wanted to implement the conciliar teaching in the Polish Church. According to Vatican II, a human being is the place where the Church and the world intersect. Indeed, while the basic question which ideologies try to answer is "what to do?", the Council seeks to answer "how to be?". During his pilgrimages in Poland, John Paul II related the breakthrough initiated by conciliar decisions to Polish circumstances. Wojtyła's philosophical thought, followed by his teaching as pope, is about the consequences of the Council, thought through and re-lived in the contemporary history of Poland. In the same book, the pope also included some thoughts about the Council. In his book *Gift and Mystery*, he even noted that "the Council has pointed to the possibility and need for an authentic renewal, in complete fidelity to the word of God and Tradition" (John Paul II; a specific introduction to the spirit of the Council is offered by Wojtyła's book *U podstaw odnowy. Studium o realizacji Vaticanum II* [*Sources of Renewal. The Implementation of Vatican II*]). Reading this work, it is difficult to resist the impression that many of the references to conciliar texts contained therein are consistent with his own philosophical reflection. The hypothesis that this reflection was shaped under the influence of the Council and, at the same time, influenced the shape of those conciliar documents in which Wojtyła was involved, will surely be justified (Millies 2017).

It is also worth mentioning one strand amidst the teaching of John Paul II, most relevant from a Polish point of view. It had already been outlined in the book *Acting Person* and is about solidarity and participation. The independent and autonomous trade union "Solidarity" would never have become a turning point in the recent history of Europe and the world, if, from its inception in the workers' strikes of July and August 1980, it had not drawn inspiration from the teaching of John Paul II, whose portraits were hung on the

gates of striking factories (for example, Gda ´nsk Shipyard). However, at the same time, another process was taking place. "Solidarity" was becoming one of the main ideas of the papal teaching. During his second and third pilgrimages to Poland, the pope profoundly identified with the issue of "Solidarity", which had been banned after the introduction of martial law in Poland in December 1981. He even demanded protection for people who had suffered over and over again from political repression. That is why it was no coincidence that, during his second pilgrimage in June 1983, his thoughts clearly turned to the relationship between the idea of solidarity and mercy—the latter depicted as a practical, truly Christian manifestation of the former. The pope himself became, in a way, a spokesman for the righteous demands of "Solidarity". In 1987, during a workers' meeting in Gda ´nsk, he said directly, "I speak about you and I speak for you" (Jan Paweł II 2012, p. 405). Praising the non-violent methods of struggle chosen by "Solidarity", John Paul II emphasised that "Solidarity must go before the struggle. Then humanity can survive. And any nation in a great human family can survive and thrive. [ . . . ] Let me add: solidarity also liberates struggle. But this is never a struggle against one another. [...] This is a struggle for man, for his rights, for his true progress: a struggle for a more mature form of human life" (Jan Paweł II 2012, p. 447).

The timelessness of the idea of solidarity would also return during subsequent papal pilgrimages. John Paul II pointed out that solidarity is not only a thing of the past, but also a task waiting to be fulfilled (Doran 1996). The pope recalled, "I heard you say then in Gda ´nsk: there is no freedom without solidarity. Today it must be said: there is no solidarity without love". During his final pilgrimage in 2002, the pope consecrated the Shrine of Divine Mercy in Krakow-Łagiewniki and entrusted the whole world to God's Mercy. In a homily delivered to nearly three million believers at a mass in Krakow, he called for the "creation of an imagination of mercy". Solidarity is definitely not confined to overthrowing a totalitarian system. It is a universal lesson of humanity, a practical implementation of the principle of social participation and love.

#### **4. Conclusions**

The teaching of John Paul II is deeply rooted in his pre-pontificate philosophical reflections and it is them that reveal the deepest dimension of the papal message. The phenomenology of the mystical experience of St. John of the Cross from the very beginning led Wojtyła to the irreducible centre of the person and pointed to the necessity of selftranscendence towards the truth which is God Himself. Wojtyła discovered deep humanism and, at the same time, abundant experimental material in the writings of the Spanish mystic. This helped him turn to personalism and phenomenology. The author of *The Acting Person*, starting from theological reflection, at the same time, lays the foundations for original philosophical anthropology. In the homilies and speeches preached by John Paul II in Poland, his long articulated and precisely constructed anthropology comes to the fore, in the centre of which is the thesis about the irreducible dignity of the human being and the formation of humanity through action and conscience, which should be grounded in objective truth (Kupczak 2002, pp. 128–40). John Paul II considered the salvation of the person in a human being as the most important. He regarded this as the criterion for any progress and value of social and political activities. Hence, he arose his opposition to the anthropological error that takes various forms, thus to false, reductive humanisms. Wojtyła, not confining himself to criticise ideological anthropological constructions, showed the value of integral anthropology. This was also reflected in his papal statements. During the pilgrimages of John Paul II to Poland, the theme of the deformation of truth by totalism first appeared and, since 1991, the error of liberalism was mentioned more and more. In both cases, a misreading of the truth about the human being violates their dignity. Along with this, there is the pope's emphasis on freedom of conscience. It is not only an affirmation of a person's transcendence towards any socio-economic system but also an expression of solidarity with every human being who struggles for recognition of them being "someone" rather than "something". John Paul II also postulated that the freedom of conscience

should not be understood merely as the freedom of worship and thought, but also as the freedom to act by the known truth—obviously within the limits of the right protection of the common good.

An important life, pastoral and intellectual experience of Wojtyła was the Second Vatican Council (whose teaching he was partially responsible for) (Scola 2010, pp. 121–22). His task was to give faith a dimension of life experience, to call for its adequate empowerment. The idea was to create a Christian mentality in which faith is not only intellectually accepted, but also existentially lived. The philosophy of *The Acting Person* helped to undertake this task and, at the same time, provided its theoretical justification. According to Vatican II, the human person is the point where the Church and the world meet. While the basic question that the ideologies of this world are trying to answer is "what to do?", the Council is looking for an answer to the question "how to be?". The teaching of John Paul II in Poland is also a translation into Polish conditions of the breakthrough initiated by the conciliar determinations. The philosophical thought of Wojtyła and, later, his teaching as pope are about the effects of the Council that are rethought and lived in the contemporary history of Poland and those countries that faced the violence of communist totalitarianism. On the other hand, in the face of corruption and lobbying in modern democracies, the relativistic conception of democracy reveals its ultimate failure. By recalling the constitutive relationship between freedom and truth and, in particular, between freedom and the truth about the human being, the papal teaching offers a criterion for assessing human action, which must always take into account the truth about the good. This truth is not a prison for action, but a guide. The good in question is the value of the human being. Just as acting together with others constitutes the foundation of the specificity of the social sphere and the basis of (relatively) autonomous political reflection, the reference of this activity to the objective value of the human person constitutes the foundation of the specificity of the moral sphere and the basis of autonomous ethical reflection, which integrates economic activity into the system of human action and its moral evaluation. Therefore, the teaching of John Paul II on political order does not contain clear political principles but is, above all, deeply marked by the defence of the person's dignity, freedom and the truth that precedes it. The pope, while traveling to his homeland, taught in a country first ruled by communists, then by liberals.

Thus, John Paul II observed a country undergoing rapid cultural and economic changes. However, he did not provide any clear political rulings. He was aware that more than political reform, a reform of the national mentality was needed, fidelity to the truth of life and man against the claims of power. Under the influence of the statements of John Paul II during his pilgrimages to Poland, an unmistakable impression arises that they form a logical and comprehensive moral teaching firmly rooted in his theological and philosophical thought before his pontificate, developing this idea (especially in the theological dimension) and transferring it into the order of practice—especially in social solidarity.

**Funding:** This research was funded by the Minister of Science and Higher Education within the program under the name 'Regional Initiative of Excellence' in 2019—2022, project number: 028/RID/2018/19.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** Not applicable.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

#### **References**


J ˛edraszewski, Marek. 2015. Sumienie jako głos przynaglenia, aby czyni´c dobro –według Karola Wojtyły. Zeszyty Naukowe Centrum Bada ´n im. Edyty Stein—Fenomen dobra. vols. 13–14, pp. 13–22. Available online: https://www.google.com/search?q=J%C4%9 9draszewski%2C+Marek.+2015.+Sumienie+jako+g%C5%82os+przynaglenia%2C+aby+czyni%C4%87+dobro&client=firefox-b -e&sxsrf=AOaemvIfqIFcXjU\_fhiXx7dDKX0PUhQlcw%3A1635529908686&ei=tDR8YdudKYPurgSL-oH4Aw&oq=J%C4%99dr aszewski%2C+Marek.+2015.+Sumienie+jako+g%C5%82os+przynaglenia%2C+aby+czyni%C4%87+dobro&gs\_lcp=Cgdnd3Mt d2l6EAM6CgguELADECcQkwI6BwgAEEcQsAM6BwgjELACECc6BAgAEBM6CggAEA0QBRAeEBM6BwgjEOoCECc6Bwgu EOoCECdKBQg8EgExSgQIQRgAUJwSWLAzYOo8aANwAngDgAGDAYgBmxSSAQUxNC4xMpgBAKABAaABArABCsgBBs ABAQ&sclient=gws-wiz&ved=0ahUKEwjbx-fZl\_DzAhUDt4sKHQt9AD8Q4dUDCA0&uact=5 (accessed on 11 November 2021).

John Paul II. 1998. Fides et Ratio. Available online: https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf\_jp-i i\_enc\_14091998\_fides-et-ratio.html (accessed on 29 October 2021).

Karasi ´nski, Waldemar. 2007. Poj ˛ecie wolno´sci w nauczaniu Jana Pawła II podczas pielgrzymek do ojczyzny. *Studia Wrocławskie* 10: 201–12.

Kiwka, Mirosław. 1999. "Przyjaciel i mistrz"—´sw. Jan od Krzyza i Jan Paweł II. ˙ *Wrocławski Przegl ˛ad Teologiczny* 7: 65–74.


Skibi ´nski, Paweł. 2005. Pielgrzymki Jana Pawła II do Ojczyzny (1979–2002) i ich kontekst historyczny. *Teologia Polityczna* 3: 166–224.

Skrzypczak, Robert. 2019. Znaczenie I pielgrzymki Jana Pawła II do Polski dla rodzimej kultury religijnej. *Społecze ´nstwo nr* 4: 14–27.


Weigel, George. 2000. *Swiadek nadziei. Biografia papie ´ za Jana Pawła II ˙* . Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak.

Wilk, Rafał K. 2007. Human Person and Freedom according to Karol Wojtyła. *International Philosophical Quarterly* 47: 265–78. [CrossRef]

Wnuk-Lipi ´nski, Edmund. 2017. Znaczenie nauczania Papieza dla polskiej polityki. Available online: https://teologiapolityczna.pl/zn ˙ aczenie-nauczania-papieza-dla-polskiej-polityki (accessed on 20 November 2021).

Wojtyła, Karol. 1969. *Osoba i czyn*. Kraków: Polskie Towarzystwo Teologiczne, pp. 58–59.

Wojtyła, Karol. 1973. Słowo ko ´ncowe [dyskusji nad Osob ˛a i czynem]. *Analecta Cracoviensia.* nr 5–6: 53–55, Kraków: Polskie Towarzystwo Teologiczne.

Wojtyła, Karol. 1976. Osoba: Podmiot i wspólnota. *Roczniki Filozoficzne* 2: 5–40.

Wojtyła, Karol. 1978. Subjectivity and the Irreducible in Man. *Analecta Husserliana* 7: 107–14.


**Johannes Ludwig Löffler**

Centre for Religion and Modernity, University of Münster, 48149 Münster, Germany; johannes.loeffler@uni-muenster.de

**Abstract:** The perpetual public display of successful mass mobilization and pilgrimage has become a pillar of papal soft power. During the 20th century, the papacy had repeatedly demonstrated its ability to use new technologies for public communication, media content production and mass mobilization. John Paul II endorsed the establishment of the first Vatican website and an official papal e-mail account, which provided Catholics a new form of communication with the Holy Father. During the pontificate of Benedict XVI, the papacy created several Twitter accounts, which would become the backbone of papal digital mobilization. Francis built on the success of his predecessors as he initiated the modernization of the Holy See's media department. However, with the growth of the Internet and the stress test of the COVID-19 pandemic, the mechanics of mobilization, pilgrimage and power have considerably changed. With the religious role of the popes taken as a given, the paper looks into the history of papal mobilization, the role of the Internet and why it is not used to its full potential yet.

**Keywords:** mobilization; pilgrimage; internet; John Paul II; Benedict XVI; Francis; soft power

#### 2021. From Archangels to Virtual Pilgrims: A Brief History of Papal Digital Mobilization as Soft Power. *Religions* 12: 657. https://doi.org/

Academic Editors: Mariano P. Barbato and Malachi Hacohen

**Citation:** Löffler, Johannes Ludwig.

Received: 28 June 2021 Accepted: 16 August 2021 Published: 18 August 2021

10.3390/rel12080657

**Publisher's Note:** MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

**Copyright:** © 2021 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

#### **1. Introduction: Papal Mobilization and Soft Power**

While the papacy has had a wide set of mobilization tools at its disposal, such as the voluntary infantry regiment of the papal Zouaves in the 19th century, or financial donations such as St. Peter's Pence, the media has always played an important role for papal mobilization. Until recently, the public power of the modern papacy rested largely on its ability to physically mobilize the masses through public appearances of the pope (Barbato and Heid 2020; Barbato et al. 2018; Klimczak and Petersen 2017). While St. Peter's Square in Rome remains a central stage of mass mobilization, apostolic journeys abroad have become a reliable tool with which to mobilize Christians around the world during papal visits to local sites of worship and historical relevance. In addition, the modern papacy introduced recurring events, such as World Youth Days, to visibly demonstrate its vitality and legitimacy in the public space. Mobilization became a strategy of public papal communication (Löffler 2018, forthcoming). However, with the ongoing decline of Catholicism in Europe, the transition towards a digital communication culture and the current situation of a global pandemic, including substantial limitations to social contacts and gatherings, the modern papacy has, at least temporarily, lost its ability to physically mobilize the masses. In this sense, the papacy is in dire need of a new strategy.

A quick survey of the history of the modern papacy indicates that paradigm shifts of mobilization frequently occurred in times of crisis. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the papacy continuously adapted new technologies to its strategy of public mobilization. For instance, before the unification of Italy and the dissolution of the Papal States, Pius IX (1846– 1878) initiated the construction of several railroads that connected the Italian states with the territories of the Papal States in order to increase the number of pilgrims (Nersinger 2020). Pius XI (1922–1939) introduced the Vatican Radio, which became an important asset of transnational papal communication during the Second World War (Pollard 2010; Samerski

2020; Valente 2020) as well as the Cold War (Bösch 2020; Hänni 2020). Since Paul VI (1963–1978), and especially since the papacy of John Paul II (1978–2005), papal air travel and official visits abroad have become an integral part of the pontifical mobilization toolkit (Barbato 2020a). With the rise of new technologies and their successful integration into the strategies of public performance, mass mobilization has started to transform into a digital phenomenon of papal power.

This article focuses on the current state of digital papal mobilization and its potential as a source of power. Its quantitative–qualitative analysis evaluates the range and content of digital papal communication channels such as the pontiff's Twitter and Instagram accounts, the Holy See's YouTube channels and other forms of electronic communication, such as electronic prayers (e-prayers) and virtual pilgrimages. In order to understand the current shift towards a digital papacy, I draw a brief genealogy of mobilization, from the first Vatican web presence in 1995 to the state of the digital papacy during the 2020–2021 COVID-19 pandemic.

*What is mass mobilization?* As the paper focuses on the current state of papal digital mobilization, the term mass mobilization refers to different overlapping aspects of power: from a political science perspective, it is used to describe the process of gathering a crowd at one place as well as acts of participation and interaction. Finally, mobilization also includes forms of orchestration, such as the usage of media in order to publicly display the masses. In summary, the success of mobilization depends not only on the number of people, but on their transformation into one group that is part of the event. Contemporary research hints at the importance of papal mass mobilization in the form of trans-local, large-scale events as a public display of papal power between the late 19th and early 21st centuries (Heid 2020; Matena 2018; Samerski 2020; Valente 2020). This suggests that the success of papal mobilization also depends on its ability to adapt to the zeitgeist of communication technology. Its development into the virtual playing fields of digital communication can be understood as the papacy's next step to mobilize the masses as followers, viewers, subscribers and virtual legions.

*How does mass mobilization work?* The famous frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes' *Leviathan* may serve as a starting point: in Hobbes' metaphor, the legitimacy of political power is visualized through the body of a ruler made up of his subjects; the pope can be understood as the head of a fluid, composite body made up of everyone that physically gathers around him (Löffler, forthcoming). According to Horst Bredekamp's theory of the picture act (*Bildakt*), where the picture and the observer become public communicators on their own (Bredekamp 1998, 2015a, 2015b; Schmitz 2007), the continuously repeated act of papal mobilization produces a publicly visible community of believers and followers. Within the field of political thought and theory, this public display of the masses can be understood as a strategic tool to represent an otherwise invisible *corpus mysticum* (Kantorowicz 1990, pp. 279–316). The publicly visible mobilization of pilgrims as a celebrating crowd transforms the power of the modern papacy into a latent political entity that can survive the politically unused moment, and its aggregation brings about structural transformations (Barbato 2018, p. 96). The modern papacy uses the mortal head of the pope to represent and legitimize an immortal and unique hybrid body—that is, a political, religious and social entity. The papacy demonstrates its significance through successful mobilization, while in return, the masses legitimize the pope. In addition, the crowd publicly communicates different aspects of papal power: praying and singing become a representation of faith; cheering and waving become a demonstration of personal affection towards the pope; the composition of flags and banners becomes a nonverbal representation of the pope as a transnational actor.

*What are the characteristics of the papal crowds?* It is a crowd that can gather regularly and in various places, such as St. Peter's Square in Rome or Christian pilgrimage sites; Catholics are visible as residents and pilgrims, as a mixed crowd of locals and travelers. In addition to its own sites, the modern papacy is able to use locations with historical and social significance as stages for mass mobilization. The papal mass is a multitude

oriented towards the pope, who guides it through the event (e.g., Angelus; Apostolic Journeys; World Youth Days) with the help of well-known rites, common chants and personal messages. Thus, the pope becomes a public magnet, a messenger and an event manager. In this regard, he plays the role of a charismatic leader. Based on the type of event, the papal mass mobilizes different parts of society. Catholic youth gather during the World Youth Days, while regional venues of worship and pilgrimage attract both local and international pilgrims. Finally, the papal mobilization is embedded in the public staging of the event itself. To mobilize also means to involve the masses as participants—e.g., the entourage of high-ranking political representatives, heads of state and government gathered during the papal funeral (Schlott 2018, 2013)—through their joint presence and their visible expression of respect for the deceased pontiff. At the end of the Angelus, it is customary for the popes to greet selected groups of pilgrims, Catholic associations and the citizens of Rome, who in turn contribute to the performance with waving flags and banners and with brief applauses and cheers. In short, masses have become the starting and endpoint of papal legitimacy and power.

*How to understand mobilization as soft power?* With the religious role of the popes taken as a given, it should be noted that the papal soft power approach is limited to questions regarding the history of papal digital communication. Contemporary papal power can be described as soft, the counterpart of traditional forms of political hard power through means of military dominance or threats; in a broad sense, it encapsulates, among other things, the ability to influence the public by means other than force or coercion and is mostly understood as a set of diplomatic skills. To quote Joseph Nye, who introduced the concept of soft power in the context of diplomatic power during the late Cold War:

"Soft power is not merely the same as influence, though it is one source of influence. . . . Nor is soft power just persuasion or the ability to move people by argument, though that is an important part of it. It is also the ability to entice and attract. Attraction often leads to acquiescence. In behavioral terms, soft power is attractive power. In terms of resources, soft power resources are the assets . . . that produce such attraction" (Nye 2008, p. 31)

The concept of a distinct form of papal authority as soft power has been widely discussed (Byrnes 2017; Hall 1997; Mazo 2015; Sommeregger 2011; Troy 2010), and recent research on the modern papacy suggests that the successful use of soft power depends, to a large extent, on the public perception of the reigning pope, his ability to verbally and nonverbally communicate with the public and the Church's capability to regularly mobilize the masses as pilgrims in Rome and abroad (Barbato 2020a; Löffler 2018).

The next section of this paper discusses the history of papal mobilization. It starts with its pre-digital state of mobilization, before taking a closer look at the rise of a digital papacy and the transition from John Paul II to Benedict XVI and Francis. This section explains how papal mobilization works and how each of the three popes used the Internet to mobilize their legions.

The third section analyzes virtual mobilization as a potential soft power resource. Drawing on the medieval concept of virtual pilgrimage and the contemporary debate about digital pilgrimage as an alternative to physically and spiritually demanding trips, it discusses the current transformation of papal authority. It uses the case of COVID-19 as a stress test of digital papal mobilization and its potential and limitations.

#### **2. A Short History of Papal Mobilization**

The history of papal mobilization as a main source of soft power began with the popes' downfall as hard power political actors. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the political power of the papacy was in rapid decline. During the Napoleonic era, it lost most of its secular power. In 1799, Pius VI died in French captivity. In 1807, French troops occupied the Papal States, and Pius VII became a prisoner until his release in 1814. The political setback was tremendous: the pope's diplomatic network temporarily diminished, and its status as an accepted political player and as a negotiator among the

European powers considerably weakened. The restoration process following Vienna merely postponed his political regress. After the unification of Italy under King Victor Emanuel II in 1861 and the occupation of Rome in 1870, the papacy was politically disempowered and the Papal State formally dissolved. The papacy reached its low and a turning point (Barbato 2020b, pp. 17–18). The rise of the modern papacy had begun.

With the acknowledgement of Italian sovereignty over the formal territory of the Papal States through the Lateran Treaty in 1929, the papacy managed to maintain two pillars of its public power: its status as a recognized subject of international law and the territory of the Vatican City State, which, despite its limited size, quickly developed into a public stage of papal mass mobilization. Thus, the papacy survived the leap into modernity due to its transformation into a hybrid actor (McLarren and Stahl 2020) with a growing number of diplomatic relations and its ability to use the physical body of the masses to continuously reshape papal authority. The pope has been transformed into a sovereign without armed forces—with the commonly known exception of the colorful Papal Swiss Guard as a visible reminder of a previous form of papal authority. He developed into a diplomatic powerhouse currently entertaining 183 diplomatic relations. The nuncio, as representative of the Holy See, the Church and the pope, mirrors even further the modern papacy's status as a hybrid actor.

To summarize the current research, the rise of political papacy during the 20th century is based on the successful mobilization of the masses (Barbato and Heid 2020). The papacy managed to successfully combine different aspects of political, religious and moral power.

#### *2.1. John Paul II and the Rise of Digital Archangels*

A possible starting date for the many paths towards a digital papacy (Barbato et al. 2018) could be Christmas 1995, when, for the first time, the Holy See's official website went at least partially online. At a time when major international businesses as well as a few governments were setting up their own websites—e.g., Microsoft and the White House published their first webpages in 1994 (Izadi 2014; Bort 2014)—the papacy was, at least at the time, one of the forerunners of the digital presence. Its beginnings were rather modest. The very first page featured only a low-resolution picture of John Paul II and his Urbi et Orbi address of 25 December 1995. In the following decades, the website would transform itself into an archive of the Church as well as a papal instrument of public communication.

The groundwork for the digital papacy was paved a few years earlier in 1991, when the president of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See, Cardinal Rosalio José Castillo Lara, choose Judith Zoebelein, an American nun of the Order of the Franciscan Sisters of the Eucharist, to work for the Vatican as coordinator and instructor for computerrelated matters. Her father worked as a programmer and she was knowledgeable with computers, having taught unemployed immigrants basic informatic skills (Zoebelein 2021) and having supervised, in 1986, the organization of computer systems for the Catholic Relief Services (Tagliabue 1999). After her arrival in Rome, she was given the task of creating a unifying standard for the separate offices and to link the computers with one another in order to establish a single Vatican Intranet. It soon became evident that, aside from creating an internal network and giving programming lessons, the time was ripe for the creation of a Vatican web presence. As the Internet continued to transform into an open public space during the early 1990s, Zoebelein pushed for the creation of an official Vatican webpage to test the public response. Joaquín Navarro-Valls, director of the Holy See's Press Office, became one of her most important allies and, in 1994, proposed the concept of a digital papacy to John Paul II as a promising form of evangelization (Zoebelein 2021). The pontiff's popularity presented a golden opportunity to mobilize Catholics around the world via the Internet. The pope quickly gave his approval. To quote Zoebelein:

"[A]t that point it was Pope John Paul who was enormously popular and very human, someone very approachable that people really wanted to know more about. So, we said, ok let's give it a try. . . . And it's not as that Pope John Paul understood the technology, he had vision beyond that. He saw that the Church needs to be out and needs to be something that can be a source to people that can be . . . in their living rooms if you will or be something that people can refer to. And so, he immediately said yes, do it". (Zoebelein 2016)

Thus, Zoebelein became responsible for the creation of the first Vatican homepage with a team that consisted of only two people: herself and one technician (ORF 2021). There is evidence that, during the early creation process, mobilization already became a driving force for Zoebelein. To visually represent the Church's two thousand years of history, she selected an ochre background design similar to parchment, which is still in use today. Besides creating an archive for the Vatican, the website was designed as a virtual storefront to display what the Church does and stands for (Zoebelein 2021). Early on, the website was based on a strategy of verbal and nonverbal papal communication to orchestrate a new form of virtual connection between the pope and the visitor. It is because of the Vatican website that the pope became even more publicly visible through digital photos, which became the new standard of the papacy's nonverbal communication strategy.

After a one-year trial stage, the Vatican website faced its first field test: hosting John Paul II's Urbi et Orbi message of 25 December 1995. The public response quickly overwhelmed the Vatican hardware and staff, taking many observers by surprise, including Sister Zoebelein. During the first 48 h, the website registered more than 300,000 visitors (Tagliabue 1999), an early demonstration of the potential mobilization power of a digital papacy. The decision to not only create a public papal e-mail account but also print every digital message addressed to the pope may indicate that the Vatican heavily underestimated the mobilization power of a virtual Pope John Paul II. The website could not handle the number of simultaneous requests and collapsed under the pressure (Helland 2004).

To explain the initial success of the papal digital sphere, it is important to consider the parallel physical format of papal mass mobilization. Among public papal performances, the Urbi et Orbi messages are only given on solemn occasions, traditionally on Easter and Christmas Day and upon the proclamation of a newly elected pope. According to the Catholic teaching, everyone who hears or sees it and that and is a man/woman of good will is granted an indulgence for their sins. Thus, it is an important asset of the papal mass mobilization, which already entailed the use of earlier forms of virtual participation such as listening to the radio or watching TV. As the Urbi et Orbi regularly mobilized people in Rome and in their own homes, it became the perfect opportunity to test the digital coverage of John Paul II.

An unexpected incident further increased the public awareness of the digital papacy. Due to a cold and sudden weakness, the pope temporarily suspended his message (Tagesschau 1995). The masses at St. Peter's Square and at home became worried. Since the newly created Vatican webpage included a public papal e-mail address, followers with a computer and internet connection had the unique opportunity to "directly" communicate with the pope. In the days following the event, people from all over the world sent e-mails, mostly offering prayers for the Holy Father's health and personal recovery, medical advice and even family recipes. From the very first day, the concept of e-prayers became a new phenomenon of papal mobilization, created by individual followers as a digital form of personal communication with the pope:

"And then we had also opened an e-mail [address] for the Holy Father which we also did not realize what that would mean and we got thousands of e-mails which does not sound like much now but back then it was an enormous amount. Right after we put that page up the Holy Father over New Year's got sick with the flu so that became the news so we got a flood of e-mails of chicken soup recipes and 'this is why my grandmother says . . . ' and this is . . . 'we are hoping, we are praying for you' . . . ; but it was a phenomenon that was kind of fun. . . . We also found out that having John Paul who . . . people loved and wanted to know more about, with the e-mails all of a sudden, he became somebody they knew. So, we got e-mails saying like 'you know my sister's divorced and I do not

know what to do; she's leaving the faith because of that' or 'I have cancer and I'm dying could you pray for me'". (Zoebelein 2016)

Another important factor for the success of the Vatican's first webpage was the provision of real-time translations of papal speeches, which were usually given in Italian. Between Paul VI and Benedict XVI, the tradition to greet the different nations in their respective languages after the Urbi et Orbi was established. However, the main messages were still expressed in Italian. The website enabled the Vatican to release official translations shortly after the event.

Finally, in addition to radio and television broadcasts, followers could use the Internet to receive the papal blessing as an alternative to a pilgrimage to Rome, which further legitimized the concept of virtual religious participation. While the Internet was not the first step towards a virtual mobilization of followers, it certainly offered new and growing possibilities for the papacy and the faithful.

After the successful field test of digital papacy, the Vatican closed the website and suspended operations for 18 months, until Easter Sunday 1997. After that, no public papal e-mail address was available. The Vatican servers, which were still at work nonetheless, were named after Archangels: the server supporting the website content took the name Raphael, patron of pilgrims and travelers, to symbolize a guide for everyone crossing the digital ocean; the server providing the firewall was named Michael, the defender against Satan, now also a protector of the virtual space; and the server hosting the Vatican's e-mail accounts was called Gabriel, assuming the role of a digital messenger of the Church.

While the website has been continuously modernized behind the scenes, its original appearance as well as its core structure with the three Archangel servers remain substantially the same. However, in order to match the transformation of the Internet into the so-called Web 2.0 of the early–mid-2000s, through which the users became active communicators, designers and content creators, the papacy was also compelled to become an active virtual entity. Despite the technological limitations of the time, the Internet was in a good position early on to become an additional form of Christian pilgrimage and participation. It was certainly no coincidence that the Vatican choose the papal Urbi et Orbi as its first digital event; thanks to the increasingly widespread use of the Internet at the private level during the mid-1990s, the physically mobilized masses at St. Peter's Square, the virtual participants at home and John Paul II's sudden sickness during the event, the website received the necessary boost to be immediately noticed. The timing could not have been better.

#### *2.2. John Paul II, Benedict XVI and the Creation of Digital Stages*

Following the success of the digital mobilization, John Paul II felt compelled to further adopt the Internet as a new type of social communication. Since the 20th century, the Catholic Church has had its own definition of the term social communication in order to describe the Church's technological and normative challenges of modern communication, e.g., print media, radio, film or television. The popes began to include the Internet into their communication strategy (Löffler, forthcoming). The annual event of the World Communications Day provided an opportunity for the popes to deal with matters of communication technology. Since the introduction of World Communications Days in 1963, the popes used the event to publicly show their stance towards communication technologies, present themselves as important actors within the public discourse on communication culture and public media and further develop the Church's usage of public media.

As a mobilization tool, the Internet is mentioned by John Paul II in his World Communications Day speech in 2001, where he advocated for a more active usage of cyberspace by Catholic communities:

"Consider, for instance . . . the positive capacities of the Internet to carry religious information and teaching beyond all barriers and frontiers. Such a wide audience would have been beyond the wildest imaginings of those who preached the Gospel before us. What is therefore needed in our time is an active and imaginative engagement of the

media by the Church. Catholics should not be afraid to throw open the doors of social communications to Christ, so that his Good News may be heard from the housetops of the world!" (John Paul II 2001)

The papal message of the following year was entirely focused on the Internet, called a "new Forum for Proclaiming the Gospel", similar to the "public space" of the forum in ancient Rome (John Paul II 2002). More importantly, John Paul II defined the virtual world as a starting point for real-world mobilization: "It is important, therefore, that the Christian community think of very practical ways of helping those who first make contact through the Internet to move from the virtual world of cyberspace to the real world of Christian community" (John Paul II 2002). Pope John Paul II's vision of the Internet was that of a stepping stone towards physical mobilization, a megaphone to enhance the range of Catholic communication. This view corresponded to the technical tools of the time, including a limited bandwidth that reduced the capabilities of online communication to small pictures and text rather than videos or simulcasts.

A prime example of the papacy's early usage of modern communication technology was the virtual pilgrimage of John Paul II to the ancient city of Ur, the presumed birthplace of Abraham located in southern Iraq. Despite the tense political situation, the pope repeatedly expressed his intention to personally visit Ur as a starting point for his planned grand pilgrimage to the Holy Land during the Great Jubilee of the year 2000 (John Paul II 1999; 1994). He intended to use "Abraham's footprints" (John Paul II 2000a; 2000b) as a shared symbol of reconciliation among the three monotheistic faiths (Stanley 2000). Although the negotiations with the Iraqi government failed, the pope still intended to visit Ur. During his General Audience of 16 February 2000, John Paul II presented his plan for a virtual pilgrimage: "Since this has not been possible for Me, I would like at least spiritually to make a similar pilgrimage. Therefore . . . together we will relive the key events of Abraham's experience, knowing well that it is not only those who boast physical descent from the great Patriarch who look to him, but also all those who regard themselves as his spiritual offspring. . . . I invite you now to accompany me in prayer on my pilgrimage to the places linked to salvation history . . . " (John Paul II 2000a). What this means is that the pope transformed the concept of locus as he used the idea of the spiritual offspring as a metaphor for a shared virtual experience of pilgrimage. On February 23, following a shortened General Audience, the pope invited the assembled crowd at St. Peter's Square to stay and follow his virtual pilgrimage via large screens, as he led a liturgical celebration inside the Paul VI Audience Hall (John Paul II 2000b). Despite the term "virtual" referring to a spiritual journey, the event illustrates how the pope used communication technology to broadcast images of Ur, the surrounding desert, biblical paintings and churches (Xiarhos 2016; Stanley 2000). Thus, his virtual journey to the historic site became an example of ecumenical dialogue, with the masses representing papal authority.

The next big steps towards digital mass mobilization occurred during the papacy of Benedict XVI, as the Vatican expanded its mobilization strategy to the digital playing fields of YouTube and Twitter. On 23 January 2009, during the Holy See's press conference presenting the message of the Holy Father for the 43rd World Communications Day, the director of the Vatican Press Office, Father Federico Lombardi, announced the inauguration of several official Vatican YouTube channels in order to expand the Catholic Church's ability to communicate with the world and further improve its digital public appearance (Lombardi 2009). On the same day, the first video was uploaded. The Vatican's YouTube strategy centered on the popes' public events—e.g., Angelus, Apostolic Journeys, Audiences—depicting the multiple roles of Benedict as a religious and political leader. However, the Vatican YouTube channels were likely not used for mass mobilization. For instance, the Vatican decided to permanently deactivate the comment function as it claimed not to be able to manage the global flow of messages and responses (Lombardi 2009), thus preventing any possible interaction with its followers. The idea that the Vatican could become another content creator did not seem too far-fetched, since YouTube had already become one of the biggest public community platforms, featuring all sorts of content from

information to entertainment. However, the Vatican misjudged the importance of the platform as a virtual community where people communicate with content creators and each other, forming lasting digital communities of viewers. It chose instead to use YouTube as an alternative TV channel.

Twelve years and a new pope later, the channels' activity is still unknown to many. Since the reform of the Vatican media, the YouTube channels' subscriber numbers have grown, with 579,000 subscribers at present for the English-speaking global main channel, followed by the Spanish (578,000), Portuguese (324,000), English (192,000), Italian (172,000) and Vietnamese channels (132,000). In contrast, between early 2019 and April 2021, the French (45,400), German (20,200), Chinese (8500), Polish (6400) and Lithuanian (2400) channels barely managed to double their numbers. With the exception of videos featuring the Holy Mass on Christmas and Easter, usually obtaining several tens of thousands of views, most videos only reach a few thousand. The ongoing renewal of the Vatican media and the ensuing inclusion of its YouTube channels into the newly created Vatican News did not bring about any significant change. Although during the peak of the global pandemic in 2020–2021, Francis used video messages and YouTube live broadcasts as a last resort to meet the challenge of public mobilization, the papacy failed to create a digital community eager to watch his videos. As of today, the modern papacy does not employ YouTube as a mobilization platform, which appears striking considering its ability to successfully use the Internet to mobilize digital masses.

On 3 December 2012, three months before the resignation of Benedict XVI, the Vatican launched the first official papal Twitter accounts in eight different languages—English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, French, Arabic and Italian—with a Latin account following soon after. The first tweet was sent during the pope's weekly audience on Wednesday, December 12, displaying Benedict XVI using an iPad (O'Loughlin 2015, p. 30; Pianigiani and Donadio 2012; Donadio 2012) as alleged proof of the authenticity of a digital papacy. The resulting scene closely resembled a previous event that occurred one year earlier, when the pope also used an iPad to tweet the first message for the new information portal news.va (BBC 2011). Of course, the pope's tweet was not entirely his own product. In fact, while he was involved in the selection of his messages' topic and wording, a media team working behind the scenes wrote and translated the 140-character texts (O'Loughlin 2015).

It is difficult to assess the early success of the papal mobilization on Twitter. Within the first hours after the accounts went online, Pope Benedict reached about 250,000 followers (Pianigiani and Donadio 2012), then about 800,000 followers at the time of his first message (Donadio 2012) and about 2.5 million in mid-January 2013 (BBC 2013). However, despite this measurable success, the papacy did not have a communication strategy able to transform followers into digital legions to be physically or virtually mobilized. First of all, in the beginning, not many tweets were published—only thirty-nine over three months. This was partly due to the early decision to use the papal tweets as a digital extension of the General Audiences, but also because of Ratzinger's poor health situation during his last year in office. Secondly, the idea that Benedict XVI would personally tweet did not stand. The already established image of his papacy did not fit at all with the idea of an online pope who communicates with his followers in person. Besides the event of the first papal tweet, the media did not push the idea of a digital papacy. At the end of his papacy and three months after the launch of @pontifex, the official accounts of Benedict XVI managed to gather three million followers altogether.

#### *2.3. Francis and the Orchestration of Digital Masses*

After the resignation of Benedict XVI on 28 February 2013, and the election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope Francis on March 13, the Vatican, in addition to the situation of a papa emeritus, faced the question of how to handle Benedict's digital heritage. The Vatican decided to integrate the more or less successful digital mobilization on Twitter into the new papacy. During the interim period in between the two papacies (sede vacante), the Vatican removed all previous papal Tweets, storing them on separate servers, and changed the account description to "Sede Vacante", thus also removing Benedict as forerunner of the following pontiff. The previous pope's followers were the only surviving element. For the first time, a successor "would be handed not only the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven, but . . . the password to the papal Twitter account and its millions of followers" (O'Loughlin 2015, p. 33).

The total number of Francis' accounts' followers is currently greater than 51.7 million, making him one of the most famous political actors of the microblogging service (BCW 2020). During the first years of his pontificate, the growth rate remained impressive, rising from 3.0 to 7.2 million followers in 2013, and then to 14.0 (2014), 19.6 (2015), 28.9 (2016), 37.5 (2017), 48.0 (2019) and 51.7 million (April 2021). Francis became one of the most followed world leaders (De Franco 2020). There are two main reasons for this success: First, in contrast to his predecessor, the public narrative of Jorge Bergoglio, who was known for his accessible and authentic approach in his previous role as Archbishop of Buenos Aires (Willey 2015; Vallely 2014; Politi 2015), was in accord with his new position as a pope who maintains a personal contact with his followers. Second, from the first day of his papacy, Francis could rely on his predecessor's foundational work in the sphere of digitalization. Only four days after his election, Francis used Twitter, asking his followers to further pray for him, a request that would become a recurring element of the papal messages: "Dear friends, I thank you from my heart and I ask you to continue to pray for me. Pope Francis" (Francis 2013).

Compared to his predecessor, Pope Francis undertook a different usage of Twitter, in both quantitative and qualitative terms. Between 2013 and 2021, the average number of daily papal messages on the German account @pontifex\_de increased from 0.61 (2013) and 0.41 (2014) to 0.93 (2016), 0.96 (2017), 1.08 (2018), 1.2 (2019), 1.87 (2020) and 1.78 (May 2021). The communication style is similar to that of other papal messages such as the Angelus, further supporting the impression that the Holy Father would personally communicate with his online followers. While the pope does not send his tweets in person, he gives ideas for upcoming messages; based on that, his communication team drafts tweets in the pope's primary languages, Spanish and Italian. After Francis gives his approval, the messages are brought to the Vatican Secretary of State's office, from where the Tweets are translated and then published (see: O'Loughlin 2015). For the most part, the tweets are written in first person, and the messages are often directed towards the audience—e.g., Christians, family and society.

Since July 2019, the papacy has also released short videos on Twitter on a regular basis in an attempt to call attention to the Vatican YouTube channels. In these monthly papal prayer requests, which started in 2016, Francis assumes the role of a narrator, sitting at his desk and facing the camera/audience while talking about Christian values in everyday life or core issues of his pontificate. In addition to a verbal communication strategy that invites the audience to follow the example of Jesus, Mary or other fellow Christians, a nonverbal communication strategy characterizes the pope as a charismatic leader, through eye contact and easily understandable metaphoric gestures within a setting reproducing a personal conversation.

The papal Twitter accounts are a prime example of a largely successful digital mass mobilization. While Francis does not send his messages in person, his communication style and his narrative as charismatic leader resulted in a rise of public attention. However, while Twitter remains an important asset for concise online communication, it is only one of many digital arenas. The biggest difference between physical and digital mobilization is the Internet's multi-locality: the pope must use multiple digital stages to become as visible as possible in order to attract as many people online as possible.

The creation of a papal Instagram account on 19 March 2016, is the latest example of digital papal mobilization. Using the pseudonym @Franciscus, the Vatican publishes papal pictures and short videos to attract followers by means of nonverbal communication, as Mons. Dario E. Viganò, then prefect of the Secretariat for Communication, outlined: "Instagram will help recount the Papacy through images, to enable all those who wish to accompany and know more about Pope Francis' pontificate to encounter his gestures of tenderness and mercy. . . . We will choose photographs from the Photographic Service of L'Osservatore Romano, selecting certain details. In this way we can show those aspects of closeness and inclusion that Pope Francis lives every day" (Sala Stampa 2016). A nonverbal communication strategy emerged that presents Francis mostly during personal interactions with individuals and as a religious leader during his trips. Compared to some prominent political figures such as Barack Obama (around 30.1), Donald J. Trump (20.5) and Recep Tayyip Erdogan (8.1), the pope's 7.6 million followers are still a low number (Statista 2020).

In contrast to Twitter with its mobilization through words of encouragement and persuasion, Instagram uses photographic images of Pope Francis in order to depict, communicate or evoke positive emotions. It implements a strategy of recurring gestures—e.g., shaking hands, hugging, touching someone's face—and motives—e.g., personal conversations, papal journeys, holy masses—to influence public opinion, and the secular media tend to reuse these positive narratives to describe the pope.

This analysis suggests that the digital mobilization of followers happens on two different fronts: the papacy uses the pope's charisma to attract digital followers in order to stay in contact, to be seen and heard and to communicate with the faithful, and the papacy uses digital communication channels to depict itself as "modern" in order to remain relevant to communicate with the public. While the Holy See managed to gather a digital crowd on Twitter, its mobilization differs from its physical counterpart. While the papacy frequently uses events such as public audiences or voyages to interact with individuals and groups, there is no replay or retweet to any individual message. As of today, there are no stories of a virtual chat with the Holy Father.

#### **3. The Virtual, the Digital and the Physical**

The idea of the virtual is an undisputed part of Christianity as well as of society and politics. It helps to understand the abstract, but more importantly, it influences the individual at the psychological level. It derives from the medieval Latin word "virtualis", meaning strength or power, and refers in scholastic philosophy to "something that exists potentially rather than actually" (MacWilliams 2002, p. 317; Lévy 1998, p. 23). The concept of virtual pilgrimage has its roots in the late Middle Ages. Due to the dangers of lengthy trips and the economic burden that came with them, a great part of the medieval population of Europe could not afford traveling to distant places such as the Holy Land. This led to the creation of what can be described as "spiritual theme parks" that "could spiritually be just as effective" (Kaelber 2011, p. 50). Local shrines became a cost-effective alternative for the faithful to experience the mobilization of a pilgrimage without having to undertake long travels.

Among the most famous examples in Europe are the shrines of Altötting, Cz ˛estochowa, Einsiedeln, Fatima, Loreto, Lourdes or Mariazell. Many apostolic voyages include papal visits to these local pilgrimage sites (see, Barbato 2020a). John Paul II visited the shrine of Our Lady of Altötting, Germany, on 18 November 1980; Benedict XVI visited the small shrine of Etzelsbach, Germany, on 23 September 2011; during his apostolic journey to Poland on the occasion of the 31st World Youth Day, on 28 July 2016, Francis celebrated the Holy Mass at the shrine of Cz ˛estochowa; and in May 2021, thirty shrines "scattered throughout the world" joined the pope's call to recite the "Rosary to pray for the end of the pandemic and for the resumption of social activity and work" (Francis 2021a).

Within the field of political thought, the categories of sovereignty, commonwealth, state, nation and people are examples of representing something invisible by means of something visible, describable and relatable (Koschorke et al. 2007; Möllers 2008; Skinner 2007, 2009, 2012). In short, the virtual can be understood as fiction that becomes reality with the power to make others act, believe, think or feel in a certain way, as it represents something that cannot be fully seen or explained.

Today's forms of digital pilgrimage are prime examples of the power of the virtual: for instance, historic sculptures or iconic imagery, such as that of the Virgin Mary or Christian Saints, are used in sites of Catholic pilgrimage to represent and uphold a tradition of local worship and to create a physical stage of mobilization where the faithful make themselves visible. Common belief and tradition are able to turn a location into a field camp of the faithful, while the location becomes the physical destination of the pilgrim's journey.

In addition, the journey of pilgrimage itself operates as "a metaphorical reminder of the Christian journey to Heaven" on which the pilgrims "walk the material roads, which evoke the spiritual road on which they also journey" (Dunn-Hensley 2020, p. 125). The pilgrim's journey becomes a crossroad between the physical and the metaphysical journey (Xiarhos 2016), with the physical hardships of the travel representing his spiritual endeavor. At least to a certain degree, the virtual is part of every form of pilgrimage as it creates a community of the faithful based on a shared physical path that represents a present, yet invisible, common faith.

#### *3.1. The Internet as a Virtual Realm*

The Internet theoretically provides a golden opportunity for the modern papacy to combine the idea of the virtual with the newly available technologies of the digital in order to combat, especially in Europe, the declining numbers of physical followers. It creates several arenas for virtual mobilization where the faithful can gather in one place in order to read, listen and watch the pope as a trans-local community, as national and regional groups or as individual followers.

While there has been an ongoing debate about the prospects of the Internet with regard to the Catholic Church and pilgrimages in particular, the most important open questions concern the authenticity of virtual representations for individual pilgrims, with a strong focus on the normative question of whether the Internet is able to provide the same experience at the psychological level (Hill-Smith 2011; Cowan 2005). In contrast, the concept of mobilization as a resource of soft power provides an alternative position, as it centers on the question of how the digital space can be used to publicly demonstrate the legitimacy of the pope. This article combines the idea of the virtual with the previously discussed research on mobilization and soft power in order to measure the current state of digital papal power.

Interestingly, even though the papacy has become more and more digital, Francis did not push for a virtual mobilization. On 17 April 2020, during a time when papal communication with the faithful and the world was mostly limited to digital messages on YouTube and Instagram, Francis spoke about the dangers of a Church going viral: "Before Easter, when the news emerged that I would celebrate Easter in an empty Saint Peter's Basilica, a bishop wrote to me, a good bishop, good; and he rebuked me. "But how come, Saint Peter's is so big, why not put at least thirty people in there, so that you can see there are people? There won't be any danger". I thought: "But, what does he have in mind, to tell me this?" I did not understand, at the time. But since he is a good bishop, very close to the people, he wanted to say something to me. When I find him, I will ask him. Then I understood. He was saying to me, "Be careful not to make the Church virtual, viral; not to make the sacraments virtual, not to make the people of God virtual. The Church, the sacraments, the people of God are concrete. It is true that in this moment we must provide this familiarity with God in this way, but so as to come out of the tunnel, not to stay inside it. And this is the familiarity of the apostles: not gnostic, not virtual, not selfish, for each one of us, but a concrete familiarity, in the people" (Francis 2021b).

A few months earlier, on 1 January 2021, Francis spoke positively about virtual mobilization efforts: "I am grateful to all those who in every part of the world, while respecting the restrictions imposed due to the pandemic, have promoted moments of prayer and reflection on the occasion of today's World Day of Peace. I think in particular of yesterday evening's virtual march organized by the Italian episcopate, Pax Christi, Caritas and Catholic Action, as well as the one from this morning organized by Sant'Egidio, being broadcast by streaming worldwide" (Francis 2021c).

Today, the virtual pilgrimage can be broadly understood as "an Internet neologism for a Web site where people can simulate a sacred journey for educational, economic, and spiritual purposes" (MacWilliams 2004, p. 223). It does not need to compete with its counterpart, since the digital legions are an additional instrument for the modern papacy to publicly legitimize itself. In contrast to a psychological debate centered on the question about individual feelings involved in digital pilgrimages, this article offers a look into the past and present usage of the Internet as a strategic tool to mobilize the masses everywhere. It concludes that in order to successfully use the Internet, the modern papacy has to achieve the following steps:


While the papacy apparently achieved the first two steps, with a digital presence that has significantly increased over the past 25 years, it has not done enough to mobilize these several million digital followers to become a reliable papal power base. Despite their current numbers, the pope's digital legions have remained mostly passive, as each digital arena limits the interaction to a certain form of communication. Regardless of the capabilities of digital platforms, they cannot fully recreate some of the fundamentals of papal mobilization: the physical–spiritual experience as an individual story of being on a journey, the feeling of being part of a mass and the physical proximity to the pope and others. Especially in the early to mid-2000s, research overestimated the impact of the cyberspace as an abrupt transition into a digital age that could provide a real alternative to the physical world. While it is true that the Internet continues to change society and communication culture, offline events have not simply vanished. As Petr Kratochvíl has pointed out, the ongoing process of virtualization has, at least for the Catholic Church, not "reduced the importance of the materiality of pilgrimage", as in its current state, the "physical aspects of pilgrimage became one of the hallmarks of pilgrimage-related texts and videos" (Kratochvíl 2021, p. 5). On the contrary, it has provided opportunities to advertise mass gatherings. There is no zero-sum game between online and offline.

At this point, the modern papacy has failed to utilize its online presence as a communitygenerating forum where newcomers and longtime followers, believers and digital tourists are allowed to create their own virtual locations, such as open discussion groups or ad hoc private conversations. Without these basic assets of communication, the sense of a papal online community will never become particularly strong. Almost two decades ago, Christopher Helland described the very same problem, using the Vatican website as an example of the Church's shortcomings with its online communication. While the Vatican website offered a "wealth of information", unofficial Catholic sites already provided an "environment for people to talk about their religious beliefs and practices, ask challenging questions concerning their faith, and participate in a safe environment where they can open up and share religious feelings and concerns" (Helland 2004, p. 31). For example, there is no Q&A space to address the pope and no real opportunity to get in contact with the papacy or other followers besides writing short messages on Twitter or Instagram. In its current state, the papal mobilization online is a one-way street, and while this might work for public appearances in the physical realm, digital communication has always been a multi-way network.

#### *3.2. COVID-19 as a Stress Test for Papal Mobilization*

If this paper's considerations about papal mobilization are correct, then the global pandemic would be the modern papacy's greatest challenge since World War II. Thus, this section deals with the Vatican's use of the Internet during the first year of the global

pandemic, using examples of papal livestreams to quantify the pope's digital mobilization power.

The coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) reached Italy at the beginning of 2020, with major regional outbreaks in Northern Italy in February and the first reported viral disease within the Vatican on March 5 (Vatican News 2020). Following regional lockdowns, the Italian government issued an assembly ban and rules of social distancing. The Vatican took similar measures, suspending all major public events and closing St. Peter's Square and Basilica. While all scheduled papal journeys abroad were canceled, other events such as the weekly Angelus Prayers and General Audiences were transformed into virtual events.

On 27 March 2020, Francis began his digital offensive, taking the global pandemic as an opportunity to hold an extraordinary moment of prayer in the form of an Urbi et Orbi blessing. Using the visual effect of a seemingly abandoned St. Peter's Square during a rainy evening, Vatican News portrayed the pope as a communicator for all mankind. The scene broadcasted by the Vatican aimed to create the narrative of an invisible, yet present, legion of digital believers, praying with the pontiff during the pandemic.

With the help of two Christian icons, the Salus populi romani image of the Virgin Mary and the crucifix of San Marcello, combined with an orchestration of verbal and nonverbal communication, Francis prayed for a rapid end of the pandemic on behalf of all people. His prayer included the sick, their relatives and everyone exposed to the invisible risk of infection due to their work. The verbal content was accompanied by a papal body language using not only Christian symbols of blessings and veneration but also social conventions of nonverbal communication.

The images of the live broadcast generated a narrative triad of pope, location and Christian icons. Francis became the petitioner for a crowd of people that were obliged to remain at home for their own safety, while the icons were part of a Christian tradition of praying for divine assistance in times of crisis. The orchestration of the event suggests that the papacy wanted to expand the definition of the mass itself, from the concept of people visibly gathering at one location to that of a virtual community including all of humanity, the viewers, the followers and everyone involved in the event. The absent masses were represented in two ways: through the empty space and the virtual viewership on the YouTube channels of Vatican News.

Vatican News broadcasted the extraordinary papal prayer as a livestream with audio commentary on YouTube. In order to measure the potential of the papacy's mobilization power, the number of viewers was recorded every five minutes during the livestream. It included the Spanish, German, English, Portuguese, Italian and French channels (VN Spain 2020; VN German 2020; VN English 2020; VN Portuguese 2020; VN Italian 2020; VN French 2020). The combined count of views of all channels reached about 1.09 million people watching the event at the same time. At its peak, the Spanish channel had about 525,000 viewers, followed by the English channel with 270,000 and the Portuguese channel with 170,000. In contrast, the German channel only reached a maximum of about 10,000 viewers, which approximately corresponds to the channel's followers. Since the event was also broadcasted on other news portals on YouTube, the Internet in general and on television, the actual number of people who watched the extraordinary event with Pope Francis is likely to have been much larger.

The success of this digital mass mobilization was only temporary as the virtual events following the extraordinary Urbi et Orbi involved far fewer spectators: during the broadcast of the Mass of the Lord's Supper on April 9, the abovementioned channels gathered around 107,000 simultaneous viewers; both the Easter Vigil on April 11 and the Easter Urbi et Orbi message of April 12 obtained around 99,000 viewers each; and the regular event of the Regina Caeli on April 13 only attracted around 5400 viewers. These numbers indicate that the papacy is certainly in a position to mobilize an audience digitally, but its success depends above all on the occasion and the public attention: first, the public media drew attention to the extraordinary occasion of the Urbi et Orbi in advance, so that people knew about the event; second, the pope seemed to be the only one able to fit the role of divine supplicant during a time of global pandemic and invisible dangers.

These results confirm the current papal research on mass mobilization. Among other reasons, the popes rely on public stages in order to communicate with believers in the universal church and to remain relevant; the papacy uses images of the deserted St. Peter's Square as a metaphor for its invisible digital legions at home. However, the findings also suggest that these legions are not regular troops or a community of papal followers, but rather resemble temporary mercenaries who are mostly interested in the event or the extraordinary.

#### **4. Conclusions**

Without its ability to mobilize the masses, the modern papacy faces the danger of losing not only its display of public support but also, more importantly, its legitimacy as a global hybrid actor. By adapting itself to the technological paradigm shifts that changed the rules of public communication and mobilization, the modern papacy became digital. By taking a close look at the recent history of papal mobilization, this article's outcome is that the success of digital mobilization depends to a great extent on the use of digital stages in order to create virtual communities where followers are given opportunities to communicate with each other and enjoy the illusion of a digital pope. In order to mobilize its digital masses, the papacy has to create visible and open digital locations.

After the surprising success of the Holy See's website, the Vatican's failure as a YouTube content creator and its success on Twitter and Instagram, the papacy seemed prepared to face the global pandemic. However, the lockdowns and assembly bans demonstrated the shortcomings of its digital mobilization, which was far less impactful than its physical counterpart. The sight of thousands of Christians gathered at St. Peter's Square or at any other religious or historic location is still far more important than any subscriber count or number of interactions.

The findings of this paper suggest that, despite a relatively good starting position and the ongoing centralization of the Vatican media apparatus, Francis' strategy of virtual mobilization has not achieved significant results. The global pandemic has become the first major stress test for digital mobilization as it resulted in a loss of public space for which the different virtual arenas of Instagram, Twitter and YouTube could not compensate. The papacy's use of the empty stage of St. Peter's Square hints at the importance of physical locations. The 2020 lockdowns proved that, at least at the present moment, the Internet provides no real alternative to physical forms of papal mass mobilization. It may serve as a communication device, but it is a different type of soft power. Rather, the exceptional situation seems to confirm current research on the modern papacy that describes physical forms of mobilization as the main source of papal power (Barbato and Heid 2020; Barbato et al. 2018). The papacy made itself visible online, but it has yet to become a digital actor.

**Funding:** This research was funded by the German Research Foundation, research project "Legions of the Popes II: A Case Study in Social and Political Transformation", project number 288978882.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

#### **References**


Bredekamp, Horst. 2015a. *Der Bildakt. Frankfurter Adorno-Vorlesungen 2007*. Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach.


Skinner, Quentin. 2007. *Visions of Politics-Volume II: Renaissance Virtues*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Skinner, Quentin. 2009. A Genealogy of the Modern State. *The British Academy Lecture* 162: 325–70.

Skinner, Quentin. 2012. *Die drei Körper des Staates*. Göttingen: Wallstein.

Sommeregger, Andreas. 2011. *Soft Power und Religion. Der Heilige Stuhl in den Internationalen Beziehungen*. Wiesbaden: VS.


Tagesschau. 1995. Tagesschau vor 20 Jahren, 25. Dezember 1995. Available online: https://www.tagesschau.de/multimedia/video/ video-142161.html (accessed on 12 February 2021).


Vallely, Paul. 2014. *Papst Franziskus. Vom Reaktionär zum Revolutionär*. Darmstadt: Konrad Theiss.

Willey, David. 2015. *The Promise of Francis. The Man, the Pope, and the Challenge of Change*. New York: Gallery Books.


MDPI St. Alban-Anlage 66 4052 Basel Switzerland Tel. +41 61 683 77 34 Fax +41 61 302 89 18 www.mdpi.com

*Religions* Editorial Office E-mail: religions@mdpi.com www.mdpi.com/journal/religions

MDPI St. Alban-Anlage 66 4052 Basel Switzerland

Tel: +41 61 683 77 34 Fax: +41 61 302 89 18

www.mdpi.com ISBN 978-3-0365-3381-0