“That’s your truth. I’m talking about my truth.” Karol Wojtyla would have found that statement deeply troubling. Having lived under both Nazi and Communist totalitarianism, he knew firsthand how regimes manipulate language, distort reality, and replace truth with ideology. His experience convinced him that freedom cannot survive without objective truth. This conviction shaped his ministry as a priest, bishop, and eventually Pope. Upon arriving in the West after his election in 1978, he found a Western culture increasingly skeptical that objective truth could even be known. What may begin as epistemological relativism in the classroom can gradually become moral relativism in everyday life. Wojtyla came to see one of his central missions as restoring confidence in objective truth.
The realist vision of philosophy proclaims that truth is objective but may be difficult to recognize. Truth has both an objective and a subjective dimension. Reality exists independently of us, yet each person must come to know it. Truth is traditionally understood as the correspondence between the mind and reality. From his days as a young professor working with even younger minds, Karol tried to open their intellects to the splendor of truth. That conviction culminated in his 1993 encyclical, Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth), his great call for the renewal of moral theology.
One of the principal enemies of moral theology, as he would see it, was moral relativism. He began by calling everyone’s attention to the truth, especially the truth proclaimed by Jesus Christ.
A Return to Truth
This truth demands a certain obedience from our intellect if we are going to live in reality.
Called to salvation through faith in Jesus Christ, “the true light that enlightens everyone” (Jn 1:9), people become “light in the Lord” and “children of light” (Eph 5:8), and are made holy by “obedience to the truth” (1 Pet 1:22) (Pope St. John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, 1).
This obedience is not always easy, and we often fall into relativism or skepticism, searching for an illusory freedom apart from truth itself. When truth is no longer viewed as objective, it becomes incapable of holding the attention of men. One of the reasons people began to doubt religious truth was the idea that scientific truth and technology could take its place. John Paul II argued vigorously against such an idea, insisting that the advance of science and technology “does not free humanity from the obligation to ask the ultimate religious questions” (Pope St. John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, 1).
If truth is objective, then morality must also possess objective content. Some actions are wrong not simply because societies condemn them, but because they contradict the truth about the human person. In addition to the existence of objective truth, he would argue for the existence of intrinsically evil acts. After a century marked by genocide, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb, it was clear that evil exists in the world. Yet many moral theologians and philosophers increasingly questioned whether any action could be judged intrinsically evil, preferring to evaluate moral acts primarily by intentions or consequences. John Paul II believed this trend left humanity without firm moral foundations precisely after a century that had witnessed Auschwitz and Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
We are remarkably creative at rationalizing our behavior. Given enough time, nearly any action can be made to appear reasonable.
As a witness to the breakup of the Soviet Union and the influx of freedom into Eastern Europe, John Paul II was determined to wake people up to the relationship between freedom and truth.
Relation Between Freedom and Truth
John Paul II’s defense of objective truth was never merely academic. It had profound political implications, especially as communist regimes collapsed across Eastern Europe. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the Soviet Union dissolved December 26, 1991. The 15 new independent nations had to face economic stagnation at the same time that they had to recover a sense of freedom for their citizens. After decades of propaganda, it was important to rediscover the value of truth in relation to freedom.
The inseparable connection between truth and freedom — which expresses the essential bond between God’s wisdom and will — is extremely significant for the life of persons in the socio-economic and socio-political sphere (Pope St. John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, 99).
As Western consumer culture and radical individualism spread eastward, the leaders of the former Soviet bloc faced the problem of proposing purpose and meaning to the lives of the newly free citizens of their various republics. The Archbishop of Cracow who had preached meaning to Poles living under Soviet occupation became the Roman Pontiff preaching meaning to all who had come out from behind the Iron Curtain.
Truth and Democracy
A plurality of ideas and the desire to avoid conflict led many Western leaders to take a path of least resistance, preferring to water down their ideas, rather than have firm ideas that could lead to discord and a possible new outbreak of hostilities. It could easily devolve into ethical relativism.
This is the risk of an alliance between democracy and ethical relativism, which would remove any sure moral reference point from political and social life, and on a deeper level make the acknowledgement of truth impossible (Pope St. John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, 101).
Rather than arguing on ideological grounds, it became preferable to find a path that was practical. The most important thing was to avoid political and physical violence. Democracy requires citizens capable of recognizing truth. The majority vote cannot substitute moral conscience. Rights depend on and come from objective human dignity.
The Triumph of Pragmatism
With a rise of individual freedoms, there was also a desire to justify the consumerist actions of the masses.
Today’s widespread tendencies towards subjectivism, utilitarianism and relativism appear not merely as pragmatic attitudes or patterns of behavior, but rather as approaches having a basis in theory and claiming full cultural and social legitimacy (Pope St. John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, 106).
This would also serve to lessen cultural distinctions, as that could lead to division among the people.
Moral Theology
Epistemological realism and political pluralism driven by pragmatism led to an influx of moral relativism into moral theology. The sense of sin had declined.
The sense of sin also easily declines as a result of a system of ethics deriving from a certain historical relativism (Pope John Paul II, Reconciliatio et Paenitentia, 18).
Pope St. Paul VI had also spoken about the loss of the sense of sin. Without objective moral norms, no action can be judged universally wrong. Moral judgments become expressions of preference rather than statements about what is objectively good or evil. This is preferable to those who wish to wipe out the idea of evil. When truth disappears, evil becomes merely a matter of opinion.
The saving power of the truth is contested, and freedom alone, uprooted from any objectivity, is left to decide by itself what is good and what is evil. This relativism becomes, in the field of theology, a lack of trust in the wisdom of God, who guides man with the moral law. Concrete situations are unfavorably contrasted with the precepts of the moral law, nor is it any longer maintained that, when all is said and done, the law of God is always the one true good of man” (Pope St. John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, 84).
Today we often hear, “That’s your truth, this is mine.” John Paul II spent his life resisting precisely that temptation. Truth is not something each person invents but something each person receives and seeks. Freedom separated from truth ultimately turns against the human person, while freedom rooted in truth leads to authentic flourishing. For John Paul II, that truth was never merely an idea. It had a face: Jesus Christ, who said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (Jn. 14:6). That conviction lies at the heart of Veritatis Splendor and remains one of his most enduring contributions to moral theology.
Father, excellently summarized! Do you think the root of the problem lies in Ockham's Freedom of Indifference (freedom from any constraints/between contraries vs freedom for excellence)? Or, does it appear later during the Reformation?