It has now been 20 years since the death of Pope John Paul II. And with the passage of time, an entirely new generation of Catholics has arisen who have no real memory of why those of us who are older still refer to him as “John Paul the Great.”

Indeed, for many young Catholics of a more traditionalist bent, John Paul is viewed as “the Baby Boomer’s pope” who, despite his putative orthodoxy, “kissed the Koran,” embraced religious relativism at Assisi, and championed a failed Council and its alleged “fatal ambiguities.”

So please indulge me in a bit of an autobiographical reflection to highlight why this view of Pope John Paul is thoroughly wrong and why he truly was “Great.” Because it is necessary to situate John Paul in a historical context to truly assess the immensity of what he accomplished, and why, therefore, he is still more relevant than ever.

In the year he was elected (1978), I was a young college seminarian who had discerned a calling to the priesthood during the post-conciliar era that George Weigel has famously labeled “the silly season.”

There is no need to recount here all of the theological and liturgical chaos that the period of 1965-1978 witnessed. But the chaos was etched into my consciousness as I entered the seminary as something very real on a raw and visceral level since it seemed as if my beloved Church was intent on destroying itself. Even Pope Paul VI said that it seemed as if “the smoke of Satan” had entered the Church.

Nor was my experience of pain and anguish unique. An entire generation of faithful Catholics had to endure both the chaos of a Church gone mad, as well as the persecution of our beliefs by those who were then in charge of things and who used words like “dialogue” and “openness to the world” and “inclusion” in dictatorial ways that really meant “shut up and get on the change train or else.”

And change always meant the accommodation of Church doctrine and practice to the moods of the prevailing secular zeitgeist. And more specifically still, it involved a baptizing of the sexual revolution as a true movement of the Holy Spirit.

It is no exaggeration, therefore, to say that the exact nature of the chaos was a crisis within the Church’s theological anthropology where the question of “what is a human being” was no longer answered Christologically but rather in the categories of a highly secularized psychology and sociology. This is why we saw an entire generation of seminarians who, if they attended more liberal seminaries (which was most of them), got precious little theological formation and were instead taught the thin gruel of secular understandings of human nature. And this was done in the name of being more “pastoral.”

But what it led to was a crisis in moral theology, liturgy and Christology. Moral absolutes were out. The moral theory known as “proportionalism” was in. So too was any notion of liturgy as a link to the transcendent horizon of our horizontal commitments.

The Eucharist was reduced to a fellowship meal of suburban niceness. And Jesus became, simply, the most “maxed-out fully engraced human” who ever lived. And in the wake of such a low Christology came an even lower ecclesiology wherein Christ and his Church were now seen as just one religious expression among many other equally valid ones. If you said otherwise and insisted upon the necessity of Christ and his Church for salvation, you were labeled as a dangerous “triumphalist” in need of reeducation.

Then the white smoke of October 1978 arose from the Sistine Chapel and everyone in my seminary gathered in the “TV room” (how quaint that now sounds) with excited anticipation. And when the name “Wojtyła” was announced, one of the seminarians shouted, “It is an African!” But our rector quickly corrected him and with jubilation announced that this was a young Polish cardinal with immense charisma and orthodoxy.

I wish I could capture and bottle for the younger generation the immensity of how much this young pope from Kraków — during the still ongoing cold war between the West and the Soviet Union — meant to us all. And how much he inspired us and gave us hope that just perhaps, finally, the Church’s 13-year-old nightmarish experiment in correlational accommodationism was over.

And it is in this regard that his legacy endures. Because he was not a cheap ham actor (as Hans Küng alleged) who was long on style but short on substance, but was a man possessed of prodigious intellectual talents. His papacy therefore cannot be reduced to a performative exercise in globe-trotting evangelization that was more a pep rally than a real revival. He traveled, but as he did so he also taught. His 14 encyclicals, his many apostolic exhortations (especially, Familiaris Consortio), and his catechesis that became his theology of the body, all give witness to the essence of his papacy as a teaching pontificate.

For me, this is his greatest legacy. And it is a legacy that we set aside to our shame since its depth and richness have only begun to be truly appreciated. His involvement and interventions at the Second Vatican Council as a young bishop (especially his role in influencing Gaudium et Spes), his first encyclical (Redemptor Hominis), his later encyclicals on moral theology, his social encyclicals, and his many speeches around the world, are all grounded in a rich, Christocentric theological anthropology.

What John Paul understood was that the days of being able to just snap your papal fingers and make terrible ecclesial theology and praxis go away were long over. And he understood that the crisis in the Church was, as I said above, a crisis of anthropology. He further understood that the Council could only be properly interpreted, and therefore implemented, if it is read in the light of the Christocentric anthropology that animated it.

Therefore, slowly but with strength and determination, he ended the worst elements of the silly season and ushered in a new generation of “John Paul II Catholics” who began the ecclesial reclamation project. He also created a profound theological foundation upon which to avoid both a runaway theological progressivism and a reactionary and revisionist traditionalism. He answered the question of “what is a human being,” and contained within that answer — Christ and his assumed humanity — are the answers to the vexing questions posed to us by human existence in a fallen world.

Therefore, what I ask of younger Catholics today is to consider what the Church would have looked like had there never been a Pope John Paul II. Was he perfect? Of course not. But he ended the worst elements of the post-conciliar chaos, gave the Church a magisterial interpretation of the true message of the Council, and developed a Christian humanist theological vision that alone can ground a proper moral theology.

And we forget this legacy to our peril. Because the voices of accommodationism were never completely vanquished and simply retreated for a time into the shadows waiting for the proper moment to return.

Those of us involved in the theological guild knew this fact well. And it seems that the accommodationists are once again resurgent and re-empowered.

Therefore, on this, the 20th anniversary of his passing, we would do well to dwell on his theological legacy as a teaching pontiff. Because those teachings are as relevant and as needed now as they were then. And perhaps even more so.