The Catholic Church is prudently patient in awarding the title “Doctor of the Church” to her greatest teachers. However luminous someone’s explication of the truths of the Catholic faith may seem in his or her time, the efficacy of that teaching can only be tested over generations, sometimes centuries. This is particularly true of the saints who stretched the Church’s understanding, discomfiting some in the process. 

Thus, it took 294 years for Thomas Aquinas, a theological innovator in his day, to be recognized as doctor Ecclesiae.

Twenty years after the death of John Paul II on April 2, 2005, it’s too early to declare St. John Paul II a doctor of the Church. It’s not too soon, however, to imagine why such an honor might be bestowed on him in the future. Five reasons suggest themselves.

1. John Paul II’s extensive magisterium provided authoritative keys to the proper interpretation of the Second Vatican Council.

Vatican II defined no dogmas, condemned no heresies, legislated no canons, wrote no creed, and commissioned no catechism: methods by which previous ecumenical councils had signaled, “This is what we mean.” 

Through his encyclicals and other magisterial texts, as well as through two new Codes of Canon Law and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, John Paul II provided the keys by which the Church could understand the Council’s 16 documents as a coherent whole, a beautiful tapestry whose pieces are sewn together by the concept of the Church as a communion of disciples in mission.    

2. John Paul II presented the full symphony of Catholic truths in such a way that those truths could be grasped by the modern mind.

At John Paul’s election, Catholic theology — and especially Catholic moral theology — was in crisis. Modernity’s nihilism, skepticism and relativism had infected Catholic thinking, leading to confusions that fractured ecclesial unity and made evangelization almost impossible. By using modern philosophical and theological tools to challenge the crippling modern and postmodern convention that there is nothing we can know with certainty, John Paul II’s teaching preserved the wisdom of the Catholic Tradition while demonstrating that even the most demanding truths of the tradition could be explicated and proposed in terms that the people of the 21st century could understand. 

3. John Paul’s knowledge of contemporary philosophy and his extensive pre-papal pastoral experience combined to give him a keen insight into the cultural crisis of our time — the crisis of human nature. 

Are we infinitely plastic and malleable? Or are there truths built into the world and into us, truths that point the path to happiness and, ultimately, beatitude?

John Paul’s Christ-centered humanism, his epic theology of the body, his writings on the meaning of suffering, and his “papal feminism” were all effective, culture-reforming responses to the utilitarian degradation of human nature: the notion that we are just bundles of morally equivalent desires, the satisfaction of which through our willfulness — “I did it my way” — is the acme of human happiness. 

4. John Paul II’s social doctrine sought to put the democratic project on a more secure foundation by teaching that it takes a certain kind of people living certain virtues to ensure that free politics and free economies support human flourishing and social solidarity. 

Events of the past 20 years have vindicated this teaching in spades. 

5. John Paul II defined the Church’s grand strategy for the 21st century and the third millennium: the New Evangelization.

By going to the Holy Land during the Great Jubilee of 2000, John Paul reminded the Church and the world that Christianity is not a myth or a fairy tale; Christianity began with the radical conversion of real men and women in places we can touch and see today, who were so transformed by their encounter with the one they called the Risen Lord that they went out on mission and changed the course of history. In closing the Great Jubilee by calling the entire Church to “put out into the deep” (Luke 5:4), John Paul summoned all Catholics to live the missionary discipleship to which they were consecrated in baptism. 

Despite the efforts of some over the past dozen years to dismiss or deconstruct this great legacy, the living parts of the world Church are those that have embraced John Paul II’s teaching and are embodying it in mission and service. Conversely, those parts of the world Church that have ignored or rejected that teaching are moribund or dying. That basic fact of 21st-century Catholic life warrants the thought that, one day, Catholicism may well acknowledge Pope St. John Paul II, doctor of the Church.