The Church, since the Second Vatican Council has placed an increased amount of emphasis on the need for the defense of authentic culture within society. Throughout his life, Pope John Paul II always stressed the importance of culture in the world as a healthy expression of human transcendence. The existence of authentic culture, he believed, is evidence of the spiritual dimension of man's nature. There has, over the past several decades, arisen a sort of cultural crisis within the Western world. John Paul II spoke repeatedly of the existence of a "culture of death" and its detrimental effects on the human person. There is an urgent need to reexamine the nature and importance of culture in light of the Holy Father's contributions toward a new understanding of culture. In addition, one must be aware that today, there exist real threats to culture. Such threats would include policies that attack or undermine the dignity of the person at the expense of material gain, temporal progress or even seemingly positive medical advances, as evidenced most recently in Congress’ attempt to loosen the government’s tight restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research. The relationship between culture and faith cannot be passed over and ignored. The former is never at odds with the latter. Rather, faith serves to enhance and perfect culture in light of the revealed truths it professes. Lamentably, the tendency today in certain circles is to set traditional religious values at odds with a "progressive" and "modern" culture. The truth is that "development" properly understood should never exclude growing in virtue or be defined simply in materialistic or utilitarian terms. This was the error of Marxism, since it viewed “progress” through the narrow prism of stifling materialistic categories. Authentic development, or progress, must include moral growth and an eternal vigilance over the dignity of the human person. Defenders of culture should voice their concern over this attempt to debase such important expressions of the human spirit.
Pope John Paul II perceived the importance of culture within society in a unique way. As a young man living in Poland under the Nazi occupation he came to appreciate the importance of his native literature, music, and language, the essential components of any culture. Since the goal of the Nazi invaders was to obliterate every vestige of Polish culture, schools were closed and professors and priests were sent to death camps, he viewed it as his mission to save Poland's memory. He accomplished this by meeting in secret with his friends to recite classic Polish literature and music. At the risk of being caught and deported to Auschwitz, these young renaissance outlaws formed a clandestine theatre group for the explicit purpose of preserving the very culture and heritage the Nazis were attempting to eviscerate. These experiences gave Karol Wojtyla a unique perspective on the vital role culture plays in the day-to-day life of a people and nation. Culture gives society an identity and purpose for which to live. It provides the keys to answer the primordial questions of human existence: Who am I as a person? Who are we as a society? Culture flows from the fountain of transcendent human expression and freedom. For this reason, the repression of culture is a grave offense to the dignity of the person.
The human person, created as a free agent in the image of God, expresses himself as person through culture. The person is also created, not to be in isolation, but to live in communion with others. Through his writings, John Paul II emphasized that when a person interacts with another, he arrives at a greater self-realization and an increased awareness of his own inestimable dignity. Culture is thus the fruit of human interaction and expression on the great stage of human society. There is a strong and inseparable relationship between culture and religious truth. Cardinal Dulles explains it as follows: "Culture is inseparable from religion, inasmuch as God is the author, sustainer, and final goal of human existence." He goes on to say, "The Gospel can make a unique contribution to culture because deep in every culture lies an impulse towards its own fulfillment through the reception of revelation, which liberates it from its involvement in sin and ambiguity." In other words, the light of truth found in faith serves to cut through the build-up of the world's wickedness and purifies a culture of its impurities.
Whenever authentic culture is suppressed or attacked, an identity crisis results in the person and in the society at large. Since the fruit of cultural expression is a greater awareness of self though interaction with the "other", the "culture of death" logically results in confusion regarding the meaning of human existence, isolation and alienation from self. The “culture of death” is really an anti-culture, a diabolical perversion of true culture. In it, the transcendence of the human person is compromised and cut down at the expense of material gain, usually determined arbitrarily and authoritatively by those in power. Convenience is given precedence over the dignity of the person under the guise of a false understanding of “progress”. Recent debates surrounding human cloning, embryonic stem-cell research, abortion and euthanasia underscore the urgency of defending the correct meaning of progress and development and their relationship to culture. Anyone advocating these procedures would like to advance their own deification of science at the expense of the inviolable rights of the person. Any so-called progress that undermines these rights recklessly chips away at the very foundation on which authentic human cultures rest, namely the dignity of the person.
John Paul II understood, perhaps better than anyone given the tumultuous experiences of his youth, the vital role culture plays in the life of a healthy and free society. While always respecting and defending the legitimate autonomy that exists between Church and state, he stressed the need for free religious expression in society. It is precisely this expression, this search for truth, and the insuppressible yearning deep in man’s heart for the Truth, which reveals the indelible image of God in every person. The barrier protecting all the fundamental rights of man from violation can only be seen once the truth about the human person is recognized and defended in the public sphere. Once a culture denies knowledge of objective right and wrong as regards the person, the door is opened up to the “dictatorship of relativism”, to which Pope Benedict XVI has so often referred. Our culture today has already been poisoned heavily by relativism, hostility to God and the dignity of the person. Proponents of this culture of death seek to extract transcendent truths from the domain of culture, relegating religion and subsequently God, to at best, a private matter of irrelevance in relation to the public square. As the vital life-breath of society, our culture, our heritage and our faith must be shielded from the noxious fumes of the culture of death.
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