Today is the 20th anniversary of the death of Pope St. John Paul II. I miss him.

John Paul was foundational in my life as a Catholic theologian. I was a college sophomore studying at St. Mary’s College in Orchard Lake, Michigan, when he was elected. In those early college years, I discovered both a call to and talent for teaching. I also had always been interested in moral theology. During my college years, our moral theology professor was Fr. Anthony Kosnik of Human Sexuality infamy. Orchard Lake’s three schools — a prep, college, and major theologate — were informally and collectively called “the Polish seminary” (although the College was co-ed). I was always haunted by the thought that we Poles, faithful to Rome, could have done a lot better than Anthony Kosnik. That thought grew more insistent after Karol Wojtyla’s election.

I vaguely knew John Paul was an intellectual, though we never had any systematic exposure to his thought. I came to discover him in graduate school, at Fordham University in New York. My first semester (September 1981) included a seminar course on “Christian Sexuality.” As a seminar, it required preparation and presentation of a research paper. Fordham is adjacent to the Bronx’s Little Italy, where the Daughters of St. Paul ran a Catholic bookstore. Providentially, I found myself there staring at Male and Female He Created Them: Catechesis on the Book of Genesis. It was a collection of John Paul’s Wednesday general audiences — still ongoing at the time — about human anthropology and its sexual implications gleaned from the Book of Genesis. I had my seminar paper!

That encounter made me think more and more about how in fact Catholic Poles had “done better” in the moral theology and ethics of Karol Wojtyla. The next term, I used The Jeweler’s Shop as my paper for theology of conscience. A die was cast. Three years later, I would present a doctoral dissertation on sexual ethics in the prepapal thought of John Paul II. My thesis was simple. Pope Paul VI had been criticized for the lack of “personalism” in Humanae vitae. But Karol Wojtyla, whose personalism was no way in doubt, reached exactly the same conclusions. So, were those who were promoting the separation of the procreative and unitive meanings of human sexuality the “real personalists?” Or was that an excuse to justify their rejection of indisputable Catholic teaching that such division is immoral? My dissertation traced how Wojtyla kept those two meanings of human sexuality indivisibly together precisely on personalistic terms from the beginning of his academic life through his papal election.

Thanks to that engagement, I also delved far deeper into Polish and Central European theology, an extraordinarily rich field still grossly unknown to “Western” thinkers. I learned Polish much better. And I became a friend of the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin (KUL), where John Paul taught.

I first met John Paul in Rome in 1989. I was there for a summer course that KUL conducted at the John Paul II Institute in Rome. In summer 1989, Poland was still imprisoned behind the Russian Iron Curtain, so some things were better said in Rome than in Lublin (though Lublin was not filled with retiring wallflowers). On June 29 we participated in the Papal Mass for Ss. Peter and Paul. That afternoon we were invited to the Apostolic Palace to meet the Pope. Our director, Fr. Stefan Wylezek, had told the Pope someone (me) wanted to give him a dissertation. When I was presented, the Pope asked what field the dissertation was in. I said “theology.”

“Oh, and what part of theology?”

“Moral theology.”

“Moral theology? Do you know that I was a moral theologian, too?”

“Yes.”

“And what specifically was your topic?”

“You.”

The Pope’s eyes could be piercing. He began paging, noted some of his works in the footnotes, and ended with the promise/threat “I will have to look well at this.”

John Paul was, of course, more than just a moral theologian or ethicist. The richness of his thinking ran much of the theological field. I’ve clung to John Paul’s thought and tried to continue building it for modern people in the modern intellectual milieu, including in the contemporary Church. Perhaps the ethnic link first connected us, but there was more. Anybody who has read John Paul’s writings knows he is not light, bedtime reading. It was a struggle to work through him, especially back then when the only introduction (an excellent one at that!) was George Williams’s The Mind of John Paul II. It was telling that the first English (and still solid) introduction to Wojtyla’s thinking came from a Harvard Unitarian.

But what I found in that struggle was not just an intellectual reward (though that was there). It was, rather, that some of the things Wojtyla was saying — boiled down into plain and understandable language — were the same things I had heard from my Catholic mother of Polish ancestry who never finished high school. He was Karol; she was Caroline (the Polish feminine would have been Karolina). It might sound funny, but when I found congruence between what the Pope and what my mother were saying, I knew I was on the right path.

And I continue to remain committed to disseminating John Paul’s way of thinking precisely because he accurately diagnosed the problems of modernity, of modern people, and of the contemporary Church (without needing a multiyear synod to figure them out). As he put it in his 1976 Lenten Retreat for Paul VI (which later became Sign of Contradiction), Wojtyla said, precisely in relation to Humanae vitae: “We are in the forefront today of a lively battle for the dignity of man.” Not a “struggle,” a battle, an existential fight for the meaning of the human person, made in God’s image and likeness, fully revealed in Christ, deserving nothing less than love. John Paul knew we were in a culture war before “culture war” was a term. Nobody whose archdiocese included a place called Auschwitz-Birkenau could deny that.

Twenty years after John Paul returned “to the home of the Father,” his erstwhile biographer George Weigel penned a tribute, noting someday John Paul may be declared a Doctor of the Church. Weigel added, however, that might happen not just because of what John Paul said and wrote and did — past events — but if what he said, wrote, and did continues to nourish and feed the Church as she moves forward in history. I have no doubt the timber is there. Let’s make fruitful use of the treasures God gave us through John Paul II.