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Theologian and social critic Richard John Neuhaus gave us the phrase the naked public square, in a 1984 book of that name, to describe the secular ideal of civic discourse without the benefit of religious and moral insight. First as an inner-city Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor, and more recently as a Catholic priest, Neuhaus has served as a rallying point for moral and theological conservatives from a variety of backgrounds—Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Jewish—to reintroduce religion into the cultural debates.

Toward that end, Neuhaus, now editor-in-chief of First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life , here explains for Christians outside the Roman church the significance of John Paul 11's recent writing on morality.

"You guys have a pope who sure knows how to pope." That is the admiring comment of a friend, a Southern Baptist who is surprised, and just a bit uneasy, about finding that he and John Paul II are on the same side in the great moral conflicts of our time.

My friend does not agree with Catholic teaching about the continuing office of Peter in the church, and he is not sure what to do with his childhood belief that the pope is Antichrist; but he will accept help from wherever he can get it, and, increasingly, he discovers he is getting it from this pope. The recent encyclical Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth) is a case in point. The encyclical has provoked widespread and generally favorable comment from sources not usually sympathetic to Catholic moral teaching.

When it appeared in October, some newspapers blazoned that the pope is clamping down on sexual ethics. And it indeed turns out that he has not changed his mind on, for instance, fornication and adultery; but that is rather to miss the point of this extended argument on the nature of morality. Other reports focused on his criticism of moral theories that go by awkward names such as proportionalism and consequentialism. That is closer to the point, but it still does not quite get it.

In this encyclical (encyclical means simply a letter to be circulated), the pope does not so much analyze the sorry moral condition of the contemporary world as he asks us to reflect on the meaning of "moral truth." The sorry truth of the matter is that many people today think "moral truth" is a contradiction in terms. You have your "values" and I have mine, and that's that. Beyond the individual assertion of values," there is nothing left to discuss. "What is truth?" asked Pilate. Like many of our contemporaries, he took that question to be a discussion-stopper. John Paul II argues that ought to be a discussion-starter.

He notes that the modern world has had a great deal to say about freedom, and that is good. But freedom must be grounded in truth. Freedom is not enough. Freedom standing by itself inevitably degenerates into license. License, which is unbridled freedom, quickly becomes the enemy of freedom. Friedrich Nietzsche, the brilliantly mad philosopher of the nineteenth century, well understood this. He saw that, once the reality of absolute truth is denied, all arguments—indeed, all human relationships—become nothing more than the exercise of "the will to power." Against Nietzsche and those of like mind, John Paul contends that power—and freedom itself—can be made and must be made accountable to truth. "Authentic freedom," he says repeatedly, "is ordered to truth." Not my truth, your truth, or her truth, not the truth of a class or a tribe or a nation, but truth. As in "absolute truth."

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March (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49