How did John Paul II go about confronting and responding to verbal duplicity during his pontificate?
Dr. Brennan: The pontiff exhibited an acute awareness of how much the success of the death culture depends upon the corruption of language and thought. He employed a persuasive discourse of truth-telling for unmasking the extreme abuse of language whereby “words have become unmoored from their meaning and we are left with a rhetoric in which the language of life is used to promote the culture of death.” The Holy Father persistently emphasized how the vastness of the destruction perpetrated during the 20th century can be attributed in large part to defective definitions of the human person. A hallmark of John Paul’s campaign against the culture of death consisted of demonstrating the power of reality to overcome a rhetoric that conceals the disconcerting truth about killing defenseless human beings inside and outside the womb. “What is need,” he insisted, “is the courage to speak the truth clearly, candidly and boldly, but never with hatred or disrespect for persons.” The pope did not l
