What is the TMC's Christian humanism?

In a simple brochure about the Thomas More Centre, we try to convey something of a potted overview of the mission and aims of the TMC.

We explain that the TMC is a “formational movement” that aims to foster “the common good” in the development of an “integrated and balanced Christian humanism and social ethics”.

Some people may be confused about our use of the term “humanism”, and for some, it may even be something of a dirty word. People as different in conviction as radical environmentalists and religious traditionalists might ask: “Isn’t the self-referential nature of humanism exactly what is wrong with the Western world?”

In a sense, they are onto something.

Humanism, cribbed and maimed by secularism, can become locked into the short-term gains and power plays of the moral free-market or within the materialistic eschatology of various forms of ideology, such as Marxism. It can be a mindset that leads to the despair of atomised individualism on one hand or crushing collectivism on the other.

Pope St John Paul II was of course a forceful voice against what he saw as the double temptation of secular humanisms.

The Polish Pope saw that one edge of the temptation to dehumanisation via humanism was a kind of nihilism, which reduces the human person and the universe to a chaos of hapless and random molecules or quarks – we become objectified and meaningless along with all the other “stuff” floating past and through us.

The other temptation is to turn the human being inside out. In an address to the Catholic University in Lublin (June 9, 1987), John Paul II urged us to “to refuse to succumb to the temptation of both self-idolatry and of self-subjectification”.

Secular humanism in its variously lethal mutations – some of which the Pope had witnessed up close and personally – tore Europe and human communities apart. This type of humanism he observed had lost or marginalised God as the source and key to a true and integrated humanism.

Both before and throughout his pontificate, John Paul II set out to correct and re-integrate these errors of secular modernity with his Christocentric humanism – what he called in his Theology of the Body audience addresses, “an adequate anthropology”.

Primary and central to his teaching and his prolific missionary journeys was a theological anthropology of the dignity of the human person resting on the central doctrine of the human person made imago Dei – made in the image of God.

It was a notion of “dignity” that, in resting upon the revelation and saving works of the God-man Jesus Christ, restores and re-integrates the imagoand along with it the apparently oppositional polarities: faith and reason, nature and grace, individual and community, work and play, heart and mind, politics and culture, freedom and responsibility and even man and woman.

John Paul II affirmed that honour, which St Thomas Aquinas had for centuries been held in the Church calling him Doctor humanitatis - the Doctor of humanity.

The Pope said: "St Thomas rotates this essential intuition: man comes from God and must return to Him. Time is the context in which man can bring his noble mission to fulfilment, making the most of the opportunities offered to him by both nature and grace."

What is “new” in the Christian humanism of John Paul II is that he engages with the contemporary awareness of time, experience, history and culture along with sound philosophy and theology.

His pursuit of what he called “the culture of life” enabled him to expand a collaboration of minds and hearts beyond the Catholic tradition and into relationships with other Christians especially, but also with other believers and people of good will.

Referring to his great encyclical Fides et Ratio, the Polish pontiff writes of the contemporary threats to an integrated and Christian humanism:

"Among the most common should be mentioned the loss of faith in reason and in its ability to arrive at the truth, the refusal of transcendence, nihilism, relativism, the forgetfulness of being, the denial of the soul, the prevalence of the irrational or feeling, the fear of the future and existential anxiety."

In a very real sense this is prophetic of our own century, and confirms that Pope John Paul II was a foundational inspiration for the Thomas More Centre in the last and present century.

Many other Christian humanists have also inspired the content of the Thomas More Centre mission, especially such figures as St Thomas More and St John Henry Newman.

In her recent YouTube interview with the theological scholar and TMC Queensland organiser Mark Makowiecki, Professor Tracey Rowland offers some fascinating theo-political observations about the crisis in Catholic institutional education, and the loss of the integration of the type of Christian humanism to which we in the TMC today aspire.

These excellent interviews are also available in podcast form for those on the move. Please support us by subscribing to the TMC YouTube channel.

There is an opportunity to hear Professor Rowland expand upon the key notion of the imago Dei as she delivers the inaugural Nicholas Tonti-Filippini Oration on November 29 in Melbourne. Limited tickets are still available here.

Anna Krohn
Executive Director
Thomas More Centre