Hello and welcome to the Being Human Podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Greg Bottaro, and today is a really special day. This is being released on the Feast of St. John Paul II. So, happy Feast Day St. John Paul II. Pray for us.

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I’m really excited about his feast day. St. John Paul II is near and dear to so many Catholics, especially the JP II generation of Catholics who I was born in 1981. He was the first Pope that I knew for so long and so much of my formation in the Church and understanding of theology and philosophy and Church, what it means to be Catholic, was really deeply grounded in the experience of having St. John Paul II as our Pope. And of course there’s all sorts of opinion about where things have gone since then, but we’re not going to get into that here. I want to just unpack a little bit of why St. John Paul II is so important for the church and the world. I’m gonna make some claims here. I’ve made them before, but St. John Paul II is the most important psychologist of the 20th and 21st century. I think that we need to do a lot more to promote and further the work of St. John Paul II. George Weigel in a biography of John Paul II said that his work, especially in the Theology of the Body, was like a ticking time bomb ready to go off. And the seeds that were planted have permeated culture and in some ways Catholic society and culture, but they have not really been this sort of explosion of truth, a truth bomb going off in the world. And I think that it’s been much more of a gradual sort of mutation over time built into the survival capacity of the Church to build out a kind of resistance to the toxins that come through culture over time.

And that’s what we’re seeing here. But we need to do more to explicate and show how clearly John Paul II’s work has prepared us for the kinds of things that we’re dealing with right now. So, I’m gonna break open a little bit more of that in today’s episode. I hope this blesses you. And if you have any responses, please as always, send me an email. Check out the show notes for my email for other resources that we’re gonna talk about today, books and other podcasts, other things that you can find online. It’s all in the show notes. So, in your podcast player, click on the episode, look down into the links, and you’ll find a lot of resources. God bless you. 

I spent the last 10 years learning how to help people using the best techniques available in psychology integrated with the Catholic faith. Now we’ve figured out that there’s a better way to help people than just slapping a Catholic label on the same secular model of therapy you find anywhere else. The real question is how will we make this shift to a new model of truly Catholic accompaniment, keeping the psychological sciences in mind while opening up to a more human and more effective approach? This podcast is here to give you the answer. Join me and follow along as I take you behind the scenes of what this new model looks like using recorded audio from sessions, working with my team, with colleagues, and even directly with clients. My name is Dr. Greg Bottaro, and I want to welcome you to the Being Human Podcast.

I’m actually going to be in Steubenville at the Franciscan University during the week that this episode is released, and I’ll be there for almost the whole week. There’s a number of events that have lined up that I’d be participating in. One of them is a series with Father Dave Pivonka, where we’ll be talking about anxiety and depression on the rise and what we can do as a Church to respond. A second, is another show, a podcast with Father Dave and some others as well, Franciscan presents. And we’ll be looking at difficult relationships and how we can navigate the difficult relationships that we find ourselves in our life. And then the third, is an event hosted by a philosopher and professor at Steubenville, Deborah Savage, who is a wonderful person and a really brilliant philosopher, and someone who I’ve been so blessed to develop a friendship with over the years who has graciously invited me to participate in a conference that she’s running on man and woman.

And so, these three major topics have a lot of sort of overlap with what a perspective of Catholic psychology might offer. So, it makes sense that this is a conversation that I’d be involved in, in all three areas, anxiety and depression, difficult relationships, and maybe the place for some of the most difficult relationships, which is between men and women, but to really go deeper in understanding what is a man. Thank you, Matt Walsh. And what is a woman? That’s sort of every time I think of that question now it’s like you can only think of Matt Walsh. So, what is a woman? He asks the question, well, we can answer on a much deeper level, philosophically, psychologically, and also theologically. Well, here’s the surprising fact. John Paul II is front and center of answering all three of those needs. What I’m gonna be presenting with Father Dave, talking about anxiety and depression is grounded on the work of St. John Paul II. What I’m gonna be talking about in terms of difficult relationships is grounded on the work of St. John Paul II. What I’m gonna be talking about in relationships between man and woman and in understanding of each is grounded on the work of St. John Paul II. Why? Why St. John Paul II? Why is he everywhere? Why is he the most appropriate answer to every question? This is a really important idea to unpack. Our world is missing this and the Church is missing this in a large fashion. And so, you’ve heard me say this before, but it is the mission of the Catholic Psych Institute to create a standard for mental health. And that standard is based on a Catholic worldview. And that Catholic worldview is based on the anthropology of St. John Paul II.

So again, I’ll make this point, I’m not gonna be completely repeating myself from past episodes. I do have a couple episodes related to this that I will post in the show notes. So if you’re inspired by this, please go look at those other episodes. The deep teaching of the Church about what it means to be human has always been a beacon of light to guide ships in the dark, to avoid crashing on the rocks of philosophical error. And so throughout the last 2000 years as heresies have arisen, as sociological distortions and different errors have come up in terms of what it is to be human. Political movements like communism and Marxism and Bolshevism and all these “isms”, as these things have arisen over time. It’s the guiding light of a Catholic perspective that leads people around the treacherous waters. And it’s like a lighthouse in the dark, shining that light and giving ships a path forward.

And for a good amount of that history, for almost half of the history of the teaching of the Church, there has been a central figure that is at the sort of core of what it is to think about the person through a Catholic lens. And that is St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Thomas Aquinas was brilliant. He was an amazing Dominican, an amazing priest, an amazing philosopher, amazing, an amazing theologian. And especially he wrote in his massive work, the Summa Theologica, he answered all of these questions from theology and he had a very scholastic, a very rational, very ordered, logical, reasonable way to approach questions. And he’d ask a question and he’d propose an answer. He’d come up with all these arguments against that answer, and he’d evaluate them and take them for their merit and for what they could offer to help refine and deepen the understanding of his answer and to give us a perspective that we could grow from.

And everything from an understanding of what the animals are, what the rocks are, and minerals to what angels are, what grace is, what the life of conversion is all about. How does the work of grace affect us in our life? What are the faculties of the human person that God made us? And then all things about God, about the trinity, about on and on and on. Literally all we could talk all day volumes and volumes of theology, a tremendous contribution to the body of understanding in the Church. It’s almost ridiculous to even use words like a contribution because what he actually did dwarfs even the understanding of what that word means. And that has been the foundation that we’ve built a lot of Catholic thought on, moral theology, sacramental theology, even liturgical sort of sense, all of these things. So, there’s this wonderful and appropriate reverence and commitment and loyalty to understanding the thought of St. Thomas. But there’s a problem. The problem is that St. Thomas was not, is not perfect and he doesn’t have the fullest possible understanding of all that there is to know. He’s not God. And he was actually just a human, a wonderfully blessed, holy, virtuous, graced human with a gift from God, which is supernatural to have insight into things that was so fundamental for us in our Church. But not perfect, not God himself. And with all things human, there is a developmental process. And we can understand this even in the way he talked about the Church. He taught us that the Church develops over time and its understanding. And we can know that the Church develops over time in its understanding. So over time, as heresies arise answers to those heresies are given, clarifications arise much in the same way that he did within his own work. As Aquinas asked questions, he answered those questions.

It’s kind of a microcosm of what happens over the entire last 2000 years as heresies arise. Those questions are answered with truth, with counsels, with dogma that’s issued with magisterial teaching. And so, we don’t have answers to the questions that haven’t been asked yet. And so not until there was a real deep need to understand and a sort of questioning about the Immaculate Conception of Mary, did the Church convene and bring together the theologians to categorically answer that question that happened after Thomas Aquinas. Thomas Aquinas asks the question within the Summa and actually comes up with the conclusion that the immaculate conception is probably not true. That Mary was probably not conceived immaculately, he was not perfect, and not until it became a larger issue within the Church and then there was further explication, did it become a dogma of our Catholic belief that Our Lady was immaculately conceived as the Ark of the New Covenant.

So, why are we talking about Aquinas? This is the feast day of St. John Paul II. This is all about St. John Paul II’s contribution. While it’s really important to understand that where Thomas Aquinas, St. Thomas Aquinas went wrong, St. John Paul II corrects. And first of all, we have to acknowledge the fact and recognize the fact that St. John Paul II was grounded on and formed in to mystic philosophy and theology. He stood on the shoulders of St. Thomas Aquinas from the 13th century and forward, and that scholastic tradition brought us to the 20th century where St. John Paul II was studying for the priesthood. He was learning domestic philosophy, metaphysics, and these ways of understanding the structure of the universe and our humanity and God. But what St. John Paul II did was recognize that new questions were being asked. This is what happens over time. There are new movements, new philosophical structures develop.

We have postmodern relativism. We have people in the 19th century starting to ask different questions. After the industrial revolution, people are thinking differently about their own place in the universe. There’s a sense of self-sufficiency developing within culture and society, less dependency on the natural order of the environment of climate, of the seasons, of weather patterns. We can now own more of being in control of our own fate. We’re developing medicines that are solving and healing diseases in new ways. We have antibiotics are discovered, and then we have the advent of technology like the microscope that gives us deeper insight into the things of the world around us and inside of us, biology, we get better insight and understanding about our own human biology. So as all these developments are happening, new senses of our place in the universe are developing, new questions are being asked, and some of the traditional authority or traditions that have passed on from authority are now questioned on a deeper level.

All of this is the sort of cultural environment and atmosphere that St. John Paul II is born into in the 20th century. Now there’s a really particular error in scholastic philosophy and in thomistic theology that we need to point out. And this error has to do with the relationship between man and woman. And this is a little bit shocking for people. And again, I want to say this with all due reverence for all things thomistic and all of the great contributions of Aquinas to our understanding in the Church. And the necessity to study and understand thomistic theology, especially for our priesthood and for people who are in ministry and the way that we understand the Church teachings. But St. Thomas Aquinas, was he’s known as a natural theologian and a natural philosopher like Aristotle. Aristotle going all the way back to that ancient philosophy of Aristotle. We see the natural lens of looking around at the world around us and making sense of it.

And so based on that Aristotelian understanding of man and woman, St. Thomas Aquinas built his understanding of man and woman. And what was that natural perspective on the place and role of man and woman in the world? Well, it actually has to do not surprisingly with procreation. It is life and the capacity for life and the transmission of life in our humanity that draws our focus in and gives us an understanding of what it is to be man and woman. And the Aristotelian and for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years, the scholastic development of the idea of relationship between men and women was built on this fundamental and a shocking error. This is really shocking when I tell you this. I want you to really think about this and how bad this error has implanted itself, no pun intended. In the way we think about procreation.

The idea was that the man contains within himself the seed of a human person, and that seed is then planted and procreation in the fertility within the fertile ground of the woman, and that this is the procreative act. It’s the planting of a seed. That is a shocking and devastating, terrible error of understanding of our biology. Now, why do I say it’s so shocking? First of all, it’s so shocking that we haven’t yet recovered from that error. We still use the language of planting a seed, of seminal fluid, of semen, to use just basic biological terms. What does that mean? It’s a seed. That’s what seminal means. So that gives us this idea that there’s a planting of a seed. What happens when you plant a seed, an acorn as the seed of an oak tree. An acorn contains in itself the blueprint for the whole oak tree and all the acorn needs as a seed is fertile soil to be planted into. And then as that acorn sprouts and then it becomes the branches or becomes the stalk and the branches of the new oak tree, the acorn, acorn grows into the oak tree. This might seem really basic, and this is sort of like a duh moment.

It is so simple, we miss it. How radically distorted our conceptualization of procreation is still maintained within our culture, within our thought culture. The man does not simply plant a seed in the fertile soil of the woman to procreate a human person. In the late 1800s, like I said, one of those incredible discoveries of technology and science was the microscope. And now with the microscope, we can look deep into human biology and we can see in the cell of a human person, chromosomes, genetic material. And what are these chromosomes? What are these 46 chromosomes that make up the genetic blueprint of a human person? That 46 chromosome genetic material is the combination and the unity of 23 chromosomes that come from the male and 23 chromosomes that come from the female. This is a radical technological and philosophical revolution in the understanding of our humanity that happened at just over a hundred years ago.

This changes everything about our understanding, our sense of self, our sense of gender, our sense of sexuality, our sense of being man and woman in the world. It cannot be overstated how important this technological revolution and biological revolution and understanding is, and it cannot be overstated how important it is that we now go back and we undo the knots, unravel the lies and errors and thinking about our masculinity and femininity that is in it’s present everywhere, even in the teaching and thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. And so, St. Thomas Aquinas has passages where he states that “the male is a more perfect version of humanity than the female.” And if we go back to that mindset of the pre-microscope days and we think about what procreation was thought to contain, we can see, okay, if the male has the fullness of the person inside of himself, like an acorn contains the fullness of an oak tree inside of itself, an oak tree drops an acorn the way that a male drops the seed of a new person into fertile soil.

And then what emerges out of that soil is a new person like an acorn gives rise to a new oak tree. Okay, well, philosophically based on that Aristotelian structure, when the thing that emerges from the soil is more like the thing that gave rise to the seed in the first place, it is more perfect. So as an acorn becomes like a oak tree, which is the analogy for man, then it is more perfect when what is planted in the seed arises out of the soil as a man, it is more perfect. If what comes out of the soil in that old scholastic framework is a female. Well, that’s very different from the thing that gave rise to the seed that initiated the seed in the first place. It’s a distortion in ways that are not like the thing that planted the fullness of the seed in the first place.

So there is in that framework a rightful understanding of a kind of imperfection and what has emerged from the planting of that seed. So now we can understand very philosophically at least, abstractly not actually thinking about humans but thinking, which is why when you start with that philosophical framework, you have to do all sorts of gymnastics. The thought exercises around how to make sense of this philosophical premise. And so Aquinas talked about how the women are imperfect and less than by nature, but are called to a greater perfection by grace. And then that gives rise to the other reciprocal pendulum swing. The consequent reaction, which is now where we come up with, well, Eve was the more perfect version of humanity. She came second, Adam was the rough draft, and Eve was the final perfection of humanity. That also is a grave error in our understanding of our humanity.

There is no place any longer in the 21st century to hold onto these grave errors in understanding our masculinity and femininity. And my proposal to the ultimate error of 2024 going into 2025 is transgenderism and transhumanism and gender confusion needs to be answered by a full recovery and renovation and reform from the Church, within the Church and our understanding of what it means to be male and female. And that means being willing to admit the errors of Thomas Aquinas and everywhere else where this error shows up by reverencing the full culmination and progression of the philosophical tradition of the Church through the lens of St. John Paul II and a restoration of the true dignity, which is true equality, fully true equality in nature and grace of man and woman. 

This is radical. And so we need to go here because that’s the only way we’re gonna offer anything helpful to gender confusion just in the way that St. John Paul II offered something helpful to the sexual confusion of the 1960s and 70s and the sexual revolution. His answer through the Theology of the Body was the antidote to that incredible toxin. And so we need to recognize that was only the tip of the iceberg. What he gave us as an antidote to the sexual revolution is only breaking the surface to go deeper. We have the antidote to gender confusion, trans ideology, and a total disintegration of the understanding of what it means to be human in the first place, which is why now we’re going into transhumanism and then here comes AI. Here comes all sorts of disintegrations of what it means to be human. Sexuality is just the beginning and we’re going all the way in now. We need John Paul II. We need his answer. So, we could talk about this at the deepest level as I’ve been breaking open here, how he restores, he says that in Mulieris Dignitatem. 

A lot of times we have a scriptural interpretation where St. Paul talks about the submission, “wives must be submissive to their husbands,” and that’s in St. Paul, and that’s not untrue. It’s Scripture, it can’t be untrue. But there’s also a place that says that “husbands and wives must be mutually submissive to each other.” That is a fuller fleshing out a more comprehensive way to understand what’s being taught in Scripture. And St. John Paul II says in a magisterial document, Mulieris Dignitatem, that we need to progress as a Church in the way we understand marriage and the relationship between man and woman and grow into the fullest comprehensive acceptance of the mutual submission of man to woman and woman to man. You can see how if we hold onto that erroneous pre-microscope scholastic interpretation, that submission of woman to man makes sense that it’s the proper order according to that philosophical framework.

And that’s what St. Thomas Aquinas says. We have to correct that error. It is true that women should be submissive to men, as it is true that men should be submissive to women. This is really striking. This is gonna be really uncomfortable for people to hear. And at the same time, can we not also recognize that it is ridiculous if it’s uncomfortable to some people? But what then does this really mean? In the Protestant culture right now, this split is very obvious and it’s manifesting itself in literal terminology and oppositional camps between what is called complementarianism and egalitarianism. These two protestantisms that is popular right now in pop Protestant theology. And so this is where we’re separating out. We know both have to be true, we are equal, but we are different. How can we make sense of this? 

Well, Catholics have the “both end” approach instead of the “either-or” approach. It’s like Jesus, is he Divine? Is He human? Both. It’s like there’s two natures there. He’s one person, with two natures. We have these ways of finagling mystery and entering in not fully explicating and understanding it, but entering into mystery. And a lot of times Protestant approaches sort of don’t allow for that mystery. A lot of the heresies of the Church have been because of not allowing for mystery, the complexity of this both end. While with gender we have both end. And so there is an equal dignity and there’s a difference between the two. But the difference cannot in any way, shape, or form point to an actual inequality. And when we talk about a natural hierarchy, that’s inequality, period. If we talk about a hierarchy by grace where women, the female person actually is called to this higher perfection, also inequality, that’s not equality. So that’s the wrong answer.

We can have both end, and the both end is possible through the fullest comprehensive absorption, receptivity of the word of God in St. Paul talking about mutual submission, which is validated ratified by St. John Paul II when he was Pope. In Mulieris Dignitatem, and making it very clear that we have to grow into as a Church this deeper understanding of the mutual submission of man and woman. Now, I said before I’m in Steubenville when this is released, talking about all these different issues, anxiety and depression, difficulty in relationships. How does St. John Paul II answer all of these questions? Well, what I’m talking about right here is only one facet of St. John Paul II’s work in writing. He has fleshed out a blueprint for the whole person, and he talks; he gives us the best psychology that any Catholic psychology needs to be grounded on. That doesn’t mean he gave us the scientific approaches and the therapeutic modalities to heal people in every way possible.

So, when I say he’s a Catholic psychologist, there are psychologists who are very philosophical and they put out sort of theory, and then there are psychologists that are very clinical and practical and they put out the practice. And then there are research psychologists who study to make sure that there’s a connection between the two and that the practice is becoming effective, that it’s proving itself. Well, St. John Paul II is the most important theorist, psychological theorist that’s ever lived. And that’s what we need to really get on board with as the foundation for every other therapeutic approach, every other approach of accompaniment, every other approach of helping other humans who have a psyche. In other words, interiority, that’s his term. He talked about interiority, and that has to do with the intermixing of the psychological, with the spiritual, the transcendent, all the things that come up within this material body, and it integrates with the spiritual dimension and nature of the person.

This is why people get so confused when asked, “what’s the difference between spiritual direction and therapy?” This is why people are so confused about how do I know if I should pray these problems away, bring these problems to prayer and hope for a spiritual solution? Or do I need medication? These are really good questions and it’s really hard to get to any thorough answer without using the work of St. John Paul II. And if people come up with these frameworks for, well, the work of spiritual direction has to do with your spiritual life and your relationship with God. The work of therapy has to do with your emotional life and your relationship to yourself and others. Okay, that’s a great start. But in what way does your relationship to yourself and others not overlap and have to do with whether or not you have a relationship with God?

In what way is our life in relationship with God not affected by and affecting our relationship to self and others only in an abstracted, idealized world? Can you go to spiritual direction and not talk about psychological issues and only some kind of abstracted, idealized? And therefore, what I’m saying is impossible world could you go to a therapist and not have your spiritual life be important to that conversation? It doesn’t exist because in reality, you’re always a human. You’re going into therapy, going into spiritual direction, talking to another human who’s providing spiritual direction or providing therapy, and we are actually an integration of body and spirit. There are two books I’m going to leave you with where you could go deeper and one is really short and easy to access and one is really long and very difficult.

The first is by philosopher Dr. John Crosby, who is at Franciscan University of Steubenville. He wrote this little book called The Personalism of John Paul II. Link in the show notes. The other one is going directly to the source material, and this has been put out now by the Catholic University of America. It’s the first in a series of eventually, I think, 20 volumes of all of the writing of St. John Paul II being translated and edited in English. This is an incredibly important mission and we need to pray for the continuation of this mission, funding and health for the translators. And Father Grzegorz Ignatik is doing the translation with a lot of support from CUA and the JP II Institute. Person and Act is the most important blueprint, the beginning of understanding. Everything we need to know as a culture about ourselves, our psychological life, our relational life with other people. It’s why we can talk about John Paul II with difficult relationships.

We can talk about John Paul II with anxiety and depression. Everything we need to know about man and woman, how we can talk about gender, the differences, complementarity, our relationship with each other. This is the work every philosopher, everybody in academia, everybody in mental health, everybody doing any kind of work of accompaniment needs to become familiar with St. John Paul II. “St. John Paul II. Pray for us.” Happy feast day, everybody. God bless you.

Thanks for listening to the Being Human Podcast. If you’ve enjoyed this episode and want to help us spread the word and hear more, please head over to iTunes. Leave us a review and subscribe as it really helps us to get our content out to more people. Be sure to listen next time as I take you deeper into what it means to be human. If you want more free content and information about what we do at the Catholic Psych Institute, head on over to catholicpsych.com. God bless you.

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