Though Gaudium et Spes acknowledges the changes of a world formed by Freud and Darwin, it did not take advances in genetics into account. It “did not anticipate that biology and the other life sciences would rapidly displace the hard sciences (such as physics) as the source of Promethean threats to the human future – and to man’s self-understanding,” Weigel remarked.
While the Pastoral Constitution depicted Marxism and Sartrean existentialism as the chief philosophical challenges to Christianity, Weigel noted that Marxism was soon to be “in the ash can of history” and Sartrean existentialism is now only of “antiquarian interest.”
Gaudium et Spes, in Weigel’s view, did not perceive that the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and others “would mount a more forceful challenge to the Christian view of the human person (and to the possibility of a truth-centered public moral discourse) than Sartre ever managed.”
Though the Pastoral Constitution welcomed the new roles for women, it also does not seem to have anticipated the “harder-edged forms of the new feminism” that would become mainstream in Western culture a few years after the document’s promulgation.
Likewise, it did not anticipate the emergence of the two-worker family and its effects, the “global plague of abortion,” or the “gay rights” movement and the future “worldwide and historically unprecedented struggle over the very definition of marriage.”
Weigel argued Gaudium et Spes “gave us few, in any, hints that a new gnosticism, teaching the radical plasticity of human nature, was about to hit the western world like a cultural tsunami.” Focused on nuclear weapons, it did not anticipate the changes threatened by biotechnology predicted by Adolus Huxley years before.
Similarly, its counsels on population growth did not foresee the demographic decline of the present age, nor the rise of millions out of poverty. Its suggestion that economic inequality would be a major cause of wars also does not seem to have been born out,
Weigel noted that Gaudium et Spes also did not anticipate globalization and the rise of the Internet, which has made the world almost “a single time zone.” Further, Weigel claimed, the document did not envisage radical secularism or academia’s replacement of an overall coherence of truth with “theories of the inevitable fragmentation and incoherence of knowledge.”
While the document explores modernity’s crisis of religious faith, Weigel asserted it did not question the “secularization hypothesis” about advancing secularism and did not imagine a world that is becoming more religious and more affected by religious belief.
Gaudium et Spes also held that an “intellectually assertive atheism” would continue to challenge the Church, not anticipating a “massive religious indifferentism” that would descend upon Europe.
“Boredom in both its spiritual and metaphysical forms – a debonair indifference to the question of God, and a stultifying lack of awe and wonder at the very mystery of being – would turn out to be a far more lethal, and far more effective, challenge to the biblical view of man than ‘scientific atheism’ or existentialism ever was,” Weigel said.
(Story continues below)
Subscribe to our daily newsletter
John Paul II’s Insight Into Man
Weigel emphasized that despite these gaps in Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution nonetheless realized that the “anthropological question” is fundamental, an insight continued by the papacy of John Paul II.
He summarized the questions asked in the future Pope’s essay recommending suggestions for the Second Vatican Council: “What, he asked, was the human condition today? What do people expect to hear from the Church, and what do they need to hear from the Church?”
According to Weigel, John Paul II thought the world needed an “integral vision of the human person, nobler and more comprehensive than other understandings of man then being proposed.
“Defective, truncated, even demonic ideas of human nature, human community, human origins, and human destiny were everywhere; the most lethal of those false ideas created the cultural conditions for the possibility of the civilizational catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century.”
Weigel claimed the future Pope held such atrocities had been made possible by “desperately defective ideas of who man is, which had led to distorted human aspirations and grotesque political projects.”