Asked once to name the most important word in the Gospels, the late Pope John Paul II quickly replied, “Truth.” That the man the world came to revere as an icon of tolerance -- the first pope to pray at the Western Wall of the Temple in Jerusalem, the first pope to enter a mosque -- should have given that particular answer suggests that this business of truth-and-dialogue is a bit more complicated, and thus a bit more interesting, than we might otherwise imagine.
In 1992, John Paul II promulgated the "Catechism of the Catholic Church," which, over the course of some 900 pages of text, glossaries, and cross-references, lays out a comprehensive and coherent vision of the truth. As John Paul understood things, what the Church proposes is not just truth-for-Catholics; what the Church proposes is the truth of the world. In Christian doctrine, the late Pope was convinced, we meet the truth about human origins and human destiny, human nature and human communities, who we are and how we ought to live. But does this constitute a “monopoly on truth?” No, for John Paul believed that all truths, from whatever source, point toward the Truth like iron shavings tend toward a magnet: all genuine truths, whether literary or scientific, whether truths of reason or truths of the heart, point toward the God who has revealed himself definitively in Christ.
Those convictions ought to lead to a richer, nobler idea of tolerance. Tolerance doesn’t mean ignoring differences, as if differences didn’t matter; tolerance means engaging differences with civility, in the calm confidence that everything that is genuinely true ultimately directs us toward the God who is the world’s source and the world’s destination, the God who reveals himself (in John 1.1) as “logos,” as reason. Real conversation involves truths in conversation.
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