Understanding Wojtyla in Order to Understand Bergoglio. The Personalist Character of Amoris Laetitia

Abstract

There is an organic continuity and creative fidelity between the thought of Jorge Mario Bergoglio / Francisco and some elements of the personalist philosophy of Karol Wojtyla / John Paul II. This relationship of continuity and creativity can be seen in three fundamen-tal topics of personalism, as a modality of Christian philosophy: the primacy of love, the subjective dimension of truth and the narrative dimension of moral reflection. On the first topic, what is shown is the introduction by Francisco, in Amoris Laetitia, of the perspective held by Wojtyla about the constitutive articulation between love and truth. True love in-cludes the truth constitutively. But the truth is not in an abstract sense, truth about the per-son-in-action demands patience and tenderness. On the other hand, on the understanding of reality, supported by Wojtyla, we elucidate the following: the objective recognition of reality implies the recognition of the objective existence of subjectivity. From this recog-nition, we can understand the teaching of Francis about the possibility of love, growing and living in God’s grace, against an objective situation of sin. It is necessary to love and support the growth of the person-in-action. It is this growth of the person that constitutes the fundamental human experience: the person is, and through the action it is in a per-petual process of construction. On this anthropological basis developed by Wojtyla, Pope Francis considers as part of his moral reflection, the importance of taking into account the processes of human and spiritual maturation in people’s lifes.