Archbishop Chaput highlighted the pope's emphasis on truth:
John Paul II argues that the search for truth is central to any genuinely human culture. The drive to understand the world and our place in it is one of the most basic human hungers. Truth is not the enemy of freedom but its foundation, since it gives us the capacity to love reality as it really is. Knowledge of the truth expands our freedom to love.
The search for truth and the capacity to love are both important and are not opposed to one another.
We can only resolve our inner confusions about life by seeking the objective truth about things, and by exploring that truth with others who hold us accountable to reality. As John Paul states bluntly, “Truth and freedom either go together hand in hand or together they perish in misery.”But searching for the truth is not limited to scientific, empirical research.
The aim of any true philosophy, it notes, should be to find the unity of truth in all things, an understanding of the whole. This demands an engagement with the classical discipline we call “metaphysics,” ... an exotic word for a very basic subject: the study of the deep truths and harmonies built into the world.As we journey through Lent towards Good Friday and Easter in a world that denies the existence of any truth beyond this world, we must, as the pope wrote, seek answers in Jesus Christ:
Reason cannot eliminate the mystery of love which the Cross represents, while the Cross can give to reason the ultimate answer which it seeks.
