What Happens If You Separate God and Man? by John M. Grondelski

By John M. Grondelski, The Catholic Thing, August 10, 2025

John Grondelski (Ph.D., Fordham) is a former associate dean of the School of Theology, Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey. All views herein are exclusively his.

In a recent essay,  I defended Pope St. John Paul II’s emphasis on Jesus Christ as the revelation of man to himself.  If the human person wants to know what he is supposed to be, he needs to look to Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary, who reveal what humanity without sin should look like.

John Paul’s pontificate focused on Christian humanism because he rightly recognized that the problem of man was the problem of our times.  No Archbishop whose archdiocese was under Soviet occupation (his included Auschwitz-Birkenau) could deny that.

I fear, however, that there’s a certain pushback in some traditionalist Catholic circles that this humanistic focus is somehow inimical to “true” religion.  Yes, there is always the danger of excessive anthropocentrism in religion but, as Wojtyła insisted, the degree to which man lives as God wills and the degree to which he lives an authentically human life proceed inseparably in tandem.  God and man are not in “either/or” relationship.  Arguably, one can maintain that removing either from the equation distorts theology. …

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