The Value of Addressing Subjectivity in Pastoral Ministry and Karol Wojtyla’s Support for its Primacy in the Philosophy of the Person

With the sea change in human thinking that came with modern thought, bringing its distinct character of the ‘turn to the subject’,[1] few philosophers appeared to successfully present a valuable holding together of both the new and the old. Karol Wojtyla was one such philosopher and, as history shows, it became his thinking that principally shaped the Catholic Church’s theology of the body. Wojtyla took hold of the modern approach to the human person through subjectivity, yet in so doing he didn’t relinquish the rich value of objectivity found in classical thought.