The historical dispute over Polish Messianism and John Paul II’s thought

Abstract

The paper addresses the problem of historical role and impact of John Paul II’s teachings on the dispute over Polish messianism which has been consistently present in the Polish literature and philosophy over the past two centuries. The article is an attempt to determine the pope’s actual contribution to the development of the idea of Polish messianism, and evaluate the ultimate significance of this contribution within a broad perspective of the evolution of Polish political thought during the latter part of the twentieth and early decades of the twenty first centuries. The starting point in the discussion is the contemporary historical-philosophical research in this field, and the final conclusions are oriented towards the philosophical qualification of the most recent attempts to revive the messianist ideology on the basis of papal thought.