„Nie będziesz miał bogów cudzych przede Mną”, czyli prawdziwy humanizm. Jan Paweł II o pierwszym przykazaniu w homilii koszalińskiej (1.06.1991)

Abstract

During the fourth pilgrimage to Poland in 1991, John Paul II based his teaching on the Decalogue, on the “ten simple words”. In his homily delivered in Koszalin, he referred to the first commandment that provides the foundations to understand all of them. God who presents the Decalogue to His people, is the same God who liberated them from Egypt. Therefore, Decalogue cannot limit human freedom, on the contrary, it helps the people to grow strong. The One who speaks to Moses on the Mount Sinai is God the Father who – as revealed in the New Testament – generates the Son from Eternity and sends us the Spirit. Thus, we could say that the Trinitarian dimension does not weaken the invocation: “You shall have no other gods before me”, but it enlightens and strengthens it. Decalogue allures not only to its goodness and truth, but also to its beauty. The first commandment presents the initial confrontation with the world which, in the name of deceptive humanism, places a human being before God. This false humanism will manifest itself in all sorts of ideologies. In the twentieth century it was Nazism, but above all, it was Communism, while today they are different versions of neo-Marxism that especially attack the biblical anthropology, closely related to the first commandment.

Keywords

• John Paul II
• Decalogue
• first commandment
• freedom
• humanism
• ideologies