At the same time, he challenged broadly accepted understandings of the dynamics of history. History, he helped demonstrate, is driven by culture, and at the heart of culture is cult, or religion. By lifting up the witness of hundreds of thousands of Christian confessors against communist tyranny, the pontificate of John Paul II demonstrated in action that Christian conviction can be the agent of human liberation. If culture is the engine of history, then free economies and democratic political communities must be built upon the foundation of a vibrant public moral culture, capable of disciplining and directing the tremendous human energies set loose by freedom. In challenging the freedom of indifference and proposing freedom for excellence in the encyclicals Centesimus Annus, Veritatis Splendor, and Evangelium Vitae, John Paul reconfigured the Church's social doctrine and scouted the terrain of public life in the twenty-first century, in which science and technology will make certain that questions of what constitutes human life and membership in the human community dominate the world's social and political agenda.
Freedom is always a fragile commodity.
Its most secure foundation, John Paul has suggested time and again, is a recognition of the dignity of the human person as the bearer of rights endowed by God.