Blessed Pope John Paul II

On this Dominica in Albis: a new Beatus to pray for us to God!

Imagine if a mother offered her son a gift that would only improve his life, would offer him brighter prospects, greater happiness, that would be uniquely to his advantage… Would I, citizen of the universal Church, member of the beautiful Body of Christ, look this gift horse in the mouth? Would I tell my loving mother to take her gift elsewhere, or would I accept it graciously, in humility, even more  with delight! since this gift could only help me (the Christian soul) to reach eternity? This is surely the case with the beatification of Pope Karol Wojtyla… Every Catholic is being offered a free gift! How else could I react but with happiness, in gratefulness, in humility?

The priest in question was a remarkable Polish man, an orphan by his 20s, who survived back-breaking work in a quarry during the war (to avoid a far worse fate at the hands of the occupying power). He only just skirted death after being hit by a truck; he was the seminarian who picked up the body of an abandoned, dying Jewish woman and hurried her away to life. He was quietly ordained in the first days after the horrific, second Great War; the young priest who got terribly sick in the harsh winter of his first parish, because he declined getting another cassock, even though his was full of holes; who loved and encouraged the youth of his Polish parishes where he lived, taking them into the mountains for hikes & canoeing; who went to Rome to write a doctorate on the Spanish mystic, Saint John of the Cross; who played soccer with other young priests; who accepted only after deep and long prayer the heavy mantle of the auxiliary episcopate of Krakow placed on his shoulders in 1958; who was a young bishop at the 21st Ecumenical Council in Rome, making major contributions to Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope), where he was photographed grinning, warming his socks by a winter oven; a powerful champion of the Polish bishops who did long and quiet battle with repressive Marxist regimes.

He was the outside candidate who surprised and shocked the world as he was elected 264th successor to the Apostle Peter; who quietly took on and defeated the repressive scourge of European Marxism; who later as pope took on a variety of corrupt Cold War regimes, by speaking, in each case, the truth in charity ; who left the safe haven of the Holy See on the Vatican Hill, in order to visit the Catholic peoples of the world on more than 100 apostolic trips; a man who sometimes identified rot in the Church, realising he needed simply to say STOP! while the Church figured out what to do. This was the man known for sleeping just four hours a night; who initiated and presided over the biggest gatherings of people in human history: the World Youth Days  eight international ones in his lifetime, another dozen in Italy. This is the man who tried to draw the factions and schisms on both left and right of the Church’s true life back into the sheepfold, even confused and disobedient priests. He longed for Christian unity: between Orthodox and Catholic, and other Christian ecclesial communities too. He went as a simple pilgrim to Greece, in the footsteps of St Paul, to the Sacred Synod, where he expressed deep sorrow on behalf of our Roman ancestors for the terrible sacking of Constantinople by mercenaries in 1204. He returned in the last months of his life relics held in St Peter’s of two great fathers of the Church  St John Chrysostom and St Gregory Nazianzen to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. He apologised to the Jewish people for past treatment. He came to Africa, to our continent, over and over.

More than all this, here was the man who suffered for his people: shot in 1981, nearly to death (grievously wounded, never properly to recover), then meeting and forgiving the would-be assassin; the man with Parkinson’s disease who was never heard complaining about this or many other ailments; a man who grew old, slowed down by the medication to suppress his illnesses. This shepherd, this vicarius of Jesus Christ bringing men to God and God to mankind showed the world how to grow old in grace, and how to suffer in dignity, not hiding away his sickness, nor quietly killing himself in Dr Kevorkian’s dingy back room, rather uniting his pain and his suffering to the scandalous, life-giving Cross of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

This same “man from a far country” (as he said about himself in his opening words from the balcony of St Peter’s, in 1978), with his old and damaged body, having given so much solace and strength to so many for so long… It finally grew too much for his body; and in my second year of studies, before Easter, he suddenly seemed to be approaching the last part of his earthly marathon: Papa Karol Wojtyla’s dies irae grew close.

I had watched him slur his words with the thick drugs of Parkinson’s for nearly two years (but on other occasions rally incredibly!). I had heard his 2004 Easter morning Mass on St Peter’s Square, seen him drive past just near me, heard his clear speech, and seen his radiant, holy half-smile. But now in Holy Week 2005, I watched him entering his own passion. Strange that in that same Holy Week just before the pope’s death former Catholic theologian Fr Hans Kung chose to release a full-page broadside against the dying pope, declaring breathlessly: “[Karol Wojtyla]… is the most contradictory pope of the 20th century”, concluding that “The great credibility of the Catholic Church, obtained by John XXIII and Vatican Council II, has given way to a true and real crisis of hope” . (On the opposite page of Corriere della Sera Italian journalist and author Vittorio Messori, who had interviewed John Paul for his first book, “Crossing the Threshold of Hope”, quietly countered with John Paul, “[t]he father who saved the Church”. Messori writes: “How can the proud Professor Kung understand a Pope who comes from Krakow, where the faith had been so heroic in the face of such ruthless secularism?”).

On Easter Sunday morning 2005, through the dying Christian soldier’s thick cloud of pain, not even his voice was left to speak theUrbi et Orbi; we heard only the breath of the ruah of God. The pope had fallen silent. Then the last days in extremis during the Easter Octave, and at last on the first Saturday night in April, into the vigil of the 2nd Sunday of Easter Feast of Divine Mercy after praying the rosary on the Square, just beneath his bedroom window… At last the great heart of the shepherd, the man of God who ached with love for the world, slipped the moorings of earthly life to put out into the deep waters of eternity. The death certificate shows he died of nine different things. Thank you, Holy Father, for showing us how to die.

I watched, with the world, as four million people came to Rome, to bid him farewell. Four million witnesses do not lie. They were there because something great and holy was happening. They came to love him even in death, as he had been at our side to love us in life. Cultural and theological and generational ground moved beneath the dead pope’s body, as it were. The world was changed forever. None but the coldest Catholic heart could ever be the same again.

Now, says our mother, the Church, five years later, there has been a miracle, documented independently by three separate doctors, as medically inexplicable. On top of overwhelming sanctity of life, this miracle is enough of God’s sign for us, to beatify the extraordinary and holy Papa Giovanni Paolo II.

Since every blessed and every saint proclaimed is a sign of God’s mercy and graciousness to the whole Christian people, how could one look askance at such a gift? Blesseds and saints are good for me! They will pray for me, if I ask them to! This the true wealth of the Christian universe: holy saints precede me into God’s mansion. Pray for me now, dear dead friends, that I too may enter the presence of God when it is my turn.

Deo Gratias for these new mercies received! From tomorrow, 1 May 2011, we will say, with the whole Church: Beate Papa Ioanne Paule, ora pro nobis Deum!”Blessed Pope John Paul, pray for us to God!” What sweet words! What a powerful intercessor we will have! How extraordinary to see the man whose human soul I had once come close to in the flesh, now raised to the altars as an intercessor for my soul.

I thank you, dear sweet God, that you have made heaven richer for me, for all of us. Another intercessor, another soul who stands in your presence and sees you as you are! May he assist us on our journey heavenwards, in our joy and our suffering. Praised be Jesus Christ, praised for ever.

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We are not afraid, blessed Holy Father, no longer afraid. We are trying to throw open the doors of our lives, to invite the world into the sanctuary of Jesus Christ, into the harbour that the Lord Jesus Christ offers the little boat of our soul, where there is protection from the storms of the world. Help us to open these doors of our hearts!
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