Be Not Afraid
Pontiff's lifelong message: "Be not afraid!"
By Steve Kloehn Chicago Tribune staff reporter
Published April 2, 2005, 2:31 PM CST
Pope John Paul II, who changed the course of the world through faith and sheer dint of will, will be remembered as a bold pontiff who towered over his century, then led his church into a new millennium. Shaped by his childhood in rural Poland and fired in the kiln of World War II, the young priest Karol Wojtyla rose to lead the world's largest church, striding the globe with an authority that transcended Catholicism. Some in his own church complained that he was a throwback to an earlier kind of pope, imperial and autocratic, bent on quashing dissent. Others said he was ahead of his time, traversing the world many times over to spread his message, the first jet set pope. But few men in any realm have ever wrestled with the leaders and movements of their eras the way Pope John Paul II did. From Nazi Germany to Soviet communism, from consumer culture to the slide into moral relativism, Wojtyla pitted himself against each of the great forces that swept over the world during his 84 years. "Be not afraid!" he called out, in his first mass St. Peter's Basilica on Oct. 22, 1978. Those were among the first words he spoke to the world as pontiff, and they became a refrain in each of his 104 trips abroad, in each of his 14 encyclicals and more than 60 other major papal documents. "Be not afraid!"--part command, part prayer--became the driving force of his 26-year papacy, an epic reign that energized and polarized the Roman Catholic Church. He stared down dictators and clamped down on critics. He was credited with toppling the totalitarian government of his native Poland in 1989, leading to the fall of communist Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. He was blamed for alienating women and liberal Catholics in the West with rigid stances against women in the priesthood, abortion, birth control and homosexuality. Church insiders chafed against the growing power of the Vatican during his pontificate, and a narrowing of debate. He made new efforts to reach out to Orthodox Christians, Jews and Muslims, and he went out of his way to forgive the man who shot and almost killed him in 1981. His ill health did take a toll on his work. Insiders say that in his last years, the pope focused only on those tasks he felt central to spreading the Gospel, while delegating the governance of the church to aides. That withdrawal led to confusion on some doctrinal issues and left the pope a virtual bystander during the crippling sexual abuse crisis faced by the Catholic Church in the United States. But for most of his pontificate, Pope John Paul II embodied the power and tradition of Catholicism at a time when the institutions and influence of the church were in flux. Some of his best work carried the essence of the church's titans--the searing clarity of Aquinas, the mysticism of St. John of the Cross--freshening their ancient messages for 1 billion Catholics from Africa to India to Latin America. He never let his followers forget that he was human. As scandalized aides looked on, the muscular, mountain-climbing pope of the early years would sometimes clown around, pantomiming that he was watching a crowd through binoculars, or donning a sombrero as he did in his first trip to Mexico in 1979. The bent figure of the final years showed his humanity in other ways. One cardinal marveled at the pope's willingness to display his infirmities to the world, preferring that the world see a pontiff who might drool or lose his voice midsentence to a pope who withdrew to the privacy of his Vatican palace. In the opening lines of "Crossing the Threshold of Hope," the 1994 book-length interview that became perhaps the first international best seller penned by a pope, he paused to note his own sinfulness, his feeling of unworthiness of God's love. "Every man has learned it. Every successor to Peter has learned it. I learned it very well," he said. "Of what should we not be afraid? We should not fear the truth about ourselves." Karol Wojtyla was born in 1920 in the small agricultural town of Wadowice, Poland. His father, a lieutenant and clerk in the Polish army, was 40 at the time; his mother was 36. His only brother was 13. They were devout Catholics, especially his mother, who wanted young "Lolek," as she called Karol, to become a priest someday. But his mother was sickly from the time he was born and died when Karol was 8. Karol's older brother, a young doctor he greatly admired, died just three years later, and his father was dead when Karol was 20. By then, death was all around him. The Nazis had invaded Poland two years earlier, and Wojtyla did forced labor in a quarry and later a chemical factory. At one point during the war, he was struck by a German army truck, an event that was never clearly determined to be accidental or intentional. Amid that horror, Wojtyla found a secret life, as an actor in an underground theater group and in a budding spirituality that drew him to illegal prayer meetings. Both callings tugged at him. In 1942, he surprised his friends by saying that the choice had been made for him: He would be a priest. On Nov. 1, 1946, Wojtyla was ordained a priest of the archdiocese of Krakow. He spent the next two years in Rome, earning a doctorate in theology, before he returned to Poland to work as a pastor. He began in a small farming parish and then moved to a university parish, where his love and talent for working with young people became legend. He also continued studying, eventually becoming a faculty member in theology at the university. When Krakow's archbishop died in 1962, Wojtyla became the temporary head of the archdiocese, just in time to give him a seat at the formative event of 20th Century Catholicism, the Second Vatican Council. In time, he became the spokesman for the 10 Polish bishops at the council. When it came time to appoint a new archbishop of Krakow, Poland's communist officials--who had tacit veto power-- ignored the list of candidates provided by Poland's ranking hierarch, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski. They dismissed the second list the cardinal submitted. And then they suggested the politically detached intellectual serving temporarily as bishop--Wojtyla--believing he would be easier to manipulate. Eventually, Wyszynski gave in, and Wojtyla was appointed archbishop of Krakow in January 1964. The young archbishop--who quickly gained the attention of Pope Paul VI with writings following Vatican II and work on the pope's special commission on birth control--was elevated to cardinal in 1967. Even with that quick rise to power, only a few people have ever been brave enough to claim that they believed Wojtyla would become pope at all, let alone so soon. The conclave that elected Pope John Paul I in 1978 took just four ballots to find a man who satisfied the cardinals, a man seen as more pastoral than ideological. But his death, after just one month in the Vatican, left the cardinals in a much more difficult position. It was a given that the next pope would be Italian--it had been more than 400 years since a non-Italian had been made the bishop of Rome--but there was a sharp split between two Italian factions. As the cardinals began to search for a way around that disagreement, one name began to be mentioned more and more frequently: Cardinal Wojtyla, a relative unknown and very young at 58, but bright and winning. At a time when the church in the West was divided and dispirited, Wojtyla had brought vigor and growth to a church under communist repression. On Oct. 16, 1978, the college of cardinals chose Wojtyla to be pope, and he, in turn, chose the name John Paul II, in homage to his predecessor. Pope John Paul II quickly became known as one of the most approachable popes in history. Soon after he became pope, he officiated at a marriage ceremony for two "commoners" simply because they had asked him. He made Vatican history on Good Friday in 1980 by putting on a regular priest's vestments and hearing worshipers' confessions for more than an hour and a half. In one of his first public appearances as pope, he pushed his bodyguards aside, saying, "I don't want gorillas around. I know how to defend myself." His security team's worst fears materialized on May 13, 1981, when a convicted murderer from Turkey, already on the run, lunged out of the crowd that had gathered in St. Peter's Square for the weekly general audience, and shot the pope twice, bringing him to the brink of death. For years, investigators tried to find out whether Mehmet Ali Agca was part of a larger conspiracy against the pope, perhaps one inspired by Eastern European communists who feared--rightly--the effect of Pope John Paul II's calls for freedom and human dignity. No link was ever proved. The pope focused his attention instead on learning from his suffering, and forgiving his attacker. On Dec. 27, 1983, the pope visited Agca in a Roman prison for 20 minutes. At the end, the pope once again offered the gunman his forgiveness, and Agca dropped to his knees, kissing the pope's hand. Even more than his personal style, the aspect of Pope John Paul II's papacy that stood out most clearly from his predecessors was his visibility around the world. He made 104 trips outside Italy, more than 150 within Italy, and personally visited almost all of Rome's 334 parishes. One of his first trips abroad, in the autumn of 1979, brought the pope to Chicago. He was the first pope to visit Chicago, but it was his third trip to the city, where he had courted the huge and loyal Polish population on two previous visits as bishop and archbishop. They turned out in droves for his papal visit, lining Milwaukee Avenue and cheering wildly. To the rest of Chicago's Catholic population, and indeed most of the world, the new pope was something of a mystery. But Chicagoans turned out in force nonetheless, filling Grant Park with hundreds of thousands of worshippers for the papal mass. The pope traced his tireless appetite for travel to an experience he had on his first trip abroad as pontiff, a visit to Mexico in 1979. At the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, he spent more than an hour praying before the dark-skinned image of the Virgin Mary that is said to have had a profound impact in the conversion of Latin America during the 16th and 17th Centuries. There, the pope later said, he had an epiphany, suddenly understanding that it was his mission to become the pilgrim pope, bringing the word of God to people around the world. The pope made it one of his first imperatives to visit his homeland. Though Poland had been for centuries one of Europe's most devoutly Catholic countries, no pope had ever been there. Nor had any pope ever traveled to a communist country. In June 1979, the pope arrived in Poland for what would turn out to be nine days of jubilation unlike anything the nation had ever known. The homecoming carried strong undercurrents of pre-communist patriotism and genuine workers' movements that would challenge the ideology of the government. More than a million people came to see him in Krakow. It was a turning point in Polish history, one recognized not only in the throngs, but in a disturbed Kremlin as well. The fire ignited during that visit flared up here and there in the months that followed, most notably in the shipyard labor strikes that were led by workers carrying posters of the pope. From Rome, the pope supported the strikes, sending public and private messages. So when the pope returned to his homeland in 1983, both the communists and the pope knew that it would be more than a simple, pastoral visit. The late auxiliary Bishop Alfred Abramowicz of Chicago traveled with him. Near every stop, Abramowicz recalled, the communist government of Poland had mobilized tank battalions, ready to move in and crush anything that looked like a threat to government control. Crowds gathered in dangerous numbers. The pope never blinked. "He was a man who identified himself with the peasant, with the scholar, with the artist. You name it, he was intimately interested in these people. He became one with them," Abramowicz remembered in 1999. "His talks were bold, almost revolutionary, and yet he controlled the crowds completely. There was no violence, no uprising. It was more like a strengthening of convictions." In the years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, journalists and scholars have debated just what role the pope played in the demise of Soviet communism. Most have argued his biggest influence on the political situation was through his uncompromising, theologically based preaching for a society that would put human beings first, giving them the freedom of worship, speech and thought. "I believe he was absolutely central to [the fall of communism] ... central to why it happened in the 1980s, and why it happened non-violently," said George Weigel, a Catholic scholar in Washington who was granted more than two years of regular interviews with the pope in preparation for the 1999 biography "Witness to Hope." The pope, Weigel said, saw his own role in Poland as "a spark in a tinderbox," lighting the intellectual fire that kept the social labor movement Solidarity alive through years of vicious suppression. Pope John Paul II tried to provide that spark wherever he encountered oppressive governmental regimes, from Chile to Haiti, the Philippines to Nigeria. Seldom did he point fingers or explicitly side with political factions; he was careful not to embarrass his hosts or provoke a government backlash that would further harm the people. But starting from Gospel passages and church teachings, his speeches and homilies would hold up an ideal of life in which governments served people, not vice versa. Through his trips abroad, covering more than 720,000 miles, the prevailing mood was one of euphoria and adoration. But some observers worried that the enthusiastic greetings the pope received had more to do with celebrity worship than with any particular devotion to the message he was carrying. "The real question one has to ask is: What kind of lasting effects do these trips have? Is there any evidence that his visits have a lasting effect on the local churches?" said Richard McBrien, a theologian and papal scholar at the University of Notre Dame. If it is difficult to estimate the lasting effects of a pope's personal presence, there is little doubt that his teaching has shaped the church for generations to come. By volume alone, his writing is bound to wield influence over a wide swath of issues that face the church. He wrote 14 encyclicals, the highest form of papal discourse, along with 13 apostolic exhortations, 11 apostolic constitutions, 42 apostolic letters, hundreds of more minor documents and several popular books. Like his prayer life, writing was a discipline he practiced rigorously, devoting hours each morning to working on whatever project was at hand. In one encyclical, "The Splendor of Truth," the pope made an impassioned argument against the moral and metaphysical relativism that has seeped through modern culture. In another encyclical, he put the church's traditional teachings on wealth and work into a modern context in which capitalism has triumphed while globalization undermines the most basic assumptions people have about their livelihoods. Lesser works have included a landmark apology to Jews, including a controversial discussion of the role of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust; a letter that emphatically declared that women cannot be priests; and others touching on the nature of Catholic colleges, war and peace, the future of the church in Africa. Perhaps his most ambitious piece was "Faith and Reason," an encyclical released in the fall of 1998, on the eve of his 20th anniversary as pope. In more than 100 pages of complex but lucid reasoning, the pope makes the case for why religion is not only possible, but a necessary response to scientific advancement, post-modern doubt about the nature of truth, and all that has transformed human attitudes in the 20th Century. Pope John Paul II thought often about the new millennium, more often as it approached. He declared 2000 a Jubilee year, in which Catholics could earn indulgences by making pilgrimages to the holiest sites of the faith. He also saw 2000 as a time to look beyond Roman Catholicism. He put special emphasis on mending relations with Orthodox Christians, making his first visit to an Orthodox nation, Romania, in 1999. He also made major overtures to other Christians, Jews and Muslims. The heart of the Jubilee, and one of the crowning moments of his papacy, was a series of trips retracing the story of Christian faith. While political difficulties prevented a proposed trip to a site believed to be the ancient city of Ur, in modern Iraq, the pope traveled in February 2000 to Egypt, to walk in the footsteps of Moses. In March 2000, he traveled to Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories, his first visit there as pope and only the second papal visit to the Holy Land. Two events in Jerusalem cemented his bond with the Jewish people. First, the pope went to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, where he prayed and met with survivors. Then, on his last day, he went to the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism. , There, the pontiff bent his head near the pitted stone and prayed silently before leaving a small written prayer stuffed into a crack in the wall, surrounded by the thousands of notes and prayers Jews leave there every day. Only briefly did that triumphant journey silence the growing hubbub about the pope's health, however. For more than a decade he had been troubled by symptoms that appeared to observers to indicate a form of Parkinson's disease. By the last few years, he had been bent into a permanent hunch, his walk reduced to a shuffle and his hands beset by tremors. The syndrome also slurred his speech and limited the expressions of his once-lively face. Still, the journey continued. In October 2003, he celebrated the 25th anniversary of his pontificate. Even as Vatican officials sought to extol the virtues of the pontificate, the pope shifted attention away from himself by choosing to beatify Mother Teresa the same weekend, pushing a contemporary and kindred spirit on the fast track to sainthood. By March 2004, his pontificate was longer than all except Pius IX's 31 years and St. Peter's estimated 34 years at the helm of the church. The pope often referred to his approaching death. But almost always he said it with a smile and with a window held open by his unshakeable faith in God. In 1999, after a crowd of Poles wished him 100 years of life, he joked, "Don't set limits on divine providence!" And as so many times before, hundreds of thousands of adoring followers broke out into joyous cheers.
I still remember watching on television the Pope's visit to Chicago in 1979 and thinking what
an amazing influence he has been on the world.
By Steve Kloehn Chicago Tribune staff reporter
Published April 2, 2005, 2:31 PM CST
Pope John Paul II, who changed the course of the world through faith and sheer dint of will, will be remembered as a bold pontiff who towered over his century, then led his church into a new millennium. Shaped by his childhood in rural Poland and fired in the kiln of World War II, the young priest Karol Wojtyla rose to lead the world's largest church, striding the globe with an authority that transcended Catholicism. Some in his own church complained that he was a throwback to an earlier kind of pope, imperial and autocratic, bent on quashing dissent. Others said he was ahead of his time, traversing the world many times over to spread his message, the first jet set pope. But few men in any realm have ever wrestled with the leaders and movements of their eras the way Pope John Paul II did. From Nazi Germany to Soviet communism, from consumer culture to the slide into moral relativism, Wojtyla pitted himself against each of the great forces that swept over the world during his 84 years. "Be not afraid!" he called out, in his first mass St. Peter's Basilica on Oct. 22, 1978. Those were among the first words he spoke to the world as pontiff, and they became a refrain in each of his 104 trips abroad, in each of his 14 encyclicals and more than 60 other major papal documents. "Be not afraid!"--part command, part prayer--became the driving force of his 26-year papacy, an epic reign that energized and polarized the Roman Catholic Church. He stared down dictators and clamped down on critics. He was credited with toppling the totalitarian government of his native Poland in 1989, leading to the fall of communist Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. He was blamed for alienating women and liberal Catholics in the West with rigid stances against women in the priesthood, abortion, birth control and homosexuality. Church insiders chafed against the growing power of the Vatican during his pontificate, and a narrowing of debate. He made new efforts to reach out to Orthodox Christians, Jews and Muslims, and he went out of his way to forgive the man who shot and almost killed him in 1981. His ill health did take a toll on his work. Insiders say that in his last years, the pope focused only on those tasks he felt central to spreading the Gospel, while delegating the governance of the church to aides. That withdrawal led to confusion on some doctrinal issues and left the pope a virtual bystander during the crippling sexual abuse crisis faced by the Catholic Church in the United States. But for most of his pontificate, Pope John Paul II embodied the power and tradition of Catholicism at a time when the institutions and influence of the church were in flux. Some of his best work carried the essence of the church's titans--the searing clarity of Aquinas, the mysticism of St. John of the Cross--freshening their ancient messages for 1 billion Catholics from Africa to India to Latin America. He never let his followers forget that he was human. As scandalized aides looked on, the muscular, mountain-climbing pope of the early years would sometimes clown around, pantomiming that he was watching a crowd through binoculars, or donning a sombrero as he did in his first trip to Mexico in 1979. The bent figure of the final years showed his humanity in other ways. One cardinal marveled at the pope's willingness to display his infirmities to the world, preferring that the world see a pontiff who might drool or lose his voice midsentence to a pope who withdrew to the privacy of his Vatican palace. In the opening lines of "Crossing the Threshold of Hope," the 1994 book-length interview that became perhaps the first international best seller penned by a pope, he paused to note his own sinfulness, his feeling of unworthiness of God's love. "Every man has learned it. Every successor to Peter has learned it. I learned it very well," he said. "Of what should we not be afraid? We should not fear the truth about ourselves." Karol Wojtyla was born in 1920 in the small agricultural town of Wadowice, Poland. His father, a lieutenant and clerk in the Polish army, was 40 at the time; his mother was 36. His only brother was 13. They were devout Catholics, especially his mother, who wanted young "Lolek," as she called Karol, to become a priest someday. But his mother was sickly from the time he was born and died when Karol was 8. Karol's older brother, a young doctor he greatly admired, died just three years later, and his father was dead when Karol was 20. By then, death was all around him. The Nazis had invaded Poland two years earlier, and Wojtyla did forced labor in a quarry and later a chemical factory. At one point during the war, he was struck by a German army truck, an event that was never clearly determined to be accidental or intentional. Amid that horror, Wojtyla found a secret life, as an actor in an underground theater group and in a budding spirituality that drew him to illegal prayer meetings. Both callings tugged at him. In 1942, he surprised his friends by saying that the choice had been made for him: He would be a priest. On Nov. 1, 1946, Wojtyla was ordained a priest of the archdiocese of Krakow. He spent the next two years in Rome, earning a doctorate in theology, before he returned to Poland to work as a pastor. He began in a small farming parish and then moved to a university parish, where his love and talent for working with young people became legend. He also continued studying, eventually becoming a faculty member in theology at the university. When Krakow's archbishop died in 1962, Wojtyla became the temporary head of the archdiocese, just in time to give him a seat at the formative event of 20th Century Catholicism, the Second Vatican Council. In time, he became the spokesman for the 10 Polish bishops at the council. When it came time to appoint a new archbishop of Krakow, Poland's communist officials--who had tacit veto power-- ignored the list of candidates provided by Poland's ranking hierarch, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski. They dismissed the second list the cardinal submitted. And then they suggested the politically detached intellectual serving temporarily as bishop--Wojtyla--believing he would be easier to manipulate. Eventually, Wyszynski gave in, and Wojtyla was appointed archbishop of Krakow in January 1964. The young archbishop--who quickly gained the attention of Pope Paul VI with writings following Vatican II and work on the pope's special commission on birth control--was elevated to cardinal in 1967. Even with that quick rise to power, only a few people have ever been brave enough to claim that they believed Wojtyla would become pope at all, let alone so soon. The conclave that elected Pope John Paul I in 1978 took just four ballots to find a man who satisfied the cardinals, a man seen as more pastoral than ideological. But his death, after just one month in the Vatican, left the cardinals in a much more difficult position. It was a given that the next pope would be Italian--it had been more than 400 years since a non-Italian had been made the bishop of Rome--but there was a sharp split between two Italian factions. As the cardinals began to search for a way around that disagreement, one name began to be mentioned more and more frequently: Cardinal Wojtyla, a relative unknown and very young at 58, but bright and winning. At a time when the church in the West was divided and dispirited, Wojtyla had brought vigor and growth to a church under communist repression. On Oct. 16, 1978, the college of cardinals chose Wojtyla to be pope, and he, in turn, chose the name John Paul II, in homage to his predecessor. Pope John Paul II quickly became known as one of the most approachable popes in history. Soon after he became pope, he officiated at a marriage ceremony for two "commoners" simply because they had asked him. He made Vatican history on Good Friday in 1980 by putting on a regular priest's vestments and hearing worshipers' confessions for more than an hour and a half. In one of his first public appearances as pope, he pushed his bodyguards aside, saying, "I don't want gorillas around. I know how to defend myself." His security team's worst fears materialized on May 13, 1981, when a convicted murderer from Turkey, already on the run, lunged out of the crowd that had gathered in St. Peter's Square for the weekly general audience, and shot the pope twice, bringing him to the brink of death. For years, investigators tried to find out whether Mehmet Ali Agca was part of a larger conspiracy against the pope, perhaps one inspired by Eastern European communists who feared--rightly--the effect of Pope John Paul II's calls for freedom and human dignity. No link was ever proved. The pope focused his attention instead on learning from his suffering, and forgiving his attacker. On Dec. 27, 1983, the pope visited Agca in a Roman prison for 20 minutes. At the end, the pope once again offered the gunman his forgiveness, and Agca dropped to his knees, kissing the pope's hand. Even more than his personal style, the aspect of Pope John Paul II's papacy that stood out most clearly from his predecessors was his visibility around the world. He made 104 trips outside Italy, more than 150 within Italy, and personally visited almost all of Rome's 334 parishes. One of his first trips abroad, in the autumn of 1979, brought the pope to Chicago. He was the first pope to visit Chicago, but it was his third trip to the city, where he had courted the huge and loyal Polish population on two previous visits as bishop and archbishop. They turned out in droves for his papal visit, lining Milwaukee Avenue and cheering wildly. To the rest of Chicago's Catholic population, and indeed most of the world, the new pope was something of a mystery. But Chicagoans turned out in force nonetheless, filling Grant Park with hundreds of thousands of worshippers for the papal mass. The pope traced his tireless appetite for travel to an experience he had on his first trip abroad as pontiff, a visit to Mexico in 1979. At the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, he spent more than an hour praying before the dark-skinned image of the Virgin Mary that is said to have had a profound impact in the conversion of Latin America during the 16th and 17th Centuries. There, the pope later said, he had an epiphany, suddenly understanding that it was his mission to become the pilgrim pope, bringing the word of God to people around the world. The pope made it one of his first imperatives to visit his homeland. Though Poland had been for centuries one of Europe's most devoutly Catholic countries, no pope had ever been there. Nor had any pope ever traveled to a communist country. In June 1979, the pope arrived in Poland for what would turn out to be nine days of jubilation unlike anything the nation had ever known. The homecoming carried strong undercurrents of pre-communist patriotism and genuine workers' movements that would challenge the ideology of the government. More than a million people came to see him in Krakow. It was a turning point in Polish history, one recognized not only in the throngs, but in a disturbed Kremlin as well. The fire ignited during that visit flared up here and there in the months that followed, most notably in the shipyard labor strikes that were led by workers carrying posters of the pope. From Rome, the pope supported the strikes, sending public and private messages. So when the pope returned to his homeland in 1983, both the communists and the pope knew that it would be more than a simple, pastoral visit. The late auxiliary Bishop Alfred Abramowicz of Chicago traveled with him. Near every stop, Abramowicz recalled, the communist government of Poland had mobilized tank battalions, ready to move in and crush anything that looked like a threat to government control. Crowds gathered in dangerous numbers. The pope never blinked. "He was a man who identified himself with the peasant, with the scholar, with the artist. You name it, he was intimately interested in these people. He became one with them," Abramowicz remembered in 1999. "His talks were bold, almost revolutionary, and yet he controlled the crowds completely. There was no violence, no uprising. It was more like a strengthening of convictions." In the years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, journalists and scholars have debated just what role the pope played in the demise of Soviet communism. Most have argued his biggest influence on the political situation was through his uncompromising, theologically based preaching for a society that would put human beings first, giving them the freedom of worship, speech and thought. "I believe he was absolutely central to [the fall of communism] ... central to why it happened in the 1980s, and why it happened non-violently," said George Weigel, a Catholic scholar in Washington who was granted more than two years of regular interviews with the pope in preparation for the 1999 biography "Witness to Hope." The pope, Weigel said, saw his own role in Poland as "a spark in a tinderbox," lighting the intellectual fire that kept the social labor movement Solidarity alive through years of vicious suppression. Pope John Paul II tried to provide that spark wherever he encountered oppressive governmental regimes, from Chile to Haiti, the Philippines to Nigeria. Seldom did he point fingers or explicitly side with political factions; he was careful not to embarrass his hosts or provoke a government backlash that would further harm the people. But starting from Gospel passages and church teachings, his speeches and homilies would hold up an ideal of life in which governments served people, not vice versa. Through his trips abroad, covering more than 720,000 miles, the prevailing mood was one of euphoria and adoration. But some observers worried that the enthusiastic greetings the pope received had more to do with celebrity worship than with any particular devotion to the message he was carrying. "The real question one has to ask is: What kind of lasting effects do these trips have? Is there any evidence that his visits have a lasting effect on the local churches?" said Richard McBrien, a theologian and papal scholar at the University of Notre Dame. If it is difficult to estimate the lasting effects of a pope's personal presence, there is little doubt that his teaching has shaped the church for generations to come. By volume alone, his writing is bound to wield influence over a wide swath of issues that face the church. He wrote 14 encyclicals, the highest form of papal discourse, along with 13 apostolic exhortations, 11 apostolic constitutions, 42 apostolic letters, hundreds of more minor documents and several popular books. Like his prayer life, writing was a discipline he practiced rigorously, devoting hours each morning to working on whatever project was at hand. In one encyclical, "The Splendor of Truth," the pope made an impassioned argument against the moral and metaphysical relativism that has seeped through modern culture. In another encyclical, he put the church's traditional teachings on wealth and work into a modern context in which capitalism has triumphed while globalization undermines the most basic assumptions people have about their livelihoods. Lesser works have included a landmark apology to Jews, including a controversial discussion of the role of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust; a letter that emphatically declared that women cannot be priests; and others touching on the nature of Catholic colleges, war and peace, the future of the church in Africa. Perhaps his most ambitious piece was "Faith and Reason," an encyclical released in the fall of 1998, on the eve of his 20th anniversary as pope. In more than 100 pages of complex but lucid reasoning, the pope makes the case for why religion is not only possible, but a necessary response to scientific advancement, post-modern doubt about the nature of truth, and all that has transformed human attitudes in the 20th Century. Pope John Paul II thought often about the new millennium, more often as it approached. He declared 2000 a Jubilee year, in which Catholics could earn indulgences by making pilgrimages to the holiest sites of the faith. He also saw 2000 as a time to look beyond Roman Catholicism. He put special emphasis on mending relations with Orthodox Christians, making his first visit to an Orthodox nation, Romania, in 1999. He also made major overtures to other Christians, Jews and Muslims. The heart of the Jubilee, and one of the crowning moments of his papacy, was a series of trips retracing the story of Christian faith. While political difficulties prevented a proposed trip to a site believed to be the ancient city of Ur, in modern Iraq, the pope traveled in February 2000 to Egypt, to walk in the footsteps of Moses. In March 2000, he traveled to Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories, his first visit there as pope and only the second papal visit to the Holy Land. Two events in Jerusalem cemented his bond with the Jewish people. First, the pope went to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, where he prayed and met with survivors. Then, on his last day, he went to the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism. , There, the pontiff bent his head near the pitted stone and prayed silently before leaving a small written prayer stuffed into a crack in the wall, surrounded by the thousands of notes and prayers Jews leave there every day. Only briefly did that triumphant journey silence the growing hubbub about the pope's health, however. For more than a decade he had been troubled by symptoms that appeared to observers to indicate a form of Parkinson's disease. By the last few years, he had been bent into a permanent hunch, his walk reduced to a shuffle and his hands beset by tremors. The syndrome also slurred his speech and limited the expressions of his once-lively face. Still, the journey continued. In October 2003, he celebrated the 25th anniversary of his pontificate. Even as Vatican officials sought to extol the virtues of the pontificate, the pope shifted attention away from himself by choosing to beatify Mother Teresa the same weekend, pushing a contemporary and kindred spirit on the fast track to sainthood. By March 2004, his pontificate was longer than all except Pius IX's 31 years and St. Peter's estimated 34 years at the helm of the church. The pope often referred to his approaching death. But almost always he said it with a smile and with a window held open by his unshakeable faith in God. In 1999, after a crowd of Poles wished him 100 years of life, he joked, "Don't set limits on divine providence!" And as so many times before, hundreds of thousands of adoring followers broke out into joyous cheers.
I still remember watching on television the Pope's visit to Chicago in 1979 and thinking what
an amazing influence he has been on the world.
posted by MaximumBob | 5:00 PM
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