On John Paul II

by Dr. John A. Gueguen

As we reflect on the life, works, and historical context of the one the Holy Spirit selected in October 1978 to teach, sanctify, and govern the People of God on earth, some observations come to mind about the meaning of his pontificate. I divide them into two groups: factual and interpretive.

Facts
These personal characteristics of Karol Wojtyla were particularly relevant–even pivotal:

1. The deep piety instilled into him early and carefully nurtured by his father and those who undertook his spiritual and secular education.
2. The prodigious intellect with which he was endowed–also carefully nurtured by a demanding program of study encouraged by a series of outstanding teachers and loyal friends, together with the disciplines he chose to cultivate (dramatics; philosophy; theology).
3. His indomitable will, steeled in the circumstances of war and enemy occupation.
4. A compassionate heart that went out to the underprivileged and victims of all forms of unjust discrimination.
5. A strong physical constitution well developed by athletics and kept in shape late into life by regular exercise.
6. His creative flair for poetry and drama well developed on the amateur stage.
7. His love of country and church–so closely interconnected in the circumstances of his life–and the related virtues of loyalty and determination developed under trial.
8. His direct and intense experience with abuses of authority, with terror and atrocities, especially in the phenomena connected to 20th century totalitarian ideologies.
9. His divine vocation to the priesthood, carefully prepared, discerned and subsequently nourished by prayer and penance, as well as continued study; his rich pastoral experience as priest and bishop.
10. When these are taken together, they amount to a great potential for leadership, both ecclesiastical and political.

Interpretation
To interpret the ways in which John Paul II actualized his potentiality brings us into the difficult terrain where relevant facts have to be weighed and balanced relative to one another. Such judgments are inevitably influenced–and perhaps decisively–by the interpreter’s own education and experience, and above all by his familiarity with his subject (in this case very extensive as a result of first-hand witness as well as reading and discussion).

A colleague at ISU (historian) suggested that when our era is viewed from a distant historical perspective, the three popes who governed the Church between 1958 and 2005–almost half a century–may be treated as a unit because of the great unifying events of the period: Vatican II and its aftermath in ecclesiastical history and the Cold War and its aftermath in secular history. The very fact that John Paul I chose those two names, and then rather inevitably John Paul II, is significant. Perhaps that period will be called “the evangelical papacy.”

We live at a time in history when popes have found it obligatory (as they had in earlier eras) to involve themselves (and the Church) in world diplomacy. That current involvement had already started in the pontificates of Bl. Pius IX and no pope was more involved than Pius XII, on account of World War II. The availability of mass media of communication and of rapid air travel, of course, developed and rapidly accelerated that involvement. Everything was in place for John Paul II to carry–to a point of saturation–those means of direct contact with uncountable hundreds of millions. Never before have so many in the world’s population been able to establish such an intimate association with a pope–or indeed, with any world leader. (Perhaps it is highly significant that it should have been a pope, rather than a political leader.)

In the days following his death, how many thousands of persons were quoted all over the world as saying they were feeling the loss of a father, a brother, a friend? One would have to conclude that John Paul was in the first place a world-class diplomat, negotiator, facilitator of interpersonal communications; in developing that role so richly he relied, of course, upon his love for drama and his ability as an actor, as well as on his deep formation in the personalist school of Christian philosophy. He managed to help many people realize that the path to holiness is widely accessible, not closed to a privileged few, who withdraw from the world. The large number of beatifications and canonizations was probably motivated, in part, by the same aim.

One word that captures this first point about John Paul’s meaning and significance is the Polish word that sparked the uprising in Poland and in short order disposed of the Communist regimes in eastern Europe–solidarnosz (solidarity). This is one of two key ideas in Christian social doctrine (the other being its complement, subsidiarity). I think John Paul made it the fulcrum not only of his social teaching, but of his zeal to evangelize the world. (And yes, gestures as well as words, were of exceptional importance in the way he went about it.) Solidarity put energy into the way he accepted as a personal charge and dedicated himself to wholeheartedly: “Go forth and teach all nations.”

The motive for evangelization is always love, the love of caritas, and at the heart of “Sollicitudo Rei Socialis,” he says that solidarity is just another word for love. For an early Church Father (Fulgentius), “the spiritual building up of Christ’s Body is achieved through love.” John Paul uses the word solidarity to give an important nuance to love, a personalistic one that spoke to the mentality of his times, especially in more ancient societies than ours. John Paul’s over-riding aim was to take the papacy (i.e. Peter) to the people–the way Peter himself had done at the beginning. And Paul even more so. For that he had to break out of the mailed vest of the ecclesiastical bureaucracy. And so we come to a matter that has occasioned (in part) this reflection:

It is asked why John Paul did not make so successful a use of his diplomatic skills in running the Church, in a pontiff’s necessary negotiations with higher (and lower) echelons in the Church bureaucracy, and especially with the world’s bishops. Wasn’t there also an internal solidarnosz to apply with equal, if not more diligence? Why did he seem to give priority to worldwide diplomacy in reaching out to people of all nations, of all faiths (and no faith)?

“I answer that” it is because he had such a keen sense of the common good–the context of both solidarity and subsidiarity–and recognized that in the contemporary world the good of the Roman Catholic Church is a part of the good of mankind (the People of God taken in a universal sense); that therefore if he stayed home and served as a kind of domestic administrator of the patrimony of that portion of the People of God of which he was the official head, he would have misplaced his priorities. What most urgently needed to be done was to heal old wounds that have separated people for centuries, for millennia.

According to a well-established principle of social philosophy (where John Paul enjoyed rare command and was free of all ideological taint), whoever would govern with justice looks first to the common good. John Paul must have seen it as clearly providential that the Holy Spirit had chosen one with this grasp of “the big picture,” and with precisely the skills needed to deal with it, to send out to evangelize the whole People of God, the entire Body of Christ, as his Vicar and the successor of Peter. Evidently John Paul thought he had no option but to go out and witness the whole of the Gospel consistently and insistently, unhesitatingly. He saw himself as a Confessor of the Faith in the arena of the world, an Apostle to both Jews and Gentiles, whose complete life had to consist in professing that “Jesus is the Christ.”

To me this means that John Paul understood the concepts “govern” and “government” beyond any narrow, administrative sense. I think he preferred “shepherd” and “shepherding.” He thought (could see) that he was always governing, not just when he was working at a desk and making decisions, but always–everywhere he was, whatever he was saying or doing–but especially when he was “working” a crowd. He was always Peter, always the chief shepherd of Christ’s flock. It was said toward the end that not until the bed of pain had he so effectively governed the Church as he showed the world (certainly his closest collaborators, and let us hope, all of the Cardinals and Bishops of the Church) what it means to give one’s life for one’s friends.

In effect everyone became his friend (in the sense Our Lord meant it), as represented by the people in the square outside the Clinic and outside St. Peter’s. In any case, it is there that God permitted him to complete his service of the Church. He was never indifferent to the government of the Church, as he understood it–the only way he thought it could and should be understood. He was governing by gesture as much as by word, by example as much as by preaching. And (an actor to the end) he was never as persuasive as when he stood before a multitude of young people–even if he couldn’t utter a sound. They understood him best then. Most could remember his perennial greeting: “Jesus Christ LOVES YOU!!” (Hadn’t that old master, Plato said it: If you want to reform the world, forget about the adults and concentrate on youth.)

So let us not say that John Paul neglected his domestic duties or was indifferent to them; there is abundant evidence to the contrary, especially the lengths to which he went in promoting the piety and formation of priests and the amount of time he spent exhorting bishops to think and act like true bishops, reminding them (especially when they, sometimes reluctantly, came to see him ad limina) that they had to be martyrs in the world as it is today; otherwise they are fake bishops!

I think his greatest continuing disappointment was the reluctance, even the unwillingness to go along with him of so many he had appointed to help him teach, sanctify, and govern the particular flocks. Is it not they who bear responsibility for any lost patrimony; is it not they who overlooked the duties of office, who allowed themselves to be intimidated by local resistance. It may be that he could see that when he came on the scene, the patrimony had already been lost (hadn’t Paul VI recognized it?–“the smoke of Satan”). And so he concentrated on what the common good required, for now. A time would come to recover the patrimony, but something more urgent was pressing.

I called that a disappointment because those who should have been his closest friends were the very ones who would not allow him to exercise in their behalf his special gift of speaking to each person in a way that brought out what was deep inside. Perhaps that gift was the fruit of his study of personhood. I believe a future historian, if he is honest, will have to point out the massive disobedience, generally passive but too often active. There must be thousands of instances where the pastors (and their theological advisers) turned away from following his lead and even obstructed his path. The world’s seminaries remained seedbeds not of loyal followers but of sophistical traitors.

Here is another reason John Paul emphasized his diplomatic role. Was it not directed in the first instance at his fellow Catholics dispersed throughout the world so that he might reach them over the intractable resistance of so many false shepherds and the disaffected persons they selected (or retained) to run the local Church and to teach future priests and what should have been a well-educated laity. He knew that he was–and had to be–a “sign of contradiction” to them. For he was following Paul’s advice to “do the truth in charity,” and maximum respect for freedom, even at the cost of unity.

Another factor I think has to be taken into account in explaining the priority John Paul gave to the common good of the world community (which in his mind was equivalent to God’s People) is connected to Pope Leo XIII’s horrifying vision of what Satan was going to be permitted to do to the world in the 20th century. I think John Paul read the Fatima apparitions as a logical extension of that vision, and then must have seen the assassination attempt on their anniversary as a confirmation of Fatima (he already knew that “third secret,” of course, before it was disclosed near the end of his life).

I conclude that this made John Paul II an “apocalyptic” pope in a way that went beyond the diplomacy and the way he governed the Church–and placed him in a different context from John XXIII and Paul VI. The mystical intervention into world history by the Lord and his Mother–and the Serpent–requires John Paul’s pontificate to be viewed in a transcendent perspective. I think he saw in that light how supremely urgent it was for him to accept the “special assignment” that came to him within the papal office as an important dimension of his mission. As he had pledged to be “totus tuus” there was no way he could not see that mission (it came through Mary) as encapsulating his pontificate. I would say that he read every other aspect of it in that light.

It seems that in his long periods of nocturnal prayer, and even as he meditated on the mysteries of the Rosary, he was habitually guided by a superior Wisdom without which he could not fulfill that mission. Those contemplative (mystical?) flights carried him beyond the mundane, and even beyond the ordinary confines of his office as Roman Pontiff to the great battle between Michael and Satan in which he saw himself implicated in a unique way. Those “wiles and snares of the devil” the whole Church used to pray to be delivered from at the end of Mass (and a few of us still do) have had such a stranglehold on the world for nigh onto a century: Can it be said that they were about to meet their match? About to face a decisive test? Ronald Reagan had identified the USSR as “the evil empire,” but he could only see part of it.

John Paul felt obligated to fit all other business of the papacy–its normal, or “peacetime” responsibilities–into that strategic picture in order to discern their right proportions. Who is to control the world in the new millennium is at stake. John Paul seemed to realize from the beginning that victory would entail his martyrdom, that his vocation was to be a martyr before the world, to give his life “as a ransom for the many” drawing as close as possible to Jesus in the meantime. Some Muslims seemed to realize what was afoot, that the Holy Spirit was mounting (or resuming) a crusade–maybe even that final battle Mary seemed to look toward at Fatima–that “era of peace” to be granted the world once enough prayer and penance had been offered for “the conversion of Russia.” (I won’t even venture to interpret the meaning of that!)

So a more complete picture emerges from these brushstrokes: a world diplomat-actor in the service of the Divine Mercy and His Mother (he dies on the first feast and has his life “restored” on the second) in a struggle orchestrated in heaven; and as a consequence, an evangelical pope, a missionary pope, a pilgrim pope, a witness pope, a reconciling pope, but also an apocalyptic pope, a mystical pope, a martyr pope. When he introduced (following St. Faustina) the Divine Mercy 3 years ago he said: “The message of Christ’s merciful love needs to resound forcefully anew….The hour has come to bring Christ’s message to everyone….The message of Divine Mercy is able to fill hearts with hope and to become the spark of a new civilization–the civilization of love” (Paul VI’s term).

All concerns having to do with the patrimony of Peter are subsumed within those roles and cared for as a function of them. For the nitty gritty of papal administration, John Paul had necessarily to rely on collaborators up close and dispersed throughout the world, few of whom understood what he was about and therefore could be faithful allies (one is surely Ratzinger), most of whom were unwilling because uncomprehending collaborators. Perhaps they should not be faulted, for it was not given to them to share his vision. Like Christ, he respected their freedom and exhibited heroic restraint in refusing to interfere with what God was permitting. (He took himself seriously when he cried out, “an education in freedom is urgently needed today.”)

Mindful not only of his contemporaries but perhaps even more for his beloved young people when they should be ready to understand them, he exhausted himself pouring out magisterial documents, carefully preparing thousands of messages to be delivered at home and all over the world, in a way not seen since the time of the early Fathers. In this, too, he was the martyr shepherd, for he realized (as Christ had in the Garden) that even most of his apostles and disciples no longer followed him. I pray that his successor will put the Church on a program of disseminating and studying that patrimony; along with the Catechism, it could be subject matter enough for two decades of prayer and digestion by the whole Church.

It remains to be seen if that successor can say of the apocalyptic struggle, with St. Thomas More, “the field is won.” Mary’s man has gained a victory, not just for the Church, but for mankind, but it remains to be seen whether it was “the” victory our Mother spoke of. In any case, I think it very unlikely that we now need another John Paul in a still higher key.

Conclusion
But who can dare venture to “interpret” this mystical figure? Let it be clear in conclusion, that my purpose has not been a vindication nor a defense, but an attempt to discern how John Paul himself understood what he was doing and why. Certainly he would want us to see and pardon many defects, many imperfections, many indiscretions. (Although they may not be the ones we are thinking of.) This has simply been an attempt to open ourselves–as to the mystery of the Eucharist–so to the mystery of the Church, and to the mystery of the Holy Spirit’s guidance.

Appended Notes from Letters
In the days immediately following the death of John Paul II, between 20 and 30 letters arrived from former ISU colleagues and students who knew that I had been (at least in their estimate) close to him. What follows are some excerpts that reflect a widespread consensus concerning the ultimate meaning of his pontificate. Some echo what I have tried to say. They are composed by persons in the Buddhist tradition, Evangelical Protestants, Baptists, Lutherans, and several Catholics; in law, civil service, foreign service, business; half are secondary and college teachers.

“The greatest lesson Pope John Paul II taught us all is simply how he lived his life. He preached the words of Jesus Christ but more importantly lived those words through love and compassion for his fellow human beings….Every person regardless of religion or race should keep that legacy of Pope John Paul II and Jesus Christ alive.”

“Church leaders are not here to win popularity contests, so he has given me a lot to think about.”

“Pope John Paul has been a tremendous influence on my thought and given me a vision of the world. I will always remember how he forgave the would-be assassin. He showed the Christ-like compassion we should all strive for–to meet violence and oppression with love and forgiveness….Pope John Paul’s journey home to Christ leaves us all with the mission to make someone’s life a little better, to use our knowledge to help make the world better. I feel very blessed to have witnessed the role he played in world events while retaining his humanity and compassion.”

“All you need to be is a human being to recognize a great soul.”

“He was an extraordinary pope, in part because he was an incredible human being: intelligent, caring, charismatic.”

“He had a contagious zest for life and with gusto carried out his vocation. It is altogether fitting that he liked the movie, ‘Life Is Beautiful.’ His life exemplified that truth.”

“To me his greatness showed in the way he energized my personal search for THE TRUTH, which I found in the Catholic Church….In his respect for the preciousness of all human life, he attempted to bring Christ’s peace to all people–the only way World Peace can be attained.”

“It constantly amazed me how he could speak so forcefully about the divinity of Jesus Christ–as the answer to all the world’s challenges.”

“We are discussing in class the Pope’s ministry of Life and Truth.”

“The effect of the pope’s death on the people here [Russia] shows the effect one man can have on the world. His life and his efforts gave everyone a little hope. That is a priceless gift that will continue to exist in the minds and hearts of millions for many years.”

“The time has arrived for the Pope to rest and his will be forever peaceful….I know I will miss him, like so many others.”

“I, too, feel like I have lost a friend. But he is in a better place to help us now than when he was here on earth.”

“I had forgotten how great his impact was on those of us Sons of the Church who had walked too far arm in arm with the world….We know that we’re closer to him now than ever and that we’re even more capable of carrying out the tasks he reminded us of when he was young. He’s young again and strong, and his voice is that much more eloquent as we read his words again, newer than before.”

This article appeared on the John Paul II Forum website. It is reproduced here with the permission of the author, Dr. John A. Gueguen, Jr.

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