A farewell to remember: what John Paul II's death taught us.

Some have expressed understandable reservations, even skepticism, about the enormous popular outpouring, especially among the young, at John Paul II's death. Where, it is asked, did the power of celebrity stop and the draw of sanctity begin? As one of those who were deeply moved by the pope's death and funeral, I wanted to try to sort out my own reactions.

I am well aware that John Paul's legacy, especially for the church, is likely to be a mixed one. It is not my intent, though, to offer a critique of his ecclesiastical politics or his theological thought. Rather, I want to speculate on why his death touched so many of us. My concerns as a scholar of Renaissance humanism and its Greek and Roman antecedents are as often cultural as spiritual, although I don't think it is easy to disentangle the two.

In Commonweal's editorial, "Peter's Successor" (April 12, 2005), the Irish novelist Colm Toibin is quoted describing the effect John Paul's dramatic gesture of holding his head in his hands for twenty minutes had on a crowd of 1 million pilgrims in Poland. "What he did ceased to be a public gesture, but became instead intensely private," Toibin wrote. "He was offering the young who had come here in the infant years of Eastern European democracy not a lesson in doctrine of faith or morals but some mysterious example of what a spiritual life might look like." As someone who lives and works in Italy each summer, I've had the opportunity to observe John Paul more intimately than most Americans. I think Toibin captured an undeniable aspect of Karol Wojtyla's remarkable appeal to believers and nonbelievers alike. I've come to see a powerful connection between John Paul II's spirituality, the major themes of his papacy, and his lifelong love of young people.

I think the first question we should ask is, how would John Paul II himself evaluate the unprecedented demonstration of affection and mourning at the time of his death? The answer, of course, is that he would look for a spiritual explanation. He would say that whatever effect he had on the people of the world came not from him at all, but from the Holy Spirit using his life and his death to open the hearts of people, especially the young, to the infinite love that God the Father has shown for the world through his Son, Jesus Christ.

How do I know John Paul II would have answered in this way? I've been rereading the original Italian edition of his Crossing the Threshold of Hope. The book is the result of a series of conversations with the Italian journalist Vittorio Messori. Messori says in his introduction that an expert theologian--one of the few people permitted to read the book when it was still in manuscript--told him that the book is a revelation in diretta ("in a live broadcast") "of the religious and intellectual universe of John Paul II, and therefore, a key to reading and interpreting his entire magisterium."

As has often been observed, prayer was a fundamental aspect of the way Karol Wojtyla lived and of the way he died. Any attempt to evaluate the enormous response to his death has to consider, as Toibin shrewdly saw, the way the man prayed. In the book, the second question Messori puts to the pope is about how he prays, how he enters into a dialogue with that Christ who gave Peter the "keys to the Kingdom of Heaven." The pope replies that prayer is a dialogue in which God, not the pray-er, plays the major role. He quotes Paul's Letter to the Romans, 8:26: "Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words."

Messori says that a close collaborator of the pope's told him that to really know the pope "you have to see him pray, especially in the intimacy of his private chapel." The 1999 PBS documentary The Millennial Pope, rebroadcast after John Paul's death, includes an interview with a Jewish conductor who happened to be in the pope's presence as he prayed. The musician says the experience was so powerful that it led him to rediscover his own religious tradition.

NBC Nightly News for Friday, April 8, the day of the pope's funeral, ended with some of the pictures National Geographic photographer Jim Stanfield had taken of the pope. Stanfield spoke of being alone with John Paul in the Garden of Our Lady at Castel Gandolfo, the pope's summer residence. They passed through a hedge. The Holy Father went right to a kneeler and started to pray; then they walked together for about a mile. Stanfield comments: "That was probably the most significant and the most rewarding experience of my life, bar none."

John Paul wrote a doctoral dissertation on St. John of the Cross. As a young man he thought of entering the Carmelites, and remained a third-order Carmelite throughout his life. As he traveled the world, he told the priests and nuns he met that their very first duty was to pray. John Paul would thus want us to say, I believe, that the first and most important explanation for the enormous reaction to his death must be a spiritual one: through him, through his own deep prayer, the Holy Spirit made people all over the world feel "sighs too deep for words."

Where do these sighs come from? In his reply to Messori's question about how he prays, the pope goes on to say that according to St. Paul, prayer concerns all of created reality. Prayer has, in a certain sense, a cosmic function. "Man is the priest of the entire creation, speaks in its name, insofar as he is guided by the Spirit." He then adds that in order to understand prayer, it is necessary to meditate for a long time on Paul's Letter to the Romans mentioned above, escpecially chapter 8:

  For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the
  sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its
  own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the
  creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain
  the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole
  creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only
  the creation, but we ourselves who have the first fruits of the Spirit
  groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our
  bodies. For in this hope we were saved. (8.19-24)

I think meditating on this passage not only tells us a great deal about John Paul's self-understanding but also provides a key to his power to move people, especially young people. St. Paul says, "The whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now." Young people are naturally drawn to the idea of redeeming the world. "For in this hope we were saved." Hope always concerns the future; young people are naturally oriented toward the future. John Paul wanted to show people how to cross the threshold of hope. He often repeated the words of Christ that he quoted in his first public appearance as pope, "Non abbiate paura!" "Don't be afraid!" These two messages, Have Hope and Don't Be Afraid, resonate in particular with the young.

John Paul traces his pastoral concern for the young back to his work with them soon after he was ordained a priest. As a young priest, he discovered the essential importance of youth. Youth is "a time given by providence to each man and given to him as a task," he writes in Crossing the Threshold of Hope. What is this task? To answer the fundamental questions concerning not only the meaning and purpose of one's life, but also the "concrete project" or direction each one's life will take. Youth, he writes, is thus the period of the "personalization" of human life. It is also the period of "communion": A human being has a vocation to love. "Young people, both men and women, know that they have to live for and with others; they know that their life has meaning when it becomes a free gift to one's neighbor." John Paul speaks of an important discovery he made as a young priest:

  This vocation to love is naturally the element of closest contact with
  the young. I learned this quickly as a priest. I felt almost an
  interior prodding in this direction. It was necessary to prepare young
  people for marriage; it was necessary to teach them love. Love is not
  a thing that you learn, and yet there's nothing more important to
  learn. As a young priest I learned to love human love.... If you love
  human love, there is born the burning desire to commit all of one's
  powers to "beautiful love."

Young people must have known the pope loved them, and their particular time of life, characterized as it is by a special concern for love and for hope. The young repaid him. They came to Rome to thank him, and to say goodbye. I know from personal experience that what the pope is saying about the time of life we call youth is true. As a college professor for more than thirty years, I've spent almost my whole life with young men and women. They want Meaning, Love, Beauty, and Hope!

Prayer and spirituality were the foundation of the pope's attraction. But prayer and spirituality alone do not account for the reaction to his death. John Paul may have had the prayer life of a cloistered Carmelite, but he lived in anything but a cloister. He had trained, after all, to be an actor. It was the combination of his attraction to the stage and his deep prayer life that made Pope John Paul II a unique presence on the world stage.

An audience gives actors, and statesmen who are actors, a certain charisma that can actually be a form of needy self-affirmation, in the sense that the actor feels affirmed by being able to seduce an audience. Like all actors, Karol Wojtyla was energized by his audience. But he was different. After Johnny Carson died, some of his friends and associates said that he could become sad and even depressed after he left the studio at the end of his nightly talk show. Friends of Judy Garland remember how she had trouble leaving her dressing room after a performance; she didn't want to go home and be alone. Bill Clinton, I think, has the actor's charisma. I felt it once just hearing his voice during a radio interview. Hitler had charisma. He once said that his words were torches; when he spoke his audience burned with them.

Unlike these actors and political leaders, John Paul II had no trouble being alone. He seems to have been at peace with himself and what he understood to be his vocation. It was this fundamental "truth" and "sincerity" of character, along with a genuine love, that elevated his charisma, his actor's ability to seduce an audience, to a different plane. John Paul II's persona communicated something very deep, something transcendent. I think that's why world statesmen seemed a little awed, even uncomfortable, in his presence. It was the pope's spirituality that grounded and purified his natural charisma as an actor.

So, too, did his intellectual interests. Part of John Paul's vocation was that of warrior in the battle of ideas. He liked ideas, big ideas. He had intellectual confidence. If being holy, being an alter Christus, is the sine qua non of the Vicar of Christ, I think being able to enter into dialogue, even combat, with different ideologies and belief systems is crucial. For the leader of the Catholic Church must embrace the very "Roman" belief, to use Seneca's image, that tradition is like the land a son inherits from his father: he must not abandon it, but must pass it on to future generations richer than he inherited it. Applied science, certainly in the form of biotechnology, has created totally new ethical problems for the church. And then there's the persistent problem of modern economics, and the way in which capitalism and its rivals want people to believe that economic growth is not only always good, but is the Good. Leaders of premodern religious and cultural traditions like the Catholic Church have to feel comfortable debating these ideas, and John Paul II did. He had the love and charisma of a St. Francis of Assisi, and the mind and combativeness of a St. Augustine. That's a unique and powerful combination.

Moreover, John Paul II exemplified the great ideal of the liberal arts, something I have written about in my scholarly work. He could do what Cicero says the ideal Roman statesman must be able to do: connect with his audience, and then speak with knowledge, wisdom, and eloquence on all things that concern the human and the divine. Sometimes I wonder if Plato would have recognized in John Paul II his philosopher-king. Cicero would certainly have found in him his orator and princeps, his ideal orator and "leading man," although Cicero, republican that he was, would not have accepted the monarchical nature of the papacy. In any case, I suspect that even his intellectual opponents respected the pope's mind. Intellectual confidence, then, was part of the pope's public presence, and perhaps contributed something to the enormous reaction to his death.

John Paul's spirituality, love of young people, actor's charisma, and broad intellectual interests all contributed to what was certainly the hallmark of his public persona: the joy he showed in carrying out his mission of evangelization to the whole world. His body gave out, but to the very end Karol Wojtyla seemed to enjoy being pope. Finding joy in the vocation of being pope is probably more rare than we would imagine. There's a little room off the Sistine Chapel called the Chapel of Tears. The cardinal who's just been elected pope goes there to put on the vestments he'll wear when he appears to the crowd waiting below in St. Peter's Square. Maybe he needs to cry as he ponders the mission that has now been entrusted to him. I read that Pope Paul VI had a great deal of trouble making decisions and was on the verge of a nervous breakdown later in his papacy. The first John Paul didn't want to be pope; he died about a month after he was elected. John Paul II, on the other hand, had a warrior's temperament. Certainly one of the major reasons he was chosen by his fellow cardinals was his proven ability to fight the Communists in Poland. There was something heroic about him, and this contributed to the popularity he enjoyed around the world.

He was heroic not only in his public persona, but in the sufferings he endured. I'm still trying to fathom what his suffering really means. In any case, I suspect that the reaction to his death was occasioned in large measure by the way in which he triumphed over sickness and death. Death and pain in the body, as Cicero would put it, are two of our greatest fears as human beings. Cicero even wrote a treatise on how to deal mentally with these quintessentially human problems. John Paul II suffered and died publicly. In so doing, he taught us all how to suffer and die. How did he do it? He believed he was being led by the Holy Spirit: he said once there are no coincidences in life. John Paul II also had certain natural talents and habits that enabled him to make what used to be called "a good death." He had his Catholic faith and his "Carmelite" prayer life and, as an actor, he took full advantage of the media and mass communications. He was thus able to teach the whole world how to suffer and die. I suspect that the reaction to John Paul II's death had to do, in some mysterious way, with how each one of us responds to the thought of our own death.

John Paul II's character was inseparable from his faith. We're all born with certain natural talents and dispositions. What happens to them depends in large measure on the culture in which we grow up. Catholicism was the culture that developed Karol Wojtyla's particular talents. I like to point out to my students that Michelangelo was born with immense artistic gifts. The way in which those talents developed was profoundly influenced by his being born in Florence during the Renaissance, and being given access while still in his teens to the Medici garden of classical sculptures, and then to the Medici palace itself, where he met many of the great intellectuals and writers Lorenzo de' Medici invited to his table. I ask my students to imagine what kind of art Michelangelo would have created had he been born at another time and place, say in Mexico at the height of Aztec civilization. The same can be said of Karol Wojtyla. He was born with a very fine mind. He became a deeply spiritual person who was also a profound thinker and a talented writer. It's not just Poland that shaped these talents, but the whole intellectual and cultural tradition of Christianity and the Catholic Church, a tradition that has been the major conduit in the West for the premodern theological and philosophical traditions of the Hebrews, the Greeks, and the Romans. Today's Vatican is a creation of the great Renaissance popes, who used the symbolism of the Rome of the Caesars to dominate the Roman barons and establish Rome as the seat of the church. John Paul II's success around the globe must say something, although I can't say how much, about the power of the Renaissance as the product of the immensely creative tension between the Judeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman worlds of thought.

As I watched the translatio of John Paul II's body through St. Peter's Square and into the basilica and up to the main altar, I saw Bernini's colonnade, Carlo Maderno's facade of St. Peter's, Michelangelo's ever-present dome, and Bernini's baldachino over the main altar, in front of which stood the catafalque. As I listened to the words and heard the haunting chant of the Litany of Saints, I thought of my Italy and my studies and intellectual interests. I felt very much at home. And I thought of how striking was the contrast between the superficiality and crude ugliness of the commercials on CNN and the beauty and depth of the ritual, including the stage on which it was performed. "This is the Catholic Church at its best," an archbishop said at one point to the CNN reporter.

I don't know how much the TV broadcasts had to do with the popular response to the pope's death. They certainly influenced my reaction. The first thing I "saw" when I watched the papal sediari carrying the pope's body through the square and up the main aisle of the basilica was the church across time. I found myself thinking: the church across time, with all of its traditions, not only informed John Paul II, it's bigger than he was. Now that he has passed away, the church and its traditions take over. For me, moreover, more than the Catholic Church was manifest in this burial ritual; I saw the "grandeur that was Rome." I love the Pantheon; I believe its dome lets a modern person actually experience the ancient kosmos, "beauty created by order," the same order that in Cicero's writings leads to a belief, which animates the liberal-arts tradition, in the unity of knowledge. As I looked at the body of John Paul II lying in state before the high altar and the baldachino, I thought: centuries ago another pope, Urban VIII, had the bronze struts under the Pantheon's portico removed and melted down to give Bernini the metal he needed to make the baldachino. What is more, above the baldachino is Michelangelo's dome, which is based on the dome of the Pantheon. I shared these thoughts with my students, brought to class a photo of Urban VIII, and pointed out that just as John Paul II lay under a baldachino created centuries ago by his predecessor, so too, if the church and the Vatican would still be around two centuries from now, another pope would be lying there in state. I--somewhat idiosyncratically I'm sure--would like to believe that Roman tradition and Greek beauty, brought back to life by the popes of the Renaissance, played some role in the enormous reaction to John Paul II's death. After all, why did Larry King use the words "tradition" and "beauty" when he told his audience they were about to watch a replay of the pope's funeral?

I believe that one of the deep spiritual longings people have today is a longing for beauty. The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar has reminded the church of how vital it is to bring the discussion of beauty back into theological speculation. The beauty we see in the Vatican and St. Peter's is a beauty not only created in the past; it also brings the past into the present, and gives us a sense, if only for a moment, of being part of something greater. John Paul II's life, death, and funeral have made me ponder not only the truth of the gospel, but the truth of beauty. Balthasar would say that they are both one. Cicero, combining Greek ideas of order, harmony, and symmetry with Roman beliefs in tradition and constancy (constantia), argues in his treatise on duties (De officiis), that one should strive to make one's own life beautiful by living with constancy and moderation:

  As the beauty of the body, through the apt composition of the members,
  moves and delights the eye in that all the parts fit together with a
  certain grace, so too this decorum that shines in a life, elicits the
  approval of those with whom one lives through the order, constancy,
  and moderation of all one's words and deeds. (1.28.98)

CNN interviewed a young Italian woman who had come to Rome to pay her respects to John Paul. She said she didn't agree with all of his teachings, but respected his conviction. In a world full of "spin," I suspect that not the least of John Paul II's appeal has been the "beautiful" constancy with which he lived his life. The events of his life seemed to fit together into a beautiful whole. Even suffering and age, which disfigured his once handsome face and body, were transfigured into a far greater beauty. Balthasar asks what is more beautiful than divine providence, the symmetry and the harmony of divine love playing out the great cosmic drama of the Creation, the Fall, and afterwards the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection. At the pope's funeral, on the facade of St. Peter's hung a tapestry portraying the risen Christ. One of the TV commentator "experts" pointed out that the Resurrection was the message people all over the world were meant to receive. Resurrection, and therefore hope. Perhaps this message is another reason for the widespread reaction to the pope's death. However we evaluate this reaction, I think John Paul would hope his life and his death show us all, and especially the young, that

  the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now;
  and not only the creation, but we ourselves who have the first fruits
  of the Spirit groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the
  redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved.

I've always been moved by these words. I believe I've never fathomed their full meaning. Now that meaning has become even deeper for me.

Robert E. Proctor is professor of Italian and chair of the department at Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut. His publications include Defining the Humanities (Indiana University Press). He is now writing a book on Rome, beauty, and the birth of the liberal arts. This article is funded in part by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.