John Paul the great 25th anniversary.

At the beginning of May, George Weigel, author of the biography of the Holy Father entitled Witness to Hope, gave a talk in Toronto in aid of Mary Mother of God School. He was really looking forward to the 25th anniversary of John Paul's election to the papacy on October 22, and his very moving address--supplemented by appropriate references to the biography itself-may serve as a fitting assessment of John Paul's long reign as Pope. Weigel structured his talk around the idea of the various "souls" or aspects of the Pope's personality!

Polish soul

First of all, he has a Polish soul. This may be problem for many people: how could this Slav, this man from a country that had dropped out of history, understand freedom, modernity's highest aspiration? The traumatic events of his early years, under the Nazi occupation, could have led him to the conviction that human existence is irrational, even absurd. But he saw the horrors of late twentieth-century life as the products of defective ideas of the human person, and the remedy for them was the transforming power of Christian love. Polish nationalism and Christian doctrine combined to make him a son of freedom. In fact his faith has made him see that there is a great hope for humanity.

Carmelite soul

Karol Wojtyla also acquired a knowledge of Carmelite spirituality as a direct result of the Nazi attack on Poland's Catholic clergy. As the Gestapo systematically stripped the parish of St. Stanislaw Kostka in Krakow of its priests, a group of young lay leaders, including Karol Wojtyla, formed a clandestine ministry called the "Living Rosary." The most prominent of these leaders, Jan Tyranowski, had an impressive library of spiritual classics, and he introduced Wojtyla to the works of St, John of the Cross, the sixteenth-century reformer of the Carmelite order. Karol took to these works avidly; soon he was reading The Ascent of Mount Carmel, The Dark Night of the Soul, The Spiritual Canticle, and The Living Flame of Love.

Carmelite mysticism, Weigel writes, is a spirituality of abandonment. In the dark night, like Jesus in the desert and on the cross, one abandons every other worldly security and plunges into a kind of radical emptiness, on the other side of which is the intense peace of mystical communion with God Himself. In this tradition God is beyond the reach of feeling, imagination, or thought. He can only be known in Himself when all our attempts to reach Him are abandoned in complete self-surrender. It was an approach to the human condition, Weigel notes, as radically opposed to the Nazi will-to-power as could be imagined! The complete handing over of every worldly security to the merciful will of God seized Wojtyla's imagination, and became the defining characteristic of his own discipleship.

Marian soul

With good reason, Weigel stated that the Holy Father had a soul devoted to the Blessed Virgin. As the 2,000th anniversary of the birth of Christ approached, he decided that the period between the solemnities of Pentecost in 1987 and the Assumption in 1988 would be a special Marian Year devoted to reflections on Mary as Mother of God and Mother of the Church. Paul VI had given Mary the title of "Mother of the Church"--which some viewed as merely a sop to religious conservatives. John Paul thought otherwise; as he explained on December 22, 1987, Mary was the first disciple, for her assent to the angel's message made the Incarnation possible. Also, her assumption into heaven prefigured the glorification of all who will be saved. So Mary provides a "profile" of what the face of the Church is, how its people should live, and what the destiny of its disciples will be.

The Marian Church--the Church of disciples--preceded and made possible the Petrine Church--the Church of office and authority. The priority of the Marian Church was emphasized in John Paul's sixth encyclical, Redemptoris mater (Mother of the Redeemer, March 25,1987) and the dignity of women in his apostolic letter, Mulieris dignitatem (The Dignity of women, August 15, 1988). John Paul sheds light on womanhood as such by the very fact that God, in the sublime event of the Incarnation, entrusted himself to the free and active ministry of a woman. The Pope's reply to radical feminism rests on the fact that Mary shows that the essence o human dignity lies in radical self-giving, not in self-assertion or the claims of autonomy.

(Interestingly, the late George Grant described the victory of Henry Morgentaler in the Supreme Court ruling of January 1988 in terms of the Nazi doctrine of "The Triumph of the Will." The feminists were exultant: it was a woman's will which had priority, not the presumed right to life of an unborn child. Her claim to autonomy and the right to self-assertion was poles apart from the self-giving which John Paul attributed to the Blessed Mother.)

Dramatic soul

As we know, Karol Wojtyla had the theatre in his blood; he not only acted in plays but he wrote them, in an effort to explore the reasons for Poland's sufferings and to keep the culture of his homeland alive. In Christian terms, he dealt with an interior drama in the individual himself, the tension between the man as he is and the man as he ought to be.

Lay soul

As well as having a dramatic soul, he has a lay soul. As late as 1917, when a Code of Canon Law appeared, the Church seemed to be run by and for the clergy; in that document, the only reference to lay people came in connection with marriage. When St. Jose Maria Escriva founded Opus Dei in 1928, he made it clear that lay people should be able to find their sanctification in their ordinary work. The call to holiness was a universal one, not something reserved for nuns and priests. The same emphasis was strongly reiterated in the documents of the Second Vatican Council. At the third session of the Council, in 1964, Wojtyla--by then an archbishop--entered the debate on a proposed decree on the apostolate of the laity. He thought that a zealous, educated laity was essential if Christian humanism was to penetrate all of society, especially in those places where priests cannot easily go. He recommended a "dialogue" between clergy and laity for their mutual enrichment in pursuit of their common purpose. A decree on the laity would help to stress that when people spoke about "The Church" they were not speaking only about bishops, priests and nuns. A decree would renew the laity as apostles in the world of work and culture.

Apostolic soul

Weigel also emphasized John Paul's apostolic soul. with special reference to Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Christian service to the poor and abandoned was the constant theme of his addresses when he went to India in 1986. Over the years Mother Teresa had brought some 50,000 people out of the gutter; she was surrounded with almost unimaginable suffering, yet no one was happier than she was. She was living testimony to the fact that the requirement to give to others is written in the human heart. John Paul has also given of himself unstintingly. By the end of 1996, Weigel states, he had undertaken 127 pastoral visits throughout Italy, travelled over 43,000 miles, and delivered 858 homilies and other addresses. And ill health has not prevented him from taking the Gospel message to 100 countries outside Italy. He has certainly been the most visible pope in history

Humanistic soul

John Paul also has a humanistic soul, based on his awareness of the significance of the human person, and his conviction that taking Christ as our model is the answer to the crisis of our civilisation. To the preparatory commission for the Second Vatican Council, he submitted a paper in 1959 contending that the crisis of humanism at the midpoint of a century which prided itself on humanism should be the organizing principle for the Council's deliberation. The Church did not exist for itself. It existed for the salvation of a world in which the promise of salvation through material means had led time and again to dehumanization and degradation. There was a much talk before and during the Council of "reading the signs of the times;" here was a bishop who had put his finger on the deepest question of the century, that of creating a humanism adequate to the aspirations of the men and women of the age.

Soul of Faith

Finally, George Weigel contends that Pope John Paul is a great soul who through the liberating power of Catholic faith changed the course of history. The papacy has traditionally claimed a universal reach. John Paul's pontificate is the first in which that claim has been empirically vindicated. It is a very obscure corner of this planet which has not been touched by the life of this pope. It is not surprising that Father Richard John Neuhaus refers to him as John Paul the Great. Weigel thinks that the framework for the future development of Catholic moral theology provided by papal encyclicals such as Veritatis splendor will continue to shape Catholic life well into the 21st century and perhaps beyond.

All this, and helping to bring down a Communist regime, John Paul's twenty-five year reign has been one of the most remarkable in the long history of the pontificate.