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JOHN PAUL II
from issue no. 10 - 2003

25 YEARS OF PONTIFICATE

The amazement remains


On that 16 October of 1978, nobody, nobody at all – not even Stefan Wyszynski, Polish primate who prophesied that the Church would be led by Wojtyla in the third millennium - could have imagined how many things would happen in the decades to come


by Marco Politi


John Paul II on 16 October 1978, 
the day of his election, looks out 
on Saint Peter’s Square for the first time

John Paul II on 16 October 1978, the day of his election, looks out on Saint Peter’s Square for the first time

Twenty-five years later the amazement remains that gripped the crowd that afternoon of 16 October in Saint Peter’s Square, when many already expected a longer conclave and suddenly a foreign face appeared on the loggia of Basilica, square-jawed and yet full of great humanity.
Because nobody, nobody at all – not even Stefan Wyszynski, Polish primate who prophesied that the Church would be led by Wojtyla in the third millennium - could have imagined how many things would happen in the decades to come. Let’s not even talk of the fall of the Berlin wall, of Poland freed, of the break up of the USSR. Only to imagine it would have been visionary. But who could have conceived a Pope who crosses the Tiber and enters the Jewish synagogue? Who could dream of a Pope who in Saint Peter’s solemnly pronounces a mea culpa for the errors and horrors committed over the centuries by the Church? Who could foresee a Roman pontiff meditating in a Moslem mosque? Who could have had the nerve to think of a choral prayer to God made by all the religious heads of the world, come to Assisi on the invitation of a Catholic Pope to beg for peace and coming back a second time to condemn the very idea that violence, terrorism and wars can be unleashed by appealing abusively to the name of God?
Who would have ever dared prdict a pope bleeding from a pistol wound caused by an assassin from Istanbul and staying in a pension called Isa (which in Arabic means Jesus)? Who would ever have dared predict that a strong, sports-loving pontiff would lead the Church from a wheelchair to share the passion of Christ and the passion of millions of men and women, left by the wayside because not sufficiently go-getting?
The more lucid and cold the observer – and he must be if he is to put the facts in order - the more obvious it is that all the trajectory of the little Lolek become successor of Peter was shaped in extraordinary fashion. The Pope who on the day of the mass of inauguration strode the parvis making enormous signs of the cross with his crozier over the heads of the crowd was already out of the normal scheme of things. Out of the ordinary was the cry: «Be not afraid! Open the doors to Christ!» Unusual from the beginning was the new line of using the word “I” instead of the pontifical and impersonal “we”, exceptional the habit of acting without clerical encumbrances, of addressing everybody with immediacy. Quite new, then, the willingness to seek out the media, to accept reporters’ questions, to offer himself to the telecameras, of launching into journeys and the busy merry-go-round of dozens of meetings in foreign countries, in the conviction that new channels needed to be found for talking to the world.
In this Karol Wojtyla continues to sow seeds. «He has always wanted men to live according to God», were the effective words of Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re in summing up the twenty-five years of pontificate. Among the thousands of images and words that he has spread through the world what remains in my heart is,…
In the first decade the world was stunned by the epos of events in Poland. It was not rationally thinkable that it wouldn’t end in revolt– because there had been such cyclically in Poland and in the sovietized countries of Eastern Europe – or even to a change of government, because that too had happened, but to the complete overthrow of the system. It was not conceivable, it seemed impossible and instead it happened.
Wojtyla has never boasted about it, the most he’s said is that he «shook a tree already rotten». Awake to the complexity of social processes and of the vacuity of those who claim to play Superman. But the fact remains that without his longsightedness, without his promptness in grasping the chance of a common strategic syntony with the American president Reagan – equally convinced that Solidarnosc should not be wiped out at any cost – the crack that opened in Warsaw would have been papered over as had already happened on other occasions in Eastern Europe. Instead the calm tenacity of the Slav Pope prevented the wound inflicted on the Party-Boss from closing. His active resistance did such that in the end the body, muscles and bone structure of the authoritarian system became gangrenous.
And yet that was not the greatest outcome of Wojtyla’s pontificate.
What has made this reign a continual font of energy is the impetus that John Paul II has transmitted day by day to the Catholic Church and from there to the larger space of the entire planet.
Karol Wojtyla, in primis, has shown in words, deeds, testimony that the faith is something relevant and present. It is not a relic from the past or the stuff of bigots. It is matter palpitating with contemporary living, precisely because the men, the women and the young people of today are looking – often hopelessly – for a meaning to give to existence. It is not the only option in a society with multiple tendencies and beliefs, of course, but in each case the Slav Pope, become Roman, i.e. universal, has shown the “relevance” of believing and proclaiming the Gospel.
Not that it means the “crisis of the sacred” has gone away, since that has distant roots and inevitably develops in a society where the “numinous” is no longer a category. And from it come the deserted churches, the abandoned confessionals, the clergy that is slowly bleeding away because even the new arrivals, even the small increases in vocations, can’t keep up with the growth of population. But this is an epochal phenomenon involving all the traditional Churches. What counts is the fact that John Paul II has brought the faith into play again and given new impetus to those in the community of believers who were and are ready to do their part in bringing the Good News.
…the touching invocation to the human brotherhood contained in the encyclical Evangelium vitae: «Others are not competitors from whom to defend ourselves, but brothers and sisters with whom to be in solidarity; they are to be loved for themselves; they enrich us with their very presence»
In the beginning some smiled at the frenzy of his journeying, at the ceremonies packed with dancing, singing, shouts, applause and somewhat kitsch choreography. But it was soon understood that there was a simple and effective design to the endless fabric of his traveling. By looking for Christian communities in every corner of the globe, by giving them “voice” and visibility, even if only for a few days, by getting close to them, John Paul II has given the billion and more Catholics on the five continents a strong sense of belonging, a spirit of sharing in the destiny of the “people of God” that a papacy secluded in the apartments of the Vatican would have been unable to offer.
From this point of view Wojtyla immediately glimpsed the urgency for the papacy to become planetary if it hoped to continue to say anything in the globalized world. There was no talk of globalization when John Paul II mounted the throne of Peter, but it is as if he had in his blood the idea that leading the Catholic Church would be possible only by projecting it on world scale.
In that aspect Karol Wojtyla has transformed the very physiognomy of the papacy. If beforehand the Roman pontiff was only the head of Catholics or at most an eminent personality in the Christian world, after these twenty-five years the papacy has been transformed into spokesman and defending lawyer for human laws on every continent, overcoming the barriers of states, cultures, faiths. Wherever he travels, the crowds perceive him as such. Whether adherents of other religions, of non-believers or of agnostics. «His figure has entered into us», I was told by a Roman teacher always distrustful of anything clerical. It succeeded in entering hearts and minds, the figure of Wojtyla, because he knew how to speak of peace and justice, but also of religious values, in a cogent way. And I recall the Israeli policewoman met on the shores of the lake of Tiberias who, looking at John Paul II, told me: «I’m not interested in the Catholic Church, but this man is a man of God».
Is there a secret in Karol Wojtyla’s power to communicate? To evoke his past as an actor is trivial. Certainly the Pope knows from experience how to take the stage and he knows how to handle a microphone without embarrassment. But the root of his power to penetrate the imagination of his contemporaries lies elsewhere. The truth is that Wojtyla is a mystic, as well as a philosopher, and hence a person accustomed to digesting events culturally and historically. One sees his mysticism when he prays. It is the moment of total abandonment to God, of the most profound immersion in the unknown dimensions of his own soul, in a total yearning for Christ. In this launching of himself in the upward dimension can be found the profound cause of his commitment among men and for men. Because the human being, as Wojtyla sees him, is not only creature of God, made in his image, but is “gloria Dei”, glory of God, splendor of God we might say poetically. And in this concept is rooted the certainty that the dignity of man (with his fundamental rights) is incomparable and to be safeguarded at any cost. «John Paul II, pilgrim of humanity», was written days ago on a banner beside the basilica of Pompei.
In this conviction lie the roots of Wojtyla socio-political action. The roots of why he is understood so well by the crowds. Here lie the deep motivations of his ability to fascinate hundreds of millions of young people on the different continents. When he exclaims, as he did in Denver: «Don’t be afraid of going about the streets, in the squares of cities and villages. It is not the time to be ashamed of the Gospel. Don’t be afraid of breaking with comfortable ways of life. Young Catholic people of the world, don’t disappoint Christ, you carry the Cross in your hands, you carry the words of life on your lips!»... When he exhorts us to take care of the most helpless and those cast aside by the logic of profit - children, the ill, the handicapped, the elderly, the poor, the unemployed, immigrants, refugees, the south of the world - the crowd feels that John Paul II is indeed on the side of the weakest. Many were stunned when after the fall of the Berlin wall he didn’t hesitate to launch himself against the savage capitalism rampant in Eastern Europe and the Third World, stating that in Marx there were «grains of truth» in his denunciation of the inhuman conditions in which workers were kept in the nineteenth century. In front of professors and students in Riga, stunned by the sudden turn, he exclaimed in 1993: «The exploitation by an inhuman capitalism (in the 19th century) was a genuine evil… and in that lies a core of truth of Marxism». Three years later in Paderborn in Germany, the day before going to the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin to celebrate the end of two nineteenth century totalitarianisms – Nazism and Communism - John Paul II took up the question again, in a place that is the living heart of the western free market. «Radical individualism must not advance, for in the end it destroys society», he said; «a world again shaped by a radical capitalist ideology must not come into being».
In his speech to the University of Riga he had, furthermore, already set out the essential commandments of the social doctrine of the Church: 1) universal destination of the good of the earth; 2) guarantee of private ownership as indispensable condition of the autonomy of the individual; 3) refusal to consider work as mere exchange; 4) promotion of a human ecology; 5) social role of the state; 6) necessity of a democracy based on values.
John Paul II greeting the pilgrims in Saint Peter’s Square at the end of the Wednesday audience

John Paul II greeting the pilgrims in Saint Peter’s Square at the end of the Wednesday audience

In this extraordinary trajectory there are also failures. His struggle against Liberation Theology in Latin America opened the way to the spread of fundamentalist Protestant sects, the systematic setting aside of any critical theology has prevented the development of new thinking on how Gospel norms may be translated into modern society, his condemnation without appeal of divorce and contraception, of laws on the interruption of pregnancy and on de facto couples, his condemnation of homosexual relationships have met with mute opposition within the very world of believers. His irreversible veto on female priesthood has made for argument. His refusal to grant communion to Catholics divorced and remarried, discarding the medicine of mercy that is adopted even among the Orthodox, appeared cruel.
And yet, even when he has set himself against the feeling of contemporaries, Pope Wojtyla has always acted as stimulus to other than trivial thinking on large questions such as the family, the value of sexual relations, genetic engineering, the purposes of political and economic structures. In a world troubled by bloody conflicts, first and foremost the endless one devastating the Holy Land, Wojtyla has preached reconciliation and the purging of memory. A powerful concept destined to cause thought for decades to come. Because to take account of one’s own wrongs and accept the reasoning of others, to forgive the crimes of others even when they are ferocious, is not a sign of weakness but contains a dynamism of rebirth that – if applied – reverberates on all aspects to the life of relationship. Individual and social.
Already when it seemed that illness would reduces his ability to act, John Paul II has launched himself this year with enormous determination into the struggle to prevent the war venture in Iraq, decided by the United States. An illegal action, avoidable, destabilizing, and the Pontiff and principal spokesmen of the Holy See have been repeating it for months. The facts are proving him right. But the alternatives set out by Karol Wojtyla are imposing themselves still more. Either the world is a community of nations and therefore a court of legitimacy such as the UN, shared by all, with rules accepted by all, is indispensable; or the world is an arena in which the strongest hold sway with all the inevitable willfulness and counter attacks. As new Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran has said, it is a matter of choosing between «the force of law or the law of force». Europe, the Pontiff has let us understand, must make its choice, mindful of its spiritual heritage and of the imperative to work for a «globalization of solidarity».
In this Karol Wojtyla continues to sow seeds. «He has always wanted men to live according to God», were the effective words of Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re in summing up the twenty-five years of pontificate. Among the thousands of images and words that he has spread through the world, what remains in my heart is the touching invocation to the human brotherhood contained in the encyclical Evangelium vitae: «Others are not competitors from whom to defend ourselves, but brothers and sisters with whom to be in solidarity; they are to be loved for themselves; they enrich us with their very presence».



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