Petrified Truth

John Paul the Great, RIP

Now he has died, tearfully for us, joyfully for himself. He can now behold "white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise."

The Wall Street Journal remembers what a difference this spiritual warrior made in our world.

When the white smoke curled up from the Sistine Chapel on that October evening back in 1978, it signaled that a new Pope had been chosen. His name was Karol Wojtyla. He came, as he said, from a distant land, and as he looked upon the faithful who had gathered on St. Peter's Square he offered words that would sum up his pastoral mission: "Be not afraid."

[T]his was a man eminently comfortable with modernity--even while he refused to accept modernity's most shallow assumptions. Just as he offered his first public words as pope in Italian to make himself understood by those below his balcony, he held that ultimate truths about man and his relationship with his Creator are never outdated, however much they require constant expression in new languages and new circumstances. As he never ceased to declare, Communism's core failure was not economic. It was anthropological, stemming from its false understanding of human nature.

Karol Wojtyla did not learn this from textbooks. He was old enough to recall how the twin totalitarianisms of our age--fascism and communism--were each once lauded by intellectuals as the inevitable destination and promise of the future. In Poland he tasted them both, yet he remained unintimidated. This experience would shape his entire papacy, a testament to his conviction that moral truth has its own legions.

And so he set that splendid Polish jaw against all the prevailing winds and . . . well, we know the rest of the story. Ironically, better than even some of his allies, the Communists themselves grasped the threat posed by a man whose only power was to expose the moral hollowness at the core of their claim. When the leader of Communist Poland tried to explain to the leader of the Communist U.S.S.R. that, as a fellow Pole, he knew how best to handle this new pope, Leonid Brezhnev responded prophetically. If the church weren't dealt with, Brezhnev retorted, "sooner or later it would gag in our throats, it would suffocate us." It did.

We don't expect the secularalists who dominate our intelligentsia ever to understand how a man rooted in orthodox Christianity could ever reconcile himself with modernity, much less establish himself on the vanguard of world history. But many years ago, when the same question was put to France's Cardinal Lustiger by a reporter, he gave the answer. "You're confusing a modern man with an American liberal," the cardinal replied. It was a confusion that Pope John Paul II, may he rest in peace, never made.

I'm sure his great friend and ally Ronald Reagan will greet him heartily, as soon as the Lord and John Paul II have finished their own reunion.

UPDATE: From the 13,000-word New York Times obituary:

[A]lmost from the start, it was evident to many of the world's Roman Catholics, and to multitudes of non-Catholics as well, that this was to be an extraordinary papacy, one that would captivate much of humanity by sheer force of personality and reshape the church with a heroic vision of a combative, disciplined Catholicism.

It was to be the longest and most luminous pontificate of the 20th century, the second longest in the history of the church, a 26-year reign that would witness sweeping political changes around the world, the growth of the Roman Catholic Church to more than a billion baptized members from 750 million, and the beginning of Christianity's Third Millennium.

The man who would call himself John Paul II was not the traditional papal figure, compassionate and loving but ascetic and remote behind the high walls and elaborate ceremony of the Vatican. Here was a different kind of pope: complex, schooled in confrontation, theologically intransigent but deftly politic, full of wit and daring, energy and physically expressive love.

More than outgoing, he was all-embracing - a bear-hugging, larger-than-life man of action who had climbed mountains, performed in plays, written books and seen war, and he was determined from the start to make the world his parish and go out and minister to its troubles and see to its spiritual needs.

President Bush said:

Laura and I join people across the Earth in mourning the passing of Pope John Paul II. The Catholic Church has lost its shepherd, the world has lost a champion of human freedom, and a good and faithful servant of God has been called home.

Pope John Paul II left the throne of St. Peter in the same way he ascended to it -- as a witness to the dignity of human life. In his native Poland, that witness launched a democratic revolution that swept Eastern Europe and changed the course of history. Throughout the West, John Paul's witness reminded us of our obligation to build a culture of life in which the strong protect the weak. And during the Pope's final years, his witness was made even more powerful by his daily courage in the face of illness and great suffering.

All Popes belong to the world, but Americans had special reason to love the man from Krakow. In his visits to our country, the Pope spoke of our "providential" Constitution, the self-evident truths about human dignity in our Declaration, and the "blessings of liberty" that follow from them. It is these truths, he said, that have led people all over the world to look to America with hope and respect.

Pope John Paul II was, himself, an inspiration to millions of Americans, and to so many more throughout the world. We will always remember the humble, wise and fearless priest who became one of history's great moral leaders. We're grateful to God for sending such a man, a son of Poland, who became the Bishop of Rome, and a hero for the ages. Video (Real).

Posted by Alan at April 2, 2005 02:43 PM