April 10, 2005

With heavenly elegance, Jesus Christ told St. Thomas: “Be not faithless but believing.” The circumstances of Pope John Paul II admonish the world in the same way. He was elected in a traumatic time: The “scientific materialism” of Marxism seemed ascendant, the free world was depressed, and Pope John Paul I died after just four weeks on the Throne of Peter. The new Pontiff, of whom few had ever heard, appeared and called out in Resurrection echo: “Do not be afraid.” On the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima he was nearly killed in fulfillment of Our Lady’s words to the Portuguese children in 1917, the last of whom died just a month before the Pope. Hours after the world was focused on the deliberate starvation of a woman in Florida, he directed its gaze on a holy dying. He gave his final blessing on Easter and died on the Feast of the Divine Mercy which he had instituted.

His body first lay in state in the Clementine Hall where I and other American students once watched him receive President Reagan in audience. Both of them were widely ridiculed for speaking of an Evil Empire. That Empire has fallen, in a way totally unexpected by the world’s babblers.

Of Pope John Paul it may be said in even louder chorus what a university student in Paris said of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “When he was among us, he showed us the superficiality of our existence.”

Like Christ who showed St. Thomas his victorious wounds, John Paul II as Vicar of Christ showed his wounded body to a “Culture of Death” as a reminder of the majesty of life. Now is a great teaching moment for the Catholic Church. Superficial commentary will increase as the Conclave meets to elect a new Pope. Many, like lint on the shoulders of a giant, will be urging the Church to do what Christ prevents her from doing: renounce the revealed dogmas as have various sects and denominations which are falling apart. Had the Pope followed the superficial advice of dissenters, his death would have been inconsequential.

To prepare a way for his successor we should do two things. By good confessions, as Christ instituted that sacrament in the Resurrection, we should make reparation for all the ridicule to which John Paul was subject in his heroic years. Then we should urge all of goodwill to accept the Papal primacy as the center of truth and rock of Christian unity. No one should breezily call John Paul II a great man who was mistaken about being the infallible Successor of Peter. If he was not what he claimed to be, he was not great. If he was, he warrants the religious obedience of all who claim Christ as Saviour. The Pope’s last word was “Amen.” To that we now add another Hebraicism: Alleluia.

Fr. George W. Rutler