Why He Is a Saint

by Slawomir Oder

  Chapter Three

  THE MYSTIC

  TRAVELING UP THE RIVER TO ITS SOURCE

  A great deal has been written about the life of John Paul II. He himself told a great deal, and not only in the book-length interviews or the conversations he authorized to recall his own story, but also in the biographical fragments that he liked to insert copiously into the fabric of his essays and his speeches. Once, however, he indulged in a confidence that was quite personal: “They try to understand me from without. But I can only be understood from within.”

  The existential path of Karol Wojtyła in fact takes its light and its first principles from his full adherence to Christ, from his certainty of being in his hands and of never being deprived of his love. It was a spirituality expressed with extraordinary intensity by the words of St. Paul: “it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20), and in it took root not only John Paul II’s exercise of virtues to a heroic degree but also his ability to establish real relationships with others, in keeping with Jesus’ statement “I have called you friends” (John 15:15).

  His faith, his hope, and his charity, as well as his courage, his tenacity, and his detachment from worldly goods, were all nourished by his certainty that he belonged to Christ. Likewise his freedom of thought and action, as when he replied, “Oh, really? And what paper will they appear in?” to the worried colleagues who informed him about the famous photographs taken in secret by a paparazzo while he was swimming in the pool at Castel Gandolfo.

  What guided his steps was his mystical capacity to observe and judge the world as the work of God and as his perennial manifestation among men—a going beyond the mere flow of things, which Roman Triptych, his last poetic work, translated figuratively into the enterprise of going against the current along a stream to the source, to the moment in which God created man in his own image.

  This view and this closeness to Christ substantiated his priesthood. To a student at the Roman Seminary who asked him what it meant to him to be the vicar of Christ, John Paul II replied immediately and spontaneously, “Even before being the vicar of Christ, I am and I work in persona Christi inasmuch as I am a priest.” As Pope Benedict XVI pointed out in one of his first Angeluses, the life of John Paul II can be ideally illustrated as a Eucharistic parable in which the sacrifice of himself for the Church, for his brothers, and for the glory of God was total.

  He was completely willing to accept from the very outset the gift that God was offering him. At the age of just twenty, Wojtyła had already experienced the pain of physical separation from all those who were dearest to him. Left entirely alone after the death of his father, and brought intensely into touch with the unpredictability and the limits of all human certainty, he understood that he could no longer rely on his own strength, that he had to trust solely in Christ and his words of salvation. This total entrusting of self to God was certainly more than a mere compensation for a lack of intimate affections, and was in fact the natural outcome of a path he had first taken when he was very young—a path marked by the progressive discovery of the power and beauty of the word of God and its superiority to the words of men. The fundamental phase of that path was his decision to abandon the theater to enter the seminary, elevating theology over aesthetics.

  BLESSED ARE THE POOR

  The decision to live in communion with Christ in the name of the Truth coincided in Wojtyła with an increasingly radical orientation toward the essentials, to the poverty of spirit exalted by the first of the evangelical Beatitudes: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Moving beyond the interpretation found in the Old Testament—which understood poverty as nothing more than the absence of material possessions, and branded it as a curse of the Lord in direct contrast to the blessings that were manifested in the form of flocks, wives, children, and wealth—Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, identified that poverty as the condition of those who open their heart to accept the “good news” that announces the invasion of the divine into the world, the presence of the kingdom of God among men. Karol Wojtyła’s mystical path in effect took the form of a progressive transformation into one of the anawim, the “poor of Israel,” who have no other hope, no other point of reference than God. And this was accompanied by an early ascetic abandonment of worldly goods.

  Even when he worked at the Solvay plant, his fellow workers noticed that he often arrived at work in the morning without the overcoat or heavy sweater he had been wearing the day before, and he always offered the same explanation: “I gave it to someone I met on the street who needed it more than I did.” They would give him something to keep him warm, but he generally kept it only for a short time, which did not fail to generate in his benefactors a certain disappointment.

  After the end of the war, Wojtyła was in charge of the reception desk at the diocesan seminary on Podzamku Street. His job was to welcome and hear out all those who arrived in search of help—sometimes spiritual but far more frequently material. A former brother of his from that seminary recalled, “Particularly edifying were his boundless faith in Divine Providence and the extraordinary sensitivity that he displayed in the face of any and all suffering. He never thought of himself or his needs. He shared all that he possessed with the poor. He knew how to give with discretion and with such respect that those who received the gift never felt humiliated. I chanced to witness these episodes through no will of my own, but I always did my best to avoid being noticed, and I crept away, to keep from causing embarrassment to him and to the recipient.”

  One day, the nuns where he came to celebrate Mass, now that he was a priest, noticed that he was dressed too scantily to protect him from the harsh winter chill, and decided to knit him a heavy woolen sweater. It is not difficult to imagine what they thought the next week when Father Wojtyła presented himself for Mass without the sweater, which he had given to a poor person.

  One Sunday morning, in the Church of St. Florian, the faithful were obliged to wait for a good long time before he presented himself to say Mass. He was able to do so only after the sacristan, who went to see what had become of him, loaned him his own shoes. The previous evening, the young assistant parish priest had given the only pair of shoes he owned to a friend, a student who had no shoes of his own. A few years later, when he was already a bishop, during a pastoral visitation it was necessary to make an urgent purchase of a pair of shoes because the soles of the shoes he was wearing had fallen off. He still insisted on asking a cobbler’s opinion, and not until the cobbler declared, “There is absolutely no way to repair these anymore!” did he resign himself to getting a new pair.

  Within the diocesan curia, this sort of behavior encountered a general lack of comprehension. The archbishops who had preceded him, all of noble birth, had always ensured that the elevated level of their appearance was consistent with the authority of their position. Wojtyła constituted a sharp break with tradition. In one clear example, after a visit to a community of Polish emigrants to the United States, he received as a gift from them a brand new automobile, a deluxe Ford, which was delivered to him in person in Cracow.

  The cardinal used the car for a while, then decided to replace it with a less ostentatious and cheaper Volga. His colleagues asked him the reason, and Wojtyła’s answer was, “When they showed me the various models in a car catalogue, I picked the one that seemed the smallest to me. But when I saw it in real life, I realized it was too nice a car for me. And then, when I was on a pastoral visit, I heard one child say to another: ‘What a car that is!’ I want the faithful to remember my visits because of my ministry, not because of the car I arrived in.” Of course, the money that came from trading in the luxury car for an ordinary one was donated to the poor.

  THE ESSENTIAL AS A FORM OF LIBERTY

  It was not easy to give him a gift. For the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of his consecration as a bishop, the diocesan prefects had decided not to give him money, because they knew he would immediately distribute any sums he receive
d. Anyone who gave him an envelope with a cash offering could be sure that the archbishop, without even opening it, would immediately hand it over to the curia treasurer—that is, if it didn’t wind up directly in the hands of a poor person first. Whenever he could, Wojtyła donated small sums to the priests who came to see him at his audiences, explaining that these were offerings for the celebration of Masses.

  The chaplain of the university in Cracow remembered that, at the end of a service celebrated by the archbishop for the students in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, he gave him a cash offering. Wojtyła was at first reluctant to accept the offering, but in the end, after repeated and insistent urging, he acceded, saying that the sum would be used to help someone in need. A while later the chaplain learned that the money had been “returned to sender,” since the cardinal had given it to the director of the university pastoral office with instructions that it be used to help poor students.

  Those who were in charge of clothing him at the time remembered that Wojtyła always wore very modest apparel and refused to replace it, even when it was quite tattered. If a hole appeared, he demanded that it be patched or darned. He owned only a single overcoat, with a lining that he inserted in the winter and removed in spring and autumn. Even when he went skiing, he wore worn, old overalls, hardly adequate to protect him from the cold and damp. Basically, aside from his cassocks, his wardrobe contained only a single change of trousers and a few shirts.

  One year, during a summer holiday, he took those shirts and, since it was very hot, cut off the sleeves. When winter came, his housekeeper, Maryja, realized how things stood and told the head bursar. To him the solution seemed obvious: “No problem. I’ll go right now and buy him some new long-sleeved shirts.” Maryja immediately objected: “It’s not that simple, because he refuses to wear new clothing; he always gives it away.” They went ahead and bought the shirts, but in order to get the archbishop to wear them, they had to rely on a trick that Maryja had long ago figured out: they soiled them and washed them a number of times so that they looked used. Wojtyła noticed nothing and made no objections.

  Despite the fact that he had virtually no possessions, Wojtyła was always urging his housekeeper to give away anything that he felt he didn’t need (even if it was a bare necessity). Every so often he would exhort her, “Go into my bedroom and clean out my personal belongings. I own too many things. Leave the more worn articles for me and give the better ones to the poor.” In reality, there was never much to give away.

  Once, when he was still auxiliary bishop of Cracow, Wojtyła found himself on the second story of the residence on Kanonicza Street and he heard voices from the floor below. He went downstairs to see what was happening and was told by the cook, Emilia, that a person was asking for some clothing. The bishop invited the woman to follow him to his bedroom and there he threw open his clothes closet, saying, “Please, take what you like and give it to that man.” Then he returned to his work.

  Once he became pontiff, Wojtyła did not temper his rigorous approach in the slightest. For example, he firmly opposed the replacement of the furniture in his Vatican apartment, furniture that had been used by Pope Paul VI and was worn and tattered; he made a concession solely for the kitchen, for considerations of safety. During a holiday in Lorenzago di Cadore, the Elizabethan Sisters, who took care of the building in which he was staying, realized that his undergarments were so patched and mended that they were irritating his skin. They took the initiative of replacing his old ones with new ones. To their surprise, they were gently scolded by the pope for having done so. He behaved the same way when he was recovering in the hospital: if the underwear he was wearing got holes in it, he asked that it be mended instead of replaced, and he invited his colleagues to distribute the new underwear to others who needed it more than he.

  In this decision to live a life of complete poverty, there was nothing contrived. Karol Wojtyła acted in this way out of a desire to resemble Christ in all things. As Cardinal Camillo Ruini, vicar for the diocese of Rome during the time in which the process of beatification took place, publicly emphasized, this attitude also found its roots in the profound inner liberty that so distinguished him, and that took concrete form in his characteristic manner of relating to other people, to all of Creation, and to all material things. The testimonial that he offered was emblematic, and all the more so because it was authentically experienced at an inner level, free of the slightest ambition to make a personal impression.

  Among many demonstrations is a little-known episode that happened during a pastoral visit to Brazil. When he met with the faithful in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, John Paul II was deeply moved by the extreme poverty of one family. And so he removed the ring from his finger and gave it to the mother of the children who were crowding around him. It was the gold ring he had been given by Pope Paul VI when he was created cardinal, but he did not hesitate to give it away because, at that moment, it was the most valuable thing he possessed. And for the rest of the apostolic voyage he was obliged to borrow the episcopal ring of the cardinal secretary of state.

  A CREATIVE AND POETIC BODY OF THOUGHT

  Karol Wojtyła’s production of essays, nonfiction, literature, and poetry is truly vast. His so-called magisterial writing—that is, the writing he did while pope—fills dozens of volumes and, just to give an idea, is roughly twenty times the length of the entire Bible. In the context of the canonical investigation, an in-depth analysis has been performed, with the involvement of a number of experts, to identify the essential principles of that body of literature. This careful reading has produced a genuine spiritual profile of Wojtyła, with the identification—according to the judgment of one of the theologians consulted—of five areas of his thought and, therefore, of his life and his actions.

  In the first place is man, immersed in a close relationship with God in Jesus Christ. It is only and exclusively in God that man can fully understand himself and it is only in God that man is capable of attaining his own vocation to happiness on earth and in heaven. A concern for the well-being of man, for his dignity and his rights—liberty, justice, and respect for life from conception to natural death—is the key theme of all the writings of the pontiff.

  In second place, we find the theme of faith, as the only way in which to read and comprehend the mystery of man, of the events that occur in his life, and of the situations in the Church and in the world. Faith is also a force capable of overcoming all possible difficulties that challenge and undermine human dignity and enslave human liberty.

  In accordance with his conviction that true faith comes into existence and is consolidated through love, for John Paul II the third essential aspect was charity, which consists of a heroic love for God and man. This love confers a definitive meaning on life, engenders a willingness to forgive, offers hope of a better future, and knocks down the barriers of enmity and all prejudice and hatred, laying the foundations for the civilization of love. Authentic love does not make us slaves but instead respects the liberty and the dignity of one’s partner.

  The fourth key theme, therefore, is dialogue, as the one and only valid and adequate form of conversation with other humans in a shared striving for truth. What gives power to this dialogue is prayer, the fifth theme, which by its very nature is a loving conversation between man and God and between God and man, the keystone of all human relations and the foundation of faith, hope, and charity.

  The speeches, discourses, and documents of the pontificate of course have a special importance. Yet the most original part of Karol Wojtyła’s thought can be considered to consist of his texts written outside the magisterial context, with the objective of setting down a whole series of significant reflections and ideas developed over the course of years.

  What expert analysis has particularly pointed out is the creativity of his thought, combined with a deep logical discipline and a vast erudition, both philosophical and theological on the one hand and, on the other, historical and literary, with a crowning to
uch conferred by his distinct poetic sensibility. Among his many works, one book has been identified as the symbolic apex of his ascetic progression: Sign of Contradiction, a collection of the meditations in the spiritual exercises preached to Pope Paul VI and the Vatican Curia in the second week of March 1976.

  The title refers to a Gospel passage, the so-called Prophecy of Simeon, concerning the newborn Jesus: “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul too” (Luke 2:34–35)—a text that Cardinal Wojtyła ideally associated with Pope Paul VI, who was at the time the target of a growing ideological opposition within the Catholic Church itself. And so that series of spiritual exercises represented to Wojtyła the possibility of comforting, in his faithfulness to Christ, the successor of Peter, whose difficult task is always confirming his brothers in the faith.

  As one of the theological censors explained, “The preacher returns to this theme with discretion and does so in a particularly moving manner in the ‘Prayer in Gethsemane’ where, in an atmosphere steeped in personal prayer, he gradually introduces the participants in the spiritual exercises to the drama of Christ’s obedience to the Father and, simultaneously, to the drama of the Church, which—in the human frailty of the apostles present in the Garden of Gethsemane—failed to persevere in solidarity with Christ, who was abandoned to solitude. From that moment on, the Church was incessantly summoned by its Lord to ‘recover’ in a certain sense that lost hour, by a vigil of prayer that joins it in the most profound way with the Savior who is on the verge of achieving his mission of redemption.”