Yet the Pope refused to retreat from his ecumenical probes into the more open sectors of Orthodoxy, and scheduled a visit to Bulgaria in May 2002. He took a circuitous route there, however, stopping briefly in the Caucasus at Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, on May 22–23. Azerbaijan is one of the world’s few Shia Muslim countries, and the Pope took the opportunity to plead once again for religious tolerance and peace. As they were getting off the plane in Baku, Joaquín Navarro-Valls (who had been fielding questions from the press about the reasoning behind a papal visit to a country with an infinitesimal Catholic population) said to the Pope, “Holy Father, there are only one hundred twenty-three Catholics in this country.” John Paul corrected him: “No, it’s one hundred twenty.” However many there were, or weren’t, they, too, had a right to think that Peter’s ministry of strengthening the brethren extended to them. In addition to interreligious contacts and an address to Azeri cultural, political, and religious leaders in which he described holiness as “the fullness of beauty,” John Paul celebrated Mass in a sports center, the country’s last Catholic church having been destroyed by Stalin in 1937. For the first time in his travels, the Pope spent the night in a hotel, where the manager gave him ash, the Azeri national dish, made of rice, meat, cabbage, and grape sauce; press reports indicated that John Paul asked for more.59
The Pope’s increasing frailty was now more evident on each of his pilgrimages, but he prepared for each pastoral visit as he had for those he had made when he was in vigorous good health—by learning what he could of the local language. So a young Bulgarian priest was recruited to teach Bulgarian to the eighty-two-year-old pontiff.60 The Pope brought a relic of Blessed John XXIII as a gift to Bulgarian Catholics; a quarter century before his election as pope in 1958, Angelo Roncalli had been apostolic nuncio in Sofia, the Bulgarian capital. While predominantly Orthodox, Bulgaria had a small Byzantine-rite Catholic community, which had suffered terribly under Bulgarian communism. Their exarch, Christo Proikov, told the London-based Tablet that “the Pope’s visit shows that we are not forgotten.… We had no contact with Rome for 50 years, but we stayed faithful. This is measured with the martyrdom of many priests and monks who died for the faith, and the suffering of some who are still living.”61
John Paul was greeted at the airport by the Bulgarian president, Georgi Parvanov, and bantered with the crowd in his new Bulgarian: “The president is young and that’s why he’s standing,” the Pope told a crowd of some 5,000; “he asked the Pope to sit because the Pope is old.”62 In a conversation later with Parvanov, John Paul told the former communist that he had never taken seriously “the so-called Bulgarian connection” to the 1981 assassination attempt on his life “because of my great esteem and respect for the Bulgarian people.” The Bulgarian foreign minister, Solomon Passy, told The Tablet that the Pope had “put an end to a big and unjust lie which has stained the name of Bulgaria,” a feat that Passy described as Bulgaria’s “largest diplomatic success since the Second World War.”63 Close students of the events before, during, and after May 13, 1981, who knew that the “Bulgarian connection” referred to the Bulgarian secret police and their KGB masters, not to the Bulgarian people, understood and appreciated the Pope’s willingness to reassure the Bulgarian people of his affection, but were less inclined than foreign minister Passy to declare the case closed.
Ecumenical advance was John Paul’s strategic goal in Bulgaria, a country whose Orthodox Church had close ties to the Patriarchate of Moscow. He had previously been to the historically Orthodox countries of Romania, Georgia, and Greece; he had persuaded many of the Orthodox faithful in Ukraine that he was a friend, not an aggressor; he had forged close ties to the Armenian Apostolic Church. Now he was in Bulgaria. Perhaps this slow pilgrimage around the borders of Eastern Christianity in Europe would eventually open the path to Moscow, in a process John Paul described in Sofia as “gradual growth in ecclesial communion.” His homily at the May 26 beatification of three Assumptionist priests martyred during Bulgaria’s postwar communist period stressed that both Catholic and Orthodox Christians had suffered at the hands of the Stalinist regime, and that “the ecumenism of saints and martyrs … is perhaps the most convincing.”64 His witness was not a matter of words alone, however. The Pope impressed Bulgarians by his determination and patience as much as by his familiar words about the Latin and Byzantine dual lungs of a renewed and reunited Europe. One Orthodox archbishop worried aloud about John Paul’s frailty: “I think the people around him, they must tell him he has to stop.” But as Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, nicely put it when asked about the Pope’s health, “Suffering is in a sense his profession.”65
John Paul’s obvious physical difficulties—his difficulties walking, the tilt of his head, a sometimes frozen expression on his face, and the trembling in his arm—continued to feed the media rumor mill. So did some changes in the manner in which he conducted events in Bulgaria (for example, by reading only small portions of his addresses or homilies, with the balance being read by aides). Speculation on the Pope’s condition and the prospects for his pontificate were also primed by Vatican “insiders,” who more often than not were low-level curial bureaucrats with no access to serious information. Thus after the apostolic visit to Azerbaijan and Bulgaria, a Czech newspaper, Tyden, ran a story suggesting that the Pope would step down after an August 2002 trip to Poland. Navarro-Valls denied the rumor, noting that the pontifical schedule remained a full one and that events were being added for 2003. John Paul’s old friend Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek lived up to the Polish meaning of his surname [“Little Thunder”] with a more pungent comment on the latest speculations about a papal abdication: John Paul would remove himself from office, the rector of the Pontifical Theological Academy in Kraków said, “when hens grow teeth.”66
On June 16, three weeks after his return from Bulgaria, John Paul II canonized Catholicism’s most famous twentieth-century stigmatic, Padre Pio of Pietrelcina. A Capuchin Franciscan, born Francesco Forgione in 1887, Padre Pio had borne the wounds of Christ in his hands, feet, and side from 1918 until his death fifty years later. John Paul attributed the miraculous cure of an old friend, Dr. Wanda Półtawska, to the intercession of Padre Pio, to whom he had written just prior to the opening of Vatican II, asking prayers for Połtawska when her life seemed in danger from cancer. A decade and a half earlier, the Capuchin’s devotion to the priestly ministry of the confessional and his willingness to endure physical suffering had made a lasting impression on Karol Wojtyła during his student days in Rome in 1946–48—when Wojtyła would also have learned about Roman suspicions of Padre Pio and controversies surrounding his ministry.67 Thus the Pope’s homily at the canonization Mass began with a reflection on the famous saying of Jesus, from that day’s Gospel reading, that “my yoke is easy and my burden light” (Matthew 11.30):
Jesus’s words to his disciples, which we have just heard, help us to understand the most important message of this solemn celebration. Indeed, in a certain sense, we can consider them as a magnificent summary of the whole life of Padre Pio, today proclaimed a saint.
The evangelical image of the “yoke” recalls the many trials that the humble Capuchin of San Giovanni Rotondo had to face. Today we contemplate in him how gentle the “yoke” of Christ is, and how truly light is his burden, when it is borne with faithful love. The life and mission of Padre Pio prove that difficulties and sorrows, if accepted out of love, are transformed into a privileged way of holiness, which opens onto the horizons of a greater good, known only to the Lord.68
Yet that yoke and burden included the cross, of which St. Paul had spoken in the day’s second reading: “But may I never boast except in the cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ” (Galatians 6.14). That, John Paul said, was the radiance that “shines above all in Padre Pio”—the willingness to “wear the marks of the Cross,” which was a reminder to the world that it “needs to rediscover the value of the Cross in order to open the
heart to love.”69
NEW WORLD TRIUMPH
Part of the long shadow cast by the events of September 11, 2001, fell on the planning for World Youth Day-2002, scheduled for Toronto, Canada. Ought the event be postponed until the threat of al-Qaeda had been reduced? Would young people simply refuse to travel, given the threat of hijacking? Would a terrorist organization attempt to disrupt the event itself, or poison the mass-produced food for the pilgrims, or take hostages? All these scenarios, and others, were bruited inside and outside the Vatican. Then there was the Pope’s health—suppose he didn’t come? Every time John Paul insisted that he would be there without fail, just as unfailingly another spate of rumors that he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, seemed to start.
On the afternoon of July 23, Pope John Paul II, having declined the use of an electronic cargo lift to get to the ground from the door of the Alitalia 767 on which he had flown from Rome, walked slowly, steadily, and by himself down the stairway that had been rolled up to the jetliner’s door. On reaching the tarmac at Toronto’s Lester B. Pearson International Airport, he pounded his cane onto the ground three times, as if to say, “You see? I told you I’d be here and you didn’t believe me. Well, I’m here.”
Toronto in July 2002 was a city whose high culture and media tended toward a certain smugness about their secularist certainties. Over six days, those certainties would be challenged—and if not displaced, then at least shaken. The challenge came primarily from the young people of World Youth Day themselves: pilgrims from forty countries and thirty-eight Canadian cities defied the terrorists, the endless bad news of the Long Lent of 2002, and the skeptics to come to Toronto and be with John Paul II at a World Youth Day whose icons were youthful heroes of the Catholic faith, including Blessed Marcel Callo, a martyr of the Mauthausen concentration camp, and Blessed Gianna Beretta Molla, a wife, mother, and pediatrician who had sacrificed her life for that of her unborn child in 1962.
Perhaps the event’s most dramatic moment came on Friday night, July 26, when, according to the now well-established rhythm of World Youth Day, the pilgrims were to participate in the traditional devotion known as the Way of the Cross, replicating Christ’s journey to Calvary. At World Youth Day-1997 in Paris, the Way of the Cross had been celebrated in several venues; in Toronto in July 2002, it was one great act of spiritual witness on the part of perhaps half a million people, walking solemnly through the center of the city, beginning at City Hall and continuing up University Avenue to the Ontario Provincial Parliament buildings in Queen’s Park. Friday night in Toronto is usually full of buzz; Friday night in Toronto had never been abuzz like this. Both local citizens and the local media were stunned by this public display of religious devotion in which one billion people throughout the world shared through a television feed from the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation).
The official World Youth Day-2002 souvenir album captured the spiritual electricity of the moment:
Jesus, Mary, the women, the soldiers, Pilate, Simon of Cyrene, the apostles and all the others pass by City Hall, enormous hospitals, corporate headquarters, and the provincial legislature. They walk along streets of concrete and asphalt, along the tree-lined boulevard that is University Avenue with its adjoining parks and tiny gardens, from the fading light of sunset to the darkness of night. An immense crowd, hundreds of thousands strong, … line[s] the route to watch and wonder and pray. Pilgrims without borders, pilgrims of the night, they come together with Jesus to relive his suffering and death.
Jesus moves through the heart of the city. He carries the Cross past air-conditioned skyscrapers filled with the busy and the powerful. He walks past the sick in the hospitals that line University Avenue. He shares their suffering, the young and old, male and female.
He makes his way, station after station, through the believers and the atheists, the hopeful and the despairing, the rich and the poor, the happy families and the forlorn individuals. He is the object of scrutiny by curious onlookers, excited children, contemplative crowds. He passes through a gathering of nations, languages, and cultures, sowing on his way the question that every Christian must answer: “And you, who do you say that I am?” He is nailed to the cross, then placed in the tomb. The crowd disperses into the night, each person looking for the last station—the station that manifests itself in life’s many twists and turns.
Tonight Jesus passes among us on the Way of the Cross—just as he does every day on the streets of the world.70
While the young people of World Youth Day were meeting in their catechetical groups, getting acquainted at Exhibition Place, and then giving Toronto an unexpected shock by turning its downtown into a medieval mystery play on Friday night, John Paul II was resting on Strawberry Island in Lake Simcoe, where the general secretary of the event, Father Thomas Rosica, C.S.B., had arranged something akin to the kind of vacation lodgings the Pope had long enjoyed in the Italian mountains. But John Paul was not only resting: he visited the “developmentally delayed adults” at the Huronia Regional Centre; took a boat ride on Lake Simcoe and dispensed rosaries to startled boaters whom he encountered; and hosted a lunch for fourteen young people on Friday afternoon, including Robin Cammarota, five members of whose Bronx parish in New York City had been killed on 9/11. Stories were exchanged over spaghetti, asparagus, salad, and cake; one youngster from Germany, twenty-year-old Anneke Pehlmöller, quickly caught on to Karol Wojtyła’s lifelong sweet tooth: “I think the Holy Father really liked the cake.” A twenty-six-year-old teacher from China, Shirley Tso, told John Paul that her people “loved him.” “They love me?” the Pope responded. “Yes,” Ms. Tso assured him, to which the Pope replied, “It is incredible.”71
So was World Youth Day-2002’s last event, the closing Mass at Toronto’s Downsview Park, a 664-acre former Canadian military base in the northern part of the sprawling metropolis. The previous night’s vigil had been built around World Youth Day-2002’s “salt and light” theme, with the Pope asking the hundreds of thousands of young people present to be his spiritual heirs and to build the civilization of love, as he had tried to do for decades. At the end of the vigil, just before his final blessing, John Paul gave pieces of salt to twelve young people, representing all present. He then returned to the motherhouse of the Sisters of St. Joseph, his Toronto residence, promising to return the next morning for the closing Mass. Then the weather intervened, dramatically.
As 9:30 A.M., the hour for the closing Mass, approached, some 800,000 pilgrims and congregants at Downsview Park were pelted by fierce rains and told not to come near the massive metal cross at the high altar, for fear of lightning strikes. The winds were so strong that tubular, four-story-high television platforms began tilting ominously, and correspondents and commentators were wiping rivers of water off their faces, live and in color. Local weather forecasters warned of the danger of tornadoes at just about the time Mass was scheduled to begin; their concerns were relayed to the papal party by the chief of security. On the helicopter ferrying the Pope to the venue, Stanisław Dziwisz said to John Paul II, “We need an intervention from God.” After the helicopter landed safely, the Pope was taken to a temporary sacristy where he was vested for Mass—a time during which he habitually prayed, as a preparation for the liturgy. Dziwisz asked the Pope to pray that God would clear the weather so that the Mass could go forward and no one would be hurt. John Paul made a great sign of the cross toward the sky, and went back to his prayer.
The worst of the storms passed; the weather began to quiet down; and by the time John Paul began his homily, the sun was shining on the drenched crowds. To Dziwisz, it was all eerily reminiscent of what had happened in Ukraine the year before. During John Paul’s address to young people in L’viv, rain began pouring down so heavily that no one could hear what the Pope was saying. So John Paul began singing a Polish children’s song, the equivalent of “Rain, rain go away …” He finished the song, the rain stopped, the crowd was stunned—and the rain commenced again after the Pope’s remarks.72
/> However the resolution of the meteorological drama might be explained, John Paul’s final Mass in Toronto was a fitting conclusion to what had been a remarkable week. Vested in the green chasuble Catholic priests wear while celebrating Mass during “Ordinary Time,” the Pope reminded his young charges that there were, in fact, no ordinary times for believers: for every life is by definition an extraordinary life, because every life is a life for whom Christ died. “Be the salt of the earth, be the light of the world!” he urged them “Do not be afraid to follow Christ on the royal road of the Cross!” At one point in his homily, John Paul pointed out that “you are young and the Pope is old”—which produced a spontaneous and lengthy chant in reply: “The Pope is young! The Pope is young!”
This being 2002, something had to be said about the Long Lent, and John Paul said it, forthrightly:
If you love Jesus, love the Church! Do not be discouraged by the sins and failings of some of her members. The harm done by some priests and religious to the young and vulnerable fills us all with a deep sense of sadness and shame. But think of the vast majority of dedicated and generous priests and religious whose only wish is to serve and do good! … At difficult moments in the Church’s life, the call to holiness becomes ever more urgent. And holiness is not a question of age; it is a matter of living in the Holy Spirit.73
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