The night before, a young man named Rémy Perras, who had been chosen to address the Pope on behalf of his generation, spontaneously exclaimed, “You are our father and our grandfather!”74 His sentiments were not unique, but they left open the question: why did John Paul II affect young people this way? An answer suggested itself at the conclusion of the Pope’s homily. The young people at Downsview Park had grown up in a world that constantly pandered to them, in advertising, dress codes, language; here was a man who did not pander, but who challenged. Moreover, he was not asking the young to take up anything other than the cause in which he was so clearly pouring out his life:
Although I have lived through much darkness, under harsh totalitarian regimes, I have seen enough evidence to be unshakably convinced that no difficulty, no fear is so great that it can completely suffocate the hope that springs eternal in the hearts of the young. You are our hope; the young are our hope. Do not let that hope die! Stake your lives on it! We are not the sum of our weaknesses and failures; we are the sum of the Father’s love for us and our real capacity to become the image of his Son.75
At the end of the Mass, John Paul asked the pilgrims present to take out the small wooden crosses they had been given in their knapsacks and to put them on—a kind of commissioning to take the Gospel out into the world. World Youth Day-2002 concluded with the Sunday Angelus, during which the Pope announced that World Youth Day-2005 would be held in Germany, at Cologne. John Paul then thanked the authorities and the planners for their work and extended final greetings to the pilgrims in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Polish. His French remarks, quoting one of Augustine’s tractates on the Gospel of John, were poignant—and, at the end, put Christ once again at the center of the pilgrim way: “We have been happy together in the light we have shared. We have really enjoyed being together. We have really rejoiced. But as we leave one another, let us not leave Him.”76
John Paul’s route home took him to Guatemala—where he canonized “Brother Pedro” de San José de Betancourt, a seventeenth-century apostle of charity sometimes called the “St. Francis of the Americas”—and to Mexico City. There, before one of the greatest throngs of a pontificate that had already drawn some of the largest crowds in human history, the Pope canonized Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, the sixteenth-century Indian who had received the impress of the icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe on his mantel, or tilma, in 1531. Juan Diego had been a figure of controversy for decades, and some scholars had denied his existence; six years after his 1990 beatification by John Paul II at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, an abbot long associated with the shrine, Father Guillermo Schulenberg, revived the controversy by describing Juan Diego as a fictional character in a myth. A Vatican investigation followed; the report of a group of thirty scholars from different countries, presented to the Holy See’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints, took the position that Juan Diego had indeed existed, thus clearing the way for the canonization.
For John Paul, Juan Diego embodied the meeting of two cultures, and the formation of a new national identity, through the power of a universal Gospel that could speak to all:
“The Lord looks down from heaven, he sees all the sons of men” [Psalm 33.13], we recited with the Psalmist, once again confessing our faith in God who makes no distinctions of race or culture. In accepting the Christian message without forgoing his indigenous identity, Juan Diego discovered the profound truth of the new humanity, in which we are all called to be children of God. Thus he facilitated the fruitful meeting of two worlds and became the catalyst for the new Mexican identity, closely united to Our Lady of Guadalupe, whose mestizo face expresses her spiritual motherhood which embraces all Mexicans.77
The following day, August 1, John Paul beatified two seventeenth-century Indian lay martyrs, Juan Battista and Jacinto de los Angeles, during a Liturgy of the Word at the Basilica of Guadalupe. Another controversy ensued when the master of papal liturgical ceremonies, Bishop Piero Marini, arranged for the rite to include a traditional Zapotec Indian “blessing” of the Pope, featuring a native woman and a great deal of smoke.
WOODEN SHOES, DIVINE MERCY, AND THE MYSTERIES OF LIGHT
John Paul returned to Castel Gandolfo for a few weeks of relative quiet after his New World travels before leaving on August 16 for a brief visit to Poland. After arriving at the Kraków airport, he went to stay in his old rooms in the archiepiscopal residence at Franciszkanska, 3. The next day, he consecrated the new (and starkly modernist) Basilica of Divine Mercy in the Łagiewniki area of Kraków, a few hundred yards from the convent chapel where the relics of St. Faustyna Kowalska were venerated. He had come to Łagiewniki, he said in his homily, because humanity’s need for God’s mercy comes “from the depth of hearts filled with suffering, apprehension, and uncertainty, and at the same time yearning for an infallible source of hope.” They had all come to Łagiewniki “to look into the eyes of the merciful Jesus, in order to find deep within his gaze the reflection of his inner life, as well as the light of grace which we have already received so often, and which God holds out to us anew each day and every day.” He wished “solemnly to entrust the world to Divine Mercy” for it was only “in the mercy of God [that] the world will find peace and mankind will find happiness!”78 No one begrudged the native son a few moments of reminiscence before the final blessing:
At the end of this solemn liturgy, I want to say that many of my personal memories are tied to this place. During the Nazi occupation, when I was working in the Solvay factory near here, I used to come here. Even now I recall the street that goes from Borek Falęcki to Dębniki that I took every day, going to work on the different [shifts] with the wooden shoes on my feet. They’re the shoes we used to wear then. How was it possible to imagine that one day the man with the wooden shoes would consecrate the Basilica of the Divine Mercy at Łagiewniki [in] Kraków.79
The following day, a Sunday, John Paul II celebrated yet another in his series of colossal outdoor Masses on the Błonia Krakowski, the Kraków Commons, where in June 1979 he had begged his people never to lose touch with the Christian roots of their nation and culture. The holiness that had nurtured those roots was the theme on this occasion, as the Pope beatified four Poles: Sancja Szymkowiak, a sister who had died in 1942 from the hardships of the Nazi occupation; Jan Beyzym, a missionary to the lepers of Madagascar who died there in 1912; Jan Balicki, who had suffered much from both the Nazi occupation and the communist usurpation of Poland’s liberties before dying in 1948; and Zygmunt Feliks Feliński, the archbishop of Warsaw in 1862–63, who spent twenty years in Siberian exile before his death in 1895. John Paul returned to Rome on August 19, having said Mass once again at one of his favorite spots for meditation and reflection during his years as a bishop in Kraków, the Holy Land shrine of Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, which was on the road to his boyhood home, Wadowice.
After presiding and preaching at the September 20 funeral Mass of another twentieth-century confessor, Cardinal Francis Xavier Nguyên van Thuân, whom he described as a man “who lived his whole life under the banner of hope,” John Paul led a joint Catholic-Lutheran Vespers service in St. Peter’s on October 4, marking the seventh centenary of the birth of St. Bridget of Sweden. Two days later, before a tremendous crowd in St. Peter’s Square composed in large part of members of Opus Dei, the Pope canonized Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, the founder of “The Work.” In his homily, the Pope stressed the ways in which the new saint had helped others to see that “work, and any other activity, carried out with the help of grace, is converted into a means of daily sanctification.” St. Josemaría, John Paul continued, had taught a “supernatural vision of life” in which every activity is undertaken in the midst of a “life in which God is always present.” What can seem monotonous to us is in fact the way that God comes to us, and the way that “we can cooperate with his plan of salvation.” Yet for all his determination to see Christians convert the world through apostolic witness in their daily lives, St
. Josemaría had recognized “what is not a paradox but a perennial truth: the fruitfulness of the apostolate lies above all in prayer and in intense and constant sacramental life.” Conversation with the Lord was “the secret of holiness and the true success of the saints.”80
The next day, while more than 100,000 pilgrims remained in Rome after the Escrivá canonization, John Paul II welcomed Romanian Orthodox Patriarch Teoctist to Rome, formally greeting him at the end of an audience for the pilgrims and entrusting Teoctist and his ministry to the pilgrims’ prayers. It was, papal spokesman Navarro-Valls remembered, another way to underscore the ecumenical imperative, as was the grand program laid out for the patriarch, which included visits to the Roman major basilicas, lectures at the Pontifical Gregorian University and the Pontifical Institute for Oriental Studies, an evening with the Sant’Egidio Community, and lunch following several hours of meetings with the Pope. The week came to an end with a Mass at St. Peter’s on October 13, at which the two octogenarian leaders, eighty-two-year-old John Paul II and eighty-seven-year-old Teoctist, jointly presided over the Liturgy of the Word and preached (John Paul deferring to Teoctist for the first homily), before they recited the Creed together in Romanian. During the Liturgy of the Eucharist, Teoctist returned to the altar for the sign of peace, and then at the end of Mass came back to the altar again to give the final blessing to the congregation after the Pope had given his.81 In a pontificate of exceptional ecumenical hospitality, an especially warm welcome had been reserved for Patriarch Teoctist, the first Orthodox leader to welcome John Paul to a historically Orthodox country.
Seventy-two hours after Teoctist returned to Bucharest, John Paul II gave the Catholic Church another surprise: five new mysteries of the Rosary, which he described in an apostolic letter, Rosarium Virginis Mariae, signed on October 16, 2002, to mark the beginning of the twenty-fifth year of his pontificate. The letter began with the Pope reminding his readers that the Rosary, while an instrument of Marian piety, was “at heart a Christocentric prayer,” as each of its fifty-three invocations of Mary centered on the phrase, “And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.” John Paul then invited the Church to rediscover the power of the Rosary as a prayer containing “all the depth of the Gospel message in its entirety”—a kind of “compendium” of the New Testament.82 It was to underscore that Gospel-centeredness of the Rosary that the Pope proposed as “an addition to the traditional pattern” of reciting the Rosary.
As the Rosary had evolved over the second millennium of Christian history, it had invited meditation on the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ, and on the fruits of the resurrection in the early Church, by means of three clusters of five “mysteries”: the Joyful Mysteries, dealing with the birth of Christ and his youth; the Sorrowful Mysteries, dealing with the Passion; and the Glorious Mysteries, from the Resurrection through the Descent of the Holy Spirit and on to the Assumption of Mary, first of disciples and pattern for all discipleship, into heaven. What was missing from this schema, John Paul noted, was a “meditation on certain particularly significant moments in [Christ’s] public ministry.” Thus he proposed, subject to “the freedom of individuals and communities,” a fourth set of meditations, the “Mysteries of Light” or Luminous Mysteries, centered on the public life of Jesus: “(1) his Baptism in the Jordan, (2) his self-manifestation at the wedding of Cana, (3) his proclamation of the Kingdom of God, with his call to conversion [as at the Sermon on the Mount], (4) his Transfiguration, and finally (5) his institution of the Eucharist, as the sacramental expression of the Paschal Mystery.”83 Each of these new Luminous Mysteries, John Paul explained, was “a revelation of the Kingdom now present in the very person of Jesus.” It was true, he noted, that “in these mysteries, apart from the miracle at Cana, the presence of Mary remains in the background.” Yet it was also true that Mary’s instruction to the waiters at the wedding feast—“Do whatever he tells you”—was first made “directly by the Father at the Baptism in the Jordan and echoed by John the Baptist” before being “placed upon Mary’s lips at Cana” and becoming her “great, maternal counsel … to the Church of every age.”84
Throughout his pontificate, John Paul II was accused of a kind of rigid traditionalism, especially by an often uncomprehending secular press, but not infrequently within the Church as well. The addition of the Mysteries of Light to one of the most traditional of Catholic devotions underscored the poverty of this characterization. Not only was the Pope “changing the Rosary,” as some put it; he was doing so in order to bring into clearer light the radical character of the Incarnation: here, in Jesus and in the Church that is his Mystical Body in history, we can touch the Kingdom of God present among us. Evangelical witness to the truth of the Gospel amidst the turbulence of history was at the heart of Marian piety, as Karol Wojtyła had learned from reading St. Louis Grignion de Montfort during World War II. To remind the Church of that truth at the beginning of the third millennium was the strategic goal of introducing the Mysteries of Light.85
To those with a sense of modern Italian history, the Pope’s address to the Italian parliament on November 14 was a surprise as great as the alteration of the “traditional pattern” of the Rosary. Modern Italy had been born in a decades-long fit of anticlericalism leading to the occupation and absorption of the Papal States; the effects of that ugliness had lingered in some minds far beyond the resolution of the outstanding issues in the 1929 Lateran Treaty, by which the popes were recognized as sovereigns of a new entity, Vatican City State, and several extraterritorial properties in and around Rome (such as Castel Gandolfo). Roman mayor Walter Veltroni, not wishing to be trumped completely by the national parliament, made John Paul a citizen of Rome on October 31. The Pope (who ended every day by blessing the city from his bedroom window) couldn’t resist a joke: “It took me twenty-four years of work to get this,” he told the mayor. “St. Paul had it easier.”86
In his address at the Palazzo Montecitorio to 800 parliamentarians and national political figures, including Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, John Paul stressed a theme that was becoming ever more prominent in his public witness: the importance of Europe remaining in contact with its Christian roots. As he put it to the heirs of the revolution of Garibaldi and Cavour, “Italy’s social and cultural identity, and the civilizing mission it has exercised and continues to exercise in Europe and the world, would be most difficult to understand without reference to Christianity, its lifeblood.” Some declined to applaud during the forty-five-minute speech. But when it was over, the entire audience gave the Pope a standing ovation, a tribute to his physical courage as well as a gesture of gratitude to the Polish pope who had paid more attention to being a pastor in Rome and Italy than had many of his Italian predecessors.87
The year ended with a reminder that the Long Lent in America continued. On December 13, 2002, John Paul II accepted the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law as archbishop of Boston, finally acceding to the cardinal’s judgment that the circumstances made it impossible for him to govern the diocese effectively. A Boston auxiliary bishop, Richard Lennon, was appointed apostolic administrator until a successor was named. In May 2004, John Paul named Law, who had spent the intervening year and a half out of the public eye, the archpriest of the Basilica of St. Mary Major.
The turbulence of history had displayed itself with a kind of inexorability in the two years following the Great Jubilee of 2000. September 11, the war in Afghanistan, the Long Lent of 2002, continuing ecumenical and interreligious conflict—all of these wore on the Pope at least as heavily as the burden of his illness. Yet John Paul had not failed to keep faith with his own charge to the entire Church at the end of the jubilee year—to leave the safe, shallow waters of institutional maintenance and put out into the deep of history in order to advance the new evangelization. His witness to truth and charity in Greece, Ukraine, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Bulgaria, as well as the remarkable success of World Youth Day-2002 in Toronto, define
d a new phase in the pontificate, one in which the Pope would lead by suffering, and lead through his suffering.
Papal Mass in Wrocław, June 1983. (L’Osservatore Romano)
John Paul II and Wojciech Jaruzelski, June 1987. (L’Osservatore Romano)
Papal Mass in Warsaw, June 1987. (L’Osservatore Romano)
At the threshold of the Holy Door of St. Peter’s, December 24, 1999. (L’Osservatore Romano)
At the papal apartment window overlooking St. Peter’s Square, December 31, 1999–January 1, 2000. (L’Osservatore Romano)
John Paul II at Mount Nebo, looking across the Jordan River, March 20, 2000. (L’Osservatore Romano)
John Paul II at the Western Wall of the Temple in Jerusalem, March 26, 2000. (L’Osservatore Romano)
John Paul II at Lourdes, August 14, 2004. (L’Osservatore Romano)
At Castel Gandolfo, September 2004. (L’Osservatore Romano)
Good Friday, March 25, 2005. (L’Osservatore Romano)
At the Policlinico Gemelli, February 6, 2005. (L’Osservatore Romano)
John Paul II lying in state in the Sala Clementina of the Apostolic Palace. (L’Osservatore Romano)
CHAPTER EIGHT
Darkening Valley
2003–2004
February 7, 2003 John Paul II approves revisions in canon law requested by American bishops in light of sexual abuse crisis.
The End and the Beginning Page 40