Invoking John Paul the Great

Last month’s anniversary Mass was something of a grand recapitulation of the John Paul II years.

Pope John Paul II prays during a Mass in St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican in 2003. (CNS photo by Alessia Giuliani, Catholic Press Photo)

ROME. Age certainly accelerates one’s sense of the passage of time.

Well do I remember high school classes that felt as long as Würm Glaciation, the minute hand circumambulating the clock’s perimeter at a glacial pace. Yet this past April 27, sitting in the south transept of the world’s greatest tombstone – the Papal Basilica of St. Peter’s in the Vatican – I remembered being at that exact spot at the 1996 Mass marking John Paul II’s priestly golden jubilee, and the intervening decades seem to have passed at hypersonic speed. Tempus fugit, indeed!

It was the tenth anniversary of John Paul II’s canonization, so it was also unnerving to realize that a full decennium had gone by since the man whose biography I had written was raised to the glory of the altars in company with Pope John XXIII. There were murmurings, then, that Pope Francis had contrived a double-header canonization to dilute the focus on John Paul II. To my mind, though, it was vere dignum et iustum, “truly right and just,” that the two bookends of the Second Vatican Council – the pope who summoned the Council to re-energize the Church for evangelization and the pope who gave the Council its authoritative interpretation while calling us to live Vatican II’s teaching in the “New Evangelization” – should be canonized together.

Be that as it may, last month’s anniversary Mass was something of a grand recapitulation of the John Paul II years.

It was organized by John Paul’s longtime secretary and confidant, Stanisław Dziwisz, now the emeritus cardinal-archbishop of Kraków. His episcopal motto, Sursum Corda [Lift Up Your Hearts], poignantly summarized the Polish pope’s electrifying impact on the world Church.

The principal celebrant was Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, dean of the college of cardinals and longtime Sostituto of the Secretariat of State under John Paul – in effect, the papal chief of staff. At ninety years old, Cardinal Re still exudes the incandescent energy he displayed as Sostituto from 1989 until 2000 – although, as I reminded him at the post-Mass reception in the atrium of the Paul VI Audience Hall, “You fell asleep on my shoulder during the premier of Our God’s Brother in Kraków in June 1997!”

And there, in the first row of concelebrants, was John Paul II’s great vicar for the Diocese of Rome, Cardinal Camillo Ruini: ninety-three and confined to a wheelchair, but determined to celebrate the sanctity of the man whose vision of a missionary, culture-reforming Church Ruini had worked heroically to bring to life in Rome and throughout Italy. What, I wondered (and not for the first time), would things have been like if Pope Benedict XVI had made Cardinal Ruini his Secretary of State?

One concelebrant’s presence raised eyebrows. Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, then merely “Don Vincenzo,” was endlessly solicitous of John Paul II for twenty-six and a half years. Over the past decade, however, Paglia has systematically dismantled – some would say, demolished – one of the Polish pontiff’s signature initiatives: the John Paul II Institute on Marriage and the Family at the Pontifical Lateran University, which today bears only a nominal relationship to the vibrant intellectual center that Carlo Caffarra, Stanisław Grygiel, Livio Melina, José Granados, and other distinguished scholars once created. (Which likely explains why the institute has so few students today.)

At the end of a Mass, the concelebrating cardinals and bishops laid a floral wreath on John Paul II’s tomb, between the chapel of Michelangelo’s Pietà and the basilica’s Blessed Sacrament chapel. They then led the congregation in a prayer composed for the occasion, which beautifully captured the Christ-centeredness of an epic pontificate and evoked some of its greatest concerns:

O Saint John Paul, from Heaven’s window give us your blessing! Bless the Church, which you loved so much and courageously served along the pathways of the world, to bring Jesus to everyone and everyone to Jesus. Let us hear again your powerful cry, “Open, open wide the doors to Christ!” Help us open the doors of our hearts to Jesus, so that we may be tireless missionaries of the Gospel today.

Bless the young, who were your great passion…Bless the families, bless every family. You who felt Satan’s assault against this precious spark of Heaven that God kindled on earth, make us strong and courageous in defending the family…

…Open new pathways to the Divine Mercy that Jesus made near to us in the Sacrament of Pardon, in the Most Holy Eucharist, and in the Charity that transforms us into a window of God’s Love. Amen.

St. John Paul II, pray for us.


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About George Weigel 520 Articles
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies. He is the author of over twenty books, including Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (1999), The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II—The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy (2010), and The Irony of Modern Catholic History: How the Church Rediscovered Itself and Challenged the Modern World to Reform. His most recent books are The Next Pope: The Office of Peter and a Church in Mission (2020), Not Forgotten: Elegies for, and Reminiscences of, a Diverse Cast of Characters, Most of Them Admirable (Ignatius, 2021), and To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II (Basic Books, 2022).

27 Comments

  1. Despite the inadequacies of his pontificate [which were easily overlooked given the wonder and genius of it all] there aren’t many days when I don’t think of him and wish he was here, now, to bring an iron fist down upon the fraudulence we endure. Presently we endure Pope John Paul’s broadly inadequate episcopal appointments as well as his unwillingness to systematically extinguish absurd theological aberrance among the clergy, religious, the episcopate and the theological academy.
    Peter Kolvenbach, SJ [Superior General 1983 – 2008] told Pope John Paul when the idea of elevating Father Bergoglio to the episcopate came up that Father Bergoglio was emotionally unstable and temperamentally unreliable. The Holy Father ignored that caution apparently because Bergoglio was erroneously not perceived as sympathetic to Marxism.
    What an extraordinary miscalculation.
    Great men can make great mistakes.

    • My dear fellow. I would greatly recommend Mark Shriver’s biography of Pope Francis. He is a very complicated man and has been through a lot. His present actions and decisions must be seen through his complex past in order to be fully understood. Don’t forget that he IS Gods choice for the present pontificate. In the end much good will come out of it all. God bless.

      • It is good to recall an insight from Pope Benedict from the early nineties in regard to papal conclaves…”The Holy Spirit always inspires, men rarely listen.”
        We’ve all been through quite a lot.
        The post-conciliar epoch has been shouldered well by some, pitifully poorly by others. There is no excuse for any priest to be unfaithful to Sacred Scripture, the Apostolic Tradition and the perennial Magisterium of the Church, . We do not substitute our own notions for these pillars of Roman Catholicism.
        I’d recommend you dive into Marcantonio Colonna’s [Henry Sire] biography of Pope Francis. Mr. Sire employed a “nom de plume” in order to forestall the consequences which would come from authorship of a biography written without rose colored glasses. His caution was well founded. “The Dictator Pope” proved to be the straw that brought the wrath down upon him.

      • May we all be freed of the history of our own “complicated” complexities and, in the mercy of God, at least not inflict our complexities on others…About the related temptation of PAPOLATRY…even when the indwelling Holy Spirit intends a particular pope for a particular time, the particular cardinal electors—invested with free will—might still choose another. Yes? “God’s choice”?

        In the END, will the current collage of disinterred ambiguities be seen by the college of cardinals to have been a time-wasting, confusing, and scandalous side track? And, when exposed to the light of day, consigned with finality into the dustbin of history. All the ambiguously novel moral theology, the ambiguously novel ecclesiology and ecumenism, and the not-so-ambiguously novel appointments and exiles.

        God sometimes writes straight with crooked lines!

        The work of the real and perennial Catholic Church, roughly scoped-out by the Council, and then by Popes John Paul II and Benedict, might then restart…That is, HOW to love truly what is particularly “concrete,” without winking at or discounting the revealed Truth—which is more than a backwardist idea or merely “abstract”? HOW to live the beatitudes on the now big-ticket items of structural and even global reach, but without diluting the concreteness of the red-line Commandments?

        St. John Paul II spoke directly to this call to holiness in, but not of the world:

        “The relationship between faith and morality shines forth with all its brilliance in the unconditional respect due to the insistent demands of the personal dignity of every man [italics], demands protected by those moral norms [!] which prohibit without exception [!] actions which are intrinsically evil” [!] (Veritatis Splendor, n. 90). “The Church is no way [!] the author or the arbiter of this [‘moral’] norm” (n. 95).

      • Mr. Connor:

        It is unfair to God to hold that a Pontiff is “God’s choice.”

        As Pope Benedict XVI observer: “The Holy Spirit is always speaking, but that does not mean the Church is always listening.”

      • It is not respectful of God to say he is God’s choice. As Benedict said, God has nothing to do with how popes are chosen. It is all subject to human fallibility made better or worse by their prayerful intent.
        Sympathy for the alleged hard life of Francis might better be directed towards his many victims.

      • James Connor, it is possible that after the Thunderbolts which struck St Peter’s on that dismal February 11th, 2013, God’s passive will accepted the election of an Active Ministerium. Never forget: “I did not abdicate.” PPBXVI to Peter Seewald, volume 2.

        • I would add, February 11th, 1929 The Lateran Treaty trapped the Pope in the small Vatican City State, the Prince of this World taking back his territory…
          “The date was deliberately chosen”… said the Pope Emeritus from Marta Ecclesia.

    • Much of what you said is untrue. It is simply a rumor that Kolvenbach produced a report on Bergoglio. This rumor is spread on the internet by SSPX and extremist traditionalist Catholics, who seem determined to believe anything that supports their various hatred, true or no. I was astonished at the people online who tended to be very critical of JP II – and subsequently discovered that almost all those who were critical were from the SSPX wing of the church. You see, JP II excommunicated their cult leader, the man they view as a replacement for God himself – Lefebvre. So these people seem determined to besmirch the memory of JP II and tell all sorts of lies about him. They will very delicately blame JP II for everything bad in the church, and then claim to be ordinary, disinterested Catholics online. But after several years of going back and forth with these people, I found they had an deep animus against JP II.

  2. Compare this – or any – picture of JPII with the photo of Francis in the recent article concerning the CBS interview.

    The contrast between the two is so stark as to be pathetic.

    Whatever

  3. About the eyebrow-raising presence of one Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, perhaps the answer is in his purple-capped inclusion (!) in the homoerotic wall mural still erected in his former cathedral for the Diocese of Terni-Narni-Amelia–just a few “walking together” steps outside of Rome: https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/leading-vatican-archbishop-featured-in-homoerotic-painting-he-commissioned

    Surely, this picture is worth a thousand words! Or, maybe even 5,000 words as in Fiducia Supplicans? How better for Paglia both to prostitute the John Paul II Institute on Marriage and the Family and to graffiti-over Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment” in the nearby Sistine Ceiling”?

    Judgment? What Judgment?

  4. Archbishop Paglia showed. Judas showed at the Last Supper. It happens.
    As for our Bishops who truly care about Sacred Scripture, Tradition, and previous faithful pontificates, St. John Paul the Great has one message for you:
    “Do not be afraid.”
    It is high time to protect your flock from the wolves in sheep’s clothing.

  5. There are persons who convey their greatness more vividly in their proximity to you. As was my extraordinary experience in Rome. Then in his waning years he was Christ bearing his cross.

  6. it was vere dignum et iustum, “truly right and just,” that the two bookends of the Second Vatican Council – the pope who summoned the Council to re-energize the Church for evangelization and the pope who gave the Council its authoritative interpretation while calling us to live Vatican II’s teaching in the “New Evangelization” – should be canonized together.

    This statement says more about George Weigel than Jorge Bergoglio.

    Mr. Weigel: Let. It. Go.

    • Not yet declared “great.” But at least sorta-great for non-amnesiacs who still measure the significance of the centuries-long fall of the Roman Empire…And, most recently the collapse of the Soviet Empire in barely a decade.

      From Rome and visiting his homeland of Poland, Pope St. John Paul II had a hand in toppling the modern-day Empire and leveling Iron Curtain–and with almost no casualties. Lest we forget, some dead white dude named Churchill said this in St. Louis, only 78 years ago in 1946:

      “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an IRON CURTAIN has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.”

      If not yet judged by history as “great,” St. John Paul II spoke as a presence, and as something more than a corner-office word merchant.

      • Three and only three Popes have had the title, “the Great,” appended to their name: Pope St. Leo I (440-461), Pope St. Gregory I (590-604), and Pope St. Nicholas I (858-867). The Church has never officially pronounced any of these popes as “Great”. These popes have rather been identified as “Great” not only by popular acclamation at the time of their deaths but also and most significantly by history itself, in each of these cases over the course of centuries and even millennia after their deaths. In the scant past 19 years since John Paul II’s death, his pontificate has undergone significant critique and re-evaluation which will doubtlessly continue for years and, yes, centuries to come. The facile attribution of the title “the Great” to him is both premature and superficial, especially tinged as it is with a nostalgic sentimentality and a narrow ideology.

    • Wrong. He is “the Great”. His vast body of work and influence, his taking down of Communism, his reconstruction of a church that was in thrall to the modern world, all of that makes him “The Great”. He stood alone against the vast forces of secularism, which seemed prime to take over the world. He opposed that trend, almost single handedly, even though the media tried to paint him as unimportant and “medieval”. He gave birth to a new crop of priests the “John Paul” priests which are slowly helping the church recover from the scandals of homosexuality. From all accounts, modern priests are now well versed in JP II, in Benedict and are becoming much more saintly and conservative. We owe JP II a lot. His ability to take on modern creepy philosophies and rebut them intellectually was magnificent. You have a lot to learn about the man. I suggest you read Weigel’s biography.

  7. Yes it has been observed by admirers, those who love him and would prefer John Paul were our pontiff, that he had faults, as do the rest of us. Insofar as his poor judgment in appointments [McCarrick among others], the refusal of John Paul to address the Marcial Maciel scandal had much to do with his naivete in the good of human nature, his advancing Parkinson’s condition. 2005 after his death and the ascendance of Benedict to the papacy, Benedict made true to his vow to rid the Church of “filth”.
    Benedict had his own baggage and realized the difficulty in dealing with the homosexual iron curtain of cardinals and bishops. If and when we have a conclave for a new pope there’s hope for a virtual miracle that someone like Willem Eijk, Robert Sarah, Rainer Woelki would gain the votes for election.

    • John Paul was a wise man, a holy man, and such individuals can be, but not always, naïve in the face of flawless bold mendacity. His love of the Church and the Holy Priesthood, his emergence from a society beset with the demonic deception inflicted by National Socialism and Marxism would have contributed to his misperception. That Pope John Paul was grievously mistaken in his estimation of McCarrick and Maciel is undoubtedly true and it is an indictment of his administrative capacity, but it cannot be identified as moral culpability. Innocence can be blind in the face of evil.

  8. John Paul was a holy man, and deserves to be a saint. He was indeed “Great.” That said, he had a blind spot with regards to Marcial Maciel, McCarrck, etc. perhaps even Santos are not perfect. Pope Benedict may not be “great” but he seemed to have a better handle on dealing with abusive, high level clergy. We can still pray to St. John Paul, he is still a Saint.

    • Never underestimate the deviousness of the lavendar mafia. No one had seen such a force in the church before, and they hid themselves well. It took us 20 years after the outbreak of their activities to understand how well they had played their insidious game. A major part of this was seeming to be conservative and Bergoglio was the epitome of this. When he was elected, all the left wing Catholic newspapers went into mourning and decried his “conservatism”. They tried their best to smear him as helping the dictators of Argentina kill people. Then he came out with his pro homosexual comments and suddenly all the criticism ceased. Before his election, everyone thought he was a pretty conservative guy.

    • I know plenty of decent and devout Catholics who have been deceived by sexual predators. Those who exploit minors are expert at building trust in parishes, schools,and communities and that allows them access to our children.

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