Vatican City, May 18, 2020 / 05:00 am (CNA).- “Thirty-nine years ago today I was on my way into St. Peter’s Square when the pope was shot,” Joan Lewis said over the phone on May 13.
It is just one of many vivid memories Lewis has of the 65 years of her life that overlapped with St. John Paul II’s, including four decades in Rome, where she closely followed the pope as a journalist and later as a Vatican translator who worked on an apostolic exhortation and the pope’s last will and testament.
Today the energetic 79-year-old Vatican journalist has spent the past few months in isolation in her apartment during Italy’s coronavirus lockdown.
Ahead of the 100th anniversary of St. John Paul II’s birth on May 18, Lewis affectionately recalled her memories of the Polish pope with a sweet tooth during a quarantine phone conversation.
“One day … I read that he loved chocolate,” she said. “I am a chocoholic, and so I thought, ‘Gee, I wonder if he might like some brownies or chocolate chip cookies?’”
“My dad’s motto was: ‘Don’t be backward in coming forward,’” she said. “So, using that to my advantage, I made about two dozen brownies, about three or four dozen chocolate chip cookies, and I called Mgsr. Stanisław, and I said: ‘I have something for the Holy Father.’”
“I didn’t tell him what it was,” Lewis added with a laugh.
Msgr. Stanisław Dziwisz, now a cardinal, was the long-time personal secretary of John Paul II, working with him since Karol Wojtyla was Archbishop of Kraków.
Lewis arranged a time to meet Dziwisz — explaining that what she had to give to the pope could not be trusted to be left with the Swiss Guards. The next day she received a thank you note.
This became a regular habit for the American at the Vatican. Every few months she would bake a sweet treat for the pope.
But word spread fast in the world’s smallest country, and soon she was baking cookies for the Vatican gendarmes, Vatican personnel office, and the nuns who worked the switchboard.
“Did I tell you with that last bunch how much the Holy Father loves your cookies?” she said Dziwisz once told her. Lewis cherishes that memory.
“People could really relate to this man,” she said. “That was the most wonderful thing about him.”
“He loved family. He loved kids. He loved different cultures. He loved skiing. He loved swimming. People could just relate to him. He was just so human and warm. I always loved his smile. His eyes seemed to twinkle so much.”
Lewis is quick to point out that covering the Vatican as a journalist 40 years ago was not like the “time of the media that we have today.”
“There were no cell phones like we have now to take pictures or record things,” she said.
One spring day in 1981, Lewis was standing outside of the Holy See press office on her way to pick up a printed bulletin.
“Ten seconds later I hear someone scream in Italian: ‘They have shot the pope!’” she said.
“That was a time when I think I experienced paralysis because my brain could not process those words,” she said. “I ran into the square and in any language I knew I asked people, groups what they saw, what they heard.”
Lewis found out that two American women had also been injured in the assassination attempt on the pope. Later, she went to visit one of the women in the hospital and eventually attended the trial of the assassin, Mehmet Ali Ağca, in Rome.
On the day of the shooting, she recalled: “We didn’t move from the press office until it was about 1:30 in the morning because none of us could write the last line on our news story until we knew if John Paul had survived surgery or not.”
At the time that John Paul II was shot, “he had only been pope for a couple of years,” she said.
Lewis was in Cairo, Egypt, working on a project for a few months with the former New York Times bureau chief Christopher Wren in 1978 when John Paul II was elected pope.
She was staying in an apartment overlooking the Nile with a family friend when they heard a news report on the radio that the pope had died.
“We were going, ‘Oh my gosh, they are really behind on this,’” she said. “We thought that they were speaking of Paul VI.” Pope Paul VI had died the month before.
“But no! It was John Paul I, so then of course we riveted,” she said.
“We were listening to the radio on October 16, 1978 at a little after seven at night, the BBC news. We heard ‘Habemus papam,’ and it was a long, drawn-out name.”
“They looked at me and said, ‘Where in Italy is he from?’” she recalled. “I said, ‘I don’t know that name.’ Then we heard he was Polish and we all dropped our forks, you know.”
Some of Lewis’ favorite memories of John Paul II are from the times she attended Mass in his private chapel.
“I have never seen anyone pray like John Paul did in my whole life,” she said.
She also met the pope as a part of the papal party for World Youth Day in Denver in 1993.
“I always loved his talks to young people,” she said. “Whenever his speeches, homilies, whatever came to my desk where it was the Holy Father addressing young people … I wanted to be the one to write it.”
Working at the Vatican from 1990 to 2005, Lewis served as part of the Holy See delegations to international conferences, including the United Nations Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, and other conferences in Copenhagen, Istanbul, and Beijing.
She said that the pope’s message for the delegates was “always to put the human being at the center of every single thing, and to protect and to defend life, to protect and defend human freedom.”
“I remember him saying very clearly to the delegation before we left. He said: ‘I want you to know … you can count on my prayers every day.’ He told us that he knew these conferences would be an uphill battle and said ‘I’m just a phone call away if you ever need me.’”
Lewis’ work for the Vatican also included translation. She remembers translating parts of Pastores dabo vobis, the pope’s 1992 post-synodal apostolic exhortation on the formation of priests, into English.
“I personally translated the Holy Father’s last will and testament,” she said, recalling that she was sitting at her desk in tears at the time.
When the pope died, Lewis said it felt like she had just lost her father a second time. Her dad had died 13 years earlier.
“All across St. Peter’s Square there were 50-60,000 just all over the place praying rosaries, singing songs, burning candles, especially young people,” she recalled of the days leading up to his death.
“He had died at 9:37, so we finished our news … and then I went out into St. Peter’s Square and finally the emotions got a hold of me, and I sobbed for 45 minutes,” she said.
“I loved every person in that square because they were paying tribute to the man I loved, this huge spiritual father.”
Fifteen years later, Lewis said that she hopes she will be able to visit St. John Paul II’s tomb in St. Peter’s Basilica on the centenary of his birth. The basilica has been closed to the public for the past nine weeks to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus. In recent weeks, the Italian government has slowly loosened its restrictions and will allow public Masses to resume on May 18, St. John Paul II’s birthday.
Lewis, who turns 80 next month, said that she has missed seeing friends, going to restaurants, stopping by the EWTN office, and going to the hairdresser during the lockdown.
But this has not stopped her from contributing to her parish’s weekly Mass livestream as a long-distance lector, writing posts for her blog, and recording her weekly radio show.
The weeks under quarantine have also given her some time to work on a book about her memories of St. John Paul II. She says it will be called “I baked cookies for a saint.”
“I feel enormously blessed that my life was touched by this man’s life,” Lewis said.
[…]
Come on, ‘Mal’.
Show once again how to uncritically and blindly cheerlead this Pope who will not condemn the world’s most powerful leader in his maniacal push on abortion.
Francis’s ‘hitman’ analogy means nothing when the President of the United States ably plays that role.
Ramjet, do you recall these words: “I have not come to condemn but to save.”
Pope Francis, who is more pro-life than most Catholics, gave this very Jesus-like response: “Let (Biden) talk to his pastor about that incoherence.” That is how it should be.
Ah. Well, we know that Cardinal Gregory and Joe Biden are both eager to talk this out. I feel better already.
You will feel even better, Carl, if you pray for them instead of just dismissing this appropriate advice.
Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, ss the scriptures teach. And woe to those who repeatedly defend the indefensible under the pretense of being loving. A shipwreck is a shipwreck Mal, whether you recognize it or not.
Do you recognize this, Athanasius? “Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.”
The key words are “evil,” and “falsely,” and “for my sake.” The issue is why evil rather than truth, and falsely rather than not falsely, and especially for my sake rather than for the sake of worldly ideology?
In the same way, we are admonished to not only love one another, but to love one another “as I have loved you” (Luke). This raises the stakes and elevates the call above humanism (its lookalike). Or, again, when Matthew speaks not simplistically of the poor, but of the “poor in spirit” which is not so limited to an economic demographic or subject to ideological manipulation.
Maybe Athanasius and others are not so uninformed and ripe for being reviled as some suppose, Mal.
Didn’t the Pope just two weeks ago invite wild-eyed abortion apologist and advocate Nancy Pelosi into the Vatican to partake of the Eucharist? Joe Biden is absolutely incoherent on every issue, not just abortion. But Pope Francis based on his kid-glove treatment of Nancy Pelosi and now his criticism of Joe Biden has established his own incoherence for all to see. Does he not remember his words from one day to the next or have any sense of their impact on his flock and the world?
Where did you read that? If you did, it would have to be one of those anti-Pope Francis sites that have yet to publish even one pro-Francis article.
Pelosi was treated as an American government official. She was not invited to receive communion.
And regarding “incoherence,” then what about the Church’s related internal detail of “Eucharistic coherence”?
And “Conscience”? And pastoral chats: ““Let (Biden) talk to his pastor about that incoherence?”
“A separation, or even an opposition, is thus established in some cases between the teaching of the precept, which is valid and general, and the norm of the individual conscience, which would in fact make the final decision [no longer a moral judgment] about what is good and what is evil. On this basis, an attempt is made to legitimize so-called ‘pastoral’ solutions contrary to the teaching of the Magisterium, and to justify a ‘creative’ hermeneutic according to which the moral conscience is in no way obliged, in every case, by a particular negative precept [thou shalt not]” (Veritatis Splendor, n. 56).
And, again:
“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, demands protected by those moral norms which prohibit without exception [!] actions which are intrinsically evil” (n. 90).
“The Church is no way the author or the arbiter [!] of this [‘moral’] norm” (n. 95).
Thank God we have the Washington DC “parish council” to sort all this stuff out! Such is our synodal Magisterium and the flattened governance of the Church. Another fig leaf for another invertebrate and “incoherent” cardinal.
“As for the defense of abortion by the U.S. president, Pope Francis stated that he leaves it to Biden’s conscience”. If there’s incoherence in Pres Biden’s abortion policy and his Catholicism, Biden finds that faux justification in Amoris Laetitia and the incoherence of Francis’ presumption of conscience as the rule of morality rather than the natural law within [written in man’s heart by God], and Christ’s revelation, which are the rule, whereas conscience, to act with knowledge, assumes knowledge by which it is the measure of moral good or evil not the rule.
It is “incoheence” that Pope Francis, a Catholic, in in favor of abortion promoting policies of the United Nations and quite willingly invites the most notorious abortion advocates on the face of the earth to lecture the Church on what they regard as sensible population planning.
From womb to tomb, life is sacred and a precious gift. Long live life.
Didn’t the Pope just two weeks ago invite wild-eyed abortion apologist and advocate Nancy Pelosi into the Vatican to partake of the Eucharist? Joe Biden is absolutely incoherent on every issue, not just abortion. But Pope Francis based on his kid-glove treatment of Nancy Pelosi and now his criticism of Joe Biden has established his own incoherence for all to see. Does he not remember his words from one day to the next or any sense of their impact on his flock and the world?
So we’ve done away with sin and replaced it with “incoherence.”
And, we no longer need to see our confessor regarding our giving material support to the killing of babies. Instead, we should have a “dialogue” with the bishop and have him accompany us (?to hell, perhaps?) Sounds like a lot of New Age, Progressive clap trap to me. Straight out of the 1960’s playbook. Kumbaya, y’all.