John Paul II's Ignored Synod Speech: 3 Highlights You Need to Read - Catholic Household

John Paul II's Ignored Synod Speech: 3 Highlights You Need to Read - Catholic Household



John Paul II’s Ignored Synod Speech: 3 Highlights You Need to Read

John Paul II’s Ignored Synod Speech: 3 Highlights You Need to Read

Oct 24, 2014 11 Comments Draper Warren

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There has been much talk about Pope Francis’s speech concluding the recent Synod on the Family. However, as a priest friend of mine, who was in Rome during the 1980 Synod on the Family, pointed out, there is not much new under the sun. Even back in 1980, the question of Holy Communion for the divorced and remarried was brought up.
It is almost like looking at some strange alternate reality. A Tale of Two Synods. At the Synod in 1980 there was a doctrinal conflict over the very same issues as were contested in 2014. Given the surprising similarities, it is especially interesting to see how Pope St. John Paul II resolved these conflicts in his closing speech. It is almost as if he wrote this speech just for us at the end of the 2014 Synod.
We are now entering the Twilight Zone.
I am shocked that this speech seems to be completely unknown and ignored. Aside from one PDF, I couldn’t even find any copies of it on the internet (I have thus included the entire text below). It is almost eerie how perfectly John Paul II’s synod speech addresses all of our questions today.
Here are some highlights from the speech:

Communion for those who have divorce and attempted remarriage?

“So the Synod—when speaking of the pastoral care of those who after divorce have entered on a new union—rightly praised those couples who in spite of great difficulties witness in their life to the indissolubility of marriage. In their life the Synod recognizes that good news of faithfulness to love which has its power and its foundation in Christ. Furthermore, the fathers of the Synod, again affirming the indissolubility of marriage and the Church’s practice of not admitting to Eucharistic communion those who have been divorced and—against her rule—again attempted marriage, urge pastors and the whole Christian community to help such brothers and sisters. They do not regard them as separated from the Church, since by virtue of their baptism they can and must share in the life of the Church by praying, hearing the word, being present at the community’s celebration of the Eucharist, and promoting charity and justice. Although it must not be denied that such people can in suitable circumstances be admitted to the sacrament of penance and then to Eucharistic communion, when with a sincere heart they open themselves to a way of life that is not in contradiction to the indissolubility of marriage—namely, when such a man and woman, who cannot fulfill the obligation of separation, take on the duty of living in total abstinence, that is, abstaining from acts that are proper only to married couples—and when there is no scandal.”

This is a strong affirmation of the Church’s teaching. Marriage is indissoluble.
I also love how he says “attempted” remarriage. We have to remember to be faithful to the Church’s teaching even in the vocabulary we use when talking about the problem. You cannot be divorced and “remarried”. It just is not possible. If such a couple cannot live as brother and sister in “total abstinence” they absolutely cannot be admitted to Holy Communion, and interestingly enough, as Pope John Paul II implies, cannot be granted absolution in the sacrament of penance because they do not possess a firm purpose of amendment! Why don’t we hear more about that today?

The Law of Gradualness?

“Thinking of those who have pastoral care of married couples and families, the synod fathers rejected any split or “dichotomy” between instruction (which is necessary for any progress in fulfilling the design of God) and doctrine (taught by the Church with all its consequences and which includes the command to live according to that doctrine). It is not a matter of keeping the law as a mere “ideal” to be obeyed in the future. It is a question of the command of Christ the Lord that difficulties should constantly be overcome. In fact, the “law of gradualness,” as it is called, is not possible unless a person sincerely obeys the divine law and seeks those benefits that are protected and promoted by that law. For “the law of gradualness” (or gradual progress) cannot be the same as “gradualness of the law” as if there were various grades or forms of commandment for different men and circumstances in the divine law.”

Finally, someone lays down the law on this whole “law of gradualness” business. (Of course, saying “finally” is ironic because this speech was delivered 34 years ago… but you get my point.) The moral law is not a mere ideal! Our Lord’s command to “Go and sin more more!” is of immediate importance. Sure, we might fall along the way, but that doesn’t mean we are not obligated to try. These remarks by Pope St. John Paul II are a total and complete rejection of the “law of gradualness” that is being proposed and advocated by some in the context of this year’s synod. Apparently, the idea isn’t new.

Changing the Church’s laws out of mercy?

“Now we wish to add something as the fruit of the labors that we have been carrying out for more than four weeks: that is, that nobody can “do charity” except in the truth. This principle can be applied to the life of every family no less than the life and work of pastors who truly mean to serve families.”

No one can do charity without the truth. Isn’t this the same thing as saying that any solution done in the name of “mercy”, which is not founded on the gospel teaching, will ultimately do more harm to those it is trying to help? It seems like this has been at the heart of Cardinal Kasper’s suggestions. There are people out there who are not living according to the Church’s teaching because they find it too difficult. Could the Church not ease up on its practice to make it more bearable for them? Christ Himself said “My yoke is easy and my burden light.” It might not always seem that way to us, but we have to remember that these practices are not arbitrary. They were given to us by Christ to help lead us to happiness and Heaven. Even giving the hint that it is OK not the follow the moral law wounds people.

Below is the complete text of the speech:

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Pope St. John Paul II’s Speech at the Conclusion of the 1980 Synod on the Family

Sistine Chapel, Vatican, Saturday October 25, 1980
We have just heard the apostle St. Paul giving thanks to God for the Church at Corinth “that in every way it was enriched in Christ Jesus, with all speech and all knowledge” (cf. I Cor 1:5). We too feel impelled at this moment first and foremost to give thanks to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, before we bring this Synod of Bishops to an end.
We came together to celebrate it, whether as members or as assistants, in the mystery of that supreme unity which belongs to the most Holy Trinity. It is to the Holy Trinity therefore that we express our thanks that we have completed the Synod, which is an outstanding sign of vigor and of great importance for the life of the Church. For the Synod of Bishops—to use the words of the council, in accordance with whose wishes the Supreme Pontiff Paul VI instituted it “acting for the whole Catholic episcopate, is a sign that all the bishops in hierarchical communion share in the cares of the universal Church” (Christus Dominus, 5).
We give thanks together for these four weeks during which we have been working. This period of time, even before the issuing of the final statements (that is, the message and the propositions) has borne fruit in us, because truth and love seem to have matured in us by a gradual process as the days and weeks have passed. It is right to mention this process, and briefly to describe how it became clear. It thus becomes plain how honestly and sincerely were manifested in it both liberty and a responsible sense of duty regarding the theme that we were discussing.
We wish today to give thanks first to him “who sees in secret” (Mt 6:4) and works as a “hidden God,” because he has directed our thoughts, our hearts and our consciences and enabled us to press on with our work in fraternal peace and spiritual joy. Indeed, such was our joy that we hardly felt the burden of work or exhaustion. And yet, how tiring it in fact was! But you did not spare yourselves in the work.
We must also express thanks among ourselves. First of all, this must be said: we must all attribute that process by which, in a way that gradually matured, we “did the truth in charity,” to the urgent prayers which the whole Church as it were standing around as has been pouring out at this time. This prayer was for the Synod and for families: for the Synod, in that it was concerned with families, and for families, because of the tasks they have to perform in the Church and in the world of today. The Synod benefited from these prayers in a quite extraordinary way. Continual and abundant prayer was made to God, especially on 12 October, when couples, representing the families of the entire world, came together to St Peter’s basilica to celebrate the sacred rites and to pray with us. If we must thank one another, we must also thank so many unknown benefactors who, throughout the world, helped us with their prayers and offered their suffering to God for this Synod.
Now we come to the time for thanking one another by name, and in this we include everybody who has helped in the celebration of this Synod: there are the presidents, the secretary general, the relator general, the members themselves, the special secretary and his assistants, the auditores and auditrices, the people appointed to help the media, the departments of the Roman Curia and especially the Consilium for the Family, and others, from the ushers to the technical assistants, typists and so on.
We are all grateful that we have been able to complete this Synod. It was an outstanding manifestation of the collegial care for the Church of the bishops of the whole world. We are grateful that we have been able to see the family as it really is in the Church and in the world of today, considering the many different situations in which it finds itself; the traditions drawn from various cultures which influence it; the aspects of civilized life that shape and affect it; and other mailers of this sort.
We are grateful that we have been able again, with the obedience of faith, to look at God’s eternal plan for the family manifested in the mystery of creation, and strengthened with the blood of the Redeemer, the Spouse of the Church. And finally we are grateful that we have been able to define, according to the eternal design regarding life and love, the tasks of the family in the Church and world of today.
The fruit which this Synod of 1980 brings forth here and now is contained in the propositions, accepted by the assembly, of which the first is entitled: “On knowing the will of God in the pilgrimage of the people of God. On the sense of faith.” This rich treasury of propositions, 43 in number, we now receive as a singularly precious fruit of the works of the Synod. At the same time we express our joy that the assembly itself, publishing its message, has spoken to the whole Church. The General Secretariat, with the help of the organizations of the Apostolic See, will take care that this message is sent to all whom it concerns, and the episcopal conferences will help in this.
The deliberations of this Synod of 1980 and the contents of the propositions certainly enable us to see the Christian and apostolic tasks of the family in the world of today, and in a special way to draw them from the total teaching of the Second Vatican Council. Thus, we make effective progress along the road which must enable this Synod to put its doctrinal and pastoral plans into effect.
With regard to this, this year’s Synod is closely connected with the previous synods and is a continuation of the synods celebrated in 1971 and especially in 1974 and 1977, which have helped to put the Second Vatican Council into practical effect and must continue to do so. These synods help the Church in a fitting way to be as she must in the conditions of our age, and so to present herself.
Within the work of this Synod must be considered of the greatest usefulness the careful examination of doctrinal and pastoral questions that especially needed such examination, and, in consequence, a sure and clear judgment of these questions.
In the wealth of interventions, relations and conclusions of this Synod, which greatly arouse our admiration there are two cardinal points—namely, fidelity to the plan of God for the family, and a pastoral way of acting which is full of merciful love and of the reverence that is owed to men, and embraces all of them, in what concerns their “being” and “living.” In all this there are some parts which have especially occupied the minds of the Synod fathers, for they realized that they were expressing the expectations and hopes of many couples and families.
It is right to mention these questions among the work of the Synod, and to recognize the very useful examination that has carefully been made of them: that is, the doctrinal and pastoral examination of questions which, although they were not the only ones to be treated in the Synod’s discussions, nonetheless had a special place there, in that they were discussed in an especially open and free way. This means that importance must be attached to the opinions that the Synod clearly and powerfully expressed on these questions, while still retaining that Christian view, in which the family is regarded as a gift of divine love.
So the Synod—when speaking of the pastoral care of those who after divorce have entered on a new union—rightly praised those couples who in spite of great difficulties witness in their life to the indissolubility of marriage. In their life the Synod recognizes that good news of faithfulness to love which has its power and its foundation in Christ. Furthermore, the fathers of the Synod, again affirming the indissolubility of marriage and the Church’s practice of not admitting to Eucharistic communion those who have been divorced and—against her rule—again attempted marriage, urge pastors and the whole Christian community to help such brothers and sisters. They do not regard them as separated from the Church, since by virtue of their baptism they can and must share in the life of the Church by praying, hearing the word, being present at the community’s celebration of the Eucharist, and promoting charity and justice. Although it must not be denied that such people can in suitable circumstances be admitted to the sacrament of penance and then to Eucharistic communion, when with a sincere heart they open themselves to a way of life that is not in contradiction to the indissolubility of marriage—namely, when such a man and woman, who cannot fulfill the obligation of separation, take on the duty of living in total abstinence, that is, abstaining from acts that are proper only to married couples—and when there is no scandal.
Nonetheless, the lack of sacramental reconciliation with God should not deter them from perseverance in prayer, in penance and in the exercise of charity, in order that they may eventually receive the grace of conversion and salvation. Meanwhile the Church, praying for them and strengthening them in faith and hope, must show herself a merciful mother towards them.
The fathers of the Synod were close in mind and spirit to the great difficulties that many couples feel in their conscience about the moral laws concerning the transmission of life and the protection of human life. Knowing that every divine precept carries with it promise and grace, they openly confirmed the validity and the sure truth of the prophetic message, full of deep meaning for the conditions of today, which is contained in the encyclical Humanae Vitae. The Synod has encouraged theologians to join forces with the hierarchical magisterium so that the biblical basis and the “personalistic” reasons (as they are called) for this doctrine may be ever more clearly made known, so that the entire teaching of the Church may become accessible to all men of good will, and may be every day more clearly understood.
Thinking of those who have pastoral care of married couples and families, the synod fathers rejected any split or “dichotomy” between instruction (which is necessary for any progress in fulfilling the design of God) and doctrine (taught by the Church with all its consequences and which includes the command to live according to that doctrine). It is not a matter of keeping the law as a mere “ideal” to be obeyed in the future. It is a question of the command of Christ the Lord that difficulties should constantly be overcome. In fact, the “law of gradualness,” as it is called, is not possible unless a person sincerely obeys the divine law and seeks those benefits that are protected and promoted by that law. For “the law of gradualness” (or gradual progress) cannot be the same as “gradualness of the law” as if there were various grades or forms of commandment for different men and circumstances in the divine law.
All couples are called to holiness in marriage according to the divine plan; and the dignity of this vocation becomes effective when a person is able to respond to the command of God with a serene mind, trusting in divine grace and his own will.
So it is not enough for couples—if they are not both of the same religious persuasion—to accommodate themselves passively and easily to their circumstances, but they should strive with patience and good will to come to a common intention to be faithful to the duties of Christian marriage.
The Synod fathers have acquired a deeper knowledge and awareness of the riches that are to be found in the cultural forms of different peoples and of the good things that every cultural form has to offer, the more fully the unsearchable mystery of Christ is understood. They have also recognized that—even within the confines of marriage and the home—there is a great field for theological and pastoral study, so that the adaptation of the gospel message to the character of each people may be better fostered and so that it may be learnt how the customs, special characteristics, the sense of life and the unique spirit of each human culture may be combined with the data of the divine revelation (Ad Gentes, 22).
This research—if carried on according to the principle of communion of the universal Church and with the encouragement of local bishops, who should be united among themselves and with the See of Peter “which presides over the whole assembly of charity” (LG 13) —will bring forth its fruits for families.
The Synod spoke timely and persuasive words with reverence and gratitude about woman, about her dignity and vocation as a daughter of God, as wife and mother. Reproving whatever harms her human dignity, the Synod stressed the dignity of motherhood. It therefore rightly said that human society should be so constituted that women are not obliged to work outside the home at a job or profession, but that the family should be able to live properly even when the mother devotes herself entirely to the family.
If we have mentioned these important questions and the replies that the Synod gave to them, we do not wish to value any less the other matters that the Synod dealt with, for, as has been shown in many interventions in these useful and fruitful weeks, these are questions worthy of being treated in the teaching and pastoral ministry of the Church with great reverence and love, full of mercy, towards men and women, our brothers and sisters, who fly to the Church for words of faith and hope. May pastors, taking their example from the Synod, address themselves to these problems, as they truly are in married and family life, with care and a firm will, that we may all “do the truth in charity.”
Now we wish to add something as the fruit of the labors that we have been carrying out for more than four weeks: that is, that nobody can “do charity” except in the truth. This principle can be applied to the life of every family no less than the life and work of pastors who truly mean to serve families.
So the principal fruit of this session of the Synod is that the tasks of Christian family, of which charity is as it were the heart, should only be full according to the whole truth. All in the Church who wish to help in the fulfilment of these tasks—be they lay people, clerics, or religious of either sex—can or this in the truth. For it is truth that sets free; it is truth that brings order: it is truth which opens the way to holiness and justice.
We have seen what the love of Christ is, what that charity is that is offered all who make up a family in the Church and in the world: not only to husband wives, but also to boys and girls and young people, and also to widow orphans, to grandparents, and to all who in any way share in family life. For these the Church of Christ wishes to be and wishes to remain both a witness gate to that fullness of life of which St. Paul speaks to the Corinthians in the words that we heard at the beginning: for we have been made rich in all things in Jesus with all speech and all knowledge (I Cor 1:5).
John Paul II
Here is a Link to the only other copy I found online.

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Draper Warren

Went to Christendom College, majoring in Theology and History with a minor in Philosophy (and went on to do graduate studies in Theology). Most of his life has been devoted to promoting Catholic Homeschooling, and he is the Associate Director of the only national Catholic homeschool conference organization. Draper resides in Front Royal, VA.

Novena to Blessed John Paul II, with words of Cardinal Ratzinger / Benedict XVI at JPII's funeral / beatification - Totus2us Podcast

Novena to Blessed John Paul II, with words of Cardinal Ratzinger / Benedict XVI at JPII's funeral / beatification - Totus2us Podcast

Novena to Blessed John Paul II

With the homilies at his funeral and beatification by Cardinal Ratzinger / Pope Benedict XVI.
<sub>Each day of the novena ends with John Paul II's Act of Entrustment to Mary (made on 8th October in the Jubilee Year 2000):
"O Mother, today we wish to entrust to you the future that awaits us,
and we ask you to be with us on our way.
We are the men and women of an extraordinary time,
exhilarating yet full of contradictions.
Humanity now has instruments of unprecedented power:
we can turn this world into a garden, or reduce it to a pile of rubble.
We have devised the astounding capacity to intervene in the very well-springs of life:
man can use this power for good, within the bounds of the moral law,
or he can succumb to the short-sighted pride of a science which accepts no limits,
but tramples on the respect due to every human being.
Today as never before in the past, humanity stands at a crossroads.
And once again, O Virgin Most Holy,
salvation lies fully and uniquely in Jesus, your Son.

Therefore, O Mother, like the Apostle John,
we wish to take you into our home,
that we may learn from you to become like your Son.
"Woman, behold your son!"
Here we stand before you to entrust to your maternal care
ourselves, the Church, the entire world.
Plead for us with your beloved Son
that he may give us in abundance the Holy Spirit,
the Spirit of truth which is the fountain of life.
Receive the Spirit for us and with us,
as happened in the first community gathered round you in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost.
May the Spirit open our hearts to justice and love,
and guide people and nations to mutual understanding and a firm desire for peace.
We entrust to you all people, beginning with the weakest:
the babies yet unborn, and those born into poverty and suffering,
the young in search of meaning, the unemployed,
and those suffering hunger and disease.
We entrust to you all troubled families,
the elderly with no one to help them, and all who are alone and without hope.

O Mother, you know the sufferings and hopes of the Church and the world:
come to the aid of your children in the daily trials which life brings to each one,
and grant that, thanks to the efforts of all, the darkness will not prevail over the light.
To you, Dawn of Salvation, we commit our journey through the new Millennium,
so that with you as guide all people may know Christ,
the light of the world and its only Saviour,
who reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit
for ever and ever. Amen."
You can subscribe to this Totus2us Novenas podcast here on itunes or here on the RSS feed.
To download the free mp3 audio recordings individually, right/double click on the play buttons  
This was recorded to begin on 13 October, leading up to the 1st feast day of Blessed John Paul, 22 October 2011.</sub>

Day 1 of Totus2us's Novena to Blessed John Paul II 

_{Beloved John Paul II, in his homily at your funeral, your dear friend and fellow bishop, Cardinal Ratzinger said:
""Follow me." The Risen Lord says these words to Peter. They are his last words to this disciple, chosen to shepherd his flock. "Follow me" – this lapidary saying of Christ can be taken as the key to understanding the message which comes to us from the life of our late beloved Pope John Paul II. ...
Follow me – as a young student Karol Wojtyla was thrilled by literature, the theatre, and poetry. Working in a chemical plant, surrounded and threatened by the Nazi terror, he heard the voice of the Lord: Follow me! In this extraordinary setting he began to read books of philosophy and theology, and then entered the clandestine seminary established by Cardinal Sapieha. After the war he was able to complete his studies in the faculty of theology of the Jagiellonian University of Kraków. How often, in his letters to priests and in his autobiographical books has he spoken to us about his priesthood, to which he was ordained on 1 November 1946. In these texts he interprets his priesthood with particular reference to three sayings of the Lord. First: "You did not choose me, but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last" (Jn 15:16). The second saying is: "The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep" (Jn 10:11). And then: "As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love" (Jn 15:9). In these three sayings we see the heart and soul of our Holy Father. He really went everywhere, untiringly, in order to bear fruit, fruit that lasts. "Rise, Let us be on our Way!" is the title of his next-to-last book. "Rise, let us be on our way!" – with these words he roused us from a lethargic faith, from the sleep of the disciples of both yesterday and today. "Rise, let us be on our way!" he continues to say to us even today. The Holy Father was a priest to the last, for he offered his life to God for his flock and for the entire human family, in a daily self-oblation for the service of the Church, especially amid the sufferings of his final months. And in this way he became one with Christ, the Good Shepherd who loves his sheep. Finally, "abide in my love:" the Pope who tried to meet everyone, who had an ability to forgive and to open his heart to all, tells us once again today, with these words of the Lord, that by abiding in the love of Christ we learn, at the school of Christ, the art of true love."
Blessed are you, beloved Pope John Paul II, because you believed! Continue, we implore you, to sustain from heaven the faith of God's people.
Beloved Blessed John Paul II, we thank you for all that you gave us and for all that we continue to receive through your intercession. We thank you for being a witness to the mercy of our heavenly Father, for being a true friend and disciple of Jesus who fully reveals man to man himself, and for being such an eloquent instrument of the Holy Spirit, having entrusted everything to Mary, the spouse of the Holy Spirit - Totus Tuus.
With you, we pray your act of entrustment to Mary ...}

• 

_{John Paul II: "I would have liked to stay with you longer, but I find consolation in the words of Jesus. He tells us the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you. The Father sends his Spirit of truth and love into the world, and the Spirit guides us in the ways of peace. Therefore do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid. Dear brothers and sisters, the Holy Spirit is with you."}

Day 2 of Totus2us's Novena to Blessed John Paul II 

_{Beloved John Paul II, in his homily at your funeral, your dear friend and fellow bishop, Cardinal Ratzinger said:
""Follow me! In July 1958 the young priest Karol Wojtyla began a new stage in his journey with the Lord and in the footsteps of the Lord. Karol had gone to the Masuri lakes for his usual vacation, along with a group of young people who loved canoeing. But he brought with him a letter inviting him to call on the Primate of Poland, Cardinal Wyszynski. He could guess the purpose of the meeting: he was to be appointed as the auxiliary Bishop of Kraków. Leaving the academic world, leaving this challenging engagement with young people, leaving the great intellectual endeavour of striving to understand and interpret the mystery of that creature which is man and of communicating to today’s world the Christian interpretation of our being – all this must have seemed to him like losing his very self, losing what had become the very human identity of this young priest. Follow me – Karol Wojtyla accepted the appointment, for he heard in the Church’s call the voice of Christ. And then he realized how true are the Lord’s words: "Those who try to make their life secure will lose it, but those who lose their life will keep it" (Lk 17:33). Our Pope – and we all know this – never wanted to make his own life secure, to keep it for himself; he wanted to give of himself unreservedly, to the very last moment, for Christ and thus also for us. And thus he came to experience how everything which he had given over into the Lord’s hands came back to him in a new way. His love of words, of poetry, of literature, became an essential part of his pastoral mission and gave new vitality, new urgency, new attractiveness to the preaching of the Gospel, even when it is a sign of contradiction."
Blessed are you, beloved Pope John Paul II, because you believed! Continue, we implore you, to sustain from heaven the faith of God's people.
Beloved Blessed John Paul II, we thank you for all that you gave us and for all that we continue to receive through your intercession. We thank you for being a witness to the mercy of our heavenly Father, for being a true friend and disciple of Jesus who fully reveals man to man himself, and for being such an eloquent instrument of the Holy Spirit, having entrusted everything to Mary, the spouse of the Holy Spirit - Totus Tuus.
With you, we pray your act of entrustment to Mary ...}

Day 3 of Totus2us's Novena to Blessed John Paul II 

_{Beloved John Paul II, in his homily at your funeral, your dear friend and fellow bishop, Cardinal Ratzinger said:
"Follow me! In October 1978 Cardinal Wojtyla once again heard the voice of the Lord. Once more there took place that dialogue with Peter reported in the Gospel of this Mass: "Simon, son of John, do you love me? Feed my sheep!" To the Lord’s question, "Karol, do you love me?," the Archbishop of Krakow answered from the depths of his heart: "Lord you know everything; you know that I love you." The love of Christ was the dominant force in the life of our beloved Holy Father. Anyone who ever saw him pray, who ever heard him preach, knows that. Thanks to his being profoundly rooted in Christ, he was able to bear a burden which transcends merely human abilities: that of being the shepherd of Christ’s flock, his universal Church. This is not the time to speak of the specific content of this rich pontificate. I would like only to read two passages of today’s liturgy which reflect central elements of his message. In the first reading, Saint Peter says – and with Saint Peter, the Pope himself – "I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ - he is Lord of all" (Acts10:34-36). And in the second reading, Saint Paul – and with Saint Paul, our late Pope – exhorts us, crying out: "My brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and my crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved" (Phil 4:1)."
Blessed are you, beloved Pope John Paul II, because you believed! Continue, we implore you, to sustain from heaven the faith of God's people.
Beloved Blessed John Paul II, we thank you for all that you gave us and for all that we continue to receive through your intercession. We thank you for being a witness to the mercy of our heavenly Father, for being a true friend and disciple of Jesus who fully reveals man to man himself, and for being such an eloquent instrument of the Holy Spirit, having entrusted everything to Mary, the spouse of the Holy Spirit - Totus Tuus.
With you, we pray your act of entrustment to Mary ...}

Day 4 of Totus2us's Novena to Blessed John Paul II 

_{Beloved John Paul II, in his homily at your funeral, your dear friend and fellow bishop, Cardinal Ratzinger said:
"Follow me! Together with the command to feed his flock, Christ proclaimed to Peter that he would die a martyr’s death. With those words, which conclude and sum up the dialogue on love and on the mandate of the universal shepherd, the Lord recalls another dialogue, which took place during the Last Supper. There Jesus had said: "Where I am going, you cannot come." Peter said to him, "Lord, where are you going?" Jesus replied: "Where I am going, you cannot follow me now; but you will follow me afterward." (Jn 13:33,36). Jesus from the Supper went towards the Cross, went towards his resurrection – he entered into the paschal mystery; and Peter could not yet follow him. Now – after the resurrection – comes the time, comes this "afterward." By shepherding the flock of Christ, Peter enters into the paschal mystery, he goes towards the cross and the resurrection. The Lord says this in these words: "... when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go" (Jn 21:18). In the first years of his pontificate, still young and full of energy, the Holy Father went to the very ends of the earth, guided by Christ. But afterwards, he increasingly entered into the communion of Christ’s sufferings; increasingly he understood the truth of the words: "Someone else will fasten a belt around you." And in this very communion with the suffering Lord, tirelessly and with renewed intensity, he proclaimed the Gospel, the mystery of that love which goes to the end (cf Jn 13:1)."
Blessed are you, beloved Pope John Paul II, because you believed! Continue, we implore you, to sustain from heaven the faith of God's people.
Beloved Blessed John Paul II, we thank you for all that you gave us and for all that we continue to receive through your intercession. We thank you for being a witness to the mercy of our heavenly Father, for being a true friend and disciple of Jesus who fully reveals man to man himself, and for being such an eloquent instrument of the Holy Spirit, having entrusted everything to Mary, the spouse of the Holy Spirit - Totus Tuus.
With you, we pray your act of entrustment to Mary ...}

Day 5 of Totus2us's Novena to Blessed John Paul II 

_{Beloved John Paul II, in his homily at your funeral, your dear friend and fellow bishop, Cardinal Ratzinger said:
"He interpreted for us the paschal mystery as a mystery of divine mercy. In his last book, he wrote: The limit imposed upon evil "is ultimately Divine Mercy" (Memory and Identity, pp. 60-61). And reflecting on the assassination attempt, he said: "In sacrificing himself for us all, Christ gave a new meaning to suffering, opening up a new dimension, a new order: the order of love ... It is this suffering which burns and consumes evil with the flame of love and draws forth even from sin a great flowering of good" (pp. 189-190). Impelled by this vision, the Pope suffered and loved in communion with Christ, and that is why the message of his suffering and his silence proved so eloquent and so fruitful."
Blessed are you, beloved Pope John Paul II, because you believed! Continue, we implore you, to sustain from heaven the faith of God's people.
Beloved Blessed John Paul II, we thank you for all that you gave us and for all that we continue to receive through your intercession. We thank you for being a witness to the mercy of our heavenly Father, for being a true friend and disciple of Jesus who fully reveals man to man himself, and for being such an eloquent instrument of the Holy Spirit, having entrusted everything to Mary, the spouse of the Holy Spirit - Totus Tuus.
With you, we pray your act of entrustment to Mary ...}

Day 6 of Totus2us's Novena to Blessed John Paul II 

_{Beloved John Paul II, in his homily at your funeral, your dear friend and fellow bishop, Cardinal Ratzinger said:
"Divine Mercy: the Holy Father found the purest reflection of God’s mercy in the Mother of God. He, who at an early age had lost his own mother, loved his divine mother all the more. He heard the words of the crucified Lord as addressed personally to him: "Behold your Mother." And so he did as the beloved disciple did: he took her into his own home" (eis ta idia: Jn 19:27) – Totus tuus. And from the mother he learned to conform himself to Christ."
Blessed are you, beloved Pope John Paul II, because you believed! Continue, we implore you, to sustain from heaven the faith of God's people.
Beloved Blessed John Paul II, we thank you for all that you gave us and for all that we continue to receive through your intercession. We thank you for being a witness to the mercy of our heavenly Father, for being a true friend and disciple of Jesus who fully reveals man to man himself, and for being such an eloquent instrument of the Holy Spirit, having entrusted everything to Mary, the spouse of the Holy Spirit - Totus Tuus.
With you, we pray your act of entrustment to Mary ...}

Day 7 of Totus2us's Novena to Blessed John Paul II 

_{Beloved John Paul II, in his homily at your beatification, your dear friend and fellow bishop, Pope Benedict XVI said:
"“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” (Jn 20:29). In today’s Gospel Jesus proclaims this beatitude: the beatitude of faith. For us, it is particularly striking because we are gathered to celebrate a beatification, but even more so because today the one proclaimed blessed is a Pope, a Successor of Peter, one who was called to confirm his brethren in the faith. John Paul II is blessed because of his faith, a strong, generous and apostolic faith. We think at once of another beatitude: “Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven” (Mt 16:17). What did our heavenly Father reveal to Simon? That Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. Because of this faith, Simon becomes Peter, the rock on which Jesus can build his Church. The eternal beatitude of John Paul II, which today the Church rejoices to proclaim, is wholly contained in these sayings of Jesus: “Blessed are you, Simon” and “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe!” It is the beatitude of faith, which John Paul II also received as a gift from God the Father for the building up of Christ’s Church.
Our thoughts turn to yet another beatitude, one which appears in the Gospel before all others. It is the beatitude of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of the Redeemer. Mary, who had just conceived Jesus, was told by Saint Elizabeth: “Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her by the Lord” (Lk 1:45). The beatitude of faith has its model in Mary, and all of us rejoice that the beatification of John Paul II takes place on this first day of the month of Mary, beneath the maternal gaze of the one who by her faith sustained the faith of the Apostles and constantly sustains the faith of their successors, especially those called to occupy the Chair of Peter. Mary does not appear in the accounts of Christ’s resurrection, yet hers is, as it were, a continual, hidden presence: she is the Mother to whom Jesus entrusted each of his disciples and the entire community. In particular we can see how Saint John and Saint Luke record the powerful, maternal presence of Mary in the passages preceding those read in today’s Gospel and first reading. In the account of Jesus’ death, Mary appears at the foot of the cross (Jn 19:25), and at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles she is seen in the midst of the disciples gathered in prayer in the Upper Room (Acts 1:14)."
Blessed are you, beloved Pope John Paul II, because you believed! Continue, we implore you, to sustain from heaven the faith of God's people.
Beloved Blessed John Paul II, we thank you for all that you gave us and for all that we continue to receive through your intercession. We thank you for being a witness to the mercy of our heavenly Father, for being a true friend and disciple of Jesus who fully reveals man to man himself, and for being such an eloquent instrument of the Holy Spirit, having entrusted everything to Mary, the spouse of the Holy Spirit - Totus Tuus.
With you, we pray your act of entrustment to Mary ...}

Day 8 of Totus2us's Novena to Blessed John Paul II 

_{Beloved John Paul II, in his homily at your beatification, your dear friend and fellow bishop, Pope Benedict XVI said:
"Today’s second reading also speaks to us of faith. Saint Peter himself, filled with spiritual enthusiasm, points out to the newly-baptized the reason for their hope and their joy. I like to think how in this passage, at the beginning of his first Letter, Peter does not use language of exhortation; instead, he states a fact. He writes: “you rejoice”, and he adds: “you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for youare receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls” (1 Pet 1:6, 8-9). All these verbs are in the indicative, because a new reality has come about in Christ’s resurrection, a reality to which faith opens the door. “This is the Lord’s doing”, says the Psalm (118:23), and “it is marvelous in our eyes”, the eyes of faith.
Dear brothers and sisters, today our eyes behold, in the full spiritual light of the risen Christ, the beloved and revered figure of John Paul II. Today his name is added to the host of those whom he proclaimed saints and blesseds during the almost 27 years of his pontificate, thereby forcefully emphasizing the universal vocation to the heights of the Christian life, to holiness, taught by the conciliar Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium. All of us, as members of the people of God – bishops, priests, deacons, laity, men and women religious – are making our pilgrim way to the heavenly homeland where the Virgin Mary has preceded us, associated as she was in a unique and perfect way to the mystery of Christ and the Church. Karol Wojtyla took part in the Second Vatican Council, first as an auxiliary Bishop and then as Archbishop of Kraków. He was fully aware that the Council’s decision to devote the last chapter of its Constitution on the Church to Mary meant that the Mother of the Redeemer is held up as an image and model of holiness for every Christian and for the entire Church. This was the theological vision which Blessed John Paul II discovered as a young man and subsequently maintained and deepened throughout his life. A vision which is expressed in the scriptural image of the crucified Christ with Mary, his Mother, at his side. This icon from the Gospel of John (19:25-27) was taken up in the episcopal and later the papal coat-of-arms of Karol Wojtyla: a golden cross with the letter “M” on the lower right and the motto“Totus tuus”, drawn from the well-known words of St Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort in which Karol Wojtyla found a guiding light for his life: “Totus tuus ego sum et omnia mea tua sunt. Accipio te in mea omnia. Praebe mihi cor tuum, Maria – I am totally yours and all that I have is yours. I accept you for my all. O Mary, give me your heart.”
Blessed are you, beloved Pope John Paul II, because you believed! Continue, we implore you, to sustain from heaven the faith of God's people.
Beloved Blessed John Paul II, we thank you for all that you gave us and for all that we continue to receive through your intercession. We thank you for being a witness to the mercy of our heavenly Father, for being a true friend and disciple of Jesus who fully reveals man to man himself, and for being such an eloquent instrument of the Holy Spirit, having entrusted everything to Mary, the spouse of the Holy Spirit - Totus Tuus.
With you, we pray your act of entrustment to Mary ...}

Day 9 of Totus2us's Novena to Blessed John Paul II 

_{Beloved John Paul II, in his homily at your beatification, your dear friend and fellow bishop, Pope Benedict XVI said:
"In his Testament, the new Blessed wrote: “When, on 16 October 1978, the Conclave of Cardinals chose John Paul II, the Primate of Poland, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, said to me: ‘The task of the new Pope will be to lead the Church into the Third Millennium’”. And the Pope added: “I would like once again to express my gratitude to the Holy Spirit for the great gift of the Second Vatican Council, to which, together with the whole Church – and especially with the whole episcopate – I feel indebted. I am convinced that it will long be granted to the new generations to draw from the treasures that this Council of the twentieth century has lavished upon us. As a Bishop who took part in the Council from the first to the last day, I desire to entrust this great patrimony to all who are and will be called in the future to put it into practice. For my part, I thank the Eternal Shepherd, who has enabled me to serve this very great cause in the course of all the years of my Pontificate”. And what is this “cause”? It is the same one that John Paul II presented during his first solemn Mass in Saint Peter’s Square in the unforgettable words: “Do not be afraid! Open, open wide the doors to Christ!” What the newly-elected Pope asked of everyone, he was himself the first to do: society, culture, political and economic systems he opened up to Christ, turning back with the strength of a titan – a strength which came to him from God – a tide which appeared irreversible. By his witness of faith, love and apostolic courage, accompanied by great human charisma, this exemplary son of Poland helped believers throughout the world not to be afraid to be called Christian, to belong to the Church, to speak of the Gospel. In a word: he helped us not to fear the truth, because truth is the guarantee of liberty. To put it even more succinctly: he gave us the strength to believe in Christ, because Christ is Redemptor hominis, the Redeemer of man. This was the theme of his first encyclical, and the thread which runs though all the others.
When Karol Wojtyla ascended to the throne of Peter, he brought with him a deep understanding of the difference between Marxism and Christianity, based on their respective visions of man. This was his message: man is the way of the Church, and Christ is the way of man. With this message, which is the great legacy of the Second Vatican Council and of its “helmsman”, the Servant of God Pope Paul VI, John Paul II led the People of God across the threshold of the Third Millennium, which thanks to Christ he was able to call “the threshold of hope”. Throughout the long journey of preparation for the great Jubilee he directed Christianity once again to the future, the future of God, which transcends history while nonetheless directly affecting it. He rightly reclaimed for Christianity that impulse of hope which had in some sense faltered before Marxism and the ideology of progress. He restored to Christianity its true face as a religion of hope, to be lived in history in an “Advent” spirit, in a personal and communitarian existence directed to Christ, the fullness of humanity and the fulfillment of all our longings for justice and peace."
Blessed are you, beloved Pope John Paul II, because you believed! Continue, we implore you, to sustain from heaven the faith of God's people.
Beloved Blessed John Paul II, we thank you for all that you gave us and for all that we continue to receive through your intercession. We thank you for being a witness to the mercy of our heavenly Father, for being a true friend and disciple of Jesus who fully reveals man to man himself, and for being such an eloquent instrument of the Holy Spirit, having entrusted everything to Mary, the spouse of the Holy Spirit - Totus Tuus.
With you, we pray your act of entrustment to Mary ...}

© Totus2us 2014 AMDG

 

Images of the Priest in the Life and Thought of John Paul II – Homiletic

Images of the Priest in the Life and Thought of John Paul II – Homiletic

This is a Great Article by George Weigel

The Church proposes, the Church imposes nothing,” John Paul wrote in the encyclical Redemptoris Missio. And to propose what? As the Pope said on so many occasions, to propose Jesus Christ as the answer to the question that is every human life.

Time magazine’s Nancy Gibbs wrote in the online edition about the feelings of those in St. Peter’s Square, looking at that window with the small lit candle while the Pope was dying:

You feel smaller when your father dies because he was strong and lifted you, carried you, and taught you, and when he’s gone the room feels too big without him. So it was in St. Peter’s Square, where pilgrims kept vigil, their faces, traced in low light by candles, murmuring, “Don’t leave us.”  Among the believers there was almost disbelief that death still comes even to a man this strong.  The Holy Father who had carried the people so far, lifted them so high, taught them so much…

If there is one great truth to be learned from the 58 years, five months, and one day of the luminous, world-transforming priestly ministry that Karol Wojtyła, Pope John Paul II, gave to the Church, it is this: a true priestly vocation begins with a commitment to radical discipleship.  A true priestly vocation begins with, is nurtured by, and lives from a man’s commitment to the truth that Jesus Christ is the answer to the question that is every human life.

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Images of the Priest in the Life and Thought of John Paul II

April 23, 2014 By George Weigel

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February, March, and early April 2005 unfolded as not just an extraordinary human drama, but as an extraordinary Christian drama and, indeed, an extraordinary priestly drama … what the world saw … and what the Church lived through … was manifestly the death of a priest.

It has been nine years since the remarkable events that unfolded between February and April, 2005—and still our minds and imaginations, and perhaps our prayers as well, come back, time and again, to the last illness and death of Pope John Paul II. Those memories take on special resonance as his canonization draws near.
It was an extraordinary human drama—perhaps one of the few genuinely global dramas in history. An entire world gathered, metaphorically, around the bed in the papal apartment to help John Paul II through what he called, in his spiritual testament, his “Passover.” Yet, February, March, and early April 2005 unfolded as not just an extraordinary human drama, but as an extraordinary Christian drama and, indeed, an extraordinary priestly drama.  For what the world saw (whether it recognized it in these terms or not), and what the Church lived through (and hopefully recognized as such), was manifestly the death of a priest. For the last time, Karol Wojtyła led the Church and the world into an experience of the Paschal Mystery.  And that is the essence of the vocation of priests: to lead the Church, and the world, into an experience of the mystery of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen.
How did the late pope do that? As my mind’s eye turns back to those dramatic days, certain vignettes, etched in poignancy, stand out.
I remember the Pope returning to the Vatican from the Policlinico Gemelli hospital on February 10 and March 13, 2005, with throngs of Romans crowding the streets to welcome back the man they had once thought of as lo straniero  (“the stranger”) but whom they now thought of, quite literally, as il papa (“father”).
I think of the Pope with a palm branch in his hand at the window of the Apostolic Palace on Palm Sunday.
I remember the Pope in his chapel in the papal apartment on Good Friday evening, holding fast to a crucifix while watching the Via Crucis at the Roman Colosseum on television. On that occasion, the Pope was back-shot, the television camera behind him so that all that you saw were his back and his hands holding that cross. Why, some television commentators asked? It was not, I replied, in order to hide his tracheotomy and his suffering, but rather to underscore the message this most visible of men in history (who had been seen live by more human beings than anyone else, ever) had taken around the world: “Don’t look at me; look at Jesus Christ.”

Then, I see in my memory the Pope at the window of his apartment on Easter Sunday—the window from which he had led the Sunday Angelus, or Regina Coeli, for more than a quarter-century—unable to speak, but blessing the city and the world, over and over and over again, as if for the last time.
And then I remember John Paul II on Friday and Saturday, April 1 and 2, concelebrating Mass from his deathbed; making the Stations of the Cross Friday afternoon, as he had done every Friday of his life since he was a teenager; and struggling to articulate a last message his associates finally understood to be addressed to the thousands of young people gathered outside his window in St. Peter’s square: “I have sought you out. Now you have come to me.  I thank you.”

Finally, I remember the last words of the dying Pope on the afternoon of April 2, asking in his native Polish to be taken to the Father’s house.
The extraordinary dignity with which John Paul II bore his final illness, and his long suffering, was the last great paternal and priestly lesson he taught the Church and the world.  As news of his death cascaded around the globe, tens of millions of people, perhaps even hundreds of millions of people, suddenly felt a bit orphaned. In a world bereft of paternity, with its unique combination of strength and mercy, Karol Wojtyła had become a father to countless men and women living in an almost infinite variety of human circumstances and cultures.  As Time magazine’s Nancy Gibbs wrote in the online edition about the feelings of those in St. Peter’s Square, looking at that window with the small lit candle while the Pope was dying:

You feel smaller when your father dies because he was strong and lifted you, carried you, and taught you, and when he’s gone the room feels too big without him. So it was in St. Peter’s Square, where pilgrims kept vigil, their faces, traced in low light by candles, murmuring, “Don’t leave us.”  Among the believers there was almost disbelief that death still comes even to a man this strong.  The Holy Father who had carried the people so far, lifted them so high, taught them so much…

When a pope is buried, a legal document called the rogito, which summarizes his life and accomplishments, is buried with him. Sealed in a metal tube, and placed inside the cypress coffin of John Paul II on the morning of April 8, the rogito for the late Pope ended in these fitting terms: “John Paul II has left to all an admirable testament of piety, of a holy life, and of universal fatherhood.”

This “universal fatherhood” was not generic, however, but quite specific: it was a distinctly priestly form of paternity, a form of paternity based on Christian fearlessness. “Be not afraid!” that familiar antiphon of the pontificate which first rang out at the Pope’s installation on October 22, 1978, is a paternal admonition, an expression of priestly encouragement.  John Paul II lived a form of paternity that took its strength from Jesus Christ, priest and victim: Jesus Christ, who carried all the world’s fear to the Cross, and by immolating that fear in the perfect sacrifice of the Son to the salvific plan of the Father, enabled all who are incorporated into him to live, not without fear, but beyond fear.

For 26 and a half years, that proclamation of Christian fearlessness, and the summons to renew cultures, societies, political communities, and economies on the basis of Christian humanism, was John Paul II’s program.  Its focal point was the Great Jubilee of 2000.  For John Paul, the Jubilee was not a kind of global birthday party for the Church’s Lord—although deepening the Church’s understanding of the mystery of the Incarnation was surely central to the Jubilee celebrations.  Rather, the strategic purpose of the Great Jubilee of 2000 was to launch the Church into the deep of the New Evangelization, as the Pope put it in Novo Millennio Ineunte, his apostolic letter closing the Great Jubilee. If the Church stayed in the shallows, minding the institutional shop, it wouldn’t be or do much. More grievously; it would fail its Lord.  But having reminded itself on the two thousandth anniversary of the Incarnation that all things are indeed possible with God, the Church had to get out of the shallows, and put out into the deep of the modern world, and the post-modern world, and whatever other worlds humanity found itself in. Why? Not so much to argue as to propose.  “The Church proposes, the Church imposes nothing,” John Paul wrote in the encyclical Redemptoris Missio. And to propose what? As the Pope said on so many occasions, to propose Jesus Christ as the answer to the question that is every human life.  That was the proposal John Paul was convinced the world was waiting for, out there in “the deep” of individual lives, as well as in cultures and societies.
And that is the proposal the Church’s priests have to make in order to inspire a renewed evangelical energy in the people of the Church, empowered by that priestly ministry to take the Christian proposal out into “the deep” of contemporary society.
What were the sources of this priestly paternity, this distinctively priestly form of fatherhood, in John Paul II?
The first inspiration came from his father.  There has been a lot of rubbish written about John Paul II and his mother, who died when he was a young boy; psychobabblers have long contended that the Pope’s Marian piety was displaced maternal affection, and so forth and so on. The fact of the matter is that Karol Wojtyła didn’t remember his mother terribly well. It was his father, Karol Wojtyła, Sr., who was the defining figure in his life as a boy, as an adolescent, and as a young man. A rather reserved gentleman, whose formal education ended in elementary school, a retired military officer of granite-like integrity, he was also, as his son later wrote, a man of “constant prayer” who taught his son by example that the Church is more than a visible institution of which one is a “member.” For, John Paul II put it in Gift and Mystery, his vocational memoir, Karol Wojtyła, Sr.’s ascetic and spiritual life taught the future pope that the mystery of the mystery of the Church, its invisible dimension, extends beyond the structure or organization of the Church—structures, as John Paul would later put it, are “at the service of the mystery.”

The future Pope with his parents

So it was Karol Wojtyła, Sr., the man everyone in the town of Wadowice called “The Captain,” who first planted in the future pope the idea that the life of faith first has to do with interior conversion—with letting the mystery enter into and begin to form one’s own life.  Perhaps just as most importantly, Karol Wojtyła, Sr., taught his son that prayerfulness and manliness are not antinomies. To be manly was, in fact, to go down on one’s knees before the mystery.  To be manly was to acknowledge one’s utter dependence upon the grace of God in one’s life.  As the son would later write of the father, “his example was in a way my first seminary… a kind of domestic seminary.”  For a priest in love with the gift of his priesthood when he wrote those lines, 50 years after his ordination, no finer filial tribute from son to father could be imagined.
The second inspiring source of a distinctly priestly form of paternity in John Paul II was the prince-archbishop of Cracow, Adam Stefan Sapieha, the man who would ordain him a priest. Until September 1, 1939, Archbishop Sapieha (who came from a noble Lithuanian family, hence “prince-archbishop”) was a rather conventional ecclesiastical careerist.  He had been one of the private secretaries of Pius X; the simple gold pectoral cross that John Paul II wore was a duplicate of the pectoral cross that Pius X had given Sapieha when consecrating him a bishop in the Sistine Chapel in 1911. A year later, Sapieha was sent back to Cracow as archbishop, where he might have expected to feel the red hat descend, and sooner rather than later.
Unfortunately for Sapieha, he had a run-in in 1920, or thereabouts, with the new apostolic nuncio to independent Poland, who had been named a bishop but had not yet been ordained—a mountain-climbing former librarian named Achille Ratti. When Ratti came to the annual meeting of the Polish bishops’ conference at the monastery of the Black Madonna in Częstochowa and tried to enter, Sapieha barred him at the door, saying. “This meeting is for bishops only.” It was not, as the personnel managers would say, a good career move, because two years later, Nuncio Ratti was elected as Pope Pius XI, and while he may have forgiven, he did not forget.
So Sapieha labored on in relative obscurity, absent the red hat that had marked his predecessors for centuries, until September 1, 1939. Then, in the wake of the Nazi invasion of Poland, and at the age of 72, this hitherto timid and rather conventional churchman became the visible symbol of Poland’s determination not to be crushed under the Nazi jackboot—or, to return to my theme, Archbishop Sapieha developed an extraordinary capacity for fatherhood, in service to a hard-oppressed people.
For four and a half years, after the Germans closed the Cracow seminary in 1939, Sapieha, at the risk of his own life and his seminarians’, ran a clandestine seminary out of his residence. Students came in and out of the residence in the early morning, or in the dark of night, for spiritual direction, for academic instruction, to serve the archbishop’s Mass, and so forth. Then, in early August 1944, when the Gestapo tried to arrest all the young men of Cracow in order to forestall a repetition of the Warsaw Uprising, Sapieha brought his seminarians in from the cold: he hid them in his house, his living room and dining room transformed into a dormitory and his drawing rooms into classrooms. There, in the archbishop’s house, he and they lived an underground seminary experience for the next six months.  Every night at 9 p.m., several dozen young men, including Karol Wojtyła, watched Adam Stefan Sapieha go into the chapel in his residence, where he laid the problems of the day—grave in the last extreme—before the Lord in prayer. From Sapieha, who embodied the ancient Cracovian tradition that the bishop is the final defensor civitatis (the “defender of the city”) its people, and their rights, Karol Wojtyła absorbed a heroic concept of the priesthood: those essential hours of prayer before the Blessed Sacrament led to an active public ministry in which the priest, following the example of Christ, the high priest, offers his life for the service of his people.

Cardinal Adam Stefan Sapieha

When he finally got his red hat in Pius XII’s first consistory in 1946, Cardinal Sapieha’s train was met, on his return to Cracow from Rome, by a huge crowd of well-wishers. The students present picked up the archbishop’s car and carried it, and the archbishop, from the train station to Sapieha’s residence. It was testimony to the reverence in which this old man was held—a reverence that can still be experienced today. Just across the street from the archbishop’s residence in Cracow is the Franciscan basilica. And on its lawn is an extraordinary, contemporary sculpture of Sapieha, commissioned by Cardinal Karol Wojtyła in the 1970’s: a man in a plain cassock, staring down as if looking into the very jaws of hell itself. The inscription reads, “Adam Stefan Sapieha, archbishop of the long dark night of occupation.”
That man, bearing that history, ordained Karol Wojtyła a priest on All Saints Day, 1946. John Paul II would later write, in Gift and Mystery, about the meaning of that experience of ordination for his understanding of the priesthood:

The one about to receive Holy Orders prostrates himself completely and rests his forehead on the church floor indicating in this way his complete willingness to undertake the ministry being entrusted to him.  That rite has deeply marked my priestly life. Years later in St. Peter’s Basilica (in the very beginning of the Second Vatican Council), I was thinking back on that moment of ordination to priesthood and I wrote a poem.  I would like to share a few lines of that poem here:

Peter, you are the floor that others may walk over you … not knowing where they go you guide their steps … You want to serve their feet that pass as rock serves the hooves of sheep.  The rock is a gigantic temple floor, the cross a pasture.

When I wrote these words, I was thinking of Peter, and of the whole reality of the ministerial priesthood, and trying to bring out the profound significance of this liturgical prostration.  In lying prostrate on the floor in the form of a cross before one’s ordination, in accepting in one’s own life, like Peter, the cross of Christ, and becoming with the Apostle a floor for our brothers and sisters, one finds the ultimate meaning of all priestly spirituality.

Pope John Paul II, Karol Wojtyła, had many mentors in the spiritual life:  Jan Tyranowski, the lay mystic who, during the Second World War, introduced him to the classics of Carmelite spirituality, especially the works of St. John of the Cross; Columba Marmion, whom he later beatified; St. John Vianney, in light of whose example he vowed to become a “prisoner of the confessional.”  But in looking for the sources of Wojtyła’s experience of the priesthood as a form of paternity, one should also look—beyond his father and Cardinal Sapieha—to the network of lay friends he first met when they were university students in Cracow and he was their chaplain— men and women who remained among his closest friends up until the end of his life.
Asked about their critical, early years in the priesthood, the popes of the last few centuries would have talked about teaching in a seminary, or being posted abroad as a member of the diplomatic service of the Holy See.  When asked what was most important in those critical early years of his priesthood, John Paul II gave a very different kind of answer: he talked about working with college kids, and about the long-lasting influence his experience as a university chaplain had on his concept and exercise of the priesthood.  And he talked quite openly about the importance of those young lives in helping form him into the kind of priest he became.
It’s interesting to note that this most priestly of priests, Karol Wojtyła, was the first pope, in centuries, who had originally intended to live his Christian vocation as a layman.  Most of the other popes of recent centuries put on their first cassock in an Italian seminary at age 11 or 12, emerging at age 22, ordained. John Paul II was different.  This was a man who, until he was a young adult, intended to live his Christian vocation as a layman. And even as he was wrestling with the idea that he had been chosen for the priesthood, he intuitively understood what Vatican II would call, some 20 years later, “the universal call to holiness.”  He knew that sanctity was not limited to the sanctuary.  And so when, as a priest, he began forming young men and women into mature Christian disciples, he could see in this form of spiritual paternity, the paternity he may have imagined for himself in another context, prior to his understanding that he had been chosen for the ordained ministry of the Church.
With these young men and women—many of whom went on to distinguished professional and academic careers—Fr. Karol Wojtyła was a challenging and demanding friend.  But his challenge was always characterized by what one woman, who knew him well for 50 years, called his “permanent openness.” Or, as another lay member of this remarkable circle of friendship put it, Wojtyła “mastered the art of listening.”

Fr. Karol Wojtyla with friends camping.

And that capacity for listening was complemented by a deep respect for the freedom of others.  One of Karol Wojtyła’s old kayaking and hiking companions, a scientist, once told me, “I talked to him for hours and hours, but I never heard him say ‘I’d advise you to…’  He’d throw light on a problem, but then he’d always say, ‘you must decide.’”  Gently compelling decisions, gently bringing young lives into an encounter with their own capacity for spiritual and moral growth—that was the hallmark of Fr. Karol Wojtyła’s priestly form of spiritual paternity.

In this dialectic of intimacy and reserve, challenge and respect for freedom, which was characterized by a complete lack of clericalism, and a deep mutual respect, Karol Wojtyła developed the pastoral strategy he would later call “accompaniment.”  As he understood it, “accompaniment” was an attempt to get beyond the pattern of sporadic encounters between priests and young people, a pattern that frequently resulted in the priest being suspected of prying into the crevices of conscience.  “Accompaniment,” rather, was a way of walking with young adults, of helping them unveil their humanity by living through their problems with them. As a colleague would later describe the process, Fr. Wojtyła tried to accompany someone else in their problems, not simply as a safe shoulder on which to cry, but so as to help unveil the humanity of the other at a new depth. In Wojtyła’s view, this was the way a priest lived out his vocation to be an alter Christus  (“another Christ”).
The strategy of accompaniment was also an expression of Karol Wojtyła’s commitment to the spirituality of the Cross. Why? Because God himself had accompanied human beings into the most extreme situation—resulting in a bad experience of  human death—through His own divine choice to be Redeemer as well as Creator.  That is what happened on the Cross.  In Karol Wojtyła’s view, the cross of Christ was the final justification for a pastoral strategy of accompaniment.
In his work as a university chaplain in Cracow, we also see the beginnings of that extraordinary magnetism for the young that was such a dramatic element in John Paul II’s exercise of the Office of Peter.  Times beyond counting, I have been asked how to account for John Paul II as "pied piper" of the young.  The conventional answer is that this was a kind of celebrity craziness to which young people were often susceptible. But that answer, which never made much sense, made absolutely no sense as John Paul II became old and crippled. And it didn’t makes sense because the Pope was asking things of young people that no “celebrity” would dream of asking.
My constant answer to the question “Why the magnetism?” is twofold. First, there was the transparent integrity of John Paul II.  Young people, particularly young people discerning what they are to do with their lives, have extremely acute baloney detectors. They can smell falseness several miles off—and there was not a whiff of that in John Paul II.  Here, transparently, was a man who lived what he proposed. He did not ask young people anything he hadn’t required of himself.  He was not asking them to take on any burden he had not borne.  He was simply asking them to let him, and to let the Church, accompany them in bearing those burdens, and in taking on the task of conforming their young lives to Christ. Transparent integrity was the first quality that young people found extraordinarily compelling about John Paul II.
The second element of his magnetism was his challenge. John Paul II didn’t pander to young people. Contemporary culture, on the other hand, constantly panders to the young—in advertising, in its accommodation of patterns of dress, in dumbing down academic requirements, in lowering behavioral expectations. Young people today grow up surrounded by a world that tells them that they’re wonderful, that there’s no real effort required to “be all that you can be,” that “if it itches, scratch it.” It’s all pander, all the time.

The Pope at World Youth Day in Rome

Then comes this man, this pope, this priest and bishop who doesn’t pander— who, in an infinity of variations on the same great theme, lays down this challenge:

Never, ever settle for less than the spiritual and moral greatness with which, by God’s grace, you are capable. Don’t ever settle for anything less than that. You will fail.  But that is no reason to lower the bar of expectation.  Get up, dust yourself off, seek reconciliation and forgiveness, and go forward, more attuned to the grace of God in your life. But don’t lower the bar.  Never settle for anything less than the spiritual and moral grandeur that is nascent in you, and that the cross of Christ makes available to you through the grace of the Holy Spirit.

That challenge struck home. In an age that is skeptical, even cynical, about the heroic, John Paul II knew, from his own pastoral experience, that young people want to be summoned to lives of heroism—even to lives of heroic sacrifice. How many young men began to discern some inclination to a vocation to the priesthood by hearing that challenge laid out in World Youth Days in Denver, or Paris, or Rome, or Toronto? A lot.
John Paul’s papal thinking on spiritual paternity was at its richest in the 1980 encyclical on God the Father, Dives in Misericordia. By the time he came to write “Rich in Mercy,” Karol Wojtyła had been thinking about fatherhood for a long time.  Life with his own father, and with the “unbroken prince,” Cardinal Sapieha, had given him a profound experience of both familial and spiritual paternity.  He had come to think of his own priesthood as a form of paternity.  And as his intuitions about fatherhood deepened, he had made a dramatic claim in a poetic essay called “Reflections on Fatherhood.”  There, Wojtyła wrote:

Everything else will turn out to be unimportant and inessential except for this, father, child, love.  And, then, looking at the simplest of things, all of us will say could we not have learned this long ago?  Has this not always been imbedded in the bottom of everything that is?

Fatherhood is at the bottom of everything that is—not electrons, protons, neutrons, and all the other apparatus of the atom. As John Paul II developed that intuition in Dives in Misericordia, he opened up new dimensions of familiar biblical texts.  Themes from the Hebrew Bible enriched John Paul’s reflection’s in Dives in Misericordia on Jesus’ preaching of a Gospel of mercy, and illustrated the late Pope’s conviction that Christianity could only be understood through Judaism, and its unique role in salvation history.  Thus, John Paul II wrote that, while God’s merciful love begins “in the very mystery of creation,” it was the experience of the people of Israel which revealed that “mercy signified a special power of love”—a love strong enough to prevail over “sin and infidelity.”  And while the Old Testament constantly teaches that God is a God of justice, it also reveals that “love is ‘greater than justice: greater in the sense that it is primary and fundamental.’”  For Christians, that Old Testament teaching is completed in the mystery of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection, which is the revelatory icon of the Father’s mercy.  For here, mercy is shown to be, not only stronger than sin, but stronger than death itself.
For John Paul, the parable of the Prodigal Son was a synthesis of this biblical theology of mercy.  In John Paul’s analysis of this most poignant of New Testament parables, the Prodigal Son is a kind of everyman, burdened by the tragedy of the human condition, which the Pope describes as the awareness of a squandered sonship, the awareness of having lost one’s human dignity.  The forgiving father, by being faithful to his paternity and going beyond the strict norm of justice, restores to the wayward prodigal son the truth about himself, which is the lost dignity of his sonship.  True mercy does not weaken or humiliate its recipient; it confirms the recipient in his or her human dignity.  Thus, the priest—in the exercise of the Church’s mercy, which is the mercy of Christ—is both alter Christus and defensor hominis, the defender of the dignity of the human person.
John Paul’s theology of the priesthood was also displayed in the 1992 apostolic exhortation, Pastores Dabo Vobis, where the Pope underscored several key points.
First, he lifted up the distinctive vocation of the ordained priesthood, precisely so that the ordained priesthood would ennoble and empower the priestly character of all the baptized.
Secondly, he showed that the ground of the distinctiveness of the ordained ministry is biblical and theological, not sociological. As John Paul wrote in Pastores Dabo Vobis, when Jesus tells his fellow townsmen in the Nazareth synagogue that Isaiah’s messianic prophecy was being fulfilled in their midst because he had been consecrated by an anointing of the Holy Spirit, he was describing the essence of a new kind of priesthood—a priesthood of perfect mediation between God and humanity.  This was something new in salvation history, and according to John Paul II, it is “absolutely necessary for understanding the nature of the Church’s ordained ministry, which is a unique participation in this unique priesthood of Christ.”
Thus, in exploring the biblical roots of the priesthood of the new covenant, Pastores Dabo Vobis emphasized that to be a priest is not to perform a task or play a role, but to become an alter Christus: a personal continuation of the mediating priesthood of Jesus himself.  Ordination, John Paul reminded the Church and the world, does not simply authorize the priest to conduct certain types of ecclesiastical business. Rather, priestly ordination configures a man to Christ in a unique way, and that configuration confers a solemn obligation to serve the Christian community.  Service, in other words, is the way the priest’s unique sacramental authority becomes an image of Christ the High Priest.
In Pastores Dabo Vobis, the image of Christ the Good Shepherd reveals the specific form of holiness that, in John Paul’s view, must inform the priesthood—what he called the holiness of “pastoral charity.”  The priest’s “headship” of a local Catholic community is a form of “headship,” or spiritual paternity, that is not defined by power.  Christian headship consists in being a servant, in being a priest suffused with pastoral charity—in being one who, as the late Pope put it, “makes a total gift of self to the Church, following the example of Christ.”

In all of this, John Paul II understood that we are dealing with a gift and a mystery.  Reflecting on the mystery of the priesthood as understood by John Paul the Great, however, and with specific reference to his responsibilities in vocations work, I’m often reminded of something a former seminary rector, Cardinal Edwin O’Brien, once said to me: “A man will give his life for a mystery, but not for a question mark.”  And if we are looking for the reasons why John Paul II was, as Cardinal William Baum once put it, “the greatest vocations director in the history of the Church,” I think the answer is here: John Paul II was the greatest of vocations directors because he had entered into the mystery, and let it transform him.  Rather than draining the priesthood of its mystery, he let himself be led ever more deeply into the mystery of priestly self-sacrifice, as we saw in those last nine weeks of his life, during which he let himself be led ever more deeply into the mystery of the priest as victim, who lays down his life, day in and day out, for his people.
How could he do this?  He could do it because he was a radically convinced Christian disciple whose discipleship was the foundation of his priesthood.  His living his priesthood as a life of spiritual paternity was rooted in that discipleship.

Thus, if there is one great truth to be learned from the 58 years, five months, and one day of the luminous, world-transforming priestly ministry that Karol Wojtyła, Pope John Paul II, gave to the Church, it is this: a true priestly vocation begins with a commitment to radical discipleship.  A true priestly vocation begins with, is nurtured by, and lives from a man’s commitment to the truth that Jesus Christ is the answer to the question that is every human life.