The meaning of John Paul’s beatification

On Sunday, in a formal, public ceremony before hundreds of thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square, Pope Benedict XVI has proclaimed “blessed” Karol Wojtyla — Pope John Paul II.  For beatification, the Vatican requires proof of a miracle attributed to the candidate’s intercession, unless the candidate was martyred for his or her faith.

In the case of Pope John Paul II, the miracle accepted and confirmed was that of the healing from Parkinson’s disease of a 48-year-old French nun.  The second miracle — the one needed for canonization — must take place after the beatification ceremony and is seen as God’s final seal of approval on the church’s declaration of holiness. That a person is declared “blessed” is not a statement about perfection.  It does not mean that the person was without imperfection, blindness, deafness or sin. Nor is it a 360-degree evaluation of the pontificate or of the Vatican. Beatification and canonization are about personal holiness.

From his childhood, Wojtyla faced hardships that tested his faith and trust in God. He lost his mother when he was nine  years old and three years later lost his only brother to scarlet fever. His father died when Karol was 20. His vocation was slowly confirmed during the dramatic events and years of the Second World War. As a young man, Karol was an actor with a local theater group and a robust athlete who loved the mountains and lakes, and an accomplished poet.

He knew the hardship of labour as he cut stones at a rock quarry. He also assisted his friends in smuggling Jews to safety during he Holocaust.

Wojtyla was ordained priest in 1946, as Poland’s new communist regime imposed severe restrictions on the Catholic Church. After two years of study in Rome, he returned to Poland in 1948 and worked as a young pastor. From the beginning, he focused much of his attention on young people, especially university students.  World Youth Days were not invented by Pope John Paul II but by the young priest, Fr. Karol Wojtyla, who always made room for young men and women in his life and ministry. In 1958, at age 38, he was named an auxiliary bishop of Poland, becoming Poland’s youngest bishop in history. Named archbishop of Krakow in 1964, Wojtyla played a key role in the Second Vatican Council, helping to draft texts on religious liberty and the Church in the modern world.

During the final years of his pontificate, John Paul II brought suffering back into the realm of the expected in human life.  Rather than hide his infirmities, as most public figures do, Pope John Paul II let the whole world see what he went through. The very visible suffering brought on by Parkinson’s disease, severe arthritis and numerous intestinal ailments became part of the pope’s spiritual pilgrimage.  Everyone could see that his spirituality gave him an inner strength — with which one can also overcome fear, even the fear of death.  His struggle with the physical effects of aging was also a valuable lesson to a society that finds it hard to accept growing older, and a culture that sees no redemption in suffering.

In the final act of his life, before the television cameras of the world, the athlete was immobilized, the distinctive, booming voice silenced, and the hand that produced voluminous encyclicals no longer able to write. Many saw the pope’s suffering as something like the agony of Jesus himself. Several hours before his death, Pope John Paul’s last audible words were: “Let me go to the house of the Father.” In the intimate setting of prayer, as Mass was celebrated at the foot of his bed and the throngs of faithful sang below in St. Peter’s Square, he died at 9:37 p.m. on April 2 while hundreds of thousands of people kept vigil for days in the piazza below the windows of the papal apartments.

Through his public passion, suffering and death, he showed the world the suffering face of Jesus in a remarkable way.

At his funeral mass on April 8, 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, his closest associate at the Vatican told the world that the Holy Father was “watching us and blessing us from the window of the Father’s House.” When the throngs of people began chanting “Santo Subito” at the end of the Pope’s funeral mass on April 8, 2005, what were they really chanting?  They were crying out that in Karol Wojtyla, they saw someone who lived with God and lived with us. He was a sinner who experienced God’s mercy and forgiveness. He was the prophetic teacher who preached the word in season and out of season.

He took the message of the Gospel and the story of the Church away from the home office on the Tiber to the farthest corners of the earth through his visits to 129 countries in the 26 years of his pontificate. He taught us not to be afraid. He showed us how to live, how to love, how to forgive and how to die. He taught us how to embrace the cross in the most excruciating moments of life, knowing that the cross was not God’s final answer.

Throughout his ministry, and especially during his entire pontificate, Pope John Paul II preached God’s mercy, wrote about it, and most of all lived it.  He offered forgiveness to the man who was destined to kill him in St. Peter’s Square.  The Pope who witnessed the scandal of divisions among Christians and the atrocities against the Jewish people as he grew up did everything in his power to heal the wounds caused by the historic conflicts between Catholics and other Christian churches, and especially with the Jewish people.  His pontificate was filled with reminders that the saints extend to each other and to us a hand to guide us on the path of holiness.

It is no coincidence, then, that his Beatification ceremony took place on May 1, the Second Sunday of Easter that is also known throughout the world as Divine Mercy Sunday, a feast the John Paul II, himself, established in the year 2000.  Where hatred and the thirst for revenge dominate, where war brings suffering and death to the innocent, abuse has destroyed countless innocent lives, the grace of mercy is needed in order to settle human minds and hearts and to bring about healing and peace. Wherever respect for human life and human dignity are lacking, there is need of God’s merciful love.  Mercy is needed to insure that every injustice in the world will come to an end. The message of mercy is that God loves us – all of us – no matter how great our sins.  God’s mercy is greater than our sins, so that we will call upon Him with trust, receive His mercy, and let it flow through us to others.  Essentially, mercy means the understanding of weakness, the capacity to forgive.

In Blessed John Paul II, the Church offers us not a model pope but a model Christian, one who mirrored inner holiness in the real world, and who, through words and example, challenged people to believe, to hope, to forgive and to love. As Canadians, let us recall with gratitude the stirring words that Blessed John Paul II spoke to hundreds of thousands of young people at the concluding mass of World Youth Day 2002 at Downsview Park in Toronto.

“At difficult moments in the Church’s life, the pursuit of holiness becomes even more urgent. And holiness is not a question of age; it is a matter of living in the Holy Spirit.”

“Do not let that hope die. Stake your lives on it. We are not the sum of our weaknesses and failures; we are the sum of the Father’s love for us and our real capacity to become the image of his Son.”

We need those words now more than ever.

Father Thomas Rosica

Thomas Rosica is the CEO Salt + Light Catholic Media Foundation and Television Network. He served as the national director and CEO of World Youth Day 2002 and the Papal Visit of Pope John Paul II to Canada