Catholic Sensibility

I am writing this only several hours after Pope John Paul II died. May he rest in everlasting peace. I think that the Pope can be remembered as a traveler. He traveled over 700,000 miles and visited 129 countries. And he found himself in decidedly unexpected places for a pope. In October of 1986, the Pope was in Assisi alongside representatives of the world’s religions and said that all those who pray "are included in the great and unique design of God." On World Youth Day in 1997, the Pope was in a secularized Paris with a million young people. Many of them, Cardinal Lustiger said, “had not been baptized and lived in a spiritual desert.” The Cardinal said, “The youth were very cognizant of the fact that the pope was not there to ‘reform’ them, but had come in order to meet with them and speak to them, without compromise, of the splendor of Truth. He trusted them; they understood his disinterested affection.” When, in 1992, the Pope visited Hungary, he prayed at a monument in Debrecen dedicated to Protestant victims of the religious wars and did not hesitate to refer to those killed by Catholics as “martyrs for the faith.” In 2000, the Pope visited the Western Wall in Jerusalem and inserted a prayer into a nook that read in part, “we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant.” Later that year, in Rome, the Pope said, “Today, the first Sunday of Lent, seemed to me the right occasion for the Church, gathered spiritually round the successor of Peter, to implore divine forgiveness for the sins of all believers. Let us forgive and ask forgiveness!” He said that our consciences would be awakened only after the recognition of past wrongs, “opening the way to conversion for everyone.” The Pope was a traveler, a pilgrim. In his last encyclical, he wrote, “I have been able to celebrate Holy Mass in chapels built along mountain paths, on lakeshores and seacoasts; I have celebrated it on altars built in stadiums and in city squares... This varied scenario of celebrations of the Eucharist has given me a powerful experience of its universal and, so to speak, cosmic character. Yes, cosmic!” Dr. John Sullivan has written on “Philosophy as Pilgrimage,” referring specifically to the theologian Maurice Blondel (1861-1949) and John Paul II: “First, a pilgrim is a person who goes in search of something desirable which is missing, rather than one who is in full possession of this treasure, truth or salvation. Second, a pilgrim is an engaged participant rather than a detached observer; the outcome of the pilgrim’s search is something of deep significance for the seeker; it is not a matter of indifference. Third, unlike a particular pilgrimage, after which we may rest, the pilgrimage of life that both Blondel and John Paul II have in mind is one of continuous and unfinished movement; it is not temporary but lifelong. Fourth, in the course of this pilgrimage, we build up a cumulative and coherent view of our experience, which should be seen in its entirety and wholeness, rather than as something fragmented and compartmentalized. In this cumulative and increasingly coherent perspective we should not have a sense of losing or leaving behind what has happened to us earlier or even long ago; instead we integrate what is important into ourselves and carry it forward in such a way that both it and we seem to undergo change in the light of each other. Fifth, as pilgrims, we must walk ‘out in the open,’ ready to mingle with others who travel on a different road, with those who go perhaps in a completely different direction; we should not need to be protected ‘indoors’ or isolated, in some form of quarantine, kept apart from possible alternative routes or sources of temptation.” The Holy Father’s pilgrimage has ended. But let his witness be an example for us, when we journey to the Assisi, Paris, Debrecen, Jerusalem, and Rome in our own lives. Mountain paths and stadiums are both embraced by God. Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord; and let perpetual light shine upon him. May he rest in peace.