Our People

In memory of me: John Paul the Great

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
24 April 2005

Catholics like litanies: long lists of names to describe Jesus or the Blessed Virgin or one of the saints and to ask for their help. It is a natural response to the fact that no one tag adequately captures such greatness.

The world’s secular leaders and media have unwittingly been composing such a litany to John Paul these past few weeks. They have called him: light in a dark century; destroyer of communism; defender of human freedom; champion of peace; advocate of reconciliation; enemy of the culture of death; builder of the civilisation of love; friend of youth; companion of the poor; unifying force; voice of the voiceless; faithful servant of God; true apostle; bridge to heaven; millennial pope; John Paul the Great.

Whether or not readers responded to the media’s litany with the words “pray for us”, the religious instinct to maintain some link with this great man and to ask his help even now has been very evident. A huge crowd gathered around John Paul II in Rome was he was dying, as he lay in state and as he was laid to rest. They gave him the biggest funeral in history—exceeded in scale of audience only by some of John Paul’s World Youth Day masses which drew crowds of several millions.

They gathered especially in St Peter’s square. I remember once being asked by a tourist in the crypt of St Peter’s what that casket was that people were kneeling before. I explained that the bones of St Peter were there. She stared at me for a while and then said “You mean, like Saint Peter in the Bible?”

“Yes,” I explained patiently, not with a litany of papal titles but with some stories from the Gospels. It was the same man whom Jesus had called to give up fishing for fish and join him as a fisher of men. The same Simon who once surnamed Jesus “Christ, the Son of the Living God” and was surnamed in return “Peter, the rock on which I’ll build my Church”, the keeper of the keys, the binder and looser, the forgiver of sins and definer of doctrines. The same Peter who was taught by Christ at his Last Supper to be servant of the servants of God. The same Peter who after the Resurrection returned to Christ and three times professed his love. The same Peter who was told to go out to all the world and proclaim the Gospel, to confirm his brothers and sisters in faith, to feed the Good Shepherd’s sheep. The same St Peter who was martyred and buried right here. That’s why the popes live and die here at the Vatican, I explained.

“Wow!” she said, and went to tell her husband and son. “Could you repeat that into our video camera,” the father asked, as he filmed the casket of St Peter’s bones.

“You know,” I heard her say to her husband on the way out of the crypt, “I think that’s why they call it St Peter’s Square!”

St Peter’s Square has been full these past weeks as never before and most of those who have been there were young people. That is a mystery to the world’s media and the liberal establishment. How can someone who taught such traditional stuff have had such an impact on the young?

“If you love me you will feed my sheep,” said Jesus to Peter as his parting charge. And then he added, “don’t forget to feed my lambs also”. Not just the old and the weary, the middle aged and the powerful. Certainly they need nourishment too, they need words of life. But don’t forget the lambs, the young ones, the little ones. John Paul did not forget.

The first time I met him in person was in 1997. Though a Sydney boy originally I was part of a Melbourne contingent meeting him in one of the grand audience halls in the papal palace. He walked around the room greeting people from all over the world and chatting with them. We explained that we were from Melbourne. With a wicked glint in his eye he said “I remember Sydney!”

No, he had not forgotten Melbourne. He was teasing us. He did that again to me only last year when the Australian bishops made their ‘ad limina’ visit to Rome. He knew I was a Dominican, a member of a religious order. So he asked me how new vocations to religious life were going in Australia. I confessed that they were not, on the whole, going very well. Then he asked me how many kangaroos there were in Australia. It was amusing, but for a fleeting moment I wondered if his sharp mind was wandering. I told him there were very many.

“I want more religious than kangaroos,” he said. He had set me up—and given me a job to do—just as Jesus did so often to Peter and the lads.

It was awe-inspiring to meet the pope and I felt very lucky to be that close to him. Yet in a sense everyone knew John Paul II. That’s why there has been such an unprecedented outpouring of grief and gratitude from billions of people. That’s why millions of young people have been saying they feel like they’ve lost a father. We knew John Paul and he knew us. Totus tuus, all yours, was his motto. He travelled the length and breadth of the globe, to get to know us and to bring us the Good News and to give himself to us...

Of his 104 pastoral visits outside of Italy, his longest was his 1986 journey of 50,000 km through Bangladesh, Singapore, Fiji, New Zealand, Australia and the Seychelles. Here he held hands and danced in a conga-line with youngsters in jeans; he conducted impromtu question and answer sessions with school children; he visited central Australian Aborigines and encouraged them in their struggle for justice and reconciliation; he met politicians and diplomats, religious and non-Christians, academics and unemployed, parishioners and seminarians, all sorts. He wore a hard hat in a factory, a pastor’s stole in a hospital, a koala in a zoo. He engaged with every rank of people and made a deep impression wherever he went.

We felt we knew him and he knew us. He was our pope.

The media was not always so enthusiastic about John Paul II. Some wanted a less prophetic figure, one who echoed the morality of the age rather than challenged it with the Gospel given to Peter. Yet these past few weeks the media has in general beem more sympathetic, more enthusiastic, than ever before to the Church. Only a few of the hardened critics tried the “He was great but…” line. Most, by far, reflected humanity’s overwhelming appreciation.

The Church has been blessed with many great popes—as well as some not so great. As we review their lives, we find some who were great scholars, “doctors of the Church”, who proclaimed the faith and developed our understanding, and others who were less intellectual, more men of prayer and piety. Some were great evangelizers, who took or sent the Gospel to the ends of earth; others stayed at home as great administrators and reformers. Some rubbed shoulders with the high and mighty of this earth, hopefully to some good effect; others reached out more to the poor and marginalized. Some brought comfort and consolation; others were signs of contradiction and confrontation.

John Paul was all of these kinds of pope. He will be remembered as one of the great intellects amongst the popes and his teachings—which fill more books than all his predecessors put together—will take many decades to unpack. As well as a philosopher-theologian he was a brilliant linguist and social critic; the man who made the Second Vatican Council a reality for today’s Catholics. Yet he was not all head. There was a deep personal piety, a great devotion to God, the Blessed Virgin and the saints—two thousand of whom he canonized or beatified. That piety came to a fitting climax as he blessed the world from his deathbed on the annual “Feast of Divine Mercy”, a Polish devotion he had introduced to the world.

He was at least as much heart as head. That revealed itself in his great dramatic gestures, putting the modern media, meetings, rallies, art and travel all at the service of the Gospel. It revealed itself in deeply moving encounters with the poor and the sick, with people dying of AIDS or living with civil war. It was nourished by long mystic nights spent in Vigil before the Blessed Sacrament and in the company of Our Lady.

While his pastoral journeys took him to every corner of earth, he also worked on the Church from within, revolutionising its internal operations. The Cardinals who elect his successor, for instance, including our own Archbishop Cardinal George Pell, will be the most diverse group in history because of John Paul’s efforts to internationalize the Church’s leadership.

Historians debate how big John Paul’s part was in the fall of communism. We may never know all of his involvements there, but Mikael Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan both thought his contribution was crucial. Without him the Polish solidarity movement might have floundered and communism survived in Poland. There would have been no knock-on effect in the rest of the Eastern block. The iron curtain might still be up and cold war still be on in 2005. The arms race would still be escalating and our world might have been teetering on the edge of nuclear disaster…

John Paul was the great moral authority of this generation past, the prophet of the age. He embraced the teaching of the Second Vatican Council that God became man not only to reveal God, but also to reveal the human person to us: to show us humanity in all its glory and possibilities. So he turned his critical gaze not only towards communism but towards any ideology or system or practice which demeaned the human person. His was always a voice for the voiceless, for the poorest of poor, the unborn, the dying, the marginalized, for every human life and for the cradles of human life, marriage and the family, community and culture.

Such words made him at times a ‘sign of contradiction’, as every pope must be. But he was always a great unifier. He working tirelessly at reuniting Eastern and Western Europe, at bringing disunited Christians back together, at bringing Christians into dialogue with non-Christians, at apologizing to those we have hurt and befriending those who are still strangers—especially that new generation yet to hear the Gospel.

More than all of this, perhaps, John Paul II led Church and world confidently but humbly from that twentieth and bloodiest of centuries into a new millennium with new vision and new hope. From his first words as Pope to the last, his were always Christ’s words to Peter and Peter’s to the world: Be not afraid. We are not doomed to repeat a century of world wars, holocausts and genocides, the massacre of the unborn and other innocents, the starvation of millions while others live in opulence. Peace and reconciliation and respect are truly possible, if all is put at the service of God and the human person.

There was a terrible irony in this great athlete being reduced to paraplegia and this great communicator rendered mute. Yet he preached even by his dying. His favourite theologian, Cardinal Hans Urs von Balthasar, said that history is a ‘theodrama’: a play in which God and humanity work out their tragic, comic, romantic and ultimately glorious story. Instead of hiding from the world John Paul let himself be seen in his weakness, like his Master on the Cross, like Peter in his turn. His many words about the dignity of every human person, including the elderly, the disabled, and the dying were not empty ones. They were words of life, his life.

So now the Church and the world have commended him to God. Only a future pope can canonize John Paul as a saint. But popular acclaim and divine grace at work in the world will be the principal evidence for any such move. Even the secular media recognize a saint when they see one. And compose their litanies. John Paul the Great: pray for us.