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Remembering John Paul II

By Rod Benson - posted Friday, 8 April 2005


After 359 years of condemnation by the church for insisting on the scandalous heresy that the earth revolved around the sun, Galileo was finally rehabilitated in 1992. Also in that year the pope issued a new universal catechism, the first revision in five centuries. In 2002 he marked his 24th jubilee by revising the prescribed way in which rosary prayers are recited, the first change of this kind in nine centuries.

Central to John Paul’s vision has been the question of the meaning of human life and, in particular, of suffering. In his final weeks and days, the world witnessed the pope’s physical and emotional suffering more intimately than ever before. The one who had defended the rights of the oppressed, the unborn and those who cannot speak for themselves now demonstrated by his silent example how to suffer and die with human dignity, “serenely abandoning himself to God’s will”, as the Vatican media put it.

John Paul the global statesman

No previous pope travelled as widely or as frequently as John Paul II. The world was literally his parish. He visited 129 countries, although not Russia or China. Nor did any previous pope understand the nature and power of mass media, or exploit it to such advantage. Where earlier popes had merely dabbled in secular politics - or had standing armies - this pope walked the world stage as an eminent statesman as well as a spiritual leader.

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As a young man John Paul watched his country overrun first by the German armies and then by Stalin’s Red Army. More than three decades later, in June 1979, as newly inaugurated pontiff, he preached to more than a million people in Victory Square, Warsaw, in the heart of communist Poland. “Come, Holy Spirit”, he called, “fill the hearts of the faithful and renew the face of the earth”.

Then he added in his distinctive, sonorous voice, “Of this earth,” indicating with a gesture the people gathered to hear him, and Eastern Europe, and the wide world. If there was a defining moment in his pontificate, suggests Vatican expert John Cornwell in The Times, “it was that declaration of liberation made in the heart of his oppressed homeland”.

John Paul will be remembered as the person who championed the banned Solidarity trade union movement in his native Poland in 1987, instigating and assisting a process that led to the eventual collapse of the Soviet empire. He was instrumental in encouraging Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to implement his program of democratising reforms known as perestroika. Baroness Margaret Thatcher remarked that “he was the moral force behind victory in the cold war”.

There were other diplomatic victories. In 1982 he visited Britain and Argentina, urging the two nations to negotiate a peaceful end to the Falklands War. In Chile, hours before meeting him, John Paul publicly blasted General Augusto Pinochet’s military government as dictatorial, and was widely credited as influencing his downfall. He advocated human rights in the Philippines in the presence of President Ferdinand Marcos. In 1984 he publicly denounced apartheid in South Africa. In 1986 he crossed the Tiber River to the Rome Synagogue, the first papal visit to a Jewish place of worship. In 1992, Israel and the Vatican forged full diplomatic ties after hostilities reaching back two millennia. In Syria in May 2001 he became the first pope to enter a mosque.

This pope also elevated more than 470 of the faithful to sainthood, and beatified 1,300 others. It has been said that he declared more people saintly and holy than all of his predecessors combined. This has undoubtedly left an indelible mark on ecclesiastical history, and signals the triumph of the gospel over distinctions of race, class and gender.

While it is premature to call the late pontiff “John Paul the Great”, there is an aura of greatness about his person and his legacy. Let us leave the hagiography to future historians, and be content in the knowledge that John Paul II was indeed an extraordinarily gifted Christian man, and an extraordinary gift to the church of Jesus Christ at a critical moment in its existence in the world.

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About the Author

Rev Rod Benson serves as ethicist and public theologian with the Tinsley Institute, and Public Affairs Director for the NSW Council of Churches.

Other articles by this Author

All articles by Rod Benson

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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