Cardinal's Column, Calendar & Appointments

April 10, 2005

The loss of a shepherd

I write this on April 1, as Pope John Paul II is dying. It will appear next week, when I expect to be in Rome for the Pope’s funeral and for the events leading up to the Conclave which will elect his successor. This was to have been a column on mercy, marking the annual celebration of Mercy Sunday, a week after Easter Sunday. That celebration is part of the legacy of Pope John Paul II, who once defined mercy as “love which is eager to forgive.” He was himself a merciful man, shaped by his vast love of God and of all those whom God loves.

It is hard to imagine a world without Pope John Paul II. For over 26 years, he has been the living voice of the Catholic faith. He has been loved intensely, and not only by Catholics. He has been respected and admired. He has been shot at, criticized, denounced. As he leaves us, millions of people around the word feel his dying as their loss.

Looking back on the quarter-century so marked by his personality and his thought, his ministry and initiatives, people reach to explain him. The motive force of his life is not a category, although many will insist he was conservative. He certainly worked to conserve and hand on the Catholic and Apostolic faith, even as it was contested. He upheld the institution of marriage and the family; he condemned abortion and worked to be sure it was not defined as a “right.” He knew that there is absolute truth, a clear difference between right and wrong, and that Jesus Christ is savior of the world through the mediation of the Church he founded as a necessary sign and instrument of salvation. Yet for some he was liberal. He denounced the “logic of capitalism” when it puts profit before people. He thought it wrong to use the death penalty in developed societies and went far to question the legitimacy of almost any war. He took stands to protect the environment. He told the United States we should welcome immigrants and care for the poor both in this country and around the world.

It is not that he was in some respects conservative and in others liberal; it is rather that he was something different from both. He wasn’t shaped by an ideology but by a person. He was a disciple of Jesus Christ who followed Christ in the ordained priesthood and as a bishop. Karol Wojtyla came to understand while still young that the Catholic faith is the truth of the world and that it is beneath human dignity to live in falsehood. He believed that anyone committed to Christ should be so completely seized by him and shaped by his truth and love that nothing in life could be outside Christ’s light and direction. A firm, decisive teacher who proclaimed the truths revealed by God unhesitatingly, he understood also the human predicament and desired not only to be with Christ but also with the world’s people. The paradox of his life is resolved in the claims of Christian discipleship and the demands made on him as the deputy of the Good Shepherd who feeds and leads the flock. Reducing him to psychological or political categories not only fails to explain him; it also keeps at bay the challenge to the status quo, both personal and social, posed by the Catholic faith which John Paul II taught and lived.

He told a Time magazine reporter a number of years ago: “We emphasize the transcendent worth of the human person. We insist that the human person must never be treated as an object; he must always be considered the subject. That is the basis for our teaching, the absolute standard.” Christ died and rose so that each human person could be saved. “To save,” he once said, “means to embrace and lift up with redemptive love.” Lifting up with redemptive love means first “to convince the world in regard to sin.” (Jn 16, 8) The love that is greater than any sin is recognized only when one is honest about one’s sinfulness. The Pope was always honest, and he was also always loving. This holding together of truth and love made him moral teacher of the world. At a time when the moral fabric of society is torn and threatens to disintegrate, he had the courage, the ability and the opportunity to sound a constructive note of clarity and hope. That is the role of the Pope, and he never shrank from it.

He knew well what the Second Vatican Council taught, because he contributed to that Council’s documents when he was a young bishop. He understood it not as an isolated event, but as a moment in the life of the tradition that unites us to Christ. For 26 years, he has proclaimed the letter and the spirit of Vatican II, guided by the charism of the papal office, often in the face of the special agendas and ideologies set upon capturing and co-opting the Council. He steered Peter’s boat in some very rough waters.

Peter’s office will soon be entrusted to another Pope. He will have to steer the ship in still stormy waters; he will have to shepherd a sometimes unruly flock. Pray that the Holy Spirit guide the cardinals who are papal electors. In this Easter Season of the Church’s year, we constantly hear the admonition of the risen Christ to his startled disciples: “Do not be afraid!” These were the first words of the newly elected Pope John Paul II to the world. We need to take them to heart again. “Do not be afraid”: the Pope has gone to God and we have lost a great shepherd. “Do not be afraid”: the risen Christ continues to love and govern his people. “Do not be afraid.”