FAREWELL, JOHN PAUL, YOU WERE THE BEST, A GREAT PAPA WHO WE KNOW WILL ONE DAY BE A GREAT SAINT AS WELL
By Michael H. Brown
He was always there, in the anteroom of our thoughts and prayers and in our homes and in Catholic churches, somewhere behind the quicksilver of stained glass in every parish as if to stand in guard of the Blessed Sacrament.
That's what it seemed like, at any rate, what it felt like with Joannes Paulus II, who stood as a Pope of popes, our rock, bulwark against society and the comfort in times of true Catholic tragedy -- a spiritual and yet also a world leader who will hover somewhere, some day, above names like Roosevelt and Kennedy and Churchill when history has its say and we see more clearly the way this man lived his vocation (to the hilt) and affected all of history.
He was always there, John Paul, rock of Peter, as if to guide and guard through unsettlement: for more than a quarter of a century, the one to whom we could look when the rest of the Church did not look so very good when we looked at it.
Were it not for John Paul the Great, the Catholic Church may well have collapsed under the weight of scandal; many would have lost faith.
How many vocations were solely because of John Paul, how many entered the priesthood due to his radiance? How many kept a favorable view of priests solely because he was there? And could anyone except John Paul have torn down the Berlin Wall, all but converted Gorbachev to Catholicism, and ended the tyranny of Communism (at least for the moment) -- which was the most dangerous threat to mankind in recorded history, greater even than the threat of Hitler?
Really, that's enough said. One has only to look at Pope John Paul II to see the radiance of the Holy Spirit. A vocation to the hilt! We don't need to review all the encyclicals and proclamations and declarations; there will be other times, intellectual times, for that. For now, we rejoice simply in his spirit, for this was a man who was the equal not only of any pope on record (save for Peter) but of the most devout saints, a man who will join Mother Teresa and Padre Pio and Sister Faustina -- and Lucia of Fatima -- and join them on an equal footing.
Watch the miracles that spring from his intercession!
And yet, this was also an "ordinary" man, a man who was legitimately humble, who didn't consider himself as anything special and did not exhibit the ego of the power he held. I have a good friend named William Gallagher who was once acting mayor of Niagara Falls, N.Y., and back in the 1970s, when the Pope, as Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, of Kracow, was making a tour of the U.S., Bill was given the duty of escorting this cardinal around for an entire day. I remember Bill telling me about that incredible memory of spending so much time with the future Pope, alone, even sipping wine with him -- and feeling like he was with a holy man, to be sure, but also a regular guy at the end of the day.
Years later, when he saw the list of papal candidates, Gallagher (now an outstanding television reporter in Detroit) was the only one who put his money on the Polish cardinal simply because he had met and loved and appreciated Cardinal Wojtyla -- this man who would rise not just to the Throne of Peter but to the heights of history, a martyr without succumbing.
Oh, John Paul: you did it! You succeeded like no one else! You ended it with happiness and dignity and your final word in life was "Amen"!
It doesn't get better than that and it is hard to cry for someone who dies the way John Paul II, who is in Heaven -- completely succeeding in his earthly mission, telling us to rejoice in his death (because he did).
But it is easy to cry for ourselves. It is easy to fall into the nostalgia.
He was with us. He was always with us. He showed us how we are supposed to live (and die) and now he -- papa, in the truest sense of the word papa -- is gone, at least to earthly eyes.