The New York Times (Wed. April 20, 2005, A11) quotes John Allen: "Having seen fascism in action, Ratzinger today believes that the best antidote to political totalitarianism is ecclesiastical totalitarianism," he wrote. "In other words, he believes the Catholic Church serves the causes of human freedom by restricting freedom in its internal life, thereby remaining clear about what it teaches and believes."
Daniel J. Wakin and The Times editorial staff would better serve their reading public if they presented the real depth and character of Allen when he made a public retraction and self-indictment at the "Catholic Common Ground Lecture," June 25, 2004 @ Catholic University of America. He said the following:
"As a journalist, it's my job to ask difficult questions, so let me now ask one aloud, prompted by this last point about the absence of spaces for dialogue: 'Why didn't Common Ground work?' Please don't misunderstand; I know the Common Ground initiative does very important things. Gathering us here this evening is a splendid case in point. At the same time, however, most observers would probably agree that measured against the aspirations of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, which were to transform the public conversation in the American Church, the Common Ground initiative has not had the desired impact. If anything, we are more polarized, more strangers to one another, today than when the project began. So, the tough question: Why?
I have a hunch. I think the proper analogy may be to substance abuse - people can't be helped if they don't want help. Similarly, a dialogue program is of no use to people convinced they have nothing to learn from one another. Perhaps, therefore, American Catholics haven't yet "bottomed out." They have not had the kind of illumination, the "ah-hah" moment, in which they grasped the sterility of ideological warfare.
I wish I had a formula for manufacturing such illumination on a mass scale. Instead, all I can offer is my personal story, in the hope that it might be indicative of something. My "conversion" to dialogue originated in a sort of "bottoming out." It came with the publication of my biography of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, issued by Continuum in 2000 and titled The Vatican's Enforcer of the Faith. The first major review appeared in Commonweal, authored by another of my distinguished predecessors in this lecture series, Fr. Joseph Komonchak. It was not, let me be candid, a positive review. Fr. Komonchak pointed out a number of shortcomings and a few errors, but the line that truly stung came when he accused me of "Manichean journalism." He meant that I was locked in a dualistic mentality in which Ratzinger was consistently wrong and his critics consistently right. I was initially crushed, then furious. I re-read the book with Fr. Komonchak's criticism in mind, however, and reached the sobering conclusion that he was correct. The book, which I modestly believe is not without its merits, is nevertheless too often written in a "good guys and bad guys" style that vilifies the cardinal. It took Fr. Komonchak pointing this out, publicly and bluntly, for me to ask myself, "Is this the kind of journalist I want to be?" My answer was no, and I hope that in the years since I have come to appreciate more of those shades of gray that Fr. Komonchak rightly insists are always part of the story. (I will not embarrass Fr. Komonchak by asking for his evaluation of my performance!)
My point is that it is unpredictable what will produce change in the human heart. I would tongue-in-cheek suggest that perhaps the editors of Commonweal could arrange for more negative reviews of books by Catholic authors, but I actually doubt that's the solution. In some fashion, however, Catholics need to be brought to see how their blinders and prejudices, far from safeguarding the faith, actually impede full Catholicity. Again, I say: I do not know how to engineer this, but if I were a pastor or spiritual director or bishop these days, I would be spending a great deal of time pondering the outlines of a "spirituality of dialogue." We must have a spirituality before a program for dialogue can realize its potential."
There is a greatness to this honesty, love for truth and self-deprecation that has already shown itself in Allen as the go-to "Wunderkind" (as Paul Elie refers to him) of Vatican reporting for both press and TV. The Times would better serve itself and us by undergoing a similar "ah-hah" moment.
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
The Mind of Benedict XVI: “If the Eye Were Not Solar, It Could Not Recognize the Sun” (Goethe)
1)From Cardinal Ratzinger’s Homily in Mass Before Conclave: “Jesus Christ: `The Measure of True Humanism’” (April 19, 2005):
a) Relativism: “How many winds of doctrine we have known in these last decades, how many ideological currents, how many fashions of thought? The small boat of thought of many Christians has often remained agitated by the waves, tossed from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, etc….
To have a clear faith, according to the creed of the Church, is often labeled as fundamentalism. While relativism, that is, allowing oneself to be carried about with every wind of `doctrine,’ seems to be the only attitude that is fashionable. A dictatorship of relativism is being constituted that recognizes nothing as absolute and which only leaves the `I’ and its whims as the ultimate measure.”
b) Truth: “We have another measure: the Son of God, true man. He is the measure of true humanism.” How does this affect truth as absolute? Jesus Christ said: “I have called you friends (Jn. 15, 15). Ratzinger says, “The Lord defines friendship in two ways. There are no secrets between friends: Christ tells us everything he hears from the Father; he gives us his full confidence and, with confidence, also knowledge. He reveals his face to us, his heart.
He gives us his confidence; he gives us the power to speak with his `I:’ `This is my body,’ and `I absolve you.’ He entrusts his body to us, the Church. He entrusts his truth to our weak minds, our weak hands, the mystery of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit…”
* * * * * * * * *
2)From Previous Writings:
Positivism as cause of relativism, nihilism and ultimately terrorism: the absence
of truth in relativism clears the runway for ideologies and the nihilism of terrorism. The ideologies that spawn terrorism fill the vacuum left by the absence of the absoluteness of truth. Positivism is the methodology that has created that vacuum.
To the assertion and question put to him in 1993, “nihilism is rapidly taking the place of Marxism. How do you analyze this divorce between faith and modernity?,” Ratzinger responded:
“It is explained by the encroachment of relativism and subjectivism, an inevitable consequence of a world overwhelmed by the alleged certainties of natural or applied science. Only what can be tested and proved appears as rational. [Sensible] (e)xperience has become the only criterion guaranteeing truth. Anything that cannot be subjected to mathematical or experimental verification is regarded as irrational.
“This restriction of reason [to the experience of the senses] has the result that we are left in almost total darkness regarding some essential dimensions of life. The meaning of man, the bases of ethics, the question of God, cannot be subjected to rational experience, verified by mathematical formulae. And so they are left to subjective sensibility alone. This is serious because if, in a society, the bases of ethical behavior are abandoned to subjectivity alone, released from common motives for being and living, handed over to pragmatism, then it is man himself who is threatened.
The great ideologies have been able to give a certain ethical foundation to society. But today, Marxism is crumbling and liberal ideology is so split into fragments that it no longer has a common, solid, coherent view of man and his future. In the present situation of emptiness, there looms the terrible danger of nihilism, that is to say, the denial or absence of all fundamental moral reference for the conduct of social life. This danger becomes visible in the new forms of terrorism (my underline).
Even though perverted, the political, social terrorism of the 1960’s had a certain kind of moral ideal. But today, the terrorism of drug abuse, of the Mafia, of attacks on foreigners, in Germany and elsewhere, no longer has any moral basis. In this era of sovereign subjectivity, people act for the sole pleasure of acting, without any reference other than the satisfaction of `myself.’
Just as the terrorism that was born from the Marxism of yesterday put its finger on the anomalies of our social order, in the same way the nihilistic terrorism of today ought to show us the course to be followed for a reflection on the bases of a new ethical and collective reason” (Interview in Catholic World Report, January 1993, 54)
3)Christian Faith: “More [Like] An Expedition Up a Mountain Than a Quiet Evening Spent Reading in Front of the Fire” (Faith and the Future [1970] 50).
Faith is not a series of ideas abstracted from sensible experience. It is not reducible to creeds and dogmas. Dei Verbum #5 of Vatican II called faith “obedience.” “`The obedience of faith’ (Rom. 16, 26; cf. Rom. 1, 5; 2 Cor. 10, 5-6) must be given to God as he reveals himself. By faith man freely commits his entire self to God, making `the full submission of his intellect and will to God who reveals.” And the revelation of God is not concepts but the very Person of the Son. John Paul II, as Cardinal, said, “Faith, as these words show, is not merely the response of the mind to an abstract truth. Even the statement, true though it is, that this response is dependent on the will does not tell us everything about the nature of faith. `The obedience of faith’ is not bound to any particular human faculty but relates to man’s whole personal structure and spiritual dynamism. Man’s proper response to God’s self-revelation consists in self-abandonment to God. This is the true dimension of faith, in which man does not simply accept a particular set of propositions, but accepts his own vocation and the sense of his existence” (Sources of Renewal 20).
Cardinal Ratzinger presents the act of faith as a personal experience that is a conversion of the whole self and like unto a death event:
“I refer to the passage from Paul’s letter to the Galatians in which he describes the Christian as a person who is distinguished both by a revolutionary, personal experience and also by an objective reality. St. Paul says, `I live, no longer I, but Christ lives within me’ (Gal 2, 20). This sentence comes at the end of that short spiritual autobiography which Paul works up right before his readers’ very eyes. He does this, not to gain glory for himself, but to clarify the message which has been entrusted to him, and he does so by making reference to his own personal history as it had been lived with Christ and with the Church. This explanation of his life leads him, so to speak, even further – from the outside to the inside. First he describes the external events of his vocation and his path through life; then in a single sentence, as clear as a lightning bolt, the inner event that took place during all of this, and is the ground of it all, is made clear. This inner event is at once personal and objective. It is the most personal of experiences and at the same time indicates what is the objective essence of Christianity for each one of us. It would be a weak oversimplification to put it this way: becoming and being a Christian depend on conversion. But that would be headed in the right direction. Yet conversion according to Paul is something much more radical than a mere revision of a few opinions or attitudes. It is a death event. In other words it is the replacement of the subject – of the `I.’ The `I’ ceases to be independent and to be subject existing in itself. It is torn from itself and inserted into a new subject. The `I’ does not perish, but must let itself diminish completely, in effect, in order to be received within a larger `I’ and, together with that larger `I,’ to be conceived anew” (The Church as an Essential Dimension of Theology (1986) reprinted as “The Spiritual Basis and Ecclesial Identity of Theology” in The Nature and Mission of Theology Ignatius (1995) 50-51).
This experience of the “I” as self-transcending in the act of faith gives the truth of the human person as created in the image and likeness of the Trinitarian God. It gives a knowledge of the freedom and dignity of the self that is beyond but grounds all further knowledge through conceptual abstraction from the experience of the senses. When Cardinal Ratzinger was inducted into the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of the Institute of France, taking the place of Andrei Sakharov, he said:
“In fact, institutions cannot maintain themselves and be effective without common ethical convictions. These, in turn, cannot come from a purely empirical reason. The decisions of the majority will themselves remain truly human and logical only if they presuppose the existence of a basic humanitarian sense and respect this as the true common good, the condition of all other goods. Such convictions require corresponding human attitudes, and these in turn cannot be developed unless the historical foundation of a culture and the ethical, religious judgments it contains are taken into consideration. For a culture and a nation to cut itself off from the great ethical and religious forces of its history amounts to committing suicide. Cultivating the essential moral judgments, and maintaining and protecting them without imposing them by force seems to me to be a condition for the survival of freedom in the face of all the forms of nihilism and their totalitarian consequences.
This is also how I see the public mission of the Christian Churches in the world of today. It is in conformity with the Church’s nature that she be separate from the State and that her faith not be imposed by the State, but rest on freely acquired convictions…. `Christ does not triumph over anyone unless the person himself wishes it. He triumphs only by convincing: for he is the Word of God’” (L’Osservatore Romano, N. 6 – 10 February 1993, 15).
The Emergence of Conscience. The Toast of Cardinal Newman: “To Conscience First, To the Pope Afterwards” (Letter of Norfolk): the truth of the human person is not achieved through the method of positivism as through the experience of the senses that leads to abstraction and reduction. It comes from the experience of the “I” in the moment of self-transcendence that is moral where the whole self is delivered to the revealing Person of Christ. When Christ stands before the person and calls for the response of faith, the “I” exercises mastery of self, takes itself into its own possession as delivers itself up as gift. This activation is the crossing-of-the-threshold from object to subject and raises the consciousness of the person to “knowledge” of self dignity and freedom. It is the state of the “original solitude” of Adam who obeyed the divine command to name the animals, which initiated the history of man as person-in-act. Helen Keller is the modern example of this rite of passage. Conscience now is activated, and Cardinal Ratzinger comments:
“This means that the first so-called ontological level of the phenomenon conscience consists in the fact that something like an original memory of the good and true (both are identical) has been implanted in us, that there is an inner ontological tendency within man, who is created in the likeness of God, toward the divine. From its origin, man’s being resonates with some things and clashes with others. This anamnesis of the origin, which results from the godlike constitution of our being, is not a conceptually articulated knowing, a store of retrievable contents. It is so to speak an inner sense, a capacity to recall, so that the one, whom it addresses, if he is not turned in on himself, hears its echo from within. He sees: That’s it! That is what my nature points to and seeks”[underline mine] (“Conscience and Truth,” Catholic Conscience, Foundation and Formation, The Pope John XXIII Medical-Moral Research and Education Center, Braintree, Mass., p. 20).
On the basis of the above, it is impossible to tag Benedict XVI with the moniker of “rigid” or even “conservative” except in the sense of seeking truth by the most open and existentialist self-transcendence. As he said in the Conclave homily on Monday, “Truth and charity coincide in Christ. In the measure that we come close to Christ also in our life, truth and charity are fused. Charity without truth would be blind; truth without charity would be like `a clanging cymbal’ (1 Cor. 13, 1).”
a) Relativism: “How many winds of doctrine we have known in these last decades, how many ideological currents, how many fashions of thought? The small boat of thought of many Christians has often remained agitated by the waves, tossed from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, etc….
To have a clear faith, according to the creed of the Church, is often labeled as fundamentalism. While relativism, that is, allowing oneself to be carried about with every wind of `doctrine,’ seems to be the only attitude that is fashionable. A dictatorship of relativism is being constituted that recognizes nothing as absolute and which only leaves the `I’ and its whims as the ultimate measure.”
b) Truth: “We have another measure: the Son of God, true man. He is the measure of true humanism.” How does this affect truth as absolute? Jesus Christ said: “I have called you friends (Jn. 15, 15). Ratzinger says, “The Lord defines friendship in two ways. There are no secrets between friends: Christ tells us everything he hears from the Father; he gives us his full confidence and, with confidence, also knowledge. He reveals his face to us, his heart.
He gives us his confidence; he gives us the power to speak with his `I:’ `This is my body,’ and `I absolve you.’ He entrusts his body to us, the Church. He entrusts his truth to our weak minds, our weak hands, the mystery of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit…”
* * * * * * * * *
2)From Previous Writings:
Positivism as cause of relativism, nihilism and ultimately terrorism: the absence
of truth in relativism clears the runway for ideologies and the nihilism of terrorism. The ideologies that spawn terrorism fill the vacuum left by the absence of the absoluteness of truth. Positivism is the methodology that has created that vacuum.
To the assertion and question put to him in 1993, “nihilism is rapidly taking the place of Marxism. How do you analyze this divorce between faith and modernity?,” Ratzinger responded:
“It is explained by the encroachment of relativism and subjectivism, an inevitable consequence of a world overwhelmed by the alleged certainties of natural or applied science. Only what can be tested and proved appears as rational. [Sensible] (e)xperience has become the only criterion guaranteeing truth. Anything that cannot be subjected to mathematical or experimental verification is regarded as irrational.
“This restriction of reason [to the experience of the senses] has the result that we are left in almost total darkness regarding some essential dimensions of life. The meaning of man, the bases of ethics, the question of God, cannot be subjected to rational experience, verified by mathematical formulae. And so they are left to subjective sensibility alone. This is serious because if, in a society, the bases of ethical behavior are abandoned to subjectivity alone, released from common motives for being and living, handed over to pragmatism, then it is man himself who is threatened.
The great ideologies have been able to give a certain ethical foundation to society. But today, Marxism is crumbling and liberal ideology is so split into fragments that it no longer has a common, solid, coherent view of man and his future. In the present situation of emptiness, there looms the terrible danger of nihilism, that is to say, the denial or absence of all fundamental moral reference for the conduct of social life. This danger becomes visible in the new forms of terrorism (my underline).
Even though perverted, the political, social terrorism of the 1960’s had a certain kind of moral ideal. But today, the terrorism of drug abuse, of the Mafia, of attacks on foreigners, in Germany and elsewhere, no longer has any moral basis. In this era of sovereign subjectivity, people act for the sole pleasure of acting, without any reference other than the satisfaction of `myself.’
Just as the terrorism that was born from the Marxism of yesterday put its finger on the anomalies of our social order, in the same way the nihilistic terrorism of today ought to show us the course to be followed for a reflection on the bases of a new ethical and collective reason” (Interview in Catholic World Report, January 1993, 54)
3)Christian Faith: “More [Like] An Expedition Up a Mountain Than a Quiet Evening Spent Reading in Front of the Fire” (Faith and the Future [1970] 50).
Faith is not a series of ideas abstracted from sensible experience. It is not reducible to creeds and dogmas. Dei Verbum #5 of Vatican II called faith “obedience.” “`The obedience of faith’ (Rom. 16, 26; cf. Rom. 1, 5; 2 Cor. 10, 5-6) must be given to God as he reveals himself. By faith man freely commits his entire self to God, making `the full submission of his intellect and will to God who reveals.” And the revelation of God is not concepts but the very Person of the Son. John Paul II, as Cardinal, said, “Faith, as these words show, is not merely the response of the mind to an abstract truth. Even the statement, true though it is, that this response is dependent on the will does not tell us everything about the nature of faith. `The obedience of faith’ is not bound to any particular human faculty but relates to man’s whole personal structure and spiritual dynamism. Man’s proper response to God’s self-revelation consists in self-abandonment to God. This is the true dimension of faith, in which man does not simply accept a particular set of propositions, but accepts his own vocation and the sense of his existence” (Sources of Renewal 20).
Cardinal Ratzinger presents the act of faith as a personal experience that is a conversion of the whole self and like unto a death event:
“I refer to the passage from Paul’s letter to the Galatians in which he describes the Christian as a person who is distinguished both by a revolutionary, personal experience and also by an objective reality. St. Paul says, `I live, no longer I, but Christ lives within me’ (Gal 2, 20). This sentence comes at the end of that short spiritual autobiography which Paul works up right before his readers’ very eyes. He does this, not to gain glory for himself, but to clarify the message which has been entrusted to him, and he does so by making reference to his own personal history as it had been lived with Christ and with the Church. This explanation of his life leads him, so to speak, even further – from the outside to the inside. First he describes the external events of his vocation and his path through life; then in a single sentence, as clear as a lightning bolt, the inner event that took place during all of this, and is the ground of it all, is made clear. This inner event is at once personal and objective. It is the most personal of experiences and at the same time indicates what is the objective essence of Christianity for each one of us. It would be a weak oversimplification to put it this way: becoming and being a Christian depend on conversion. But that would be headed in the right direction. Yet conversion according to Paul is something much more radical than a mere revision of a few opinions or attitudes. It is a death event. In other words it is the replacement of the subject – of the `I.’ The `I’ ceases to be independent and to be subject existing in itself. It is torn from itself and inserted into a new subject. The `I’ does not perish, but must let itself diminish completely, in effect, in order to be received within a larger `I’ and, together with that larger `I,’ to be conceived anew” (The Church as an Essential Dimension of Theology (1986) reprinted as “The Spiritual Basis and Ecclesial Identity of Theology” in The Nature and Mission of Theology Ignatius (1995) 50-51).
This experience of the “I” as self-transcending in the act of faith gives the truth of the human person as created in the image and likeness of the Trinitarian God. It gives a knowledge of the freedom and dignity of the self that is beyond but grounds all further knowledge through conceptual abstraction from the experience of the senses. When Cardinal Ratzinger was inducted into the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of the Institute of France, taking the place of Andrei Sakharov, he said:
“In fact, institutions cannot maintain themselves and be effective without common ethical convictions. These, in turn, cannot come from a purely empirical reason. The decisions of the majority will themselves remain truly human and logical only if they presuppose the existence of a basic humanitarian sense and respect this as the true common good, the condition of all other goods. Such convictions require corresponding human attitudes, and these in turn cannot be developed unless the historical foundation of a culture and the ethical, religious judgments it contains are taken into consideration. For a culture and a nation to cut itself off from the great ethical and religious forces of its history amounts to committing suicide. Cultivating the essential moral judgments, and maintaining and protecting them without imposing them by force seems to me to be a condition for the survival of freedom in the face of all the forms of nihilism and their totalitarian consequences.
This is also how I see the public mission of the Christian Churches in the world of today. It is in conformity with the Church’s nature that she be separate from the State and that her faith not be imposed by the State, but rest on freely acquired convictions…. `Christ does not triumph over anyone unless the person himself wishes it. He triumphs only by convincing: for he is the Word of God’” (L’Osservatore Romano, N. 6 – 10 February 1993, 15).
The Emergence of Conscience. The Toast of Cardinal Newman: “To Conscience First, To the Pope Afterwards” (Letter of Norfolk): the truth of the human person is not achieved through the method of positivism as through the experience of the senses that leads to abstraction and reduction. It comes from the experience of the “I” in the moment of self-transcendence that is moral where the whole self is delivered to the revealing Person of Christ. When Christ stands before the person and calls for the response of faith, the “I” exercises mastery of self, takes itself into its own possession as delivers itself up as gift. This activation is the crossing-of-the-threshold from object to subject and raises the consciousness of the person to “knowledge” of self dignity and freedom. It is the state of the “original solitude” of Adam who obeyed the divine command to name the animals, which initiated the history of man as person-in-act. Helen Keller is the modern example of this rite of passage. Conscience now is activated, and Cardinal Ratzinger comments:
“This means that the first so-called ontological level of the phenomenon conscience consists in the fact that something like an original memory of the good and true (both are identical) has been implanted in us, that there is an inner ontological tendency within man, who is created in the likeness of God, toward the divine. From its origin, man’s being resonates with some things and clashes with others. This anamnesis of the origin, which results from the godlike constitution of our being, is not a conceptually articulated knowing, a store of retrievable contents. It is so to speak an inner sense, a capacity to recall, so that the one, whom it addresses, if he is not turned in on himself, hears its echo from within. He sees: That’s it! That is what my nature points to and seeks”[underline mine] (“Conscience and Truth,” Catholic Conscience, Foundation and Formation, The Pope John XXIII Medical-Moral Research and Education Center, Braintree, Mass., p. 20).
On the basis of the above, it is impossible to tag Benedict XVI with the moniker of “rigid” or even “conservative” except in the sense of seeking truth by the most open and existentialist self-transcendence. As he said in the Conclave homily on Monday, “Truth and charity coincide in Christ. In the measure that we come close to Christ also in our life, truth and charity are fused. Charity without truth would be blind; truth without charity would be like `a clanging cymbal’ (1 Cor. 13, 1).”
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
The Theo-logic of the Conclave
Peter already sits among the Cardinals at the Conclave. They will recognize him from the inside. Since “no one knows the Son except the Father” (Mt. 11, 27), the Cardinals must be “drawn by the Father” (Jn. 6, 44) to re-cognize him who is “Rock” as Jesus Christ is “Cornerstone.”
Since the Church is a communio of other-generating relations and not a political grouping of individuals (one is who one is only by the giving of the self), the Conclave is an act of the whole Church, not simply Cardinals choosing a political head. Since one is only insofar as one begets and is begotten, one “knows” the other only from the inside. You recognize the other as “I” only by experiencing yourself as “I.”
That said, the Cardinals in Conclave do not choose the one who will be Peter. Peter is already present among them. They must re-cognize him. Each one in the Conclave must become Peter, and “cognize” him in themselves, in order to be able to “re-cognize” him who has already been chosen by the Father with the Holy Spirit. Like is known by like. To know is become one-being-with-another. If Christ is “cornerstone” (Acts 4, 11), then the vice-Christ must be “rock.” One must become rock to recognize rock. Goethe said, “if the eye were not solar, it could not see the sun.”
Contrary to the reigning epistemology, the Conclave is not an exercise in democratic methodology powered by the logic of geopolitics, facility in languages, personality appeal or even theological acumen. It is an exercise of faith, working within a supernatural logic, in order to recognize him who experiences in his bones that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Mt. 16, 16).
Such was Karol Wojtyla. As Lorenzo Albacete responded, “Karol Wojtyla, John Paul II, is not a man with faith. His identity is faith. For him the human being is not the biological creature; what defines a human being is faith… To him there is no other question. It is the fundamental basic question because faith for him is not a collection of beliefs, like I believe there is a god. I believe this god, if one is a Christian, is a Trinitarian… Faith for him is a lifestyle. It is a way of situating yourself in front of reality, starting with your own self. It is a judgment, a position, a stand that you take” – on Rock – “with respect to everything.” John Paul II was rock re-cognizing Rock. And so he began his homily on October 22, 1978:
“You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” (Mt. 16, 16). These words were pronounced by Simon, son of John, in the region of Caesarea Philippi. And he expressed them in his own language, with a profound, lived and deeply felt conviction. But these words do not find their source, their origin, in him. “Flesh and Blood has not revealed this to you but my Father in heaven” (Mt. 16, 17). These were the words, full of faith. They mark the beginning of the mission of Peter in the history of salvation, in the history of the People of God. From then on, from this confession of faith, the sacred history of salvation and of the People of God should acquire a new dimension: to be expressed in the historic dimension of the Church. This ecclesial dimension of the history of the People of God has its origins - in fact is born - from these words of faith, and are tied to the man who pronounced them: “You are Peter –rock, stone – and on you, as on a rock, I will build my Church.”
John Paul II explained this supernatural logic – “theologic” - that must take place in the Sistine Chapel.
“Luke gives us an indication which points in the same direction when he notes that this dialogue with the disciples took place when Jesus "was praying alone" (Lk 9:18). Both indications converge to make it clear that we cannot come to the fullness of contemplation of the Lord's face by our own efforts alone, but by allowing grace to take us by the hand. Only the experience of silence and prayer offers the proper setting for the growth and development of a true, faithful and consistent knowledge of that mystery which finds its culminating expression in the solemn proclamation by the Evangelist Saint John: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father" (1:14)” (Novo Millennio Ineunte #20)
One of the Cardinals present now in the Sistine Chapel has been drawn by the Father because he has entered into the prayer of Christ to the Father as in Luke 9, 18. He is experiencing himself to be the “cornerstone that was rejected by you the builders” (Acts 4, 11), and as vice-Christ experiences in himself the power to “radiate fatherhood.” And although afraid of his inadequacy as Simon son of John, when the Ancient One reaches toward Adam in the Sistine (the electors praying), He will be reaching toward Christ, and the vice Christ. And as John Paul said to us in his “Tryptych:” “You who see all, point to him! He will point him out.” As Christ is the meaning not only of who God is, but who man is, the one pointed out will be the one who, like Christ, will be able to say not only to the Church but to the world “Be Not Afraid.”
Since the Church is a communio of other-generating relations and not a political grouping of individuals (one is who one is only by the giving of the self), the Conclave is an act of the whole Church, not simply Cardinals choosing a political head. Since one is only insofar as one begets and is begotten, one “knows” the other only from the inside. You recognize the other as “I” only by experiencing yourself as “I.”
That said, the Cardinals in Conclave do not choose the one who will be Peter. Peter is already present among them. They must re-cognize him. Each one in the Conclave must become Peter, and “cognize” him in themselves, in order to be able to “re-cognize” him who has already been chosen by the Father with the Holy Spirit. Like is known by like. To know is become one-being-with-another. If Christ is “cornerstone” (Acts 4, 11), then the vice-Christ must be “rock.” One must become rock to recognize rock. Goethe said, “if the eye were not solar, it could not see the sun.”
Contrary to the reigning epistemology, the Conclave is not an exercise in democratic methodology powered by the logic of geopolitics, facility in languages, personality appeal or even theological acumen. It is an exercise of faith, working within a supernatural logic, in order to recognize him who experiences in his bones that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Mt. 16, 16).
Such was Karol Wojtyla. As Lorenzo Albacete responded, “Karol Wojtyla, John Paul II, is not a man with faith. His identity is faith. For him the human being is not the biological creature; what defines a human being is faith… To him there is no other question. It is the fundamental basic question because faith for him is not a collection of beliefs, like I believe there is a god. I believe this god, if one is a Christian, is a Trinitarian… Faith for him is a lifestyle. It is a way of situating yourself in front of reality, starting with your own self. It is a judgment, a position, a stand that you take” – on Rock – “with respect to everything.” John Paul II was rock re-cognizing Rock. And so he began his homily on October 22, 1978:
“You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” (Mt. 16, 16). These words were pronounced by Simon, son of John, in the region of Caesarea Philippi. And he expressed them in his own language, with a profound, lived and deeply felt conviction. But these words do not find their source, their origin, in him. “Flesh and Blood has not revealed this to you but my Father in heaven” (Mt. 16, 17). These were the words, full of faith. They mark the beginning of the mission of Peter in the history of salvation, in the history of the People of God. From then on, from this confession of faith, the sacred history of salvation and of the People of God should acquire a new dimension: to be expressed in the historic dimension of the Church. This ecclesial dimension of the history of the People of God has its origins - in fact is born - from these words of faith, and are tied to the man who pronounced them: “You are Peter –rock, stone – and on you, as on a rock, I will build my Church.”
John Paul II explained this supernatural logic – “theologic” - that must take place in the Sistine Chapel.
“Luke gives us an indication which points in the same direction when he notes that this dialogue with the disciples took place when Jesus "was praying alone" (Lk 9:18). Both indications converge to make it clear that we cannot come to the fullness of contemplation of the Lord's face by our own efforts alone, but by allowing grace to take us by the hand. Only the experience of silence and prayer offers the proper setting for the growth and development of a true, faithful and consistent knowledge of that mystery which finds its culminating expression in the solemn proclamation by the Evangelist Saint John: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father" (1:14)” (Novo Millennio Ineunte #20)
One of the Cardinals present now in the Sistine Chapel has been drawn by the Father because he has entered into the prayer of Christ to the Father as in Luke 9, 18. He is experiencing himself to be the “cornerstone that was rejected by you the builders” (Acts 4, 11), and as vice-Christ experiences in himself the power to “radiate fatherhood.” And although afraid of his inadequacy as Simon son of John, when the Ancient One reaches toward Adam in the Sistine (the electors praying), He will be reaching toward Christ, and the vice Christ. And as John Paul said to us in his “Tryptych:” “You who see all, point to him! He will point him out.” As Christ is the meaning not only of who God is, but who man is, the one pointed out will be the one who, like Christ, will be able to say not only to the Church but to the world “Be Not Afraid.”
Thursday, April 14, 2005
The Impact of John Paul: the Cause.
Class offered at Our Lady of Peace, New Providence, N.J., April 15, 2005
Class @ Our Lady of Peace, New Providence, April 15, 2005: 10:00 am.
The Root Cause of the Universal Impact of John Paul II
1) Definitive Numbers of Attendance at Pope's Funeral
6,000 Media Personnel on Hand
VATICAN CITY, APRIL 12, 2005 (Zenit.org).- Three million people came to Rome to attend John Paul II's funeral rites, an event covered by 6,000 media personnel, the Holy See announced.
Vatican spokesman Joaquín Navarro Valls reported the data on the presence of the media and numbers of pilgrims to Rome, from the moment of the Pope's death until the day of his funeral, April 2-8. ZENIT already reported some of the preliminary figures last Sunday.
According to the Holy See's statement, the Vatican press office and the Pontifical Council for Social Communications accredited 6,000 journalists, photographers and radio and television agents for the media coverage of the event.
The press note stated that 137 television networks in 81 countries notified the pontifical council that they broadcast the funeral. The real number was likely higher.
The funeral was followed on the Holy See's Internet web page by 1.3 million people.
The Mass was concelebrated by 157 cardinals. Seven hundred archbishops and bishops and 3,000 prelates and priests were present. Three hundred priests distributed Communion.
There were 169 foreign delegations present, as well as 10 monarchs, 59 heads of state, 3 heirs to the throne, 17 heads of government, 3 spouses of heads of state, 8 vice heads of state, 6 deputy prime ministers, 4 presidents of parliaments, 12 foreign-affairs ministers, 13 other governmental ministers, 24 ambassadors, and 10 presidents, directors-general and secretaries-general of international organizations.
Also present were delegations of 23 Orthodox and Eastern Orthodox Churches, 8 Churches and ecclesial communions of the West, and 3 international Christian organizations.
In addition, there were several delegations and officials of Judaism, and 17 delegations of non-Christian religions and organizations for interreligious dialogue.
Citing data from the Italian Civil Protection, the Holy See reported that during the period the body of the Pope lay in state in St. Peter's Basilica, 21,000 entered the church every hour, or 350 a minute.
The average time necessary to see the Pope's mortal remains was 13 hours, with a maximum wait of 24 hours. The line extended for 5 kilometers (approximately 3 miles).
On the day of the funeral, 500,000 faithful were in St. Peter's Square and the Via della Conciliazione and were able to follow the funeral Mass, while 600,000 followed it on large screens in other parts of Rome. There were 29 large screens placed around the city.
Four hundred disabled persons followed the Mass in reserved places in the atrium of St. Peter's Basilica.
Some of the 10,000 volunteers distributed 3 million free bottles of water among pilgrims.
Twenty-one medical posts were set up and first-aid treatment was given to 4,000 people.
The municipality of Rome sent 20 SMS messages to the cell phones of 43,500 citizens with information on hospitality for pilgrims and the traffic.
2) The reason for the unprecedented interest in John Paul II, beyond a secularist interpretation: Editorial by National Catholic Register:
“The truth is, his pontificate was perfect in a way — and it was more than Karol Wojtyla was capable of.
Yes, Karol Wojtyla was a talented man, but not that talented. As a playwright, he learned about the importance of drama and the power of arresting insights — but he wasn’t a great playwright. As a poet, he learned to reflect the beauty of God’s creation in words — but he wasn’t a great poet. As a writer, he was philosophically rich and theologically deep in a way that will change the course of the Church — but he was a dense writer who is difficult to read.
The sum total of the talents of this Pole from Wadowice couldn’t possibly be credited with all that Pope John Paul II did, any more than the fisherman Peter’s management expertise can be credited with the Church’s success during its rocky beginnings.
Above all, God deserves our praise and our gratitude for Pope John Paul II.
In the end, perhaps the one thing the Holy Father did was at the same time the simplest and most difficult thing he was asked to do.
He prayed. Deeply. Insistently.
For hours, every day.
As Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete once said, the real secret of the Christian message is "All you have to do is do what you’re supposed to do. The Pope has done what he’s supposed to do. And boy, has he really done it."
It takes a profound love to do what you’re supposed to do, day in and day out. John Paul had that love. That’s what gave him an edge.
Even as an altar boy, he had done what he was supposed to do. Even when the German army entered Poland in 1939.
"It was the first wartime Mass before the altar of the crucified Christ and the scream of sirens and the thud of explosions have remained forever in my memory," said Father Kazimierz Figlewicz, who was a priest in Krakow at the time. "Nonetheless Karol in his imperturbable way had crossed over the bridge and walked to the cathedral because he was always observant in his religious commitments."
When the Church made him a priest, he continued to do what he was supposed to do — using his priesthood to reach young couples and college students.
When the Church made him a bishop in a land torn by communism, he did what he was supposed to do — he opposed the communists in a fearless but careful way, maximizing the rights of the Church and the power of his witness at the same time.
When the Church made him Pope in a time of intense turmoil in the Church, he did what he was supposed to do again.
It could have been different. Karol Wojtyla could have insisted on being an actor. He could have insisted on being a university professor. He could have become a full-time poet. He could have clung to the things he thought were valuable in his personality and asserted them. He may have made a mark on the world of some kind.
But instead he lost himself in God’s plan, handed over his talents, did what he was supposed to do — and achieved more than any man or woman in memory.
And at the end of his life, God proved who deserves the credit for the Pope’s astounding success. The illness that struck the Pope was marked by the way it targeted the very talents that had supposedly accounted for his success.
As a speaker, the younger John Paul could be very eloquent — but his speeches for almost the last decade of his life were difficult to listen to as he strained and slurred his words.
The athletic, spry John Paul had inspired people by his custom of bending down to kiss the ground of the nations he visited, his sportsman pursuits and his vigorous character. At the end of his life he could barely move, and his hands shook as he was wheeled around on a podium.
The former actor’s face expressed a range of emotions that helped him communicate with his audience. But at the end, he couldn’t smile well, laugh, show concern or use his face much at all.
Yet, even when the talents of the man faded, the people still flocked to see the Pope. They flocked to him at the 2000 World Youth Day in Rome, and he surprised critics and fans alike when they flocked to him again in Toronto in 2002.
Karol Wojtyla had no charismatic aura on his own. It was given to him by God, and it was charged to incandescence by his fidelity in the simple obligations of his Christian life: prayer, the sacraments, obedience to the Church.
It wasn’t Karol Wojtyla people were coming to see. It was Peter — the one who was given a special grace by God to be Vicar of Christ.
On our front page, we say, "Pray for Us, Pope John Paul II." We repeat it here.
Pray for us, Your Holiness. Give us the courage to follow your simple path of conversation with God and acceptance of his will. Your life shows us where true greatness lies: In loving God enough to do what we’re supposed to do. Pray that we learn this lesson and do it.
Pray that we will be worthy of you, John Paul the Great.
3) The above is certainly correct. But it fails to bring out the unique development that was at the core of the Second Vatican Council and this Pope. I refer to the uniqueness of the human person, the meaning of freedom as the self-mastery, self-possession and self-gift of the “I” that is oneself. And how that “I” is the unique gift that is not God’s gift, but “mine.” It is the mystery of the relative autonomy – or “theonomy” – of my freedom to become myself as image of the Three Persons.
Does this mean that God’s causality is not primary and universal? No! Without Him we can do nothing. But the mystery consists in the engendering of a free person, who is not merely an instrumental cause or a secondary cause. Notice the Pope’s “definition” of freedom: “The Crucified Christ reveals the authentic meaning of freedom; he lives it fully in the total gift of himself and calls his disciples to share in his freedom” (Veritatis Splendor #85).
4) What everyone senses about John Paul II: he has made a radical gift of self to each one of us. It is extremely personal. Persons, young and old, interviewed while queuing up to pass by the body exactly why they came, explained, without giving reasons, that they simply had to be there. There was the sense of a most personal relation when in fact extrinsically and empirically there was no such relation from the outside. It makes one recall his first phrases of Redemptor Hominis:
“When we penetrate by means of the continually and rapidly increasing experience fo the human family into the mystery of Jesus Christ, we understand with greater clarity that there is at the basis of all these ways that the Church of our time must follow, in accordance with the wisdom of Pope Paul VI, one single way: it is the way that has stood the test of centuries and it is also the way of the future. Christ the Lord indicated this way especially, when, as the Council teaches, `by His Incarnation, He, the Son of God, in a certain way united Himself with each man. The Church therefore sees its fundamental task in enabling that union to be brought about and renewed continually. The Church wishes to serve this single end: that each person may be able to find Christ, in order to that Christ may walk with each person the path of life, with the power of the truth about man and the world that is contained in the mystery of the Incarnation and the Redemption…
“Accordingly, what is in question here is man in all his truth, in his full magnitude. We are not dealing with the `abstract’ man, but the real, `concrete,’’ `historical’ man. We are dealing with `each’ man for each one is included in the mystery of the Redemption and with each one Christ has united Himself for ever through this mystery…. The object of her [the Church’s] care is man in his unique unrepeatable human reality. The Council points out this very fact when, speaking of that likeness, it recalls that ‘man is the only creature on earth that God willed for itself. Man as `willed’ by God, as `chosen’ by Him from eternity and called, destined for grace and glory – this is `each’ man, `the most concrete’ man, `the most real;’ this is man in all the fullness of the mystery in which he has become a sharer in Jesus Christ, the mystery in which each one of the four thousand million human beings living on our planet has become a sharer from the moment he is conceived beneath the heart of is mother.”
The mystical reality is that in giving himself to Christ, he gave himself to the Christ in me, and in each person. People felt this with emotion. The NCR editorial above touches on this but without having hit the key. It was God in John Paul II and his obedience to do “what he was supposed to do.” But it’s not just doing things as performances. He did drama, he wrote poetry, he became a priest, he did philosophy and theology, he became Pope, and he traveled. He obeyed. He did what he was supposed to do. But as Lorenzo Albacete said, “boy, has he really done it." Or as the farmer in the Midwest remarked after his first trip to the United States, “Your Pope really knows how to pope.”
It’s all in the “boy.” The obedience was not compliance. It was free gift of his whole self. That’s what stirs the emotion, creates the novelty, produces the greatness. The gift was spousal. It was total and unto death. “He loved them to the end.” On the world stage, he showed us how to live and how to die. The poetry, the drama, the philosophy, even the papacy were the occasions and the incarnations of the gift. But, again, not any gift. Not an object, but the “I.” He could not do it without being loved by God (which is called “grace”). But he was the agent of the gift of himself. Only he could give himself. God could not do it since then He would violate the very freedom that He gave us. It was his gift, and the content was himself. Which, by the way, is the meaning of the priesthood of Jesus Christ.
Here he lives out what was the key to the Council and the center of his understanding of the human person: Made in the image of a trinity of Persons, “man, the only earthly being God has willed for itself, finds himself by the sincere gift of himself.” This: “the only earthly being God has willed for itself,” is his understanding of man as “an unfinished being, as indicated precisely by this `fissure’ in him open to the infinite. According to this view, other natures in the world of nature are in their own way `finished beings,’ while man, open to the absolute, awaits his completion.”
In August 1991 at Jasna Gora, Poland (after the collapse of Communism), John Paul addressed the 1.7 million young people of world youth day with the words of God’s Self revelation:
`“I AM” (The Word): behold the name of God. So responds a Voice from the burning bush to Moses when he asked to know the Name of God. `I am who am’ (Ex. 3, 14)… As evening drew near, before the Sabbath at Passover, Jesus was taken from the cross and placed in the tomb. The third day he came among his `startled and terrified’ disciples to say to them: `Peace be with you! ... It is I myself!’ (Lk. 24, 36-37, 39): the divine `I AM’ of the Covenant – of the Paschal Mystery – of the Eucharist.
“Man was created in the image and likeness of God, to be able to exist and to be able to say to his Creator `I am.’ In this human `I am’ is all the truth of life and conscience. `I am’ before You, who `Are.’
“When God asked the first man: `Where are you?,’ Adam responded, `I hid, (from you)’ (cf. Gen. 3, 9-10), almost trying not to be before God. You cannot hide, Adam! You cannot help but be before him who has created you, who has made you in the way that `you are,’ before him `who searches hearts and knows’ (Rom. 8, 27).”
5.) John Paul II, stripped of almost all his objective powers, retains his subjective self-gift, and the entire world knew it. He continued to “radiate fatherhood, and we continued to be affirmed.
The proof that it was the “I” of John Paul II that was given and to whom the people, particularly the youth of the world, were responding, was that piece by piece he was stripped of gesture, facial expression, ambulatory power, and finally, word. He was never ceased to communicate his “I” nor the gift of it with mouth agape attempting to speak from his window on his last Wednesday attempt. Struggling to speak to the people in St. Peter’s Square and finding no sound, he put one hand before his face and pounded the plastic lecturn before him. Everyone understood. He had a clarity of consciousness and loved us “to the end.” Previously, having lost most of his body as vehicle of communication, he remarked facetiously that he ruled the Church “from the neck up.”
At Lourdes last August, Cardinal Lustiger framed it this way: "The pope, in his weakness, is living more than ever the role assigned to him of being the Vicar of Christ on earth, participating in the suffering of our Redeemer. Many times we have the idea that the head of the church is like a super-manager of a great international company, a man of action who makes decisions and is judged on the basis of his effectiveness. But for believers the most effective action, the mystery of salvation, happens when Christ is on the cross and can't do or decide anything other than to accept the will of the Father."
And when the Lord took the “I” at 9, 32 pm April 2, 2005, tens of thousands of people standing outside in St. Peter’s Square dropped into an eerie, total silence and then to their knees, moved by profound emotion. We all did.
3) The Key to the Mind of John Paul II is Disclosing the “I” as the Ultimate Created Reality: Being As Opposed to Consciousness.
Basically, he does what is called a “phenomenological” description of what we have seen of Helen Keller discovering her “I”as real being by naming the water (as Adam naming the animals).
“We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motion of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that `w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.
I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me. On entering the door I remembered the doll I had broken. [She had earlier destroyed the doll in a fit of temper.] I felt my way to the dearth and picked up the pieces. I tried vainly to put them together. Then my eyes filled with tears; for I realized what I had done, and for the first time I felt repentance and sorrow.”
What had happened? Helen had exercised her subjectivity as cause by “throwing” (Ballein) the “likeness” (sym): w-a-t-e-r at the wet flowing object. She had experienced herself as cause, and therefore came to a consciousness of herself as “self.”
Walker Percy: “before, Helen had behaved like a good responding organism. Afterward, she acted like a rejoicing symbol-mongering human. Before, she was little more than an animal. Afterward, she became wholly human. Within the few minutes of the breakthrough and the several hours of exploiting it Helen had concentrated the months of the naming phase that most children go through somewhere around their second birthday.”… 3
Karol Wojtyla’s fundamental discovery is the experience of the “I” as being. Experience is always about reality, and therefore about being. In modern thought, the “I” has been identified with consciousness, or the thought about thinking. Reflective thought, not experience, was the access. Wojtyla experiences himself as the cause of free action. His “I” is not the result of reflection on the act of thinking or willing. It is discovered as the cause of an experience of (free, not instinctual or stimulus-response mechanism) self-determination as a free act. “But as the need increases to understand the human being as a unique and unrepeatable person, especially in terms of the whole dynamism of action and inner happenings proper to the human being – in other words, as the need increases to understand the personal subjectivity of the human being – the category of lived experience takes on greater significance, and, in fact, key significance. For then the issue is not just the metaphysical objectification of the human being as an acting subject, as the agent of acts, but the revelation of the person as a subject experiencing its acts and inner happenings, and with them its own subjectivity.
“The experience of the human being cannot be derived by way of cosmological reduction; we must pause at the irreducible, at that which is unique and unrepeatable in each human being, by virtue of which he or she is not just a particular human being – an individual of a certain species – but a personal subject. Only then do we get a true and complete picture of the human being. We cannot complete this picture through reduction alone; we also cannot remain within the framework of the irreducible alone (for then we would be unable to get beyond the pure self). The one must be cognitively supplemented with the other. Nevertheless, given the variety of circumstances of the real existence of human beings, we must always leave the greater space in this cognitive effort for the irreducible; we must, as it were give the irreducible the upper hand when thinking about the human being, both in theory and in practice. For the irreducible also refers to everything in the human being that is invisible and wholly internal and whereby each human being, myself included, is an `eyewitness’ of his or her own self – of his or her own humanity and person.”
Perhaps, the analytical genius of Wojtyla comes to the fore precisely here.
The “I” is being, not consciousness. But the experience which discloses the “I” as being is the work of consciousness. He distinguishes the consciousness of the experience of sensible things - which is taken from the experience (sensible perception) of the external world: this pink cloud – from the consciousness of the experience of the self (“I”) in the act of self-determination in the moment of morality: responsibility or guilt. In its (non abstractive) mirroring function, consciousness grasps the subject (not yet experienced as “I”), which has been objectified by reflective (not “reflexive,” in the terminology of Wojtyla) thought, and then “actualized” (subdued/mastered) by itself. He distinguishes between the reflectiveness of the mind turning back on its own act of knowing things and the reflexiveness of consciousness which captures both the reflections of the subject in potency to self-determine, and in the act of moving itself. This capturing both states of the self as pre and post self-determination, as potency and act with respect to itself, constitutes the experience of the “I” as “I.” And he corroborates this when he remarks in Fides et Ratio #83 that “In a special way, the person constitutes a privileged locus for the encounter with being, and hence with metaphysical enquiry.”
He remarks in the Acting Person: “The consequence of the reflexive [not reflective] turn of consciousness is that this object – just because it is from the ontological point of view the subject – while having the experience of his own ego also has the experience of himself as the subject. In this interpretation `refexiveness’ is also seen to be an essential as well as a very specific moment of consciousness. It is, however, necessary to add at once that this specific moment becomes apparent only when we observe and trace consciousness in its intrinsic, organic relation to the human being, in particular, the human being in action. We then discern clearly that it is one thing to be the subject, another to be cognized (that is, objectivized) as the subject, and a still different thing to experience one’s self as the subject of one’s own acts and experiences… This discrimination is of tremendous import for all our further analyses, which we shall have to make in our efforts to grasp the whole dynamic reality of the acting person and to account for the subjectiveness that is given us in experience.
Indubitably, Man is, first of all, the subject of his being and his acting; he is the subject insofar as he is a being of determinate nature, which leads to consequences particularly in the acting. In traditional ontology that subject of existing and acting which man is was designated by the term suppositum – ontic support – which, we may say, serves as a thoroughly objective designation free of any experiential aspects, in particular of any relation to that experience of subjectivity in which the subject is given to itself as the self, as the ego. Hence “ suppositum” abstracts from that aspect of consciousness owing to which the concrete man – the object being the subject – has the experience of himself as the subject and thus of his subjectivity. It is this experience that allows him to designate himself by means of the pronoun “I.” We know “I” to be a personal pronoun, always designating a concrete person. However, the denotation of this personal pronoun, thus….
Hence not only am I conscious of my ego (on the ground of self-knowledge) but owing to my consciousness in its reflexive function I also experience my ego. I have the experience of myself as the concrete subject of the ego’s very subjectiveness. Consciousness is not just an aspect but also an essential dimension or an actual moment [but not the “I” itself] of the reality of the being that I am, since it constitutes its subjectiveness in the experiential sense.”
Class @ Our Lady of Peace, New Providence, April 15, 2005: 10:00 am.
The Root Cause of the Universal Impact of John Paul II
1) Definitive Numbers of Attendance at Pope's Funeral
6,000 Media Personnel on Hand
VATICAN CITY, APRIL 12, 2005 (Zenit.org).- Three million people came to Rome to attend John Paul II's funeral rites, an event covered by 6,000 media personnel, the Holy See announced.
Vatican spokesman Joaquín Navarro Valls reported the data on the presence of the media and numbers of pilgrims to Rome, from the moment of the Pope's death until the day of his funeral, April 2-8. ZENIT already reported some of the preliminary figures last Sunday.
According to the Holy See's statement, the Vatican press office and the Pontifical Council for Social Communications accredited 6,000 journalists, photographers and radio and television agents for the media coverage of the event.
The press note stated that 137 television networks in 81 countries notified the pontifical council that they broadcast the funeral. The real number was likely higher.
The funeral was followed on the Holy See's Internet web page by 1.3 million people.
The Mass was concelebrated by 157 cardinals. Seven hundred archbishops and bishops and 3,000 prelates and priests were present. Three hundred priests distributed Communion.
There were 169 foreign delegations present, as well as 10 monarchs, 59 heads of state, 3 heirs to the throne, 17 heads of government, 3 spouses of heads of state, 8 vice heads of state, 6 deputy prime ministers, 4 presidents of parliaments, 12 foreign-affairs ministers, 13 other governmental ministers, 24 ambassadors, and 10 presidents, directors-general and secretaries-general of international organizations.
Also present were delegations of 23 Orthodox and Eastern Orthodox Churches, 8 Churches and ecclesial communions of the West, and 3 international Christian organizations.
In addition, there were several delegations and officials of Judaism, and 17 delegations of non-Christian religions and organizations for interreligious dialogue.
Citing data from the Italian Civil Protection, the Holy See reported that during the period the body of the Pope lay in state in St. Peter's Basilica, 21,000 entered the church every hour, or 350 a minute.
The average time necessary to see the Pope's mortal remains was 13 hours, with a maximum wait of 24 hours. The line extended for 5 kilometers (approximately 3 miles).
On the day of the funeral, 500,000 faithful were in St. Peter's Square and the Via della Conciliazione and were able to follow the funeral Mass, while 600,000 followed it on large screens in other parts of Rome. There were 29 large screens placed around the city.
Four hundred disabled persons followed the Mass in reserved places in the atrium of St. Peter's Basilica.
Some of the 10,000 volunteers distributed 3 million free bottles of water among pilgrims.
Twenty-one medical posts were set up and first-aid treatment was given to 4,000 people.
The municipality of Rome sent 20 SMS messages to the cell phones of 43,500 citizens with information on hospitality for pilgrims and the traffic.
2) The reason for the unprecedented interest in John Paul II, beyond a secularist interpretation: Editorial by National Catholic Register:
“The truth is, his pontificate was perfect in a way — and it was more than Karol Wojtyla was capable of.
Yes, Karol Wojtyla was a talented man, but not that talented. As a playwright, he learned about the importance of drama and the power of arresting insights — but he wasn’t a great playwright. As a poet, he learned to reflect the beauty of God’s creation in words — but he wasn’t a great poet. As a writer, he was philosophically rich and theologically deep in a way that will change the course of the Church — but he was a dense writer who is difficult to read.
The sum total of the talents of this Pole from Wadowice couldn’t possibly be credited with all that Pope John Paul II did, any more than the fisherman Peter’s management expertise can be credited with the Church’s success during its rocky beginnings.
Above all, God deserves our praise and our gratitude for Pope John Paul II.
In the end, perhaps the one thing the Holy Father did was at the same time the simplest and most difficult thing he was asked to do.
He prayed. Deeply. Insistently.
For hours, every day.
As Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete once said, the real secret of the Christian message is "All you have to do is do what you’re supposed to do. The Pope has done what he’s supposed to do. And boy, has he really done it."
It takes a profound love to do what you’re supposed to do, day in and day out. John Paul had that love. That’s what gave him an edge.
Even as an altar boy, he had done what he was supposed to do. Even when the German army entered Poland in 1939.
"It was the first wartime Mass before the altar of the crucified Christ and the scream of sirens and the thud of explosions have remained forever in my memory," said Father Kazimierz Figlewicz, who was a priest in Krakow at the time. "Nonetheless Karol in his imperturbable way had crossed over the bridge and walked to the cathedral because he was always observant in his religious commitments."
When the Church made him a priest, he continued to do what he was supposed to do — using his priesthood to reach young couples and college students.
When the Church made him a bishop in a land torn by communism, he did what he was supposed to do — he opposed the communists in a fearless but careful way, maximizing the rights of the Church and the power of his witness at the same time.
When the Church made him Pope in a time of intense turmoil in the Church, he did what he was supposed to do again.
It could have been different. Karol Wojtyla could have insisted on being an actor. He could have insisted on being a university professor. He could have become a full-time poet. He could have clung to the things he thought were valuable in his personality and asserted them. He may have made a mark on the world of some kind.
But instead he lost himself in God’s plan, handed over his talents, did what he was supposed to do — and achieved more than any man or woman in memory.
And at the end of his life, God proved who deserves the credit for the Pope’s astounding success. The illness that struck the Pope was marked by the way it targeted the very talents that had supposedly accounted for his success.
As a speaker, the younger John Paul could be very eloquent — but his speeches for almost the last decade of his life were difficult to listen to as he strained and slurred his words.
The athletic, spry John Paul had inspired people by his custom of bending down to kiss the ground of the nations he visited, his sportsman pursuits and his vigorous character. At the end of his life he could barely move, and his hands shook as he was wheeled around on a podium.
The former actor’s face expressed a range of emotions that helped him communicate with his audience. But at the end, he couldn’t smile well, laugh, show concern or use his face much at all.
Yet, even when the talents of the man faded, the people still flocked to see the Pope. They flocked to him at the 2000 World Youth Day in Rome, and he surprised critics and fans alike when they flocked to him again in Toronto in 2002.
Karol Wojtyla had no charismatic aura on his own. It was given to him by God, and it was charged to incandescence by his fidelity in the simple obligations of his Christian life: prayer, the sacraments, obedience to the Church.
It wasn’t Karol Wojtyla people were coming to see. It was Peter — the one who was given a special grace by God to be Vicar of Christ.
On our front page, we say, "Pray for Us, Pope John Paul II." We repeat it here.
Pray for us, Your Holiness. Give us the courage to follow your simple path of conversation with God and acceptance of his will. Your life shows us where true greatness lies: In loving God enough to do what we’re supposed to do. Pray that we learn this lesson and do it.
Pray that we will be worthy of you, John Paul the Great.
3) The above is certainly correct. But it fails to bring out the unique development that was at the core of the Second Vatican Council and this Pope. I refer to the uniqueness of the human person, the meaning of freedom as the self-mastery, self-possession and self-gift of the “I” that is oneself. And how that “I” is the unique gift that is not God’s gift, but “mine.” It is the mystery of the relative autonomy – or “theonomy” – of my freedom to become myself as image of the Three Persons.
Does this mean that God’s causality is not primary and universal? No! Without Him we can do nothing. But the mystery consists in the engendering of a free person, who is not merely an instrumental cause or a secondary cause. Notice the Pope’s “definition” of freedom: “The Crucified Christ reveals the authentic meaning of freedom; he lives it fully in the total gift of himself and calls his disciples to share in his freedom” (Veritatis Splendor #85).
4) What everyone senses about John Paul II: he has made a radical gift of self to each one of us. It is extremely personal. Persons, young and old, interviewed while queuing up to pass by the body exactly why they came, explained, without giving reasons, that they simply had to be there. There was the sense of a most personal relation when in fact extrinsically and empirically there was no such relation from the outside. It makes one recall his first phrases of Redemptor Hominis:
“When we penetrate by means of the continually and rapidly increasing experience fo the human family into the mystery of Jesus Christ, we understand with greater clarity that there is at the basis of all these ways that the Church of our time must follow, in accordance with the wisdom of Pope Paul VI, one single way: it is the way that has stood the test of centuries and it is also the way of the future. Christ the Lord indicated this way especially, when, as the Council teaches, `by His Incarnation, He, the Son of God, in a certain way united Himself with each man. The Church therefore sees its fundamental task in enabling that union to be brought about and renewed continually. The Church wishes to serve this single end: that each person may be able to find Christ, in order to that Christ may walk with each person the path of life, with the power of the truth about man and the world that is contained in the mystery of the Incarnation and the Redemption…
“Accordingly, what is in question here is man in all his truth, in his full magnitude. We are not dealing with the `abstract’ man, but the real, `concrete,’’ `historical’ man. We are dealing with `each’ man for each one is included in the mystery of the Redemption and with each one Christ has united Himself for ever through this mystery…. The object of her [the Church’s] care is man in his unique unrepeatable human reality. The Council points out this very fact when, speaking of that likeness, it recalls that ‘man is the only creature on earth that God willed for itself. Man as `willed’ by God, as `chosen’ by Him from eternity and called, destined for grace and glory – this is `each’ man, `the most concrete’ man, `the most real;’ this is man in all the fullness of the mystery in which he has become a sharer in Jesus Christ, the mystery in which each one of the four thousand million human beings living on our planet has become a sharer from the moment he is conceived beneath the heart of is mother.”
The mystical reality is that in giving himself to Christ, he gave himself to the Christ in me, and in each person. People felt this with emotion. The NCR editorial above touches on this but without having hit the key. It was God in John Paul II and his obedience to do “what he was supposed to do.” But it’s not just doing things as performances. He did drama, he wrote poetry, he became a priest, he did philosophy and theology, he became Pope, and he traveled. He obeyed. He did what he was supposed to do. But as Lorenzo Albacete said, “boy, has he really done it." Or as the farmer in the Midwest remarked after his first trip to the United States, “Your Pope really knows how to pope.”
It’s all in the “boy.” The obedience was not compliance. It was free gift of his whole self. That’s what stirs the emotion, creates the novelty, produces the greatness. The gift was spousal. It was total and unto death. “He loved them to the end.” On the world stage, he showed us how to live and how to die. The poetry, the drama, the philosophy, even the papacy were the occasions and the incarnations of the gift. But, again, not any gift. Not an object, but the “I.” He could not do it without being loved by God (which is called “grace”). But he was the agent of the gift of himself. Only he could give himself. God could not do it since then He would violate the very freedom that He gave us. It was his gift, and the content was himself. Which, by the way, is the meaning of the priesthood of Jesus Christ.
Here he lives out what was the key to the Council and the center of his understanding of the human person: Made in the image of a trinity of Persons, “man, the only earthly being God has willed for itself, finds himself by the sincere gift of himself.” This: “the only earthly being God has willed for itself,” is his understanding of man as “an unfinished being, as indicated precisely by this `fissure’ in him open to the infinite. According to this view, other natures in the world of nature are in their own way `finished beings,’ while man, open to the absolute, awaits his completion.”
In August 1991 at Jasna Gora, Poland (after the collapse of Communism), John Paul addressed the 1.7 million young people of world youth day with the words of God’s Self revelation:
`“I AM” (The Word): behold the name of God. So responds a Voice from the burning bush to Moses when he asked to know the Name of God. `I am who am’ (Ex. 3, 14)… As evening drew near, before the Sabbath at Passover, Jesus was taken from the cross and placed in the tomb. The third day he came among his `startled and terrified’ disciples to say to them: `Peace be with you! ... It is I myself!’ (Lk. 24, 36-37, 39): the divine `I AM’ of the Covenant – of the Paschal Mystery – of the Eucharist.
“Man was created in the image and likeness of God, to be able to exist and to be able to say to his Creator `I am.’ In this human `I am’ is all the truth of life and conscience. `I am’ before You, who `Are.’
“When God asked the first man: `Where are you?,’ Adam responded, `I hid, (from you)’ (cf. Gen. 3, 9-10), almost trying not to be before God. You cannot hide, Adam! You cannot help but be before him who has created you, who has made you in the way that `you are,’ before him `who searches hearts and knows’ (Rom. 8, 27).”
5.) John Paul II, stripped of almost all his objective powers, retains his subjective self-gift, and the entire world knew it. He continued to “radiate fatherhood, and we continued to be affirmed.
The proof that it was the “I” of John Paul II that was given and to whom the people, particularly the youth of the world, were responding, was that piece by piece he was stripped of gesture, facial expression, ambulatory power, and finally, word. He was never ceased to communicate his “I” nor the gift of it with mouth agape attempting to speak from his window on his last Wednesday attempt. Struggling to speak to the people in St. Peter’s Square and finding no sound, he put one hand before his face and pounded the plastic lecturn before him. Everyone understood. He had a clarity of consciousness and loved us “to the end.” Previously, having lost most of his body as vehicle of communication, he remarked facetiously that he ruled the Church “from the neck up.”
At Lourdes last August, Cardinal Lustiger framed it this way: "The pope, in his weakness, is living more than ever the role assigned to him of being the Vicar of Christ on earth, participating in the suffering of our Redeemer. Many times we have the idea that the head of the church is like a super-manager of a great international company, a man of action who makes decisions and is judged on the basis of his effectiveness. But for believers the most effective action, the mystery of salvation, happens when Christ is on the cross and can't do or decide anything other than to accept the will of the Father."
And when the Lord took the “I” at 9, 32 pm April 2, 2005, tens of thousands of people standing outside in St. Peter’s Square dropped into an eerie, total silence and then to their knees, moved by profound emotion. We all did.
3) The Key to the Mind of John Paul II is Disclosing the “I” as the Ultimate Created Reality: Being As Opposed to Consciousness.
Basically, he does what is called a “phenomenological” description of what we have seen of Helen Keller discovering her “I”as real being by naming the water (as Adam naming the animals).
“We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motion of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that `w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.
I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me. On entering the door I remembered the doll I had broken. [She had earlier destroyed the doll in a fit of temper.] I felt my way to the dearth and picked up the pieces. I tried vainly to put them together. Then my eyes filled with tears; for I realized what I had done, and for the first time I felt repentance and sorrow.”
What had happened? Helen had exercised her subjectivity as cause by “throwing” (Ballein) the “likeness” (sym): w-a-t-e-r at the wet flowing object. She had experienced herself as cause, and therefore came to a consciousness of herself as “self.”
Walker Percy: “before, Helen had behaved like a good responding organism. Afterward, she acted like a rejoicing symbol-mongering human. Before, she was little more than an animal. Afterward, she became wholly human. Within the few minutes of the breakthrough and the several hours of exploiting it Helen had concentrated the months of the naming phase that most children go through somewhere around their second birthday.”… 3
Karol Wojtyla’s fundamental discovery is the experience of the “I” as being. Experience is always about reality, and therefore about being. In modern thought, the “I” has been identified with consciousness, or the thought about thinking. Reflective thought, not experience, was the access. Wojtyla experiences himself as the cause of free action. His “I” is not the result of reflection on the act of thinking or willing. It is discovered as the cause of an experience of (free, not instinctual or stimulus-response mechanism) self-determination as a free act. “But as the need increases to understand the human being as a unique and unrepeatable person, especially in terms of the whole dynamism of action and inner happenings proper to the human being – in other words, as the need increases to understand the personal subjectivity of the human being – the category of lived experience takes on greater significance, and, in fact, key significance. For then the issue is not just the metaphysical objectification of the human being as an acting subject, as the agent of acts, but the revelation of the person as a subject experiencing its acts and inner happenings, and with them its own subjectivity.
“The experience of the human being cannot be derived by way of cosmological reduction; we must pause at the irreducible, at that which is unique and unrepeatable in each human being, by virtue of which he or she is not just a particular human being – an individual of a certain species – but a personal subject. Only then do we get a true and complete picture of the human being. We cannot complete this picture through reduction alone; we also cannot remain within the framework of the irreducible alone (for then we would be unable to get beyond the pure self). The one must be cognitively supplemented with the other. Nevertheless, given the variety of circumstances of the real existence of human beings, we must always leave the greater space in this cognitive effort for the irreducible; we must, as it were give the irreducible the upper hand when thinking about the human being, both in theory and in practice. For the irreducible also refers to everything in the human being that is invisible and wholly internal and whereby each human being, myself included, is an `eyewitness’ of his or her own self – of his or her own humanity and person.”
Perhaps, the analytical genius of Wojtyla comes to the fore precisely here.
The “I” is being, not consciousness. But the experience which discloses the “I” as being is the work of consciousness. He distinguishes the consciousness of the experience of sensible things - which is taken from the experience (sensible perception) of the external world: this pink cloud – from the consciousness of the experience of the self (“I”) in the act of self-determination in the moment of morality: responsibility or guilt. In its (non abstractive) mirroring function, consciousness grasps the subject (not yet experienced as “I”), which has been objectified by reflective (not “reflexive,” in the terminology of Wojtyla) thought, and then “actualized” (subdued/mastered) by itself. He distinguishes between the reflectiveness of the mind turning back on its own act of knowing things and the reflexiveness of consciousness which captures both the reflections of the subject in potency to self-determine, and in the act of moving itself. This capturing both states of the self as pre and post self-determination, as potency and act with respect to itself, constitutes the experience of the “I” as “I.” And he corroborates this when he remarks in Fides et Ratio #83 that “In a special way, the person constitutes a privileged locus for the encounter with being, and hence with metaphysical enquiry.”
He remarks in the Acting Person: “The consequence of the reflexive [not reflective] turn of consciousness is that this object – just because it is from the ontological point of view the subject – while having the experience of his own ego also has the experience of himself as the subject. In this interpretation `refexiveness’ is also seen to be an essential as well as a very specific moment of consciousness. It is, however, necessary to add at once that this specific moment becomes apparent only when we observe and trace consciousness in its intrinsic, organic relation to the human being, in particular, the human being in action. We then discern clearly that it is one thing to be the subject, another to be cognized (that is, objectivized) as the subject, and a still different thing to experience one’s self as the subject of one’s own acts and experiences… This discrimination is of tremendous import for all our further analyses, which we shall have to make in our efforts to grasp the whole dynamic reality of the acting person and to account for the subjectiveness that is given us in experience.
Indubitably, Man is, first of all, the subject of his being and his acting; he is the subject insofar as he is a being of determinate nature, which leads to consequences particularly in the acting. In traditional ontology that subject of existing and acting which man is was designated by the term suppositum – ontic support – which, we may say, serves as a thoroughly objective designation free of any experiential aspects, in particular of any relation to that experience of subjectivity in which the subject is given to itself as the self, as the ego. Hence “ suppositum” abstracts from that aspect of consciousness owing to which the concrete man – the object being the subject – has the experience of himself as the subject and thus of his subjectivity. It is this experience that allows him to designate himself by means of the pronoun “I.” We know “I” to be a personal pronoun, always designating a concrete person. However, the denotation of this personal pronoun, thus….
Hence not only am I conscious of my ego (on the ground of self-knowledge) but owing to my consciousness in its reflexive function I also experience my ego. I have the experience of myself as the concrete subject of the ego’s very subjectiveness. Consciousness is not just an aspect but also an essential dimension or an actual moment [but not the “I” itself] of the reality of the being that I am, since it constitutes its subjectiveness in the experiential sense.”
Impact of John Paul II on the World: the Cause
A class offered @ Our Lady of Peace, New Providence, N.J. 4/15/05
Class @ Our Lady of Peace, New Providence, April 15, 2005: 10:00 am.
The Root Cause of the Universal Impact of John Paul II
1) Definitive Numbers of Attendance at Pope's Funeral
6,000 Media Personnel on Hand
VATICAN CITY, APRIL 12, 2005 (Zenit.org).- Three million people came to Rome to attend John Paul II's funeral rites, an event covered by 6,000 media personnel, the Holy See announced.
Vatican spokesman Joaquín Navarro Valls reported the data on the presence of the media and numbers of pilgrims to Rome, from the moment of the Pope's death until the day of his funeral, April 2-8. ZENIT already reported some of the preliminary figures last Sunday.
According to the Holy See's statement, the Vatican press office and the Pontifical Council for Social Communications accredited 6,000 journalists, photographers and radio and television agents for the media coverage of the event.
The press note stated that 137 television networks in 81 countries notified the pontifical council that they broadcast the funeral. The real number was likely higher.
The funeral was followed on the Holy See's Internet web page by 1.3 million people.
The Mass was concelebrated by 157 cardinals. Seven hundred archbishops and bishops and 3,000 prelates and priests were present. Three hundred priests distributed Communion.
There were 169 foreign delegations present, as well as 10 monarchs, 59 heads of state, 3 heirs to the throne, 17 heads of government, 3 spouses of heads of state, 8 vice heads of state, 6 deputy prime ministers, 4 presidents of parliaments, 12 foreign-affairs ministers, 13 other governmental ministers, 24 ambassadors, and 10 presidents, directors-general and secretaries-general of international organizations.
Also present were delegations of 23 Orthodox and Eastern Orthodox Churches, 8 Churches and ecclesial communions of the West, and 3 international Christian organizations.
In addition, there were several delegations and officials of Judaism, and 17 delegations of non-Christian religions and organizations for interreligious dialogue.
Citing data from the Italian Civil Protection, the Holy See reported that during the period the body of the Pope lay in state in St. Peter's Basilica, 21,000 entered the church every hour, or 350 a minute.
The average time necessary to see the Pope's mortal remains was 13 hours, with a maximum wait of 24 hours. The line extended for 5 kilometers (approximately 3 miles).
On the day of the funeral, 500,000 faithful were in St. Peter's Square and the Via della Conciliazione and were able to follow the funeral Mass, while 600,000 followed it on large screens in other parts of Rome. There were 29 large screens placed around the city.
Four hundred disabled persons followed the Mass in reserved places in the atrium of St. Peter's Basilica.
Some of the 10,000 volunteers distributed 3 million free bottles of water among pilgrims.
Twenty-one medical posts were set up and first-aid treatment was given to 4,000 people.
The municipality of Rome sent 20 SMS messages to the cell phones of 43,500 citizens with information on hospitality for pilgrims and the traffic.
2) The reason for the unprecedented interest in John Paul II, beyond a secularist interpretation: Editorial by National Catholic Register, 4/13/2005:
“The truth is, his pontificate was perfect in a way — and it was more than Karol Wojtyla was capable of. Yes, Karol Wojtyla was a talented man, but not that talented. As a playwright, he learned about the importance of drama and the power of arresting insights — but he wasn’t a great playwright. As a poet, he learned to reflect the beauty of God’s creation in words — but he wasn’t a great poet. As a writer, he was philosophically rich and theologically deep in a way that will change the course of the Church — but he was a dense writer who is difficult to read.
The sum total of the talents of this Pole from Wadowice couldn’t possibly be credited with all that Pope John Paul II did, any more than the fisherman Peter’s management expertise can be credited with the Church’s success during its rocky beginnings.
Above all, God deserves our praise and our gratitude for Pope John Paul II.
In the end, perhaps the one thing the Holy Father did was at the same time the simplest and most difficult thing he was asked to do.
He prayed. Deeply. Insistently.
For hours, every day.
As Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete once said, the real secret of the Christian message is "All you have to do is do what you’re supposed to do. The Pope has done what he’s supposed to do. And boy, has he really done it."
It takes a profound love to do what you’re supposed to do, day in and day out. John Paul had that love. That’s what gave him an edge.
Even as an altar boy, he had done what he was supposed to do. Even when the German army entered Poland in 1939.
"It was the first wartime Mass before the altar of the crucified Christ and the scream of sirens and the thud of explosions have remained forever in my memory," said Father Kazimierz Figlewicz, who was a priest in Krakow at the time. "Nonetheless Karol in his imperturbable way had crossed over the bridge and walked to the cathedral because he was always observant in his religious commitments."
When the Church made him a priest, he continued to do what he was supposed to do — using his priesthood to reach young couples and college students.
When the Church made him a bishop in a land torn by communism, he did what he was supposed to do — he opposed the communists in a fearless but careful way, maximizing the rights of the Church and the power of his witness at the same time.
When the Church made him Pope in a time of intense turmoil in the Church, he did what he was supposed to do again.
It could have been different. Karol Wojtyla could have insisted on being an actor. He could have insisted on being a university professor. He could have become a full-time poet. He could have clung to the things he thought were valuable in his personality and asserted them. He may have made a mark on the world of some kind.
But instead he lost himself in God’s plan, handed over his talents, did what he was supposed to do — and achieved more than any man or woman in memory.
And at the end of his life, God proved who deserves the credit for the Pope’s astounding success. The illness that struck the Pope was marked by the way it targeted the very talents that had supposedly accounted for his success.
As a speaker, the younger John Paul could be very eloquent — but his speeches for almost the last decade of his life were difficult to listen to as he strained and slurred his words.
The athletic, spry John Paul had inspired people by his custom of bending down to kiss the ground of the nations he visited, his sportsman pursuits and his vigorous character. At the end of his life he could barely move, and his hands shook as he was wheeled around on a podium.
The former actor’s face expressed a range of emotions that helped him communicate with his audience. But at the end, he couldn’t smile well, laugh, show concern or use his face much at all.
Yet, even when the talents of the man faded, the people still flocked to see the Pope. They flocked to him at the 2000 World Youth Day in Rome, and he surprised critics and fans alike when they flocked to him again in Toronto in 2002.
Karol Wojtyla had no charismatic aura on his own. It was given to him by God, and it was charged to incandescence by his fidelity in the simple obligations of his Christian life: prayer, the sacraments, obedience to the Church.
It wasn’t Karol Wojtyla people were coming to see. It was Peter — the one who was given a special grace by God to be Vicar of Christ.
On our front page, we say, "Pray for Us, Pope John Paul II." We repeat it here.
Pray for us, Your Holiness. Give us the courage to follow your simple path of conversation with God and acceptance of his will. Your life shows us where true greatness lies: In loving God enough to do what we’re supposed to do. Pray that we learn this lesson and do it.
Pray that we will be worthy of you, John Paul the Great."
3) The above is certainly correct. But it fails to bring out the unique development that was at the core of the Second Vatican Council and this Pope. I refer to the uniqueness of the human person, the meaning of freedom as the self-mastery, self-possession and self-gift of the “I” that is oneself. And how that “I” is the unique gift that is not God’s gift, but “mine.” It is the mystery of the relative autonomy – or “theonomy” – of my freedom to become myself as image of the Three Persons.
Does this mean that God’s causality is not primary and universal? No! Without Him we can do nothing. But the mystery consists in the engendering of a free person, who is not merely an instrumental cause or a secondary cause. Notice the Pope’s “definition” of freedom: “The Crucified Christ reveals the authentic meaning of freedom; he lives it fully in the total gift of himself and calls his disciples to share in his freedom” (Veritatis Splendor #85).
4) What everyone senses about John Paul II: he has made a radical gift of self to each one of us. It is extremely personal. Persons, young and old, interviewed while queuing up to pass by the body exactly why they came, explained, without giving reasons, that they simply had to be there. There was the sense of a most personal relation when in fact extrinsically and empirically there was no such relation from the outside. It makes one recall his first phrases of Redemptor Hominis:
“When we penetrate by means of the continually and rapidly increasing experience fo the human family into the mystery of Jesus Christ, we understand with greater clarity that there is at the basis of all these ways that the Church of our time must follow, in accordance with the wisdom of Pope Paul VI, one single way: it is the way that has stood the test of centuries and it is also the way of the future. Christ the Lord indicated this way especially, when, as the Council teaches, `by His Incarnation, He, the Son of God, in a certain way united Himself with each man. The Church therefore sees its fundamental task in enabling that union to be brought about and renewed continually. The Church wishes to serve this single end: that each person may be able to find Christ, in order to that Christ may walk with each person the path of life, with the power of the truth about man and the world that is contained in the mystery of the Incarnation and the Redemption…
“Accordingly, what is in question here is man in all his truth, in his full magnitude. We are not dealing with the `abstract’ man, but the real, `concrete,’’ `historical’ man. We are dealing with `each’ man for each one is included in the mystery of the Redemption and with each one Christ has united Himself for ever through this mystery…. The object of her [the Church’s] care is man in his unique unrepeatable human reality. The Council points out this very fact when, speaking of that likeness, it recalls that ‘man is the only creature on earth that God willed for itself. Man as `willed’ by God, as `chosen’ by Him from eternity and called, destined for grace and glory – this is `each’ man, `the most concrete’ man, `the most real;’ this is man in all the fullness of the mystery in which he has become a sharer in Jesus Christ, the mystery in which each one of the four thousand million human beings living on our planet has become a sharer from the moment he is conceived beneath the heart of is mother.”
The mystical reality is that in giving himself to Christ, he gave himself to the Christ in me, and in each person. People felt this with emotion. The NCR editorial above touches on this but without having hit the key. It was God in John Paul II and his obedience to do “what he was supposed to do.” But it’s not just doing things as performances. He did drama, he wrote poetry, he became a priest, he did philosophy and theology, he became Pope, and he traveled. He obeyed. He did what he was supposed to do. But as Lorenzo Albacete said, “boy, has he really done it." Or as the farmer in the Midwest remarked after his first trip to the United States, “Your Pope really knows how to pope.”
It’s all in the “boy.” The obedience was not compliance. It was free gift of his whole self. That’s what stirs the emotion, creates the novelty, produces the greatness. The gift was spousal. It was total and unto death. “He loved them to the end.” On the world stage, he showed us how to live and how to die. The poetry, the drama, the philosophy, even the papacy were the occasions and the incarnations of the gift. But, again, not any gift. Not an object, but the “I.” He could not do it without being loved by God (which is called “grace”). But he was the agent of the gift of himself. Only he could give himself. God could not do it since then He would violate the very freedom that He gave us. It was his gift, and the content was himself. Which, by the way, is the meaning of the priesthood of Jesus Christ.
Here he lives out what was the key to the Council and the center of his understanding of the human person: Made in the image of a trinity of Persons, “man, the only earthly being God has willed for itself, finds himself by the sincere gift of himself.” This: “the only earthly being God has willed for itself,” is his understanding of man as “an unfinished being, as indicated precisely by this `fissure’ in him open to the infinite. According to this view, other natures in the world of nature are in their own way `finished beings,’ while man, open to the absolute, awaits his completion.”
In August 1991 at Jasna Gora, Poland (after the collapse of Communism), John Paul addressed the 1.7 million young people of world youth day with the words of God’s Self revelation:
>`“I AM” (The Word): behold the name of God. So responds a Voice from the burning bush to Moses when he asked to know the Name of God. `I am who am’ (Ex. 3, 14)… As evening drew near, before the Sabbath at Passover, Jesus was taken from the cross and placed in the tomb. The third day he came among his `startled and terrified’ disciples to say to them: `Peace be with you! ... It is I myself!’ (Lk. 24, 36-37, 39): the divine `I AM’ of the Covenant – of the Paschal Mystery – of the Eucharist.
“Man was created in the image and likeness of God, to be able to exist and to be able to say to his Creator `I am.’ In this human `I am’ is all the truth of life and conscience. `I am’ before You, who `Are.’“When God asked the first man: `Where are you?,’ Adam responded, `I hid, (from you)’ (cf. Gen. 3, 9-10), almost trying not to be before God. You cannot hide, Adam! You cannot help but be before him who has created you, who has made you in the way that `you are,’ before him `who searches hearts and knows’ (Rom. 8, 27).”
5.) John Paul II, stripped of almost all his objective powers, retains his subjective self-gift, and the entire world knew it. He continued to “radiate fatherhood," and we continued to be affirmed.
The proof that it was the “I” of John Paul II that was given and to whom the people, particularly the youth of the world, were responding, was that piece by piece he was stripped of gesture, facial expression, ambulatory power, and finally, word. He was never ceased to communicate his “I” nor the gift of it with mouth agape attempting to speak from his window on his last Wednesday attempt. Struggling to speak to the people in St. Peter’s Square and finding no sound, he put one hand before his face and pounded the plastic lecturn before him. Everyone understood. He had a clarity of consciousness and loved us “to the end.” Previously, having lost most of his body as vehicle of communication, he remarked facetiously that he ruled the Church “from the neck up.”
At Lourdes last August, Cardinal Lustiger framed it this way: "The pope, in his weakness, is living more than ever the role assigned to him of being the Vicar of Christ on earth, participating in the suffering of our Redeemer. Many times we have the idea that the head of the church is like a super-manager of a great international company, a man of action who makes decisions and is judged on the basis of his effectiveness. But for believers the most effective action, the mystery of salvation, happens when Christ is on the cross and can't do or decide anything other than to accept the will of the Father."And when the Lord took the “I” at 9, 32 pm April 2, 2005, tens of thousands of people standing outside in St. Peter’s Square dropped into an eerie, total silence and then to their knees, moved by profound emotion. We all did.
3) The Key to the Mind of John Paul II is Disclosing the “I” as the Ultimate Created Reality: Being As Opposed to Consciousness.
Basically, he does what is called a “phenomenological” description of what we have seen of Helen Keller discovering her “I”as real being by naming the water (as Adam naming the animals).
“We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motion of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that `w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.
I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me. On entering the door I remembered the doll I had broken. [She had earlier destroyed the doll in a fit of temper.] I felt my way to the dearth and picked up the pieces. I tried vainly to put them together. Then my eyes filled with tears; for I realized what I had done, and for the first time I felt repentance and sorrow.”
What had happened? Helen had exercised her subjectivity as cause by “throwing” (Ballein) the “likeness” (sym): w-a-t-e-r at the wet flowing object. She had experienced herself as cause, and therefore came to a consciousness of herself as “self.”
Walker Percy: “before, Helen had behaved like a good responding organism. Afterward, she acted like a rejoicing symbol-mongering human. Before, she was little more than an animal. Afterward, she became wholly human. Within the few minutes of the breakthrough and the several hours of exploiting it Helen had concentrated the months of the naming phase that most children go through somewhere around their second birthday.”… 3
Karol Wojtyla’s fundamental discovery is the experience of the “I” as being. Experience is always about reality, and therefore about being. In modern thought, the “I” has been identified with consciousness, or the thought about thinking. Reflective thought, not experience, was the access. Wojtyla experiences himself as the cause of free action. His “I” is not the result of reflection on the act of thinking or willing. It is discovered as the cause of an experience of (free, not instinctual or stimulus-response mechanism) self-determination as a free act. “But as the need increases to understand the human being as a unique and unrepeatable person, especially in terms of the whole dynamism of action and inner happenings proper to the human being – in other words, as the need increases to understand the personal subjectivity of the human being – the category of lived experience takes on greater significance, and, in fact, key significance. For then the issue is not just the metaphysical objectification of the human being as an acting subject, as the agent of acts, but the revelation of the person as a subject experiencing its acts and inner happenings, and with them its own subjectivity.
“The experience of the human being cannot be derived by way of cosmological reduction; we must pause at the irreducible, at that which is unique and unrepeatable in each human being, by virtue of which he or she is not just a particular human being – an individual of a certain species – but a personal subject. Only then do we get a true and complete picture of the human being. We cannot complete this picture through reduction alone; we also cannot remain within the framework of the irreducible alone (for then we would be unable to get beyond the pure self). The one must be cognitively supplemented with the other. Nevertheless, given the variety of circumstances of the real existence of human beings, we must always leave the greater space in this cognitive effort for the irreducible; we must, as it were give the irreducible the upper hand when thinking about the human being, both in theory and in practice. For the irreducible also refers to everything in the human being that is invisible and wholly internal and whereby each human being, myself included, is an `eyewitness’ of his or her own self – of his or her own humanity and person.”
Perhaps, the analytical genius of Wojtyla comes to the fore precisely here.
The “I” is being, not consciousness. But the experience which discloses the “I” as being is the work of consciousness. He distinguishes the consciousness of the experience of sensible things - which is taken from the experience (sensible perception) of the external world: this pink cloud – from the consciousness of the experience of the self (“I”) in the act of self-determination in the moment of morality: responsibility or guilt. In its (non abstractive) mirroring function, consciousness grasps the subject (not yet experienced as “I”), which has been objectified by reflective (not “reflexive,” in the terminology of Wojtyla) thought, and then “actualized” (subdued/mastered) by itself. He distinguishes between the reflectiveness of the mind turning back on its own act of knowing things and the reflexiveness of consciousness which captures both the reflections of the subject in potency to self-determine, and in the act of moving itself. This capturing both states of the self as pre and post self-determination, as potency and act with respect to itself, constitutes the experience of the “I” as “I.” And he corroborates this when he remarks in Fides et Ratio #83 that “In a special way, the person constitutes a privileged locus for the encounter with being, and hence with metaphysical enquiry.”
He remarks in The Acting Person: “The consequence of the reflexive [not reflective] turn of consciousness is that this object – just because it is from the ontological point of view the subject – while having the experience of his own ego also has the experience of himself as the subject. In this interpretation `refexiveness’ is also seen to be an essential as well as a very specific moment of consciousness. It is, however, necessary to add at once that this specific moment becomes apparent only when we observe and trace consciousness in its intrinsic, organic relation to the human being, in particular, the human being in action. We then discern clearly that it is one thing to be the subject, another to be cognized (that is, objectivized) as the subject, and a still different thing to experience one’s self as the subject of one’s own acts and experiences… This discrimination is of tremendous import for all our further analyses, which we shall have to make in our efforts to grasp the whole dynamic reality of the acting person and to account for the subjectiveness that is given us in experience.
Indubitably, Man is, first of all, the subject of his being and his acting; he is the subject insofar as he is a being of determinate nature, which leads to consequences particularly in the acting. In traditional ontology that subject of existing and acting which man is was designated by the term suppositum – ontic support – which, we may say, serves as a thoroughly objective designation free of any experiential aspects, in particular of any relation to that experience of subjectivity in which the subject is given to itself as the self, as the ego. Hence “ suppositum” abstracts from that aspect of consciousness owing to which the concrete man – the object being the subject – has the experience of himself as the subject and thus of his subjectivity. It is this experience that allows him to designate himself by means of the pronoun “I.” We know “I” to be a personal pronoun, always designating a concrete person. However, the denotation of this personal pronoun, thus….
Hence not only am I conscious of my ego (on the ground of self-knowledge) but owing to my consciousness in its reflexive function I also experience my ego. I have the experience of myself as the concrete subject of the ego’s very subjectiveness. Consciousness is not just an aspect but also an essential dimension or an actual moment [but not the “I” itself] of the reality of the being that I am, since it constitutes its subjectiveness in the experiential sense.”
Class @ Our Lady of Peace, New Providence, April 15, 2005: 10:00 am.
The Root Cause of the Universal Impact of John Paul II
1) Definitive Numbers of Attendance at Pope's Funeral
6,000 Media Personnel on Hand
VATICAN CITY, APRIL 12, 2005 (Zenit.org).- Three million people came to Rome to attend John Paul II's funeral rites, an event covered by 6,000 media personnel, the Holy See announced.
Vatican spokesman Joaquín Navarro Valls reported the data on the presence of the media and numbers of pilgrims to Rome, from the moment of the Pope's death until the day of his funeral, April 2-8. ZENIT already reported some of the preliminary figures last Sunday.
According to the Holy See's statement, the Vatican press office and the Pontifical Council for Social Communications accredited 6,000 journalists, photographers and radio and television agents for the media coverage of the event.
The press note stated that 137 television networks in 81 countries notified the pontifical council that they broadcast the funeral. The real number was likely higher.
The funeral was followed on the Holy See's Internet web page by 1.3 million people.
The Mass was concelebrated by 157 cardinals. Seven hundred archbishops and bishops and 3,000 prelates and priests were present. Three hundred priests distributed Communion.
There were 169 foreign delegations present, as well as 10 monarchs, 59 heads of state, 3 heirs to the throne, 17 heads of government, 3 spouses of heads of state, 8 vice heads of state, 6 deputy prime ministers, 4 presidents of parliaments, 12 foreign-affairs ministers, 13 other governmental ministers, 24 ambassadors, and 10 presidents, directors-general and secretaries-general of international organizations.
Also present were delegations of 23 Orthodox and Eastern Orthodox Churches, 8 Churches and ecclesial communions of the West, and 3 international Christian organizations.
In addition, there were several delegations and officials of Judaism, and 17 delegations of non-Christian religions and organizations for interreligious dialogue.
Citing data from the Italian Civil Protection, the Holy See reported that during the period the body of the Pope lay in state in St. Peter's Basilica, 21,000 entered the church every hour, or 350 a minute.
The average time necessary to see the Pope's mortal remains was 13 hours, with a maximum wait of 24 hours. The line extended for 5 kilometers (approximately 3 miles).
On the day of the funeral, 500,000 faithful were in St. Peter's Square and the Via della Conciliazione and were able to follow the funeral Mass, while 600,000 followed it on large screens in other parts of Rome. There were 29 large screens placed around the city.
Four hundred disabled persons followed the Mass in reserved places in the atrium of St. Peter's Basilica.
Some of the 10,000 volunteers distributed 3 million free bottles of water among pilgrims.
Twenty-one medical posts were set up and first-aid treatment was given to 4,000 people.
The municipality of Rome sent 20 SMS messages to the cell phones of 43,500 citizens with information on hospitality for pilgrims and the traffic.
2) The reason for the unprecedented interest in John Paul II, beyond a secularist interpretation: Editorial by National Catholic Register, 4/13/2005:
“The truth is, his pontificate was perfect in a way — and it was more than Karol Wojtyla was capable of. Yes, Karol Wojtyla was a talented man, but not that talented. As a playwright, he learned about the importance of drama and the power of arresting insights — but he wasn’t a great playwright. As a poet, he learned to reflect the beauty of God’s creation in words — but he wasn’t a great poet. As a writer, he was philosophically rich and theologically deep in a way that will change the course of the Church — but he was a dense writer who is difficult to read.
The sum total of the talents of this Pole from Wadowice couldn’t possibly be credited with all that Pope John Paul II did, any more than the fisherman Peter’s management expertise can be credited with the Church’s success during its rocky beginnings.
Above all, God deserves our praise and our gratitude for Pope John Paul II.
In the end, perhaps the one thing the Holy Father did was at the same time the simplest and most difficult thing he was asked to do.
He prayed. Deeply. Insistently.
For hours, every day.
As Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete once said, the real secret of the Christian message is "All you have to do is do what you’re supposed to do. The Pope has done what he’s supposed to do. And boy, has he really done it."
It takes a profound love to do what you’re supposed to do, day in and day out. John Paul had that love. That’s what gave him an edge.
Even as an altar boy, he had done what he was supposed to do. Even when the German army entered Poland in 1939.
"It was the first wartime Mass before the altar of the crucified Christ and the scream of sirens and the thud of explosions have remained forever in my memory," said Father Kazimierz Figlewicz, who was a priest in Krakow at the time. "Nonetheless Karol in his imperturbable way had crossed over the bridge and walked to the cathedral because he was always observant in his religious commitments."
When the Church made him a priest, he continued to do what he was supposed to do — using his priesthood to reach young couples and college students.
When the Church made him a bishop in a land torn by communism, he did what he was supposed to do — he opposed the communists in a fearless but careful way, maximizing the rights of the Church and the power of his witness at the same time.
When the Church made him Pope in a time of intense turmoil in the Church, he did what he was supposed to do again.
It could have been different. Karol Wojtyla could have insisted on being an actor. He could have insisted on being a university professor. He could have become a full-time poet. He could have clung to the things he thought were valuable in his personality and asserted them. He may have made a mark on the world of some kind.
But instead he lost himself in God’s plan, handed over his talents, did what he was supposed to do — and achieved more than any man or woman in memory.
And at the end of his life, God proved who deserves the credit for the Pope’s astounding success. The illness that struck the Pope was marked by the way it targeted the very talents that had supposedly accounted for his success.
As a speaker, the younger John Paul could be very eloquent — but his speeches for almost the last decade of his life were difficult to listen to as he strained and slurred his words.
The athletic, spry John Paul had inspired people by his custom of bending down to kiss the ground of the nations he visited, his sportsman pursuits and his vigorous character. At the end of his life he could barely move, and his hands shook as he was wheeled around on a podium.
The former actor’s face expressed a range of emotions that helped him communicate with his audience. But at the end, he couldn’t smile well, laugh, show concern or use his face much at all.
Yet, even when the talents of the man faded, the people still flocked to see the Pope. They flocked to him at the 2000 World Youth Day in Rome, and he surprised critics and fans alike when they flocked to him again in Toronto in 2002.
Karol Wojtyla had no charismatic aura on his own. It was given to him by God, and it was charged to incandescence by his fidelity in the simple obligations of his Christian life: prayer, the sacraments, obedience to the Church.
It wasn’t Karol Wojtyla people were coming to see. It was Peter — the one who was given a special grace by God to be Vicar of Christ.
On our front page, we say, "Pray for Us, Pope John Paul II." We repeat it here.
Pray for us, Your Holiness. Give us the courage to follow your simple path of conversation with God and acceptance of his will. Your life shows us where true greatness lies: In loving God enough to do what we’re supposed to do. Pray that we learn this lesson and do it.
Pray that we will be worthy of you, John Paul the Great."
3) The above is certainly correct. But it fails to bring out the unique development that was at the core of the Second Vatican Council and this Pope. I refer to the uniqueness of the human person, the meaning of freedom as the self-mastery, self-possession and self-gift of the “I” that is oneself. And how that “I” is the unique gift that is not God’s gift, but “mine.” It is the mystery of the relative autonomy – or “theonomy” – of my freedom to become myself as image of the Three Persons.
Does this mean that God’s causality is not primary and universal? No! Without Him we can do nothing. But the mystery consists in the engendering of a free person, who is not merely an instrumental cause or a secondary cause. Notice the Pope’s “definition” of freedom: “The Crucified Christ reveals the authentic meaning of freedom; he lives it fully in the total gift of himself and calls his disciples to share in his freedom” (Veritatis Splendor #85).
4) What everyone senses about John Paul II: he has made a radical gift of self to each one of us. It is extremely personal. Persons, young and old, interviewed while queuing up to pass by the body exactly why they came, explained, without giving reasons, that they simply had to be there. There was the sense of a most personal relation when in fact extrinsically and empirically there was no such relation from the outside. It makes one recall his first phrases of Redemptor Hominis:
“When we penetrate by means of the continually and rapidly increasing experience fo the human family into the mystery of Jesus Christ, we understand with greater clarity that there is at the basis of all these ways that the Church of our time must follow, in accordance with the wisdom of Pope Paul VI, one single way: it is the way that has stood the test of centuries and it is also the way of the future. Christ the Lord indicated this way especially, when, as the Council teaches, `by His Incarnation, He, the Son of God, in a certain way united Himself with each man. The Church therefore sees its fundamental task in enabling that union to be brought about and renewed continually. The Church wishes to serve this single end: that each person may be able to find Christ, in order to that Christ may walk with each person the path of life, with the power of the truth about man and the world that is contained in the mystery of the Incarnation and the Redemption…
“Accordingly, what is in question here is man in all his truth, in his full magnitude. We are not dealing with the `abstract’ man, but the real, `concrete,’’ `historical’ man. We are dealing with `each’ man for each one is included in the mystery of the Redemption and with each one Christ has united Himself for ever through this mystery…. The object of her [the Church’s] care is man in his unique unrepeatable human reality. The Council points out this very fact when, speaking of that likeness, it recalls that ‘man is the only creature on earth that God willed for itself. Man as `willed’ by God, as `chosen’ by Him from eternity and called, destined for grace and glory – this is `each’ man, `the most concrete’ man, `the most real;’ this is man in all the fullness of the mystery in which he has become a sharer in Jesus Christ, the mystery in which each one of the four thousand million human beings living on our planet has become a sharer from the moment he is conceived beneath the heart of is mother.”
The mystical reality is that in giving himself to Christ, he gave himself to the Christ in me, and in each person. People felt this with emotion. The NCR editorial above touches on this but without having hit the key. It was God in John Paul II and his obedience to do “what he was supposed to do.” But it’s not just doing things as performances. He did drama, he wrote poetry, he became a priest, he did philosophy and theology, he became Pope, and he traveled. He obeyed. He did what he was supposed to do. But as Lorenzo Albacete said, “boy, has he really done it." Or as the farmer in the Midwest remarked after his first trip to the United States, “Your Pope really knows how to pope.”
It’s all in the “boy.” The obedience was not compliance. It was free gift of his whole self. That’s what stirs the emotion, creates the novelty, produces the greatness. The gift was spousal. It was total and unto death. “He loved them to the end.” On the world stage, he showed us how to live and how to die. The poetry, the drama, the philosophy, even the papacy were the occasions and the incarnations of the gift. But, again, not any gift. Not an object, but the “I.” He could not do it without being loved by God (which is called “grace”). But he was the agent of the gift of himself. Only he could give himself. God could not do it since then He would violate the very freedom that He gave us. It was his gift, and the content was himself. Which, by the way, is the meaning of the priesthood of Jesus Christ.
Here he lives out what was the key to the Council and the center of his understanding of the human person: Made in the image of a trinity of Persons, “man, the only earthly being God has willed for itself, finds himself by the sincere gift of himself.” This: “the only earthly being God has willed for itself,” is his understanding of man as “an unfinished being, as indicated precisely by this `fissure’ in him open to the infinite. According to this view, other natures in the world of nature are in their own way `finished beings,’ while man, open to the absolute, awaits his completion.”
In August 1991 at Jasna Gora, Poland (after the collapse of Communism), John Paul addressed the 1.7 million young people of world youth day with the words of God’s Self revelation:
“Man was created in the image and likeness of God, to be able to exist and to be able to say to his Creator `I am.’ In this human `I am’ is all the truth of life and conscience. `I am’ before You, who `Are.’“When God asked the first man: `Where are you?,’ Adam responded, `I hid, (from you)’ (cf. Gen. 3, 9-10), almost trying not to be before God. You cannot hide, Adam! You cannot help but be before him who has created you, who has made you in the way that `you are,’ before him `who searches hearts and knows’ (Rom. 8, 27).”
5.) John Paul II, stripped of almost all his objective powers, retains his subjective self-gift, and the entire world knew it. He continued to “radiate fatherhood," and we continued to be affirmed.
The proof that it was the “I” of John Paul II that was given and to whom the people, particularly the youth of the world, were responding, was that piece by piece he was stripped of gesture, facial expression, ambulatory power, and finally, word. He was never ceased to communicate his “I” nor the gift of it with mouth agape attempting to speak from his window on his last Wednesday attempt. Struggling to speak to the people in St. Peter’s Square and finding no sound, he put one hand before his face and pounded the plastic lecturn before him. Everyone understood. He had a clarity of consciousness and loved us “to the end.” Previously, having lost most of his body as vehicle of communication, he remarked facetiously that he ruled the Church “from the neck up.”
At Lourdes last August, Cardinal Lustiger framed it this way: "The pope, in his weakness, is living more than ever the role assigned to him of being the Vicar of Christ on earth, participating in the suffering of our Redeemer. Many times we have the idea that the head of the church is like a super-manager of a great international company, a man of action who makes decisions and is judged on the basis of his effectiveness. But for believers the most effective action, the mystery of salvation, happens when Christ is on the cross and can't do or decide anything other than to accept the will of the Father."And when the Lord took the “I” at 9, 32 pm April 2, 2005, tens of thousands of people standing outside in St. Peter’s Square dropped into an eerie, total silence and then to their knees, moved by profound emotion. We all did.
3) The Key to the Mind of John Paul II is Disclosing the “I” as the Ultimate Created Reality: Being As Opposed to Consciousness.
Basically, he does what is called a “phenomenological” description of what we have seen of Helen Keller discovering her “I”as real being by naming the water (as Adam naming the animals).
“We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motion of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that `w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.
I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me. On entering the door I remembered the doll I had broken. [She had earlier destroyed the doll in a fit of temper.] I felt my way to the dearth and picked up the pieces. I tried vainly to put them together. Then my eyes filled with tears; for I realized what I had done, and for the first time I felt repentance and sorrow.”
What had happened? Helen had exercised her subjectivity as cause by “throwing” (Ballein) the “likeness” (sym): w-a-t-e-r at the wet flowing object. She had experienced herself as cause, and therefore came to a consciousness of herself as “self.”
Walker Percy: “before, Helen had behaved like a good responding organism. Afterward, she acted like a rejoicing symbol-mongering human. Before, she was little more than an animal. Afterward, she became wholly human. Within the few minutes of the breakthrough and the several hours of exploiting it Helen had concentrated the months of the naming phase that most children go through somewhere around their second birthday.”… 3
Karol Wojtyla’s fundamental discovery is the experience of the “I” as being. Experience is always about reality, and therefore about being. In modern thought, the “I” has been identified with consciousness, or the thought about thinking. Reflective thought, not experience, was the access. Wojtyla experiences himself as the cause of free action. His “I” is not the result of reflection on the act of thinking or willing. It is discovered as the cause of an experience of (free, not instinctual or stimulus-response mechanism) self-determination as a free act. “But as the need increases to understand the human being as a unique and unrepeatable person, especially in terms of the whole dynamism of action and inner happenings proper to the human being – in other words, as the need increases to understand the personal subjectivity of the human being – the category of lived experience takes on greater significance, and, in fact, key significance. For then the issue is not just the metaphysical objectification of the human being as an acting subject, as the agent of acts, but the revelation of the person as a subject experiencing its acts and inner happenings, and with them its own subjectivity.
“The experience of the human being cannot be derived by way of cosmological reduction; we must pause at the irreducible, at that which is unique and unrepeatable in each human being, by virtue of which he or she is not just a particular human being – an individual of a certain species – but a personal subject. Only then do we get a true and complete picture of the human being. We cannot complete this picture through reduction alone; we also cannot remain within the framework of the irreducible alone (for then we would be unable to get beyond the pure self). The one must be cognitively supplemented with the other. Nevertheless, given the variety of circumstances of the real existence of human beings, we must always leave the greater space in this cognitive effort for the irreducible; we must, as it were give the irreducible the upper hand when thinking about the human being, both in theory and in practice. For the irreducible also refers to everything in the human being that is invisible and wholly internal and whereby each human being, myself included, is an `eyewitness’ of his or her own self – of his or her own humanity and person.”
Perhaps, the analytical genius of Wojtyla comes to the fore precisely here.
The “I” is being, not consciousness. But the experience which discloses the “I” as being is the work of consciousness. He distinguishes the consciousness of the experience of sensible things - which is taken from the experience (sensible perception) of the external world: this pink cloud – from the consciousness of the experience of the self (“I”) in the act of self-determination in the moment of morality: responsibility or guilt. In its (non abstractive) mirroring function, consciousness grasps the subject (not yet experienced as “I”), which has been objectified by reflective (not “reflexive,” in the terminology of Wojtyla) thought, and then “actualized” (subdued/mastered) by itself. He distinguishes between the reflectiveness of the mind turning back on its own act of knowing things and the reflexiveness of consciousness which captures both the reflections of the subject in potency to self-determine, and in the act of moving itself. This capturing both states of the self as pre and post self-determination, as potency and act with respect to itself, constitutes the experience of the “I” as “I.” And he corroborates this when he remarks in Fides et Ratio #83 that “In a special way, the person constitutes a privileged locus for the encounter with being, and hence with metaphysical enquiry.”
He remarks in The Acting Person: “The consequence of the reflexive [not reflective] turn of consciousness is that this object – just because it is from the ontological point of view the subject – while having the experience of his own ego also has the experience of himself as the subject. In this interpretation `refexiveness’ is also seen to be an essential as well as a very specific moment of consciousness. It is, however, necessary to add at once that this specific moment becomes apparent only when we observe and trace consciousness in its intrinsic, organic relation to the human being, in particular, the human being in action. We then discern clearly that it is one thing to be the subject, another to be cognized (that is, objectivized) as the subject, and a still different thing to experience one’s self as the subject of one’s own acts and experiences… This discrimination is of tremendous import for all our further analyses, which we shall have to make in our efforts to grasp the whole dynamic reality of the acting person and to account for the subjectiveness that is given us in experience.
Indubitably, Man is, first of all, the subject of his being and his acting; he is the subject insofar as he is a being of determinate nature, which leads to consequences particularly in the acting. In traditional ontology that subject of existing and acting which man is was designated by the term suppositum – ontic support – which, we may say, serves as a thoroughly objective designation free of any experiential aspects, in particular of any relation to that experience of subjectivity in which the subject is given to itself as the self, as the ego. Hence “ suppositum” abstracts from that aspect of consciousness owing to which the concrete man – the object being the subject – has the experience of himself as the subject and thus of his subjectivity. It is this experience that allows him to designate himself by means of the pronoun “I.” We know “I” to be a personal pronoun, always designating a concrete person. However, the denotation of this personal pronoun, thus….
Hence not only am I conscious of my ego (on the ground of self-knowledge) but owing to my consciousness in its reflexive function I also experience my ego. I have the experience of myself as the concrete subject of the ego’s very subjectiveness. Consciousness is not just an aspect but also an essential dimension or an actual moment [but not the “I” itself] of the reality of the being that I am, since it constitutes its subjectiveness in the experiential sense.”
Thursday, April 07, 2005
"My Words Have Not Converted You - My Blood Will Convert You"
The picture of John Paul II on p. 23 of "U.S. News and World Report" of 4/11/05 says it all. Head thrown back, mouth agape in a grimace of agony at the frustration of not being able to speak on March 30 is a portrait of self-gift that the world has long understood and cannot describe in words. They are responding to this last public gesture with their feet and their exhaustion. 18,000 persons per hour in a 24 hour wait for a 10 second view. It transcends the view. It is a somatic response of whole persons to the embodiment of Christ in Roman time and space. It was simply necessary to go! All the talk of the difficulty in parsing out the encyclicals and documents of John Paul II - and therefore their supposed irrelevancy - is rebutted to the tune of an expected four million people descending on Rome for this funeral tomorrow. Let's see the exact number!This is the actual beginning of the "new springtime of Christianity" that marks the Third Millennium in the real time. He said in "Mission of the Redeemer" #86:
"If we look at today's world, we are struck by many negatiave factors that can lead to pessimism. But this feeling is unjustified: we have faith in God our Father and Lord, in his goodness and mercy. As the thrid millennium of the redemption draws near, God is preparing a great springtime for Christianity, and we can already see its first signs. In fact, both in the non-Christian world and in the traditionally Christian world, people are gradually drawing closer to gospel ideals and values, a development which the Church seeks to encourage. Today in fact there is a new consensus among peoples about these values: the rejection of violence and war; respect for the human person and for human rights; the desire for freedom, justice and brotherhood; the surmounting of different forms of racism and nationalism; the affirmation of the dignity and role of women.
"Christian hope sustains us in committing ourselves fully to the new evangelization and to the worldwide mission, and leads us to pray as Jesus taught us: `Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven' (Mt. 6, 10)."
Robert Moynihan (Editor, "Inside the Vatican" November 2002, 16-25) affirmed that John Paul II's canonization of St. Josemaria Escriva ended not only the 20th century but an entire millennium and a half:
"The 20th century ended, for the Catholic Church, on October 6, 2002. It ended precisely 40 hears after the opening of the Second Vatican Councl in 1962.
It ended on a warm, blue autumn day in Rome with John Paul II's canonization of Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, the founder of Opus Dei, as a saint.
In so doing, the Pope presented sanctity as the vocation of every baptized person, and so reiterated the central message of the Second Vatican Council.
The 20th century was the century that brought the medieval world to a definitive end...
Having experienced the 20th century, the solution seemed evident: the Church needed to `go to ground' - to de-clericalize... and to have its members intermingle in all aspects of ordinary human life, indistinguishable in any outward way from other members of society except in the excellence of their work, engaged in as a vocation... a vocation to sanctity in the midst of the world....
The Holy Father pronounced the formula of canonization for the Spanish priest at 10,23 a.m. in St. Peter's Square. And so, in a certain sense, we may say that we know the exact minute that the old century and the old world ended: at 10,23 a.m. in Rome on a sunny Octrober morning in the year 2002."
Indeed, the canonization of Escriva marked the existential, again real time, universal call to holiness characterized by secularity. But now, the springtime begins in which people sense the presence of the Spirit. The civilization of love, a culture of life, begins now, on April 8, 2005 at 10 a.m. in Rome. The banquet has been prepared, now come and eat.
"If we look at today's world, we are struck by many negatiave factors that can lead to pessimism. But this feeling is unjustified: we have faith in God our Father and Lord, in his goodness and mercy. As the thrid millennium of the redemption draws near, God is preparing a great springtime for Christianity, and we can already see its first signs. In fact, both in the non-Christian world and in the traditionally Christian world, people are gradually drawing closer to gospel ideals and values, a development which the Church seeks to encourage. Today in fact there is a new consensus among peoples about these values: the rejection of violence and war; respect for the human person and for human rights; the desire for freedom, justice and brotherhood; the surmounting of different forms of racism and nationalism; the affirmation of the dignity and role of women.
"Christian hope sustains us in committing ourselves fully to the new evangelization and to the worldwide mission, and leads us to pray as Jesus taught us: `Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven' (Mt. 6, 10)."
Robert Moynihan (Editor, "Inside the Vatican" November 2002, 16-25) affirmed that John Paul II's canonization of St. Josemaria Escriva ended not only the 20th century but an entire millennium and a half:
"The 20th century ended, for the Catholic Church, on October 6, 2002. It ended precisely 40 hears after the opening of the Second Vatican Councl in 1962.
It ended on a warm, blue autumn day in Rome with John Paul II's canonization of Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, the founder of Opus Dei, as a saint.
In so doing, the Pope presented sanctity as the vocation of every baptized person, and so reiterated the central message of the Second Vatican Council.
The 20th century was the century that brought the medieval world to a definitive end...
Having experienced the 20th century, the solution seemed evident: the Church needed to `go to ground' - to de-clericalize... and to have its members intermingle in all aspects of ordinary human life, indistinguishable in any outward way from other members of society except in the excellence of their work, engaged in as a vocation... a vocation to sanctity in the midst of the world....
The Holy Father pronounced the formula of canonization for the Spanish priest at 10,23 a.m. in St. Peter's Square. And so, in a certain sense, we may say that we know the exact minute that the old century and the old world ended: at 10,23 a.m. in Rome on a sunny Octrober morning in the year 2002."
Indeed, the canonization of Escriva marked the existential, again real time, universal call to holiness characterized by secularity. But now, the springtime begins in which people sense the presence of the Spirit. The civilization of love, a culture of life, begins now, on April 8, 2005 at 10 a.m. in Rome. The banquet has been prepared, now come and eat.
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
The Conclave and the New Pope: "Roman Tryptych;" John Paul II
"It is here, beneath this wondrous Sistine profusion of color
that the Cardinals assemble -
the community responsible for the legacy of the keys of the Kingdom.
They come here, to this very place.
And once more Michelangelo wraps them in his vision.
`In Him we live and move and have our being.'
"Who is He?
Behold, the creating hand of the Almighty,
the Ancient One,
reaching towards Adam...
In the beginning God created...
He, who sees all things...
"The colors of the Sistine will then speak the
word of the Lord:
Tu es Petrus[Mt. 16, 18] - once heard by Simon, son of John.
`To you I will give the keys of the Kingdom.'
Those entrusted with the legacy of the keys
gather here, letting themselves be enfolded
by the Sistine's colors,
by the vision left to us by Michelangelo -
So it was in August, and again in October,
in the memorable year of the two Conclaves,
and so it will be once more, when the time comes,
after my death.
"Michelangelo's vision must then speak to them.
`Con-clave:' a shared concern for the legacy of the keys,
the keys of the Kingdom.
"Lo, they see themselves in the midst of the
Beginning and the End,
between the Day of Creation and the Day of Judgment...
It is granted man once to die, and thereafter, the Judgment!
"Final transparency and light.
The clarity of the events -
the clarity of consciences -
During the conclave Michelangelo must teach them -
Do not forget: Omnia nuda et aperta sunt ante oculos Eius.
You who see all, point to him!
He will point him out..."
that the Cardinals assemble -
the community responsible for the legacy of the keys of the Kingdom.
They come here, to this very place.
And once more Michelangelo wraps them in his vision.
`In Him we live and move and have our being.'
"Who is He?
Behold, the creating hand of the Almighty,
the Ancient One,
reaching towards Adam...
In the beginning God created...
He, who sees all things...
"The colors of the Sistine will then speak the
word of the Lord:
Tu es Petrus[Mt. 16, 18] - once heard by Simon, son of John.
`To you I will give the keys of the Kingdom.'
Those entrusted with the legacy of the keys
gather here, letting themselves be enfolded
by the Sistine's colors,
by the vision left to us by Michelangelo -
So it was in August, and again in October,
in the memorable year of the two Conclaves,
and so it will be once more, when the time comes,
after my death.
"Michelangelo's vision must then speak to them.
`Con-clave:' a shared concern for the legacy of the keys,
the keys of the Kingdom.
"Lo, they see themselves in the midst of the
Beginning and the End,
between the Day of Creation and the Day of Judgment...
It is granted man once to die, and thereafter, the Judgment!
"Final transparency and light.
The clarity of the events -
the clarity of consciences -
During the conclave Michelangelo must teach them -
Do not forget: Omnia nuda et aperta sunt ante oculos Eius.
You who see all, point to him!
He will point him out..."
Monday, April 04, 2005
Be Not Afraid - From Beginning to End
John Paul II, Radiating Fatherhood, engendering sons and daughters: "My words have not converted you; My blood will convert you" [poem that St. Stanislaus murmurs to himself before a King of Poland who was unreceptive to Christian sensitivity].
"This beloved son of Poland, who became the Father of Freedom to Eastern Europe, has taught us not to fear in the face of crushing tyranny. As he championed life while the culture of death engulfed the West, he taught us not to fear to speak the truth about the value of the human person. And as he faded from athletic vigor to frail old age, he taught us not to fear old age or death. `Do not be afraid' has been his ringing cry.
"But we are afraid to lose you, dear papa, even though we know you will be with us till, praying for us as you have through your entire reign, only now in the presence of Jesus and our Blessed Mother. Our hearts cannot be made ready to let you go and we are afraid of having them broken again. But broken they will be; the tears already flowing soon to become a flood.
"We imagine you entering the Gates, embraced by the Truth and Beauty you have loved and called us all to love. We see you welcomed by all the Saints you have recognized, cupping the face of that tiny nun once again in your great strong hands, and hearing the `Well done' that is the true crown of a Christian! We rejoice with you in hope.
"And we will try, God help us, papa - we will try, to not be afraid."
* * * * * *
The legacy of John Paul II is not to be afraid. Having been held in the arms of Mary and whispering back to her, “Totus Tuus Sum Ego,” he was not afraid to become Peter, who recognized the Face of Christ and gave testimony, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” These are the opening words of his opening Urbi et Orbiaddress on October 22, 1978. They meant that, indeed, he was now Peter. Our Lady had been told not to be afraid to make the gift of herself to receive the Holy Spirit and thereby give God the gift of a body.
John Paul II told us not to be afraid because his mission was to radiate the fatherhood of being with us and engender us into Jesus Christ. He gave everyone identity. He spoke the truth to us. He even sang it to us on the great lawn of Central Park. And we sang back to him.
Karol Wojtyla had acted out and written dramatic works into and beyond the time of his participation in the Second Vatican Council. The last dramatic work in the Taborski collection was entitled, "Radiation of Fatherhood." It has four speakers: Adam, Chorus, Woman (also called Mother) and Monica (a child). Perhaps some of the words of Adam, the first man, and the mother, take on meaning for us as we begin to experience the impact of the man himself. One gets the feeling that he and his words will have more impact now in death than they had in life:
Adam:
“After a long time I came to understand that you do not want me to be a father unless I become a child. That is why Your Son came into the world. He is entirely Yours. In Him the word `mine’ finds complete justification; it can be spoken credibly by Him. Without such a justification and credibility this word is a risk – love is a risk, too. Why did you inflict on me the love that in me must be a risk? And now Your Son takes on Himself all the risk of love.
How much the word `mine’ musts hurt when it turns out later to mean `not mine.’ I think with awe about the strain and toil of Your Son, about the magnitude of His love. How much did He take on Himself? What voids did He fill? How great is the void He must fill! After all, in all of us the common denominator of our loneliness remains, and in it, against all the logic of existence, `mine’ still tries to force out `Yours.’ Could I too become a son? I did not want to be one. I did not want to accept the suffering caused by risking love. I thought I would not be equal to it. My eyes were too fixed on myself, and in such a situation love is most difficult.
When Your Son came, I remained the common denominator of man’s inner loneliness. Your Son wants to enter it. He wants to because He loves. Loneliness opposes love. On the borderline of loneliness, love must become suffering: Your Son has suffered.
And now there are two of us in the history of every man: I who conceive and bear loneliness and He in whom loneliness disappears and children are born anew.
Many people look on Your Son’s life, on His suffering and death; many have gone the way He takes. I do not stand apart from Him; I do not oppose Him. I admire and worship Him, but at the same time I resist Him. I do it to some extent because I cannot afford to do anything else. Sometimes this is connected with a mirage of greatness. But I find it even harder to retain a sense of my own greatness than a sense of my loneliness. In loneliness one can hide and forget. But what am I to do when I keep falling off pedestals? What am I to do when people tormented by other people, crucified like Your Son, return and ask the same questions: Where has the exiled father gone to? Where has the punishing father come from?
The mother:
“Do not be afraid. This must hurt. It is a pain like the pain of birth. A woman knows infinitely more about giving birth than a man. She knows it particularly through the suffering that accompanies childbearing. Still, motherhood is an expression of fatherhood. It must always go back to the father to take from him all that it expresses. In this consists the radiation of fatherhood.
One returns to the father through the child. And the child, in turn, restores to us the bridegroom in the father. This is very simple and ordinary. The whole world is full of it. Zone must enter the radiation of fatherhood, since only there does everything become fully real. For at no point can the world be fiction, the inner world even less than the external world. Just think! Think, all of you: one must choose to give birth! You have not thought about this. One must choose to give birth even more than to create.
In this consists the radiation of fatherhood. It is no metaphor, but reality. The world cannot depend on metaphor alone, the inner world even less than the external world.
We return to the father through the child. And the child in turn restores to us the bridegroom in the father. Do not separate love. Love is a unity” (Karol Wojtyla, “Radiation of Fatherhood” in The Collected Plays and Writings on Theater, University of California Press (1987) 339-341).
People can understand this as a mysterious approximation to the inner experience they have had of John Paul II for the last 26 years. He affirmed everyone, and in doing so he gave identity to persons, churches and nations. For example, by his fearlessness in Warsaw on June 2, 1979, he quite literally gave the Poles back their identity as a people and nation and sparked the peaceful revolution that was “Solidarity” and the eventual fall of Communism worldwide. Unbelievably, under the guns of a grinding and dehumanizing Communism, he dared to say,
“Without Christ, it is impossible to understand this nation, with a past so splendid and at the same time so terribly difficult. It is not possible to understand this city, Warsaw, the capital of Poland, which in 1944 committed itself to an unequal battle against the aggressor, a battle in which it was abandoned by the allied powers, a battle in which it was buried under its own rubble, if one does not recall that under this same rubble there was also Christ with his cross which can be found facing the church of Krakowskie Przedmiescie. It is impossible to understand the history of Poland from Stanislaw in Skalka to Maximilian Kolbe in Oswiecim, if one does not apply, to them also, that unique and fundamental criterion which bears the name of Jesus Christ.”
In 1995, he tried to do the same thing here in the United States. He affirmed the foundational experience of the dignity of the human person that is at the root of our Constitution and Bill of Rights:
“I say this too to the United States of America: Today, in our world as it is, many other nations and peoples look to you as the principal model and pattern for their own advancement in democracy. But democracy needs wisdom. Democracy needs virtue, if it is not to turn against everything that it is meant to defend and encourage. Democracy stands or falls with the truths and values which it embodies and promotes.
"Democracy serves what is true and right when it safeguards the dignity of every human person, when it respects inviolable and inalienable human rights, when it makes the common good the end and criterion regulating all public and social life. But these values themselves must have an objective content. Otherwise they correspond only to the power of the majority or the wishes of the most vocal. If an attitude of skepticism were to succeed in calling into question even the fundamental principles of the moral law, the democratic system itself would be shaken in its foundations (cf. Evangelium Vitae, 70).
"The United States possesses a safeguard, a great bulwark, against this happening. I speak of your founding documents: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. These documents are grounded in and embody unchanging principles of the natural law whose permanent truth and validity can be known by reason, for it is the law written by God in human hearts (cf. Rom. 2, 25).
"At the center of the moral vision of your founding documents is the recognition of the rights of the human person, and especially respect for the dignity and sanctity of human life in all conditions and at all stages of development.. I say to you again, America, in the light of your own tradition: Love life, cherish life, defend life, from conception to natural death.”
A similar, but even more dramatic call and affirmation to Europe as a whole was given by the Pope to the bishops of Europe in "A Declaration to Europe" on November 9, 1982 from Santiago de Compostela:
"(A) huge vacuum... awaits credible heralds of new proposals of values capable of building a new civilization worthy of man's vocation.
"There is a need for heralds of the Gospel who are experts in humanity, who have a profound knowledge of the heart of present-daya man, participating in his joys and hopes, anguish and sadness, and who are at the same time contemplatives in love with God. For this we need new saints. The great evangelizeres of Europe have been the saints. We must beg the Lord to increase the Church's spirit of holiness and send us new saints to evangelize today's world."
He concluded:
"Therefore, I, John Paul, son of the Polish nation which has always considered itself European by its origins, traditions, culture and vital relationships, Slavic among the Latins and Latin among the Slavs:
I, Successor of Peter in the See of Rome, a See which Christ wished to establish in Europe and which he loves because of its efforts for the spread of Christianity throughout the whole world;
I, bishop of Rome and Shepherd of the Universal Church, from Santiago, utter to you, Europe of the ages, a cry full of love:
Find youself again. Be yourself. Discover your origins, revive your roots. Return to those authentic values which made your history a glorious one and your presence so beneficent in the other continents. Rebuild your spiritual unity in a climate of complete respect for other religions and other genuine liberties. Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God... You can still be the guiding light of civilization and the stimulus of progress for the world. The other continents look to you and also hope to receive from you the same reply which St. James gave to Christ: POSSUM. I can."
As Christ is risen from the dead, John Paul II is still present to us. The coincidences are outstanding. He gave us Faustina as saint and Mercy Sunday. He dies five minutes after that vigil Mass and rosary are concluded at the foot of his bed on the First Saturday of Our Lady - to be followed by her Annunciation today, Monday. His last testament to us was the Eucharist and the priesthood: “Take and eat, this is my Body.” As Christ is the gift of Self to us, so we are to become gift to others to affirm and engender them.
The funeral on Friday may be the most outstanding public media event - and therefore the most notorious piece of catechesis - in the history of the world. Stay tuned for its impact on souls. People may begin not to be afraid.
"This beloved son of Poland, who became the Father of Freedom to Eastern Europe, has taught us not to fear in the face of crushing tyranny. As he championed life while the culture of death engulfed the West, he taught us not to fear to speak the truth about the value of the human person. And as he faded from athletic vigor to frail old age, he taught us not to fear old age or death. `Do not be afraid' has been his ringing cry.
"But we are afraid to lose you, dear papa, even though we know you will be with us till, praying for us as you have through your entire reign, only now in the presence of Jesus and our Blessed Mother. Our hearts cannot be made ready to let you go and we are afraid of having them broken again. But broken they will be; the tears already flowing soon to become a flood.
"We imagine you entering the Gates, embraced by the Truth and Beauty you have loved and called us all to love. We see you welcomed by all the Saints you have recognized, cupping the face of that tiny nun once again in your great strong hands, and hearing the `Well done' that is the true crown of a Christian! We rejoice with you in hope.
"And we will try, God help us, papa - we will try, to not be afraid."
* * * * * *
The legacy of John Paul II is not to be afraid. Having been held in the arms of Mary and whispering back to her, “Totus Tuus Sum Ego,” he was not afraid to become Peter, who recognized the Face of Christ and gave testimony, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” These are the opening words of his opening Urbi et Orbiaddress on October 22, 1978. They meant that, indeed, he was now Peter. Our Lady had been told not to be afraid to make the gift of herself to receive the Holy Spirit and thereby give God the gift of a body.
John Paul II told us not to be afraid because his mission was to radiate the fatherhood of being with us and engender us into Jesus Christ. He gave everyone identity. He spoke the truth to us. He even sang it to us on the great lawn of Central Park. And we sang back to him.
Karol Wojtyla had acted out and written dramatic works into and beyond the time of his participation in the Second Vatican Council. The last dramatic work in the Taborski collection was entitled, "Radiation of Fatherhood." It has four speakers: Adam, Chorus, Woman (also called Mother) and Monica (a child). Perhaps some of the words of Adam, the first man, and the mother, take on meaning for us as we begin to experience the impact of the man himself. One gets the feeling that he and his words will have more impact now in death than they had in life:
Adam:
“After a long time I came to understand that you do not want me to be a father unless I become a child. That is why Your Son came into the world. He is entirely Yours. In Him the word `mine’ finds complete justification; it can be spoken credibly by Him. Without such a justification and credibility this word is a risk – love is a risk, too. Why did you inflict on me the love that in me must be a risk? And now Your Son takes on Himself all the risk of love.
How much the word `mine’ musts hurt when it turns out later to mean `not mine.’ I think with awe about the strain and toil of Your Son, about the magnitude of His love. How much did He take on Himself? What voids did He fill? How great is the void He must fill! After all, in all of us the common denominator of our loneliness remains, and in it, against all the logic of existence, `mine’ still tries to force out `Yours.’ Could I too become a son? I did not want to be one. I did not want to accept the suffering caused by risking love. I thought I would not be equal to it. My eyes were too fixed on myself, and in such a situation love is most difficult.
When Your Son came, I remained the common denominator of man’s inner loneliness. Your Son wants to enter it. He wants to because He loves. Loneliness opposes love. On the borderline of loneliness, love must become suffering: Your Son has suffered.
And now there are two of us in the history of every man: I who conceive and bear loneliness and He in whom loneliness disappears and children are born anew.
Many people look on Your Son’s life, on His suffering and death; many have gone the way He takes. I do not stand apart from Him; I do not oppose Him. I admire and worship Him, but at the same time I resist Him. I do it to some extent because I cannot afford to do anything else. Sometimes this is connected with a mirage of greatness. But I find it even harder to retain a sense of my own greatness than a sense of my loneliness. In loneliness one can hide and forget. But what am I to do when I keep falling off pedestals? What am I to do when people tormented by other people, crucified like Your Son, return and ask the same questions: Where has the exiled father gone to? Where has the punishing father come from?
The mother:
“Do not be afraid. This must hurt. It is a pain like the pain of birth. A woman knows infinitely more about giving birth than a man. She knows it particularly through the suffering that accompanies childbearing. Still, motherhood is an expression of fatherhood. It must always go back to the father to take from him all that it expresses. In this consists the radiation of fatherhood.
One returns to the father through the child. And the child, in turn, restores to us the bridegroom in the father. This is very simple and ordinary. The whole world is full of it. Zone must enter the radiation of fatherhood, since only there does everything become fully real. For at no point can the world be fiction, the inner world even less than the external world. Just think! Think, all of you: one must choose to give birth! You have not thought about this. One must choose to give birth even more than to create.
In this consists the radiation of fatherhood. It is no metaphor, but reality. The world cannot depend on metaphor alone, the inner world even less than the external world.
We return to the father through the child. And the child in turn restores to us the bridegroom in the father. Do not separate love. Love is a unity” (Karol Wojtyla, “Radiation of Fatherhood” in The Collected Plays and Writings on Theater, University of California Press (1987) 339-341).
People can understand this as a mysterious approximation to the inner experience they have had of John Paul II for the last 26 years. He affirmed everyone, and in doing so he gave identity to persons, churches and nations. For example, by his fearlessness in Warsaw on June 2, 1979, he quite literally gave the Poles back their identity as a people and nation and sparked the peaceful revolution that was “Solidarity” and the eventual fall of Communism worldwide. Unbelievably, under the guns of a grinding and dehumanizing Communism, he dared to say,
“Without Christ, it is impossible to understand this nation, with a past so splendid and at the same time so terribly difficult. It is not possible to understand this city, Warsaw, the capital of Poland, which in 1944 committed itself to an unequal battle against the aggressor, a battle in which it was abandoned by the allied powers, a battle in which it was buried under its own rubble, if one does not recall that under this same rubble there was also Christ with his cross which can be found facing the church of Krakowskie Przedmiescie. It is impossible to understand the history of Poland from Stanislaw in Skalka to Maximilian Kolbe in Oswiecim, if one does not apply, to them also, that unique and fundamental criterion which bears the name of Jesus Christ.”
In 1995, he tried to do the same thing here in the United States. He affirmed the foundational experience of the dignity of the human person that is at the root of our Constitution and Bill of Rights:
“I say this too to the United States of America: Today, in our world as it is, many other nations and peoples look to you as the principal model and pattern for their own advancement in democracy. But democracy needs wisdom. Democracy needs virtue, if it is not to turn against everything that it is meant to defend and encourage. Democracy stands or falls with the truths and values which it embodies and promotes.
"Democracy serves what is true and right when it safeguards the dignity of every human person, when it respects inviolable and inalienable human rights, when it makes the common good the end and criterion regulating all public and social life. But these values themselves must have an objective content. Otherwise they correspond only to the power of the majority or the wishes of the most vocal. If an attitude of skepticism were to succeed in calling into question even the fundamental principles of the moral law, the democratic system itself would be shaken in its foundations (cf. Evangelium Vitae, 70).
"The United States possesses a safeguard, a great bulwark, against this happening. I speak of your founding documents: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. These documents are grounded in and embody unchanging principles of the natural law whose permanent truth and validity can be known by reason, for it is the law written by God in human hearts (cf. Rom. 2, 25).
"At the center of the moral vision of your founding documents is the recognition of the rights of the human person, and especially respect for the dignity and sanctity of human life in all conditions and at all stages of development.. I say to you again, America, in the light of your own tradition: Love life, cherish life, defend life, from conception to natural death.”
A similar, but even more dramatic call and affirmation to Europe as a whole was given by the Pope to the bishops of Europe in "A Declaration to Europe" on November 9, 1982 from Santiago de Compostela:
"(A) huge vacuum... awaits credible heralds of new proposals of values capable of building a new civilization worthy of man's vocation.
"There is a need for heralds of the Gospel who are experts in humanity, who have a profound knowledge of the heart of present-daya man, participating in his joys and hopes, anguish and sadness, and who are at the same time contemplatives in love with God. For this we need new saints. The great evangelizeres of Europe have been the saints. We must beg the Lord to increase the Church's spirit of holiness and send us new saints to evangelize today's world."
He concluded:
"Therefore, I, John Paul, son of the Polish nation which has always considered itself European by its origins, traditions, culture and vital relationships, Slavic among the Latins and Latin among the Slavs:
I, Successor of Peter in the See of Rome, a See which Christ wished to establish in Europe and which he loves because of its efforts for the spread of Christianity throughout the whole world;
I, bishop of Rome and Shepherd of the Universal Church, from Santiago, utter to you, Europe of the ages, a cry full of love:
Find youself again. Be yourself. Discover your origins, revive your roots. Return to those authentic values which made your history a glorious one and your presence so beneficent in the other continents. Rebuild your spiritual unity in a climate of complete respect for other religions and other genuine liberties. Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God... You can still be the guiding light of civilization and the stimulus of progress for the world. The other continents look to you and also hope to receive from you the same reply which St. James gave to Christ: POSSUM. I can."
As Christ is risen from the dead, John Paul II is still present to us. The coincidences are outstanding. He gave us Faustina as saint and Mercy Sunday. He dies five minutes after that vigil Mass and rosary are concluded at the foot of his bed on the First Saturday of Our Lady - to be followed by her Annunciation today, Monday. His last testament to us was the Eucharist and the priesthood: “Take and eat, this is my Body.” As Christ is the gift of Self to us, so we are to become gift to others to affirm and engender them.
The funeral on Friday may be the most outstanding public media event - and therefore the most notorious piece of catechesis - in the history of the world. Stay tuned for its impact on souls. People may begin not to be afraid.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)