Why
Pope John Paul II, who will be canonized April 27, discerned possibilities when
others saw only barriers.
GEORGE
WEIGEL
April 21, 2014 7:10
p.m. ET
In a March 1996
conversation, Pope John Paul II told me, almost wistfully, "They try to
understand me from the outside, but I can only be understood from inside."
His tone that evening was less critical than it was bemused, even resigned. But
whether his regrets involved biographers who treated him as a globe-trotting
politician or journalists who parsed his every word and deed in conventional
left-right categories, the view from outside, he knew, was not going to get
anyone close to the essence of Karol Wojtyła.
I agreed with him
then; and now, nine years after his death, in the days before his April 27
canonization, I agree with him even more. John Paul II, who embodied the human
drama of the second half of the 20th century in a singular way, and whose witness
to the truth of humanity's noblest aspirations bent the curve of history toward
freedom, can only be understood from inside out. Or, if you prefer, soul first.
His was a
many-textured soul. Some of its multiple facets help explain his extraordinary
accomplishments in the Catholic Church and on the world stage.
Pope John Paul II in
Avila, Spain, in November 1982.Getty Images
He had a Polish soul,
formed by a distinctive experience of history. Vivisected in the Third Polish
Partition of 1795, his country was not restored to the map of Europe until
1918. But during those 123 years of political humiliation, the Polish nation
survived the demise of the Polish state through its language, its literature
and its faith, with the Catholic Church acting as the safe-deposit box of
national identity.
Learning about that
hard experience as a boy, Karol Wojtyla was permanently inoculated against the
twin heresies that had beset the West for centuries: the Jacobin heresy that
the political quest for power runs history, and the Marxist heresy that history
is simply the exhaust fumes of economic processes. Knowing in his Polish soul
that culture, not politics or economics, drives history over the long haul,
John Paul II could ignite a revolution of conscience during his first papal
visit to Poland in 1979. He summoned his people to live the truth about
themselves, to reject the communist culture of the lie, and to find in that
restored national identity irresistible tools of resistance to oppression.
This son of Poland
was, at the same time, a man of global vision with a deeply humanistic soul,
forged by what he regarded as the crisis of
modernity: a crisis in the very idea of the human person. That crisis, he
believed, was not confined to communism's materialist reduction of the human
condition, which he tenaciously fought as a university chaplain, a professor of
ethics, a charismatic priest and a dynamic bishop. The crisis could also be
found in those Western systems that were tempted to measure men and women by
their commercial utility rather than by the innate and inalienable dignity that
was their birthright.
John Paul II's
conviction, biblically rooted and philosophically refined, was that every human
life is of infinite value, at every stage and in every condition. This was the
basis of hispriestly ministry for almost six decades;it was the conviction that
forged his unique moral analysis of world politics; and it was the ground from
which he could inspire men and women from a staggering variety of cultures.
He could also touch
those lives because of his dramatic soul. As a young man, he confessed in a
memoir later in life, he was "obsessed" with the theater. And while
he took some useful skills from those experiences on stage— John Gielgud once
commented on John Paul II's "perfect" sense of timing, as Alec
Guinness marveled at the resonance of his voice—he also developed a dramatic
view of the human condition. We all live, he believed, in a quotidian, yet
deeply consequential, moral drama. Every day of our lives is lived in the
dramatic tension between who we are and who we should be.
John Paul II intuited
this on stage; he refined that intuition as a philosopher. And it was deepened
by his Christian conviction that the drama of every human life is playing
within a cosmic drama in which the God of the Bible is producer, director,
scriptwriter and protagonist. That Christian conviction, in turn, was what
allowed him to say, a year after he was shot in St. Peter's Square in 1981,
"In the designs of Providence there are no mere coincidences."
A man whose soul is
formed by the conviction that "coincidence" is merely a facet of
providence that he has not yet grasped is a man impervious to the tyranny of
the possible. And here, too, the soul of John Paul II helps explain his
accomplishment.
When he was elected
pope in 1978, some observers, fixated on what they imagined to be possible, saw
in the Catholic Church only contention and possible ruin. He saw seeds of
reform and renewal, leading to what he would call a "New Evangelization,"
a new missionary dynamic in Catholicism that would offer the divine mercy to a
broken and wounded humanity. Others, fixated on what seemed settled in world
affairs, believed that the Yalta division of Europe after World War II was
permanent. But after June 1979 and the rise of the Solidarity movement in
Poland, he saw possibilities for dramatic cultural, social and eventually
political change in Eastern Europe—and then helped effect them.
If John Paul II seemed
able to discern possibilities where others saw only barriers; if he saw (as he
put it at the United Nations in 1995), a "springtime of the human
spirit" after a winter of murderous discontent embodied in two world wars,
the gulag and Auschwitz—well, one could look to his keen mind for an explanation.
But the deeper explanation lies in his soul, and in the human character formed
by that soul.
It was John Paul's
soul in which hundreds of millions of human beings found an exemplar of decency
and an icon of hope. It was the character formed by that soul that made him a
champion of resistance against the tyranny of diminished expectations, personal
and political.
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