Dynamic pastor of the global village

April 4, 2005

John Paul II married tradition to the age of instant communication, writes Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor.

John Paul II's papacy was a daring attempt to communicate to an ever more global world what it means to be a human being created by God. Conscious always of the drama of salvation, he demonstrated by his word and example the implications of the Gospel for all humanity. He was a man of many gifts who was endowed with great offices: he was a poet, playwright, actor, philosopher, priest, archbishop and cardinal. But it is as the 263rd successor of St Peter that history will remember him. His 26-year-long papacy - apart from St Peter only one other pope, Pius IX, ruled for longer - spanned an era and breached the new millennium. He was, simply, one of the most remarkable leaders of the Catholic Church in its 2000-year history - a giant in a global age. He has left us all orphans.

From the very beginning, he was a remarkable personality, unafraid to express himself. He was a master of the striking image, the symbolic moment, the dramatic scene. His call to the world to "Open the Door to Christ" was a powerful introduction in 1978. At the time, he was little known. There was a sense of, "Who is this man from the East"?

Over the next quarter of a century, he answered that question. He was seen by more people than anyone in history: a figure in white preaching freedom and dignity to some of the biggest crowds ever assembled. He was the catalyst of a great peaceful revolution: history will place him alongside St Francis of Assisi as one of the great witnesses to the power of the word over that of the sword.

He was a Polish nationalist, the first Slav Pope, who helped to realise his nation's historic dream of a state, yet lived most of the later part of his life in the Vatican. From there, with increasing difficulty as old age and disease enfeebled him, he conducted endless forays into the world, the first successor of St Peter in the modern age to act more like St Paul.

He was above all extraordinarily courageous. A man of deep prayer, he had a conviction of God's providence running through his life, a conviction reinforced by a number of narrow brushes with death. It was a conviction that led him to cling on to the papacy long after it appeared apt to some observers to do so. In the late 1990s and early years of the new millennium, he was no longer the energetic man of action, the "white tornado" of the 1980s, but became an icon of suffering, putting on display all the indignities of infirmity in order to show the God-given dignity within. Another man might have resigned, but the Pope felt very deeply that his life was a providential choice by God to be lived for the Church until the moment God called him to his reward.

The Pope became, in his weakness, identified with vulnerability. The last time I met him was in Lourdes, in August last year. There was a moving moment when a wheelchair-bound young man was brought forward to receive a blessing. The two men in wheelchairs gazed at each other wordlessly - the Pope and the pilgrim at one in that moment, in their shared humanity. The message in Lourdes was the same as it had been in Poland in 1979: God has created every human person with an innate human dignity, which neither totalitarianism nor physical degradation could suffocate. The Pope's defence of that dignity took him first to the East, to face down the evils of communism; then to the developing world, to plead for the poor; and lastly to the West, to confront the erosion of dignity presented by consumerism, individualism and the subjection of people to technology.

Pope John Paul was an extraordinarily complex man and, as such, is very hard to pigeon-hole. He was unshakeable in so many of his convictions, yes, because he had deep beliefs as a Catholic Christian that he felt it his duty to preach in season and out. But he was not rigid or constrained by tradition. He could be extraordinarily radical in the way he reached out across the boundaries of faith and ideology to appeal to the humanity in all people.

He was not exactly a pacifist, for example, but near to it. Here was a man who preached peace in a very strong, direct way. He was an extraordinary, wonderful mixture and it would not do - not at all - to characterise Pope John Paul as a rigid conservative. He was open to the whole reality and mystery of the universe and human beings.

He had a feeling that he was a pope for all people and he had the strength to do that. The invitations that came for him to visit were always welcome and those he accepted, to places such as Cuba or even the Holy Land, were very significant.

He thought a lot about social issues. He came from Poland, a nation behind the Iron Curtain that had known unimaginable horrors. His early life, particularly during and after the war, was one of hardship, in common with his people. The fact that he had been down into the valley of suffering - he was an orphan by the age of 20 - prepared him spiritually, made him self-contained by knowing his dependence on God.

It moulded him so that when he became a bishop, then a cardinal and eventually pope, he was a rock-like person. He was moulded not just by his teaching but by the events of his life. That made him what he was. And as pope, he spoke about these issues based on his own experiences clearly and distinctly. It had a profound effect.

Future historians will be able to see, much more clearly than I can, the effect his historic return to his native land had in the breakdown of communism in Eastern Europe. But while I think the Pope will be remembered for being a world evangelist, his legacy will be seen less in his great travels than in his teaching.

He showed the world that there are objective truths that should form our life and our behaviour, truths that begin from a recognition of God's sovereignty. Today's world says truth is relative, that truth can be, as it were, shaped to each person. But the Pope set his face against that idea: he proclaimed objective moral truths. His social teaching and his teaching about the Gospel of life and about the universality of certain moral truths is tremendously important.

His was a rare and great rapport with young men and women, the likes of which few popes in the past century managed to achieve. In his private life, he would occasionally go and meet young people and sing with them, and they loved him for that. He always had a joke and was not afraid to laugh with them.

That is why I think one of the most abiding images of this papacy will be the last one: the tens of thousands of young people who gathered in St Peter's Square below the papal apartments to hold vigil long into Friday night. The reporters were astonished at the stillness that supervened that night. But it was typical. John Paul II preached before enthusiastic crowds, but he also led them into silence and contemplation. He was always the still centre, who radiated the serenity that comes from a life of prayer.

He was an awesome figure. But he was also a very down-to-earth man, with a good sense of humour, who enjoyed being teased. I remember a lunch he attended at the English retreat house near Rome, which looks across to the papal summer residence at Castelgandolfo. The then rector of the English College asked him: "Holy Father, when you're shaving in the morning and you look across the lake, do you think about us?" The Pope thought for what seemed a very long time, before declaring, with a mischievous smile: "No. Not often."

I will miss him.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor is the Archbishop of Westminster.


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