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John Paul II, Pope of the millennium

by E. Weerapperuma

October 16th was an historical day in the annals of the Catholic Church as His Holiness Pope John Paul II celebrated the Silver Jubilee of His pontificate. His papacy began on October 16, 1978, having been elected as the 264th Pope. As Vicar of Christ he is the third Pope to have served the Church for over 25 years and the second non-Italian Pope after 455 years. The first non-Italian Pope was a native of Netherlands, Arian VI, in 1522.

The culminating point of the jubilee celebrations was the Concelebrated Holy Mass offered on October 16 by the Pontiff along with Cardinals and Bishops at St.Peter's Square in Rome. During the past few weeks the world Catholic community has been conducting special prayer services to invoke blessings on the Pope now 83, weak and poor in health.

The Pontiff has also named 31 bishops and priests for the Red Hat, a set of new members to the College of Cardinals. They will be eligible to elect the next Pope at a future conclave, if they have not reached 80 years of age. There are only 109 cardinals eligible to vote at present and it is less than 120, the specified number.

Media reported the Pope insisted to have the Consistory advanced to October 21, a week after jubilee celebration, which otherwise is due to be held in February 2004. It was "an indication of the failing health of the Pope who realises that his days are numbered", media reported.

This month is an unusually busy month for Vatican with the decision of the Pope to hold Consistory in October where the princes of the Church will receive their Red Hats, immediately after the two outstanding events: the Silver Jubilee of the Papacy and the Beatification of Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

On October 11, on the directives of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Sri Lanka, special prayer services and a Concelebrated Holy Mass were offered at the Tewatta National Basilica of Our Lady of Sri Lanka with the participation of all the Bishops and lay faithful invoking blessing on Holy Father.

According to Church chronicles, after St.Peter, the First Vicar of Christ who served the Church from 33 A.D. to 64 A.D., the times of the first apostles, the longest serving Popes were Blessed Pius IX and Leo XIII. The shortest lived Pope was Stephen II of 752 A.D. Being elected he died before consecration. The Catholic Church celebrates the Silver Jubilee of Papacy, almost after one hundred years. Pope Leo XIII served as Pontiff from 1878 to 1903, served 25 years and five months. We are in 2003 to witness the present Pope who celebrates his Silver Jubilee of Papacy.

The elevation of Karol Josef Wojtyla as the second non-Italian Pope, brought a revolutionary look to the office of the future popes and changed the face of the world. The fall of the iron curtain, destabilising the USSR and the Red Block has been attributed to the impact created by the elevation of this pope.

History will record him, as the man who saw the fall of communism; the pope who travelled the extra mile to reconcile with the Jews; He is the first Pope to have gone into a synagogue and embraced the Muslims saying "they are our elder brothers".

It was not difficult for him to step into a synagogue for Wadowice Synagogue was near Karol's High School and he had seen it often. "I have in front of my eyes the numerous worshippers who during their holidays passed on their way to pray....". He had lived with the Jews and Stanislaw Jura was one of his classmates. He is the pope who raised his voice against the contemporary evils in our "culture of death".

"Pope John Paul II is a man of immense personal charm and ability who by his travels,by electronic web around the global village, has touched millions of lives. Having lived under both Hitler and Stalin and being a truly gifted philosopher, this Pope would be someone to listen to, even if he held no office at all. "Measured by almost any set of human standards Pope John Paul II is the most important person in the 20th century as he had a hand in eradicating the final bastions of Communism", wrote Gerard V.Bradley, Professor of Law in the Notre Dame Law School and a regular columnist for "Catholic Dossier".

Holy Father, as Vicar of Jesus Christ and successor to St.Peter, had taken the Church to the door-step of every nation and country he travelled. His mission around the globe, pushed back, the boundaries of the Old Christian Europe - proselytizing, reforming, opening new churches in Latin America, the United States, the East and Africa or wherever he went. He wooed and won the media with his personal gifts and variety.

Major themes of Pope John Paul II's papacy could be traced to the shaping events of his life - a life whose roots were sunk in Polish soil. His Christian vision, his very emotion drew their depth and intensified from the country he left to become the Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church.

He has been the skiing pope, the poet pope, the best selling-CD pope, the designer robes pope, the intellectual pope. But he has never descended into a trivial meaningless-unimportant, celebrity, dignitary-or a luminary.

He is also the infuriating, the retrograde pope, the silencing pope who ignored the calls for revolutionary changes in the status of women. He had visited 129 countries and crossed more than one million kilometres on voyage for total of 575 days, covering 600 places. He had made 2,400 speeches and had issued 14 encyclicals.

The Pontiff has also established Pope John Paul II Institute, Populorum Progression Institute for the indigenous people of South Africa. Besides this, he has established the Papal Academy for Life and the Papal Academy of Social Sciences. He designated the World Patients' Day and World Youth Day.

Poland, was the largest country in Europe in the 16th century. A vast land area from Baltic to the Black Sea, a power to be reckoned with during the medieval years. It ceased to exist on the European map by the turn of 18th century. The day Karol Josef Wojtyla was born in Wadowice, a small town in Poland about 50 kilometres from Krakow, was on a day of great reckoning for the Poles: May 18, 1920, the Polish Miracle Day.

History records that on that day Marshal Jozef Pilsudski struck a deciding blow in the war against the Soviet Union and seized Kiev. It was Poland's first major military victory in over two centuries. It set in motion events which briefly restored Poland's independence.

His father, Lieutenant Karol senior, an administrative officer of the army, married school teacher Emilia Kaczorowska in 1906. Karol was born as the third child of the family in an apartment amidst the Jews in Wadowice and the Church of Our Lady could be seen from the windows. Emilia, the soul of Karol's home was very fond of her son and she used to tell her neighbours, that one day her son would be a great man, a priest. She died on April 13, 1929, when Karol was just eight.

When his only brother Edmund graduated from the School of Medicine at the Jagellonian University, father took both of them to Black Madonna, the Queen of Poland, in Czestochowa, the heart of Polish Christianity.

The Lieutenant was a force for rectitude and piety, one of several key influences in Pope's religious life. He was taken to Kalwaria, Marian Shrine close to Wadowice and instilled in him devotion to Mary. "Day after day I was able to observe the austere way in which he lived. By profession he was a soldier and his life was a life of constant prayer after the death of my mother. Sometimes I would wake up in the night and find my father on his knees, just as I would always see him kneeling in the parish church. We never spoke about a vocation to the priesthood, but his example was in a way my first seminary, a kind of domestic seminary" recalled the Pontiff.

As a young man Karol was athletic and enjoyed playing soccer as a goalie. He took daredevil swims in a flooded Swaka River. He was an excellent student and served as the president of his school "Solidarity". He developed a love for theatre and for a time his ambition was to study literature and be a professional actor. But he lacked the self-aggrandizing qualities often associated with actors. He used to stand to the side in photos.

He is somewhere remote, a bit aside from all of us", said his classmates. Nonetheless his patriotic passions were perfectly suited to a particular kind of Polish theatre. During the Nazi occupation Karol clandestinely pursued both his studies and his acting while working as a stonecutter to support himself and to hold the work permit he needed to avoid deportation or imprisonment. He was active in the UNIA, a Christian democratic underground organisation.

While convalescing from an accident Karol considered a religious vocation. By 1942 he was studying for the priesthood,at clandestine Theological faculty of the Jagaiellonian University.

He was ordained a priest on November 1, 1946. Soon after, the Archbishop of Krakow, Cardinal Adam Stefan Sapeha sent him to Rome for further study on Moral Theology. Back from Rome he joined Lublin University.

In 1958 when Pope Pius XII named him the auxiliary bishop of Ombi, he was just 38. He was consecrated as Bishop September 28, 1958, and on January 13,1964, Pope Paul VI appointed him as the Archbishop of Krakow. On June 26, 1967 he was made a cardinal by the same pope.

Eamon Duffy of the Cambridge University, the author of "Saints and Sinners" described the powerful ways suffering connected Poland to John Paul's papacy.

"Suffering is crucial for understanding John Paul, at a personal level, and at a racial, ethnic, historical and theological level. His personal life is one of enormous personal deprivation: the loss of his mother when he was very young; the loss of his brother who was perhaps the person he was closest to in the world; then when he was a very young man, before he had really shaped his own life choices,the loss of his father, whose piety had been crucial shaping his own religion...."

"But the Polish people have been a victim-people, for 200 years, partitioned between Germany and Russia, religiously oppressed, enslaved, abandoned by the world at the beginning of the Second World War. And that experience of desolation for him is part and parcel of the religious desolation of the East, a Church which is the Church of Silence, which was cut off from the West.... He feels he has given the Churches of the East a special vision, a special access to the Gospel of the Crucified....Personal suffering for him chimed in perfectly and became an image of this greater vocation to the suffering of the Churches of the East".

The poets of 19th century in Poland, Slowacki and Mickiewicz, kept alive the beauty and pain of Poland and had impressed Karol. Slowacki composed a poem on "The Solvic Pope", a prophetic poem about a Pope from the East and of a world that had never had a Polish Pope. Karol was raised with a vision of one. He memorised it. "The Slovic Pope" -

"Will not flee the sword - Like that Italian

Like God - He will bravely face the sword"

The pope was fascinated by the martyred St.Stanislaw, a bishop assassinated by a tyrant King in 1709. As Cardinal of Krakow he often referred to this saint.

The communists did not appreciate the reference. They knew that this saint stood for the resurrection of Poland. When the saint was murdered the enraged populace chased the King away.

John Paul II never had to overcome any limitations in his relation to the Jews, for his childhood experience was with the Jews in Wadowice. That town was built of narrow streets around the central square of administrative buildings. There were 8,000 Catholics and 2,000 Jews were living in close proximity in his idyllic home-town where Poles and Jews got along just fine.

They lived in an apartment from a Jewish landlord. He went to school with the Jews. His closest friend was Jerzy Kluger, a Jewish boy from a wealthy local family. During the Nazi occupation he would have witnessed murder of the Jews in the streets.

He would have known the outright treachery of those who turned Jews in, for food. The silence of the Church he knew during the Holocaust.

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