He Taught Us Who We Are
- JANET E. SMITH
In his letter marking the close of the Jubilee year, Pope John Paul II wrote, I have often stopped to look at the long queues of pilgrims waiting patiently to go through the Holy Door. In each of them I tried to imagine the story of a life, made up of joys, worries, sufferings; the story of someone whom Christ had met and who in dialogue with Him, was setting out again on a journey of hope.
He
went on to relate: As I observed the continuous flow of pilgrims, I saw them
as a kind of concrete image of the pilgrim Church, the Church placed, as Saint
Augustine says, amid the persecutions of the world and the consolations of God.
In part, this passage shows where Pope John Paul II got his energy to write speeches,
encyclicals, letters, exhortations, greetings, etc., that fill volumes; to visit
more places on earth than perhaps any other public figure ever; to be with his
flock in endless long and often tedious ceremonies. For him all of this was an
extended love feast; he loved each and every one of us and loved the fact that
we are loved by Christ. Pope John Paul II was a true alter Christus; he
wanted to touch us, to be with us, to rejoice with us, to console us, to guide
us and to be inspired by us.
Pope John Paul II quite simply loved life
and loved every human person, because he understood the true meaning of the human
drama. When he looked over a crowd of people, he did not see a sea of humanity,
or consumers, or polluters, or voters, but he saw souls, souls that God had willed
into existence and souls that God wants with Him for eternity, souls that are
filled with a longing that only God can satisfy. Each life is infinitely fascinating
and infinitely interesting and infinitely important because it is the story of
a souls journey to God.
I sometimes wondered if, when he looked out
over the huge crowds, that amidst all his joy, Pope John Paul II experienced great
sorrow at the thought that few people realize how precious they are to God, how
loved they are. In his Letter to Families, I found some confirmation of
this suspicion in the line: Man must reconcile himself to his natural greatness.
It is profoundly sad that we dont realize how great we are. The greatness
of the human person comes from our ability to understand that we are made in the
image and likeness of God and from our freedom to embrace that reality as a gift
and to love the fact God that made us. The greatest responsibility of the human
person, the greatest actualization of his innate dignity, is to live in accord
with the truth, the truth about himself, about the world around him, about God.
Pope John Paul II understood that all crimes against life are based on falsehoods,
are a misuse of our freedom, are crimes against God, against the love that God
has for each one of us; he also understood them to be signs of despair, to be
instances of the failure to hope.
Those who love life, who love the
reality of the human person, wish to live their lives in service of life and to
extend Christs love to all. They will know that Love is...the fundamental and
innate vocation of every human being (FC 1). The natural place to learn
these truths and these responsibilities is in the family, and Pope John Paul II
never tired of extolling and explaining the importance of the family. What pained
him greatly about the Culture of Death in which we live is that the crimes against
life in our times are crimes of mothers and fathers against their unborn children,
of sons and daughters against their ailing parents, of health-care professionals
against their patients. It pained him that we have become so skeptical, so doubtful
about the ability to know the truth, that we are comfortable calling evil good
and good evil; we have developed the habit of calling crimes rights and considering
efforts to protect life and to promote human decency acts of arrogance and intolerance.
When Pope John Paul II lay dying, a friend asked me how I was handling his
death. A few years ago, when I thought of his dying, I froze with grief; I thought
the day he died would be one of the darkest of my life since I so admired him
and his pontificate. But I responded to my friend that I was really more joyous
than sad, that I thought Pope John Paul II and God Himself seemed to have scripted
a most beautiful ending to his life. The Holy Father had faced death several times;
he survived an assassination attempt and forgave the assassin; he survived cancer;
he went into public with his debilitating Parkinsons and made us realize that
even when all he could be was present to us, that presence, sometimes drooling,
sometimes silent, was of great consolation to us. When Terri Schiavo was being
starved to death, the Holy Father accepted a feeding tube. And then in his last
days, he choose not to go back to the hospital, not to go on a respirator or kidney
dialysis machine or powerful medication; he allowed the dying process to take
over.
Pope John Paul II was a man with a fierce love of life and will
to live; he certainly did not give up, but he was certainly not afraid of death
and he would have been right to have been confident that a legion of angels and
saints and his beloved Jesus Christ were awaiting him with open arms. He showed
us how to live, he showed us how to suffer, he showed us how to die, and most
importantly he showed us how to love.
This is Meaghen Gonzalez, Editor of CERC. I hope you appreciated this piece. We curate these articles especially for believers like you.
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Acknowledgement
Smith, Janet. "He Taught Us Who We Are." Catholic Exchange (April 9, 2005).
Reprinted with permission of Janet Smith.
The Author
Janet E. Smith holds the Father Michael J. McGivney Chair of Life Ethics at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit. She is the author of Living the Truth in Love: Pastoral Approaches to Same-Sex Attraction, In the Beginning . . .: A Theology of the Body, Life Issues, Medical Choices: Questions and Answers for Catholics, The Right to Privacy (Bioethics & Culture), Humanae Vitae: A Generation Later and the editor of Why Humanae Vitae Was Right. Prof. Smith has received the Haggar Teaching Award from the University of Dallas, the Prolife Person of the Year from the Diocese of Dallas, and the Cardinal Wright Award from the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars. She was named Catholic of the Year by Our Sunday Visitor in 2015. Over a million copies of her talk, "Contraception: Why Not" have been distributed. Visit Janet Smith's web page here. See Janet Smith's audio tapes and writing here. Janet Smith is on the Advisory Board of the Catholic Education Resource Center.
Copyright © 2005 Janet Smith