Blessed John Paul II

Every Christian has certain inclinations, certain predispositions that can become an obstacle to the fullest possible realization of the Christian life. I'm not talking here about sin, which obviously is an obstacle for every Christian; but just about innocent differences in personality. There are Christians who regard religious faith as primarily something to be felt. They are very good at experiencing the grief of Good Friday, and the despair of Holy Saturday, and the joy of Easter Sunday. The mirror image of this first group of people, along the spectrum of Christian psychology, are those who take comfort in having all the proper intellectual convictions demanded by the Faith. They've read the whole Catechism. Maybe they've even read the Summa, or Ratzinger, or Rahner, or every 20th-century papal encyclical. They subscribe to First Things or America (or maybe, if they're real eggheads, both). And they may be slightly embarrassed by the effusive, emotional Catholicism of the first group, just as that first group is perplexed by the "cold, sterile" intellectualism of the second group.

There is a third group of Christians, the group to which all of us should belong, regardless of whichever of the first two groups may also claim us. It is the group of believers who regard Christianity primarily as something to be done, rather than as something just to be felt or understood. It is the group of people who have realized that our zeal for the Faith, rooted in our knowledge of Christ's teaching, compels us to live in an entirely new way as a response to what we feel and what we know.

The papacy of John Paul II was important in many ways, but it was especially important, I think, as a way of uniting these three groups of Christians. No one I can think of in the last 100 years was a more intellectually powerful scholar of Christianity than John Paul II (although his successor is giving him an impressive run for his money on that score). Nor was any Christian in my lifetime more obviously consumed with an elemental love of Christ and an almost childlike joy in Christ than John Paul II. So it's only natural that, combining as he did in his own person the full mind and the full heart of the Christian, he would be so eloquent in calling us all to join that third group -- those who turn their emotional commitment, or their intellectual commitment, or both, into a life of action in the service of Christ and His Kingdom.

Nowhere did John Paul II express this Christian synthesis more clearly than in his 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor -- maybe the greatest Catholic document of the 20th century.

It is urgent to rediscover and to set forth once more the authentic reality of the Christian faith, which is not simply a set of propositions to be accepted with intellectual assent. Rather, faith is a lived knowledge of Christ, a living remembrance of his commandments, and a truth to be lived out. A word, in any event, is not truly received until it passes into action, until it is put into practice. Faith is a decision involving one's whole existence. It is an encounter, a dialogue, a communion of love and of life between the believer and Jesus Christ, the Way, and the Truth, and the Life (cf. Jn 14:6). It entails an act of trusting abandonment to Christ, which enables us to live as he lived (cf. Gal 2:20), in profound love of God and of our brothers and sisters. [VS 88.4]

I'm old enough to have a clear recollection of the day John Paul II was elected Pope. I watched the live TV coverage, and saw a very unfamiliar figure, suddenly and inexplicably dressed in papal vestments, step out onto the balcony of St. Peter's, while all the commentators kept asking, "Who? Who did they say?"  I knew just enough Italian to understand his first words as Pope, declaimed in a trained actor's voice, and I have remembered them a thousand times since:

"Sia lodato Gesu Cristo!"

Praised be Jesus Christ!

If we had only known it at the time, we might have understood that the new Pope was giving us, in those four words, a complete Catholic catechesis, one that he would expand on and enrich in the course of the next 26 years -- a vision of Christianity as something to feel, something to know, and something to do.

Praised be Jesus Christ. Now and forever.

Blessed John Paul II, pray for us.

The Pope William F. Buckley Wanted

Here's an interesting little snapshot from the past -- an essay that William F. Buckley wrote for The New Republic in the late summer of 1978, as the world waited for the Catholic Church to choose a successor to Pope Paul VI. Buckley's wish list for the qualities the new pope should possess is fascinating both for the ways in which it accurately diagnosed what was wrong with the Church in those turbulent years, and also for the ways in which Buckley could not have foreseen or even hoped for the kind of pope the Church ultimately got in John Paul II.


What did Buckley get right about the Church's most pressing needs that September? First of all, he realized that the Church needed more than anything else a pastoral pope, rather than a pope around whom one ideological brand of Catholicism or another could rally for the advancement of its own worldly agenda.

"The Pope must stand out as the principal symbol of the transfiguring dimension of life...The Pope’s capacity persuasively to superordinate the spiritual over the material is the highest skill his community can demand from him."


John Paul II was nothing if not a "symbol of the transfiguring dimension of life." He successfully placed himself above the political squabbles that had already broken out in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council and, simply by the force of his own personality and intellect, made it impossible not to acknowledge him as the Pastor of the Universal Church in a way that Paul VI never managed to do. He was, supremely, a spiritual leader of a kind the church had not elevated to the Chair of Peter in 20 years.


Buckley also saw accurately the damage done to the liturgical life of the Church by the "spirit of Vatican II," although he was rather too willing to blame Vatican II itself, rather than a false implementation of the Council's decrees, for that damage:


"The showplace of the church is the liturgy, and here the [Council's] reforms proved disastrous: a disfiguration of what was venerable and beautiful, into a vulgar collegiality that is artificial, distracting and appropriately celebrated by the worst abuses against the English language in the history of syntax."


Well, maybe. Most of what Buckley is lamenting here can be catalogued under the heading of what was permitted in the name of the Council rather than what the Council mandated. And surely Buckley -- a man to whom language itself had a sacramental dimension -- would be pleased to see the reformed translation of the Mass that will be introduced next year, a translation that will correct many of the "worst abuses against the English language in the history of syntax."


In other respects, Buckley can sound surprisingly -- and perhaps to some people disillusioningly -- like a typical '70s "progessive" Catholic. He thinks that dispensing with the rule of celibacy would not harm the standing of the priesthood as a "distinctive spiritual caste." More tendentiously, he seems to hope for a general dilution of the Church's teaching on human sexuality and marriage.


"The new Pope is likely to look again at these arguments [condoning contraceptive practices within marriage], and it is likely that, in a fresh allocution, he will modify Humanae vitae at least to the point of making it paradigmatic as distinct from binding. To say that the supreme point of sexual union is the continuation of life is to say that and not necessarily more than that. A retreat from a strict constructionist reading of Humanae vitae probably would be welcome in the long run without being held up as evidence of theological demagogy."


Well, we're none of us perfect, and it's almost reassuring in a way to discover that even as subtle a mind as William F. Buckley's could occasionally lapse into relativist incoherence, as he does here. With John Paul II he did not get his wished-for "retreat" from Humanae vitae. Instead he and we got a brilliant and forceful vindication of that historic and courageous papal document. (If you're Catholic and have not read Love and Responsibility, you should. Tomorrow.)


Perhaps the ecclesiastical portent that Buckley most obviously missed as he gazed into his 1978 crystal ball was the central importance of generational transition in the Church. It's a portent that the coming pope, John Paul II, did not (thank God) fail to recognize. Buckley's generation of Catholics -- the Vatican II generation, if you will -- was already giving way to the next generation (mine, as a matter of fact) when John Paul II was elected. And my generation in turn would prove much less influential in shaping the Church of the New Millennium than the generation that followed it. It was this younger generation that John Paul II targeted so successfully, and molded into the generation of young priests -- priests in their 30s and 40s today -- that will fulfill the promise of the Second Vatican Council and correct the misdirections committed in the Council's name. Ultimately, the inspiring of that generation may prove to be John Paul II's greatest gift to the Church.


As things turned out, the Church in October 1978 did not quite get the pope William F. Buckley wanted. Instead, it got a better pope than Buckley -- or any of us -- could ever have imagined.