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Time is needed to evaluate so long and significant a pontificate as that of John Paul II. The risk, now, is that of emphasizing some of its features while relegating others to a secondary level. The most important factor would seem to be the integrity and harmony that unite multiple aspects of the personality and mission of Karol Wojtyla. His family origin and his Polish nationality undoubtedly provide one basis and also a key to understanding his pontificate. In the case of John Paul II it was not an “unconscious” heritage. As shown by the reflections on this aspect of his life in his book Memory and Identity, Karol Wojtyla was very conscious of the significance, mission and message of the history of his own nation. His election as Pope is seen as the fruit of this history and reveals not only the sense and value of his nation’s suffering and spiritual drive but also the responsibility to make it bear fruit. The “national mentality” that each person bears within him is also important. The Slav mentality is the mentality of cordiality, of intuitiveness, in which the language of the heart prevails over cold logic, triggering a facility of communication and affection but also a risk of subjectivism. The Slav soul is in a special way “naturaliter cristiana”. It should be added, however, that the Pope, as a young man, tempered these inclinations with study and personal formation. He sharpened the natural sense for prayer, typical of Slav religiosity, with the study of St. John of the Cross and many other authors, Slav intuitiveness with the logic and objectivity of the Thomist system. The by now famous image of “breathing with both lungs”, referred to Eastern and Western Europe, is the fruit of his own personal experience and of that of the other Slav nations, heirs of the mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius. These have naturally absorbed all the richness of the philosophy, theology and spirituality of the Eastern heritage, while at the same time involving the nascent nations of Western European civilization. “The language of the heart” scientifically deepened for example in the works of Father pidlík (not by chance created cardinal) peculiar to the Slav mentality explains the piety of the Pope, his devotion to the Virgin Mary and his relation to God. It also explains his facility in penetrating to the depths of the individual persons he met. It was his way of communicating, as he himself explained in his book Rise, Let Us Be On Our Way. And then there is his personal experience of the two forms of totalitarianism Nazism and Marxism that in the years of his election strongly influenced society and the Church. The peoples that lived under the yoke of Communism saw, in a quite spontaneous way, the Pope “come from afar” as a “man who understood them”. For the believers on the other side of the Iron Curtain he was an authoritative witness and interpreter of this “suppressed lung” of Europe. As Memory and Identity demonstrates, experience and philosophic reflection gave the Pope the basis for a profound interpretation of this phenomenon, showing their conclusions also in the present. In this way he demonstrated that Europe today is committing the same “anthropological error” and sowing the seeds of new forms of Communist totalitarianism. John Paul II, pontiff with a Slav heart, became the “Pope of the heart”, an expression that epitomizes his enormous mystical and human depth.
