first page - john paul II" "
On 16 October, twenty-five years ago, a young Pope, of Polish origin, presented himself on the balcony of St. Peter’s. He seemed determined to assume in full his mission as “Vicar of Jesus Christ” as officially indicated by the ‘title’ of the Bishop of Rome. His first message to Catholics was that of Christ’s apostrophe to his disciples: “Be not afraid!”. “Be not afraid exclaimed the new Pope of welcoming Christ and accepting his power. Help the Pope and all those who want to serve Christ and, with the power of Christ, to serve man and the whole of humanity. Be not afraid. Fling open the doors to Christ. Open the frontiers of States, economic and political systems, the huge fields of culture, civilization and development, to his salvific power”. Twenty-five years later, the prophetic nature of these words, in which the whole parabola of the pontificate is epitomized, is striking. Young, dynamic, sporting people then spoke of the “athlete of God” he took his first steps in the footsteps of Christ in Galilee. He always tried to imitate him: preaching the new evangelization, travelling the globe, multiplying the symbolic gestures that spoke to the world, bringing the Eucharist to the heart of prayer and action, were, right from the start, his main concerns. And he never repudiated them. “The Church lives by the Eucharist” is the title of his last encyclical of 17 April 2003, which proposes the meeting with the Lord and emphasizes the effective presence of Christ at man’s side. In assuming this presence of Christ, he has throughout his pontificate expressed his concern for man, for the dignity of the human person, which is his constant and greatest thought, and forcefully exercised the ministry of the Word. He has thus become today the one moral authority common to almost the whole of humanity: what statesman can claim such an audience throughout the whole world, an audience transcending Catholicism? After the attempt on his life on 13 May 1981, and the various operations consequent on it, combined with old age and illness, the Pope began to bear in his own body the sufferings of the world. He has increasingly become the icon of the suffering Christ who takes upon himself the sins of the world. Witness of the great European tragedy of the twentieth century, he bears within himself the sufferings of Poland, of the Shoah (as archbishop of Krakow, he was also bishop of Auschwitz) and those of never-ending Christian martyrdom: he confided to Paul VI one day that, in his view, the concentration camps would ever remain the symbol of hell on earth, where “the greatest evil that man is capable of perpetrating on his fellowmen was expressed”. Among the neo-pagan and atheist systems, John Paul II shared the sufferings of Christians; and accompanied the sufferings of the Jews. That’s why he chose to become the promoter of an ecumenism renewed in contact with the sufferings shared in the camps and has forged with Judaism a relation unique in the history of the Papacy, based on respect for and friendship with the “elder brother”. He continues to this day to bear as his cross this suffering that seems to characterise the destiny of man, as is visible when he expresses his indignation about the persistence of the violence and conflicts that are devastating the planet, about local or regional conflicts, or about the American war in Iraq. Yet his attitude has nothing to do with a model of Christian life that privileges suffering and penitence in a spirit of reparation, according to a spirituality inherited from the nineteenth century; there is neither ‘dolorism’ nor ‘rigorism’ in his proposal, only a firm faith in the Resurrection, heart of the Christian mystery. John Paul II has to cope today with a body that betrays him. He is truly the Vicar of Christ, who has taken upon himself the suffering of the Cross to provoke the conscience of man.
