John Paul the Great

Karol Wojtyla: actor, athlete, priest, bishop, cardinal,… Pope John Paul II. As a Catholic, I knew that he was a great pope, beloved by billions of people around the world. I was not, however, fully aware of his heroism until reading the many wonderful tributes published over the weekend. Here are a few excerpts from my favorites.

“He once described his high-school years as a time in which he was ‘completely absorbed’ by a passion for the theater. So it was fitting that Karol Jozef Wojtyla lived a very dramatic life. As a young man, he risked summary execution by leading clandestine acts of cultural resistance to the Nazi occupation of Poland.” As a young priest, he opposed Stalin’s suppression of intellectual and spiritual freedoms. “As archbishop of Krakow, he successfully fought the attempt by Poland's communist overseers to erase the nation's cultural memory.”

He fervently believed in the sanctity of human life. In 1968, then- Cardinal Wojtyla “suggested that ‘a degradation, indeed a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person’ was at the root of the 20th century's grim record: two World Wars, Auschwitz and the Gulag, a Cold War threatening global disaster, oceans of blood and mountains of corpses.”

“As Pope John Paul II, he came back to Poland in June 1979; and over nine days, during which the history of the 20th century pivoted, he ignited a revolution of conscience that helped make possible the collapse of European communism a decade later.” (George Weigel)

“Communist agents in Bulgaria … recruited a Turk to assassinate the Pope. The attack failed in more ways than one. Pope John Paul II wasn't killed, and neither was he deterred. He continued traveling the world with the vigorous message of undiluted Christianity. His message trumped Communism’s and … with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, he vanquished Soviet Communism.” (Fred Barnes)

“John Paul II occupied the world's oldest office, which traces its authority to history's most potent figure, a Palestinian who never traveled a hundred miles from his birthplace, who never wrote a book and who died at 33. And religion, once a legitimizer of political regimes, became in John Paul II's deft hands a delegitimizer of communism's ersatz religion.” (George Will)

Pope John Paul II opposed totalitarianism everywhere he found it. “He would not countenance the way in which some of the church's representatives, particularly in Latin America, used religious language to justify violent change. His opposition to the idea of ‘liberation theology’ helped stop the march of Communism in Central and South America.”

“He insisted that there was a world beyond politics and that his church's critical mission was to minister to the soul. And he did so at a time when everything has become political, from the unanswerable question of when life begins to the unbearable contemplation of life's end and whether humans should take an active role in ending it.” (John Podhoretz)

In his last few days John Paul II found the strength to speak out against the enforced death of Terri Schiavo. The Pope’s passion for morality and the truth was captured in his writings.

“But no darkness of error or of sin can totally take away from man the light of God the Creator. In the depths of his heart there always remains a yearning for absolute truth and a thirst to attain full knowledge of it. This is eloquently proved by man's tireless search for knowledge in all fields. It is proved even more by his search for the meaning of life. The development of science and technology, this splendid testimony of the human capacity for understanding and for perseverance, does not free humanity from the obligation to ask the ultimate religious questions. Rather, it spurs us on to face the most painful and decisive of struggles, those of the heart and of the moral conscience. (John Paul II, Veritatis splendor)

To the very end the courage of this very human man was on display for the world. Some day, Pope John Paul II will be known as John Paul the Great, poet and Renaissance man.

"A flame rescued from dry wood has no weight in its luminous flight yet lifts the heavy lid of night." (Karol Jozef Wojtyla)