The Life and Legacy of Pope John Paul II

by Wyatt North

  The Communist victory was fleeting. The Polish episcopate simply extended the closing date of both celebrations until the pope could come to participate in them.

  When a Polish pope was first named, the Polish government had tried to put a positive spin on the situation by invoking Polish nationalism. On the occasion of the pope’s return, it was all the Communists could do to stay out of the way. They helped very little with the overwhelming task of preparing for the pope’s visit. Preparations, including measures to safely control the large crowds anticipated, were organized at a grass-roots level by common people, both believers and non-believers, sometimes under the guidance of Polish clerics but sometimes organized by the people themselves.

  In June 1979, Karol Wojtila returned to Poland as Pope John Paul II. One million Poles turned out at the start of his visit for an outdoor Mass conducted in Victory Square (now Pilsudsky Square) in the center of Warsaw. That number would only grow as the pope moved throughout Poland on his itinerary. Millions more followed on radio and television. The theme of John Paul’s sermon in Victory Square was Christ’s central place in Polish history. Anyone who opposed this truth of Polish history harmed the Polish people. He affirmed that Christ would continue to hold pride of place in the future. He offered to God Poland’s history of suffering, and he included in that history the Jews who had died in the Warsaw ghetto “in their hundreds of thousands.” As he spoke, the people chanted: we want God, we want God in schools, we want God in the family, we want God¼

  Throughout the nine days of his visit, John Paul continued to hammer the message that Polish history and the Polish heart could only be understood through its Catholic shrines and Catholic devotion. Toward the end of his stay in Krakow, a vast gathering of young people threatened to erupt into a massive anti-government demonstration, perhaps even a riot. Sensing the danger and not wanting to encourage a possible tragedy, the pope put aside his planned remarks and instead bantered gently with the crowd. Speaking extemporaneously, he was able to calm the situation.

  By the end of his visit, an estimated thirteen million Poles had seen the pope in person. Heartened and renewed by his words, they gained a sense of their own numbers, unity, and worth.

  The Communist governments of Europe had cause to worry. The pope had galvanized Poland’s population. He had called Poles to authentic living and asked audiences comprised of both believers and nonbelievers whether they had the maturity to be nonconformists. Many observers credit the pope’s visit with the emergence of the non-violent labor movement, Solidarity, which arose at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk (also known as the Gdansk Shipyard) under the leadership of an unemployed electrician, Lech Walesa, who had been fired from his position at the shipyard in 1976 due to his activism. On August 14, 1980, seventeen thousand workers seized control of the Lenin Shipyard to protest rising prices and other issues. Workers in twenty nearby factories joined the strike.

  Walesa affirmed that the pope had made them aware of their numerical strength and told them not to be afraid. Poles had reason to be afraid: a 1970 worker protest had ended with dozens killed and more than one thousand wounded from machine-gun fire, and both the 1956 Hungarian Uprising and the 1968 Prague Spring had been silenced when Soviet tanks rolled in.

  Yet less than a year after the pope’s visit, the Communist regime would be forced to authorize the existence of this first independent, non-Communist trade union, which occurred on August 31, 1980. By 1981, Solidarity’s membership was more than nine million, one-third of Polish workers. Solidarity was suppressed through much of the 1980s under martial law imposed by the prime minister, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, in December 1981. Shortly after the shipyard strike, in September 1980, Pope John Paul published his encyclical Laborem Exercens (On Human Work) in support of Solidarity, and he met with Walesa in 1983 in highly publicized talks.

  Due to relentless anti-Communist agitation within Poland and pressure from Western governments, elections took place in 1989, and a Solidarity-led coalition government was formed with Solidarity's Tadeusz Mazowiecki as Poland’s first non-Communist prime minister since 1948. At the end of 1990, Walesa became the president of Poland. Similar peaceful movements in other Soviet satellites were inspired by Solidarity and came to be known collectively as the Revolutions of 1989. Erosion of the Soviet bloc culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. The Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991.

  Solidarity was able to succeed, in part, because of its broad coalition of workers, farmers, intellectuals, and the Church. When the pope had visited in 1979, ordinary Polish citizens had realized their ability to unite and organize to accomplish a common task. Karol Wojtila’s community building had paid off.

  Shots Ring Out

  May 13, 1981, was a normal Wednesday. It was after 5:00 in the early evening, and the pope was conducting his regular weekly general audience with an estimated 10,000 people present. At the moment he was circling St. Peter’s Square for the second time in an open vehicle. Beside him in the car sat his personal secretary, Monsignor Stanislaw Dziwisz, who much later would be named Archbishop of Krakow by Pope Benedict. John Paul had just finished kissing a young child and had handed her back to her proud parents.

  Although the police report said four shots were fired, Monsignor Dziwisz remembers it this way: A shot rang out, followed by the sound of hundreds of pigeons taking flight. A second shot followed. The pope slumped into the arms of Monsignor Dziwisz, who was stunned. Who would attack this gentle man?

  “Where?” asked the monsignor. “In the stomach,” replied the pope. “Are you in pain?” he continued. “Yes,” came the reply.

  The pope was less than one week shy of his sixty-first birthday. He had been shot in the abdomen, right elbow, and the second finger of his left hand. Two women were also wounded by the bullets, one critically. The pope was rushed by ambulance to the Agostino Gemelli University Polyclinic (Hospital). Monsignor Dziwisz was asked by the pope’s personal physician to perform the last anointing. Having hemorrhaged badly, John Paul received six pints of blood, some of which was donated by the doctors present. He then underwent nearly five-and-a-half hours of surgery during which parts of his intestine were removed in three places. Following his release he experienced a serious infection and again had to be hospitalized. Then he had to undergo a second operation to reverse his colostomy. Only in mid-August was he released from the hospital for the last time.

  The attempt occurred on the anniversary of the day in 1917 when three shepherd children claimed they saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary in Fatima, Portugal. While still in the hospital, John Paul asked to see the so-called third secret that had been revealed to the children. He then credited Our Lady of Fatima with saving his life.

  The wood-be assassin was an escaped murderer and small-time crook by the name of Mehmet Ali Agca. The 23-year-old Agca, a Turkish citizen with links to a Turkish ultranationalist group called the Gray Wolves, had escaped from prison while awaiting trial for the 1979 murder of a Turkish left-wing newspaper editor. He was convicted in absentia. He wrote a letter to a Turkish newspaper at the time and said he had escaped prison so that he could kill the pope, who was scheduled to visit Turkey. Two years later, when he was apprehended in St. Peter’s Square, he had in his pocket several notes in Turkish, including one that read: “I am killing the Pope as a protest against the imperialism of the Soviet Union and the United States and against the genocide that is being carried out in El Salvador and Afghanistan.”

  The pope publicly forgave Agca, but when he went to the prison to meet with Agca, he was troubled by the man’s lack of remorse. Agca for his part wanted to know why the pope was still alive when he had fired off several good shots. Agca, too, blamed the Virgin of Fatima.

  On May 13, 2000, at Fatima, the Vatican secretary of state revealed the third secret to an audience of 600,000 believers. He explained that the secret had not been revealed earlier so as not to promote speculation surrounding the cloaked information. The commen
tator on the secret was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who at the time was head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith but later became Pope Benedict. The written text of the secret described “a bishop dressed in white,” whom the Portuguese children believed was the pope. This pope, “half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow,” comes to the foot of a cross and is “killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him.” Then-Cardinal Ratzinger explained that the larger meaning of the message could be understood as the suffering state of the Church in the twentieth century and that Agca was not a tool of divine destiny. His fate had not been predetermined; rather, he had acted entirely with free will.

  Although he never saw any proof to confirm the suspicion, John Paul believed the K.G.B. was behind the assassination attempt. Who else stood to gain by his death? With support for Solidarity swelling in Poland, he knew that the Soviet Union viewed him as a dangerous threat to the survival of communism. They were right, but whether they were involved in the attempt has never been determined.

  Although sentenced to life in prison, Agca was pardoned by the Italian President Carlo Ciampi in June 2000 after serving nineteen years for the crime. He was then extradited to Turkey to complete his prison sentence for the murder of the Turkish journalist, and also for several robberies. He was freed from a Turkish prison in January 2010 at the age of 52.

  Agca’s mental state is thoroughly dubious. Although he had initially indicated Palestinian ties and K.G.B. and Bulgarian involvement in the attempt on the pope’s life, he later disavowed those remarks. While anticipating his release from prison, he bizarrely applied to both Poland and Portugal (where Fatima is located) for citizenship but was denied it. After his release, he declared himself “Christ eternal.” He further stated: “I proclaim the end of the world. All the world will be destroyed in this century. Every human being will die in this century.” It has never been clear whether Agca is a madman or simply obfuscating.

  As traumatic as the event was at the time, the pope recovered well and continued with his mission.

  Mother Teresa

  In February 1986, John Paul visited Mother Teresa’s Nirmal Hriday Home for the Dying in Calcutta. There he tended to the afflicted. When he left, the pope hugged Mother Teresa. His experience with the afflicted had moved and upset him, and he was clearly grateful to Mother Teresa for her mission.

  The two had first met in the early 1970s, but they developed a close friendship after John Paul’s election as pope. She visited the pope whenever she was in Rome and apprised him of her work. He was naturally especially interested in her inroads into Communist countries. Because she was outspoken in her defense of the unborn, the pope asked her to spread this message for him because she could go to places he could not. Since her values so closely aligned with his, he felt he could trust her.

  Mother Teresa had once joked that all her sisters should hasten to die because this pope (John Paul) was canonizing everyone. The reason behind John Paul’s vigorous canonizing activity was this: because he believed that the road to sainthood was open to everyone, he wanted people in every nation to have their own saints to honor and hold as role models.

  Upon hearing of Mother’s Teresa’s death, the pope expressed the wish that her sainthood would follow quickly. He was utterly convinced of her merits. As it happened, he opened and fast-tracked the cause for Mother Teresa’s canonization less than two years later, waiving the usual five-year waiting period. She was beatified in 2003. On that occasion, John Paul called her “an icon of the Good Samaritan,” who chose “to be not just the least but to be the servant of the least.”

  A Leader for Youth

  As is well-known, young people were a particular focus John Paul’s pastoral care. He was concerned about them as the future of the Church. He was concerned about them as part of his vision for the family. He was concerned about them because of his emphasis on human dignity at all stages of life. And he was concerned about them for themselves.

  From the beginning of his priesthood as a university chaplain, John Paul cared about the lives of young people. As early as the month following his election, the new pope was out meeting the young, in the first instance, addressing thousands of teenagers in Rome. He told them to spread the word about how much he relied upon them.

  Due to his willingness to participate in honest dialogue with the youth of the world, he was able to engage them to an unprecedented degree. They loved his gentle banter, loving ways, and obvious concern. He even sang with them. They were simply mesmerized. In May 1980, he met for three hours with thousands of young people in the Parc des Princes stadium in Paris. The success of this event led to a series of World Youth Days. The 1993 World Youth Day in Denver drew 700,000 attendees despite predictions that secular young people simply weren’t interested. At the University of Rome Tor Vergata in 2000, he drew a crowd of two million.

  John Paul II and Gender Issues

  Another group John Paul sought to engage was women. He has been accused of having had little understanding of women due to lifelong isolation from them. He did, after all, lose his mother at a young age and had no sisters or in-laws. This characterization hardly seems balanced, however. Karol Wojtila was not psychologically stunted. He was very active socially as a youth. He had female friends with whom he shared the stage. Women participated in the literary and academic circles in which he was involved. He knew many women quite well through his university chaplaincy and through his Catholic social and study circles. He had, in fact, interacted with women a great deal in his life.

  If John Paul chose not to implement every change some women would have wanted, it wasn’t because he didn’t understand modern women and their aspirations. In many respects, he did understand modern women—the modern women of his youth in Poland. What he couldn’t understand was why the Catholic feminists contemporary with his pontificate didn’t agree with him.

  John Paul was not a latecomer to the idea of women’s advancement and representation. While still a professor at the Catholic University, he had attempted to have a nun, Sister Zofia Zdybicka, appointed to the faculty. As it happened, Sister Zofia’s Ursuline superior denied her the opportunity, but permission was later granted by a different superior. He was also one of the few speakers to take notice of the female religious who were present at the Second Vatican Council, addressing them in his opening remarks.

  John Paul was in many ways deeply sympathetic to the circumstances of women. He wrote movingly about women who struggled to earn a living, mothers whose adult children neglected them, and widows who lived with loneliness (“Apostolic Letter Mulieris Dignitatem of the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II on the Dignity and Vocation of Women on the Occasion of the Marian Year,” August 15, 1988).

  His teachings on women accorded with his overarching commitment to the principle of human dignity. As pope, John Paul outspokenly defended women’s basic humanity, a humanity he viewed as being complementary to the male but no less worthy. Complementarity was central to his view of the respective roles of men and women. Nevertheless, since man and woman were created equally human in the image of God, as taught in the Book of Genesis, both were entitled to fundamental dignity. (This had also been expressed in Gaudium et Spes.) Women’s value is intrinsic, irrespective of her cultural setting, job, education, marital status, or personal attributes.

  John Paul readily acknowledged the historic subjugation of women and affirmed the need to overturn it. Accordingly, his interpretation of Ephesians 5:22, “Wives, be subject to your husbands as to the Lord,” involved husbands and wives being mutually subjugated to each other in a relationship of reciprocal self-giving (General Audience, August 11, 1982).

  He was unequivocal about the importance of women in the modern workforce, and he truly believed that allowing women to reach their potential would lead to the betterment of humanity. He even apologized for the role any members of the Church had played in the suppression of women and pointed to the need to fo
llow Jesus’ example in according women respect.

  Within the Church, he tried to allow women a larger voice. During his pontificate, women participated as experts in synods and conferences. More women received placements in the departments of the Roman Curia, the administrative structure of the Holy See. In Latin America, where a shortage of priests was a chronic problem, he allowed an increase in the number of women serving as parish administrators. Women religious were permitted to conduct baptisms, burials, and prayer services, and to distribute previously consecrated hosts. And in 2004, for the first time, two women theologians were appointed to the International Theological Commission, and a woman was named to be president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.

  All this accords well with the first stages of modern feminism. But there was a point beyond which John Paul was not prepared to go. He viewed certain contemporary behaviors as being culturally conditioned and running counter to the eternal teachings of the Church and the divine plan. He simply could not see alternative theological explanations or approaches to his positions on male priesthood, birth control, abortion, or gender identity. Toward the end of his life, he could be quite harsh in his opposition. He extolled women who were prepared to die in childbirth rather than undergo lifesaving abortions, or who suffered in abusive situations to preserve the sacrament of marriage. In one particularly insensitive moment, he went as far as to blame women for the bad behavior of men. He naively thought that reliance on moral education would cure all ills. And thus, he alienated large segments of Church membership with his views.