Twenty years after the death of Saint John Paul II, I share some reflections I wrote at the time, when I was in Rome as priest secretary to Cardinal William Baum.
Wednesday, 6 April (2005) 11:30 PM
The coverage today said one million people viewed the Pope’s body in Saint Peters in the first twenty-four hours it was available. Fifteen to eighteen thousand people are passing every hour now. The lines to pay respects to the Holy Father are so huge that it is extremely difficult to get in or out of our building.
But people know. They have seen a real life. They have seen John Paul and have seen Christ in him. He showed them who they really are – the oppressed people of Poland and Eastern Europe, and of Cuba; the disillusioned and disinterested youth of the consumerist West, of France and Germany, of the United States; the people who know they are capable of love and of joy despite their poverty, in Mexico, in Africa, in the Phillipines. They saw the truth about themselves, and they saw it because of him.
And it changed the world.
I also marveled at what a privilege and blessing it is to have known John Paul. What a priest! What a father! Up to his last breath he kept nothing for himself, nothing, but offered it all for the salvation of souls. And even now, even in his death, he is still drawing people to Christ and His Church. Lives are being changed.
He has shown us what one single human life can be, when lived in fidelity to its creator: rich and strong, true and irresistible. To see him there, just one body, vulnerable as any of us, and to realize what he did with what he was given, makes it difficult not to think about that an amazing thing Man is. As Saint Anselm said, “The glory of God is the living man!”
The people out there, waiting in line in the streets for twenty hours to see a dead man, cannot be categorized in any way, not in age, not in culture, not in education or credulity. They are just people. And they, like most people, want to DO something about what they have seen and known. So they come.
Friday, 8 April, (2005) 6:00 PM
It could have rained. But we didn’t get that. Today, we had wind. When I settled into my seat in front of Saint Peter’s Basilica at ten o’clock this morning, I thought, how nice. There is a breeze! … A little later, it stiffened and started knocking things over on the credence table, next to which I was sitting. A processional candle went over and its glass globe smashed on the pavement... I even saw it pick up the carpet runner several inches.
The crowd made its presence known…It was a JPII crowd. That crowd, along with the wind, was what I will remember about today. They were not spectators, they were PARTICIPANTS. They were THERE, and they made their presence, and their participation, felt. For twenty-six and a half years, John Paul II had been telling them how precious they were, how important their very presence, how important their participation in the great mysteries of life and of God. They believed him.
There were crowds in every direction and all over the city… But these vast dimensions, and all the coverage, all the narrative, all the lights and cameras and action, all of it made it very tempting to overlook something: what happened today, though vast in scale, unprecedented in its participants, unheard of in its impact, was totally ordinary. It happens all the time. It is what families do. It is what Christians do when we lose a loved one. It is a part of life; necessary, and even good. But by no means easy. We lost a father. Today, it just took a while to say goodbye.
Because of the distances to be covered today, I brought the Cardinal in a wheelchair… It made it possible for him to participate in every aspect of the funeral without exhaustion or too much pain.
After we all sang the In Paradisum (“May the angels sing you into paradise”), the time came. As the crowd chanted and sang and waved goodbye, and the pallbearers moved toward the coffin, I rolled the Cardinal back into the loggia, or vestibule, of the Basilica … We stood at the foot of the ramp, looking up at these huge doors. Slowly they swung open, and revealed the side aisle of Saint Peters stretching hundreds of feet away... It was deserted, and awesome.
We rolled up the ramp, up the aisle, and around the main altar. By then the procession was coming up the main aisle. The cross and candles and servers kept going, but the Cardinals and Patriarchs stopped in the aisle, stepped aside, and faced each other. I could see the doors close. Now the wind was left behind. The crowd was outside. The enormous bronze doors even shut out the sound of the solitary huge bell tolling above. It was silent. There was a long pause.
Then the Holy Father went by, borne on the shoulders of the twelve pall bearers. He was followed by members of his household, the old old friends from Poland who count as his only family, and the eight cardinals who would accompany him to the tomb.
As he passed, the Cardinals all took off their skullcaps. We blessed ourselves. In silence but for the shuffle of the pall-bearers’ feet, he continued on his way, the same way the cross and candles had led, over to the door that leads to the grottoes beneath. The coffin grew smaller and smaller. He disappeared from view. It was the last I will see of him.
We all stood there for a while. The Cardinals looked around, waiting for someone, some master of ceremonies, to tell them what to do. No one was there. After a few moments, they shrugged, and began to fall out of line.
“The wind blows where it wills, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8)
Monsignor Smith
