Requiescat in Pace, John Paul the Great

I got this e-letter from Crisis Magazine (A Catholic Mag in the States) that was about the Pope, and had some thought-provoking points I thought I'd reproduce here. It seemed fitting for the day of his funeral. God bless.

His Final Homily

CRISIS Magazine e-Letter

April 7, 2005

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Dear Friend,

In the end, it was a peaceful death. Surrounded by those who knew and loved him, within earshot of the cheering thousands who came to be near his broken body, John Paul the Great passed into eternal life.

With his prolonged suffering and dying, he offered a final homily -- one that even the mainstream media could not ignore. It said this: Every human life has inherent dignity; every human life is precious; and even death should be embraced and experienced without shame.

How different that is from what our own culture tells us. We kill our young, starve our disabled, and hide away our elderly so we're not confronted with a forward glimpse of our own mortality.

Is it any wonder the secular world never really understood the man? And so we're told he was the great political warrior who overthrew communism. That's true, as far as it goes. But the pope's political activity was simply the manifestation of a profound faith lived in the world; he was not himself a politician.

And this, for many, seems a contradiction. Indeed, much of John Paul II's life appears inconsistent to the secular West. He was a celibate priest who wrote much on the glories of marriage; he advocated religious freedom while "stifling debate" in his own Church; he was "progressive" on social issues and "conservative" on moral matters; a brilliant philosopher/writer/poet who tried to shut down theological speculation, etc.

In hearing and reading these claims repeatedly the past week, I've come to conclude that John Paul II is a kind of mirror for the rest of us. The way we see him tells us far more about ourselves than it does about him. For this great and holy pope was remarkable not for his ability to balance opposing forces in his personality, but for his thoroughgoing consistency. He believed -- as the Catholic Church has always taught -- that all human life has dignity, and that that dignity must be reflected in our relations with God, ourselves, and each other.

His writings, his theological positions, his political activism -- all of it emerged from this fundamental belief. That so many of us find contradiction in the man shows us how far we have fallen.

May John Paul the Great pray for us all.

Best to you,

Brian [Saint-Paul, Editor, Crisis Magazine]