The JP2-Generation has arrived.
For all those with eyes to see and ears to hear, a veritable revolution of faith is afoot. In many ways, young Catholics are making considerable contributions to the Church in America.
Reclaiming the Dignities of the Ordained Priesthood
In the wake of the crisis of 2001, not a few of them are beginning to reclaim the dignities of the ordained priesthood. In places like Denver, Sioux Falls, and now Milwaukee, young seminarians and priests are living an important truth about authentic life-giving love.
They are retaking the priesthood as a path to sanctity and a means of selfless service to Christ and His People. For them, the authorities of an ordained man do not derive from the imposition of his own will. But, rather, they rise out of his tireless acts of self-donation.
That truth rests on a bedrock principle of the pontificate of Pope John Paul II.
An old newsreel from Vatican TV sports a rookie JP-II, pooling questions from the international news media aboard Good Shepherd I.
In a pointed fashion, one of the journalists asked the pope whether he had been doing too much traveling. He was making an obvious reference to the three international trips that the pope had made during the first twelve months of his pontificate. In 1979 he visited Mexico, the United States of America, and Poland.
The pope paused for a second, and then responded. He said that indeed he had been doing too much traveling. But, he reminded his interlocutor that sometimes a man has to do “something that is too much.”
He was suggesting that magnanimity is an important Christian virtue. His interlocutor could expect a pontificate that would be centered on it.
Indeed, magnanimity defines the present pontificate. John Paul has issued more pastoral and magisterial statements than any one of his recent predecessors (with the singular exception of Pope Leo XIII). He has canonized more saints and beatified more blesseds than all of the previous modern popes combined. And, when all of his trips outside of the Vatican are taken together, he has traveled more miles than half the distance to the moon or four times around the earth.
For all intents and purposes, he is the most readily recognized person on the planet. Some estimates suggest that his countenance has been reprinted or broadcast on television more times than that of Mona Lisa.
Yet, he has been magnanimous in still more innumerable respects. When the Word is understood in these ways, it reflects and encapsulates a telling truth about his personal holiness and integral sense of moral virtue. And it also explains why this Polish pope has had a superstar status among young people.
The Captivating Truth of the Law of the Gift
In the late 1960s, when the Church was rocking and reeling from the heresies of the sexual revolution, he wrote a little book on the ethics of conjugal love. In it, he surmised that the human person is destined for a freedom that is built upon truth — one which is found in being lost to others.
This is a truth that the pope has literally borne on his back and carried in his heart. During the long dark night of the Polish soul, when Nazis held the nation under an absolute reign of terror, the pope risked his own life in order to make safer those of his Jewish companions and neighbors. Often, he helped to hide Jews he had only known as acquaintances or passersby. Not a few times he provided safe passage for Jewish émigrés from his native Poland.
Last summer, when I was in Krakow for a three-week conference on the life and writings of this Polish pope, I was able to stand in the shadow of these same awe-inspiring events.
The papal biographer, George Weigel, served as our lecturer and tour guide. On one of our excursions to the Vistula River, which winds past the ancient Wawel Cathedral, he showed us the route that the pope had traveled one winter night when he made the ultimate decision to become a priest as a young man.
It was not at all a safe passage. Under the cover of night, it would take the young Karol Wojtyla across frozen and ice-capped waters and past Nazi patrolmen. That route would terminate at the Archbishop’s residence where an underground seminary was being operated illegally. But, it could have ended in death just as easily.
In choosing to follow that road, the pope was running the risk of losing his own life. To be seen on the streets after the Nazi-imposed curfew risked almost certain deportation to “the east”, a macabre sobriquet for Auschwitz.
In tracing that route, Weigel was recounting a magnanimous tale of a vocation tried in fire. It was the only kind of a story that could captivate the hearts and minds of young people — one that blended the fire of determination with a siren call to a life of Christian virtue.
On the banks of the Vistula, Weigel’s young listeners experienced for themselves the palpable and real power that is pregnant in the doing of things “that are too much.”
I reflected on that scene for sometime, even after I had returned to the United States. To me, it suggested that true human greatness consists in the fundamental option to pursue the truth even at the expense of grave personal risks.
That scene on the banks of the river taught me that authentic freedom must be founded on the whole truth about man. And, at its core, that truth entails an invitation to find oneself in a total act of self-donation. It entices us to embark on an adventure in fidelity to a good that rises above the possibilities of this material world. It gives us hope.
An Abrupt and Sudden End for the Pleasure Principle
I slowly began to understand that message for myself on the morning of September 11, 2001. At the same time as the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I was seated in an ethics class at St. Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire.
That morning we were discussing John Stuart Mill, the noted philosopher of utilitarianism. His moral calculus relied on the enumeration of risks and rewards to oneself. An action that required too many personal sacrifices was to be decidedly chosen against. The maximization of pleasure was of the essence of the moral act.
His concept of moral truth resonated with the message of sexual liberation: “if it feels good, do it.” But it was not the principle that directed the men and women aboard the fated planes that day.
That morning, aboard one of the hijacked planes a more subtle rallying cry was being intoned. At the prospect of losing his own life in order to divert the plane from a possible attack upon the United States Congress, Todd Beamer supplied his now-famous answer, “let’s roll.”
As the President would later remark in his first address to the nation after the attacks, the reign of the pleasure principle had come to an abrupt and sudden end.
Young Catholics instinctively understood the point that he was making. The pleasure principle no longer captivated our youthful hearts and minds because it was incapable of teaching us the whole truth about man. In its bifurcation of freedom from truth, it provides nothing more than willfulness without direction.
Todd Beamer, like Pope John Paul II, had made a profound personal choice on the basis of self-donation, not some kind of utilitarian self-assertion. In losing the freedom of his own life, he regained it in the lives of the men, women, and children that he saved on top of Capitol Hill that fateful morning.
Todd Beamer and Pope John Paul II have lived lives of magnanimous virtue. They did extraordinary things that, in the end, came at the expense of grave personal sacrifices. When certain courses of action could have been foregone or avoided altogether and grave trials sat out, those men chose to run in their direction. They chose to embrace those crosses, rather than to abandon them.
In other words, they sought to define their lives according to the principle that sometimes men have to do “something that is too much.”
We need to practice this same kind of courage and moral heroism in our daily lives and ordinary ministries. If we do, the pope assures us that we “will set the world ablaze.”
Vocations directors and parish priests would do well, then, to emphasize the role that self-donation plays in the life of a priest. In this regard, they should repeat the words of the pope himself, who challenged young people to “be not afraid!” and to “open wide the doors to Christ!”
Young people, they’ll find, are willing to throw their lives away for a greater good. We intuitively recognize the value of a life of self-giving love.
When the priesthood is discussed in these terms, young people feel part of a revolution of faith and evangelization that is already defining our generation. We are excited about the “springtime of faith” that the Church has entered. And we are willing to do things “that are too much,” in order to take that season well into the third Christian millennium.
© Copyright 2004 Catholic Exchange
John Paul Shimek frequently writes about the JP2-Generation and issues related to men's spirituality. His writing has appeared in the National Catholic Register, the Newark Catholic Advocate, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He lives in Brookfield, Wisconsin. Readers can contact him at intermirifica@hotmail.com .
