No sooner had Pope John Paul II passed away last April 2 than some good souls began urging that he be immediately declared by acclamation, as it were “John Paul the Great” or even “Saint John Paul.” It was an understandable, even touching, reaction to the death of a much loved man. It also was thoroughly wrongheaded.
Some things are better if they are permitted to mature through the passing of time and the exercise of careful judgment. Whether John Paul will one day be known as “the Great” is best left to history to decide. As for sainthood, over the centuries the Church has worked out a reasonable, prudent process for assessing that question and the late pope's cause is in fact now moving ahead on a fast track and in a manner that should gratify his most ardent admirers.
Granting all that, however, I have no hesitation in saying that, a year after his death, both the greatness and the goodness of this extraordinary pope are even more clear than they were during his lifetime. Although the formal bestowal of titles and honors will be welcome when it comes, the titles and honors can only confirm that in spiritual terms this was a giant of a man.
There were many strands to the complex personality of Karol Wojtyla. But if one were to put his central trait in a single word drawing together and uniting everything else, I believe the word would be integrity.
In a way, of course, that only stands to reason. Beyond its ordinary, everyday meaning honesty, straight shooting, and so on the word integrity refers to the wholeness and fundamental unity of self of one who possesses it. Integrity, you might say, is the integrating principle of a truly integrated life. Pope John Paul II had it to a marked degree.
This was dramatically apparent at the very end, during those deeply moving days of February and March last year when the pope was waging his last, gallant struggle against approaching death while the whole world watched and prayed. Old, sick, indomitable, he refused to give up when a lesser person would have surrendered to the inevitable. Polish stubbornness, you say? Perhaps so but I think there was something else to it besides that.
John Paul II handled his dying as he did out of the conviction that this was the form his personal vocation had taken what God was asking of him as the final act of fidelity in a faith-filled life.
Not long before his death, a nasty book appeared (I don't care to mention the title or the author) which managed to get the meaning of his declining years exactly wrong. In this writer's view, his insistence on soldiering on was an expression of willfulness and an exaggerated sense of his own importance. Yet the truth was that John Paul II had subordinated his will to God's to an extent few people achieve. And at the end he understood clearly that God wanted him to show the world what the death of a great and good man was like.
Many people die holy deaths. Lately I've had the privilege of observing the last days of a holy priest who served my parish faithfully and well for years. There are a lot of cases like that, thank God. But John Paul's special calling was to remind us in a very public way what it means to live with integrity to the very end. The lesson will stay with us for a long time.
Russell Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington, DC. You can email him at RShaw10290@aol.com.
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