Dear Saint Anne Family:

One hundred years ago today, on May 18th 1920, a child was born in Poland who would forever change the history of humanity. I want to share with you a passage from a beautifully written article that was published in a newspaper in my country on April 2, 2005, the day that John Paul II, through Mary, and with great love, gave Christ his soul. I must admit that this is without a doubt, the press publication that has most moved me in my entire life. I remember reading it on that same day – I who had been ordained a priest just a few months earlier - when the world was praying for their father who was about to leave us.

This weekend I spoke in my homily of the presence of God in the soul and of the inner path that we all have to travel to join Him. Juan Manuel de Prada, the author of this article, speaks about the life of John Paul II, who was then on his deathbed, as a path towards the Lord which is always inward.

In these difficult days, and on the hundredth anniversary of his birth, may Saint John Paul II intercede for the Church, which he loved so much and for which he gave everything, even to the last breath of his life.

"YOU HAVE WON, GALILEAN!

Those final words that Julian the Apostate uttered before dying could be the motto accompanying the agony of John Paul II. I write these lines as an orphan silence settles on the world, stopping the clocks, the orbit of the planets, the coursing of blood in the veins. It is difficult to escape from the pain as the certainty of the death of Pope Wojtyla rushes at us. But that pain is mixed with a secret joy when we recount the days of a man who understood earthly existence as a journey towards intimacy with God. Perhaps the most moving teaching of this Pope, who is determined to die with his sandals on, attains today its full applicability: John Paul II has not limited himself to being God’s bureaucrat perched on his throne of infallibility. He wanted to show us that the primary mission of a Christian, of any Christian, is to identify himself with Christ, entering into his mystery, and suffering his tribulations with Him, immolating himself in the same bonfire of humanity in which God chose to make Himself present among us. Without this full identification with Christ, we can be more or less scrupulous followers of some rites or liturgies, or cultural heirs of his Gospel, but never Christians in the strict and purest sense of the word. Pope Wojtyla has taught us the true core of a Faith that ran the risk of stalling out in the fulfillment of some precepts, or, on the contrary, of surrendering to a placid and banal aggiornamento. Wojtyla's journey toward intimacy with God has been an epic saga in search of the roots of faith, a rebellion against the fear and complacency that strangle Christians.

John Paul II has discovered for us - he has reminded us, rather - that there is no true faith without personal contact with the Galilean who brought the revolution of love to the world. Through a selfless catechesis of suffering, through an apostolic passion that undermined his health, through a new mystique of prayer, through a renewed exaltation of the sacraments, John Paul II has cleared the path that leads us to a reunion with God. Perhaps in our time, hostage to hedonism, the radical subversion of this message has not come to penetrate yet (...) The need for conversion that John Paul II has preached without fear, that vigor for holiness that he wanted to infuse in us constitutes, of course, a scandal for our time, so willing to indulge in the marasmus of ease. This Pope has discovered for us - he has reminded us, rather - that the Christian commitment is a demanding, arduous and enormous expedition in pursuit of the spirit.

It is in this recovery of the spirit, in this undisguised encounter with Christ, his joy and his suffering, in which the most enduring teaching of this Papacy is encrypted and which perhaps will take decades to be fully assimilated. In the miracle of the man who returns to God and melds with Him, forgetting convenience and fears, willingly finding Him mirrored in the face of every man who suffers, the legacy of an old man who is detaching himself from his earthly envelope as I write these lines, is condensed.

An orphan silence settles on the world, stopping the clocks, the orbit of the planets, the coursing of blood in the veins. From the abysses of pain that consume us today, we can exclaim exultantly: "You have won, Galilean!"

Published May 18, 2020 , Reflections