"On May 19, 2007, the Friends of the Pope John Paul II Foundation and the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center celebrated the late Holy Father's birthday. The centerpiece of the event, was the celebration of Mass. Monsignor Sokolowski of The Catholic University of America was the chief celebrant and homilist. He graciously agreed to share the homily from the celebration."

HOMILY ON POPE JOHN PAUL II
Msgr. Robert Sokolowski
May 19, 2007

When something extraordinary happens, when something striking occurs, whether in public life or in our private lives, it takes a long time to understand what has taken place.  It takes a long time to digest what has come about.  We have to go over the event and repeat it, we have to remember it, talk about it, and let it settle into the past, before we can put it into perspective and get some sense of what it was all about.  It is often difficult to answer the question, “What happened?”, especially when the thing that took place was monumental and unprecedented, when nothing quite like it had happened before.

I think this is the case with the papacy of Pope John Paul II and the life of Karol Wojtyla.  His papacy and his life comprise an event that is hard to “take in,” and this is true not only within a small community of people who admired him, nor even within the Catholic Church, but also in the history of the world.  How many people in the entire world were not aware of him?  When he was elected pope, and perhaps especially when he died, everyone knew something happened, but it will take historical perspective to know what it was. 

The Church and the world are making an assessment of this man and his papacy, and as a small contribution to this task, I would like to offer a few reflections, as we gather here to commemorate his birthday, which was yesterday, May 18, and as we do so in this building dedicated to his memory.  Karol Wojtyla was born in 1920, 87 years ago. 

John Paul II made different impressions on different people, but I would like to highlight one feature that he embodied in an especially vivid way; I would like to highlight his courage.  This virtue is well expressed in Polish as “odważność” or “śmiałość.”  John Paul II was especially odważny or smiały.  There are other Polish words that express courage in different ways, and there are many words in English as well; we say a person is courageous, but we also call a person brave and bold, daring and audacious, resolute and manly, we say that someone has valor and fortitude.  All these terms express one basic human virtue, but they also bring out different nuances in that virtue, different aspects of it.  Still, all these words do apply to the Holy Father, John Paul II.  I am sure that as I recited these words you were silently thinking how appropriate all of them were to designate what he was and how he lived. 

As I have listed them, they are human virtues.  As admirable as these virtues are, God’s grace gives us a virtue that is even greater than these; God gives us the gifts of the Holy Spirit, which enable us to live not only in and for this world, but to live our life with God, to live in God’s service.  The fourth of the gifts of the Holy Spirit is fortitude.  It is the virtue not of the warrior or the statesman, but that of the religious missionary and even the martyr. 

Who better exemplified the Spirit’s gift of fortitude than John Paul II?  People saw his human courage, his manliness, but through this human virtue they also got a glimpse of the work of the Holy Spirit.  Everyone knew that his life embodied more than human virtue. 

The essential courage of Karol Wojtyla was shown in the way he dealt with adversity and hostility, in how he dealt with the burdens of life and the assaults of enemies.  Consider how he studied for the priesthood, in secret and in danger, during the Nazi occupation, how he dealt with the dangers and deprivations of that time, how kept his national tradition and language alive, how he then dealt with the Communist regime when he had to live under it, and how he defended the Church in the face this implacable enmity. 

His courage was manifest in his actions as Pope.  June, 1979 trip to Poland that sparked the Solidarity movement, set in motion historical currents that brought about the fall of Communism a scant 10 years later.  A commentator observed about his arrival in Poland, “He obviously is the King of Poland.”  And a king’s duty is not just to represent the people, but to defend them, and courage is needed for this.  Somebody among the KGB knew that this response was trouble, and so there occurred the assassination attempt May 13, 1981, twenty-six years ago, and the way he dealt with that was another instance of his courage.  Finally, of course, we recall his fortitude in facing his final debilitating illness and not allowing even that to stop him. 

All these events and actions of the Holy Father were what we could call the essential manifestations of courage, the central feature of courage, which is to face adversity and fearful things and to do so without fear.  They can be summarized in the phrase that the John Paul II used, “Be not afraid,” a phrase he used to communicate his own courage to other Christians.  His words are a paraphrase of Christ’s words to his disciples as stated in chapter 14 of St. John’s gospel, “Do not let your heart be troubled or be afraid.”  (Jn 14:27).  It is hard to imagine anyone who took these words to heart more deeply than did Karol Wojtyla. 

I have another aspect of the virtue of courage that I believe John Paul II embodied.  It is what we could call the boldness that courage sometimes involves.  It is important for us, certainly, to react to troubles and dangers when they come upon us, to show fortitude in trials.  But another aspect of courage is going out to meet the enemy or the problems that must be faced.  Boldness involves taking initiatives, setting forth and setting out and not just sitting back and waiting.  The great apostle St. Paul was like this.  The other apostles, as faithful as they were after the coming of the Holy Spirit, tended to stay around Jerusalem, their home base where they felt comfortable.  If they went out, they thought in terms of a few miles in this direction or that.  In their missionary work they took little baby steps.  St. Paul, in contrast, was bold, daring, and audacious.  He moved out to the wider world, in his first journey he circled through Asia Minor, in his second and third journeys he moved to Greece, and in his fourth and final journey, as a prisoner, he went all the way to Rome itself.  What a difference that boldness made for the Church.  Karol Wojtyla had this element of courage as well, this boldness, and he transformed the papacy through it.  Some of us are old enough to remember that not too long ago the papacy was considered the “prisoner of the Vatican.” 

I would like to bring out another analogy between St. Paul and Pope John Paul II.  The travels of St. Paul were originally motivated by the diaspora of the Jewish people.  As he moved from one place to another, he would first speak to the Jews who were there.  In the beginning Christianity was seen as a faction within Judaism.  As things developed, as we know from the Acts of the Apostles, the Christian gospel was gradually announced directly to the Gentiles, and at the first Council of Jerusalem the apostles formally decided that the Gentiles did not have to follow the Jewish Law.  This was one of the very first decisions the Church had to make in its infancy, to determine how it was to be related to the Jewish tradition within which it came into being, and how it moved beyond that to the wider world. 

Let us move forward now from St. Paul to our own day.  When Karol Wojtyla was a student in Rome, he used the time he had free from his studies to visit people in the Polish diaspora in various parts of Europe.  I think one can see a certain analogy here with St. Paul’s exploration.  This instinct for travel in the name of Christ, this audacity as a form of courage, began to germinate then.  When he was a cardinal in Cracow, he again traveled, but now at greater distances.  Part of this travel was to visit with Polish communities abroad (when he was here in Washington, for example, he recommended the establishment of a Polish parish, which was founded in Silver Spring, Maryland, by Cardinal Hickey as Our Lady of Poland), but his missionary work was again not limited to his national confreres; he was, like St. Paul, a missionary for Christ, and in God’s providence he was preparing for the way he would later represent Christ throughout the world.  Karol Wojtyla was not a tourist; he did not travel just to see the sights; as a priest, archbishop, cardinal, and pope, he went places to confirm the faith of Christians and to bring the gospel to all parts of the earth. 

This boldness was a special characteristic of John Paul II, and it certainly was related to his flair for drama, but it was not showmanship.  He made God present to people, he made Christ present, he made the Church present.  In the West at least, some elements in the Church have developed a kind of inferiority complex, a feeling that the Church has to pull back, that it must accommodate to the world, that it has nothing to say to the dazzling elites who represent modern science, modern politics, and modern entertainment.  Some Christians, perhaps academics and intellectuals in particular, have become timid and faint of heart in regard to the Christian gospel.  John Paul II did not think that way; he boldly took on the modern world, and many people in the world responded with admiration and respect.  He did not only talk about humanity as redeemed by Christ; he also showed the world how it looks. 

I have one final point to make concerning the courage of Pope John Paul II.  To begin the kind of voyage he set out on involves risk.  To step out on the world stage as a moral and spiritual leader requires nerve.  Most people would have been struck by stage fright.  Most people would ask, What if I make a blunder?  Will I find the right words?  What if I fall apart in front of everybody?  Most people are happier in a more secure, more familiar, and less chancy environment.  Think of the confidence that Karol Wojtyla needed to undertake what he did.  We could call it self-confidence, but that would not be the best term; it was confidence in God, which was reflected in the intense prayer that so often marked him in his public appearances.  He was strong enough even to suffer debilitating illness in public, when a person is not in control even of his own body. Even then, he trusted that God would not let him down, and the witness he bore in all those years shows how well placed his faith was.  The Holy Father was not performing when lived and died in public view, he was not playing a part, and what he did was not an act.  It was real, and it was seen and admired as such by the world.  He lived and died bearing witness to God. 

John Paul II shared this courage with the Church, and we pray that the next generation of priests, religious, and laity will be deeply inspired by him.  He shared his virtue and his intellect with others, in the way that parents share their virtue and their intelligence with their children.  May his life bear fruit in generations and centuries to come.