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COMMENTARY
April 6, 2005
The surprise of love
I feel complacency even pleasure in the grand media spectacle the "wallowing" in that funeral in Rome. Without question much of it is shallow and some of it is on a level with the ignoble Diana spectacle of 1997. The late Pope was a superstar and was himself willing to encourage a variation on the "cult of personality" as a means of broadcasting his urgent message to the world. But the message was not from him; it was from God. To some degree all Christians were encouraged to do this to make spectacles of themselves from the instructions of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. ("Nor do men put a light under a basket but on a candlestick.") It can be justified in the degree the person in question defers to God as the source of his charisma. We are told to make our faith shine among men to be a light unto the world. It was what the Jews were told by their Maker from very ancient times: to be the city on the hill. It was plainly true in the life of our late Holy Father: that he was made by God's grace a great torch held so high that people could see the light. I had myself some reservations about the Pope's missions in politics and ecumenism. They were reservations only: I was with him in the main. It is difficult for the Catholic Church which is among other things a worldly institution of immense size (there may be more Catholics in communion with Rome than there are Muslims) to accommodate the world outside herself. And given the unalterable truths which she is bound to witness to get these relations just right. We Catholic Christians are under a solemn obligation to evangelize our faith working to the salvation of all souls. But we are also under a solemn obligation to love our neighbour to love real people including those not Catholic just as they are. And we are under a further obligation to see and to appreciate what in every other confession and faith we find in resonance with our own. Love is indivisible. What the late Pope did especially in light of our sometimes terrible and shameful history with the Jews was cut a Gordian knot. He never said we should cease "to pray for the conversion of the Jews". He did say unambiguously that as Catholics we are called to recognize the special dignity of the Jewish faith that underlies our own. And in his catechism to more broadly acknowledge the mystery of salvation. At the age of ten in Poland Karol Wojtyla was asked why a Jewish child was his closest friend. He is remembered to have explained We are children of the same God. He was the way he was from an early age. We cannot compel the beliefs of others. In the tradition of our Messiah we must evangelize chiefly by example and even when by argument chiefly through parable -- through the metaphor and image of Christian art in the broadest sense of "art". If what we preach be true then that truth will shine in our lives and works with much greater clarity than any crude argument. "By their fruits ye shall know them." This Pope himself did what charity demands: acting the part compelled by his own beliefs through his own gracefully-inspired reason. The reader who wants to know what he preached may easily obtain a copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church published in 1994 and revised in 1999. The arguments are laid out coherently there in what I consider an extraordinary work: a kind of miracle that it could be written so well in an age like this. It is part of what brought me into the Catholic Church from outside and the hand of John Paul II is all over it. Many Catholics have inwardly sneered at all the showy "outreach" not only to non-Catholics but within the fold to the "Papal Youth" or others whose comprehension of the faith may sometimes seem sentimental and shallow. And many continue to bitterly regret the continued degradation of the liturgy and closely associated with that the collapse of educational standards and discipline among the clergy; indeed any and every accommodation with what is "post-modern". They resented Pope John Paul II because for all his achievements in the broad brush of the spirit he did not adequately crack the whip against "the money-changers within the Temple". Some of this criticism will finally prove valid: the late Pope himself made the charge against himself. It was not in his gift to be a tough administrator a consolidator. We may need such a man as his successor. His gift was the opposite: to take the world by surprise by the "surprise of love". And thanks be to God that is what we really needed. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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