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COMMENTARY
April 9, 2005
Rally
"I leave no property behind that needs to be disposed of the late Holy Father mentions in his will, which is mostly spiritual in nature, written and added to in Lenten retreats over many years. He wrote this in Polish -- in these recent days my heart has gone out to this noble Catholic people, who have watched the burial of their most illustrious son. It was so Polish of him, to turn his last words to the close companions around his bed, and tell them, Don't weep for me." We have wept all the same. He was like a knight of old. All the earthly pomp goes under the hill; it was attached only to the earthly office not to the man; and dark dark dark, it all goes into the dark, the vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant . And now the man is gone he can be more intimately in our presence than when he was a man. I am a Catholic myself and as other Catholics I intend sometimes to pray to God through the intercession of this "Jan Pawel". Especially I intend to invoke him when I seek the virtue of courage of which he was an exemplar. And in illness. The man who was interred yesterday in the ground as his predecessor Paul VI in a vacant crypt beneath St. Peter's amid millions of pilgrims in Rome has something to say today to a crowd assembled in Ottawa. The passage I shall soon quote is from his last book published in English last fall entitled Rise Let Us Be On Our Way. As I have mentioned several times recently the books of Karol Wojtyla are worth reading in and of themselves regardless to the fact that he was Pope. Worth reading as we would read other modern Polish poets and thinkers for instance Czeslaw Milosz or Zbigniew Herbert; worth entering mentally into discussion with as we would with their books. These Poles knew about tyranny. The book in question has several chapters of rich autobiography from Poland in the later 1950s and takes up where Gift & Mystery (1996) left off. But then it "opens out" into meditations on the duties of bishops and priests; on the demands of ministry in general. It is thus another personal will and testament. Now read and consider: "Silence in the presence of the enemies of a cause encourages them. Fear in an apostle is the principal ally of the enemies of the cause. 'Use fear to enforce silence' is the first goal in the strategy of the wicked. The terror used in all dictatorships depends on the fearfulness of apostles. Silence possesses apostolic eloquence only when it does not turn its face away from those who strike it. So it was in the case of Christ's silence." There is a rally today in Ottawa in defence of the institution of marriage which I hope all my readers will be attending. There is a certain strength in numbers whether the cause be good or ill; I am certain this is a good and urgent cause. For those who would attempt to change the definition of what is marriage -- and therefore of what is a man and a woman of what is a father and a mother a mother and a child -- who would reverse what can be sanctified and what cannot -- are the enemies not only of tradition but of the God who speaks through nature and that tradition. This enemy requires our silence. He is writing laws to command our fear like the law Svend Robinson introduced to Parliament which made it a vaguely-defined criminal offence tantamount to genocide to speak unflatteringly of homosexuals. And using quasi-legal institutions such as the Alberta Human Rights Commission which is now attempting to silence Calgary's Bishop Fred Henry for writing an episcopal letter reminding his flock of Catholic doctrine on sodomy. Bill C-38 itself and the administrative and statutory changes that are being drafted to accommodate it provide the groundwork for further acts of silencing by de-legitimizing in law such sacred terms as husband and wife father and mother. If the legacy of John Paul II means anything -- and it does -- it will be in every brave heart that is standing against this morally abhorrent legislation. We must not agree to shut up. And when we are struck by the power of the State we must continue to look in the eyes of our enemy with apostolic eloquence. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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