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20 years after ‘an encounter with Christ’

Totus Tuus: The Legacy of John Paul II

By Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted
Sept. 15, 2007

Pope John Paul II liked to say with a smile that, as a boy, he wasn’t fast enough to make the soccer team of his Catholic parish, so he played goalie on the Jewish soccer team.

He also liked to say, “There is no such thing as coincidence.” Being goalie on the Jewish soccer team meant that many of his childhood friends were Jewish. Some years later, many of them would be killed by the Nazis in the extermination camps such as Auschwitz.

Still later, he would be the first pope since St. Peter to visit a Jewish synagogue. He was also the pope who established official diplomatic relations between the Holy See and the State of Israel, the first pope to visit the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem to pray there for peace in the Holy Land and to leave in a niche in a wall a personal note. Because of the friendships he made playing soccer, John Paul was able to overcome centuries of mistrust and misunderstanding between Jews and Catholics and to place Jewish-Christian relations and dialogue on a whole new foundation.

John Paul’s mother died 3 weeks before he made his first Holy Communion; his only brother died when he himself was just 12. “There is no such thing as coincidence.” This man of faith who grew up without a mother in the home would be the only pope to write an apostolic letter to children, an apostolic letter to youth, and to establish World Youth Day.

When his mother died, his father took him to a Shrine dedicated to the Virgin Mary. There, both father and son poured out their tears to our Blessed Mother, and found new hope and strength through her intercession. For the rest of his life, the Mother of God held a prominent place in John Paul II’s daily life. On the papal visits that he made to countries around the world, he would also include a pilgrimage to a Marian Shrine. Notice, for example, where he began his pastoral visit to Arizona: here at the Basilica of St. Mary. “There is no such thing as coincidence.”

When would-be assassin Ali Agca shot John Paul in St. Peter’s Square, it happened on the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima, May 13, 1981. Although he nearly died, and it took almost 12 months for him to recover, he not only survived but he also saw the assassination attempt as an opportunity to do something beautiful for God. Exactly one year after the assassination attempt, he went on pilgrimage to Fatima, to express his gratitude to Our Lady for her protection. He took with him the bullet that surgeons recovered from his body and it remains on display there today. He attributed his survival to the Virgin Mary, saying, “One finger pulled the trigger, another guided the bullet.”

By “coincidence,” the pope’s cardiologist and mine were the same person. I remembering talking with her, some weeks after the pope had been shot. She had the clothes she had been wearing as she cared for him in the hospital’s emergency room securely stowed in her office. They were still covered with his blood. “These are my first class relics,” she proudly proclaimed, “they shall never be washed.”

The Holy Father used his recovery time to write an Apostolic Letter on the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering. And then, once fully recovered, he went to visit the would-be assassin in prison, to assure him of his forgiveness and to speak with him as with a brother. “There is no such thing as coincidence.”

John Paul II was a man who firmly believed in the love of God. Nothing weakened his faith. Adolph Hitler’s Nazi troops invaded his homeland, crushing not only the Polish army but killing thousands of innocent civilians, the majority of the Polish Jews, 1/3 of Poland’s priests and Religious, and a high percentage of Polish artists and intelligentsia. Soviet Communists replaced the Nazis, after World War II, with an atheistic, totalitarian regime. Despite these terrible losses for his own country, and the great hardships it brought to him and all his fellow citizens, the future Holy Father never gave in to despair.

At the age of 20, he had no family members still living, or any other close relatives. He was nearly killed when struck by a German army truck. Throughout his life, he suffered several serious illnesses, and for the last 10 years of his life, he struggled with the ravages of ever advancing Parkinson’s disease. Yet, he never lost hope.

He believed, with St Paul, that God makes all things work for the good, even those things that break our heart, or disfigure our body, or those that surpass our ability to understand.

A man of many talents, John Paul was a poet, a playwright, a linguist, a theologian, and a philosopher. He is the only Cardinal of the Church to be invited to lecture at Harvard on the merits of scholarship in the field of philosophy.

He loved theater and the arts, initially thinking as a young man that he would make a career as an actor. But God had other plans that stretched far beyond the theaters of Poland and Eastern Europe. The whole world was to be his stage, and he would use it not to promote his own agenda but to tell the Good News of God’s love.

John Paul II’s visit to Phoenix was historic and memorable for many reasons. I recall, in particular, how eager he was to meet with the Native American peoples here. In fact, from the beginning of his pontificate, he had looked for ways to lift up the beauty of Native American cultures. In 1980, he beatified Kateri Tekakwitha, also known as the Lily of the Mohawks. In 2002, he canonized Juan Diego, the Indian man to whom Our Lady of Guadalupe first appeared in central Mexico. And in 1986, he nominated the Most Reverend Donald Pelotte to be bishop of Gallup, our first Native American in the USA to become a bishop. Many of you, present tonight, probably recall how Bishop Pelotte joined Bishop O’Brien here in Phoenix to welcome the Holy Father to the valley, and especially to take part in the special meeting with Native peoples.

John Paul II beatified 1337 men and women, and canonized 484. No other pope in history came close to proclaiming so many saints and blesseds. Why, we might ask, did he do this?

 Because, it seems to me, he knew from experience what we human beings are capable of, both the good and the bad.

Living in what he called the bloodiest century in history, he knew that we humans are capable of horrific cruelty, even on a colossal scale, and against the most innocent among us.

Nonetheless, all the cruelty that he knew from firsthand experience never overwhelmed what he knew by faith, namely that love is always possible and even more, as St. Paul say, “Love never fails.”

And so, John Paul lifted up, for the world to honor, courageous martyrs and inspiring saints, from every land and culture, saints who heroically loved even in the face of crushing evil.

Not surprisingly, some of these saints died at the Auschwitz death camp: notably Saint Maximilian Kolbe and Saint Edith Stein, also known by her Carmelite name, Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

He beatified Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta who, not longer after John Paul visited Phoenix, came herself to grace our valley, to open up a convent, and to show, here as in Calcutta, her love for the poorest of the poor.

It was also John Paul II who canonized the saint who opened the first school for Native Americans in Arizona, St. Katharine Drexel. After founding the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, she established over 60 schools for African and Native Americans all across our land, including St. Michael’s School, which still today serves the Apache children.

By canonizing these and hundreds of other holy men and women around the world, John Paul helped us to believe that we too can love our enemies, can overcome evil with good, and have a close friendship with Christ. We, too, can trust Jesus when He says to us in our day, “Be not afraid. I am with you always, even until the end of the world.”

I cannot fail to mention the special love of John Paul for young people. His outreach to university students began in his first year of priestly ministry, in 1947 in Krakow, where he discovered the importance of accompanying youth in their search for meaning, and of talking candidly with them about love and marriage, and about truth and lies. Of course, he loved to do this while kayaking or hiking in the mountains, while skiing or gathered around a camp fire.

He began World Youth Day in 1984, over the objections of many of his closest advisers. “What pope had ever done anything like this before?” they asked; “How would you get young people to come to an event with the pope?” Well, the youth came! They came in overwhelming numbers. And the youth celebrations of faith became immensely popular. After World Youth Day in Denver in 1993, the front cover of a leading magazine called him “John Paul Superstar.”

But people who took time to notice, especially young people themselves, quickly discovered that John Paul never sought popularity by watering down the Gospel’s demands or by sidestepping tough, unpopular issues. In fact, he deliberately sought out such tough issues, intentionally choosing to address them directly, not with anger or an edge, but with both charity and candor.

How fitting that, as he was dying in Rome in April 2005, millions of youth from around the world, traveled to Rome and gathered below the window of his bedroom that overlooks St. Peter’s Square, to keep vigil for this Holy Father who, they knew, had a great love for them.

In a book entitled John Paul the Great, written shortly after he died, Peggy Noonan writes:

“We all want a spiritual father. We want someone who can inspire and guide us in the most important area of life, our very understanding of its meaning. So many of us did not have fathers who could teach us about faith and the deeper meaning of things, or who could teach us effectively and through demonstrating faith… I came to see that John Paul was coming to play that role in my life, as I am certain he did for millions, tens of millions, of others.”

“We all want a spiritual father. Whatever the circumstances of your life or family, whatever strong fathers you have in your life, we all want a spiritual father. We want someone who will stand for what is difficult and right, what is impossible but true. We are human, and so we don’t always want to live by the truth or be governed by it. But we are grateful when someone stands for it. And when he walks onto the balcony and you can see him and reach to him and know he is there—well, that is something (pp. 63, 235).”

When he was nominated a bishop on July 4, 1958, he chose as his episcopal motto two Latin words, “Totus Tuus,” “Totally yours.” The motto expressed his intention to love Christ and the Church with a love like that of Mary: total, pure and complete.

With the help of God’s grace, he succeeded in fulfilling the great commandment: “Love the Lord your God, with all your mind and all your strength and all your heart; and love your neighbor as yourself.” Totally yours—that’s how he lived. And he wanted us to believe we can do the same.

Nothing happens by accident; there is no such thing as coincidence. God’s love guides all times and seasons. He holds the whole world in His hands. Like John Paul, then, let us be not afraid.