Pope
Francis is the only Pope to have been ordained a priest after the close of the
Second Vatican Council. John XXIII
convoked the Council but most of the proceedings took place under his successor
Paul VI. John Paul II was Bishop of
Cracow during the Council so he took part in its deliberations, championing
religious freedom and calling especially for the abandonment of the Church’s
ancient and shameful ambivalence towards the Jews. After the month long pontificate of John Paul
I Karol Wojtyla was elected in 1978 at the age of fifty eight. During his twenty eight year long pontificate
he was an untiring teacher and undertook over one hundred international trips
becoming Bishop to the whole world. Pope
Emeritus Benedict was at the Council as a theologian – Joseph Ratzinger – to
the Cardinal Archbishop of Munich. Under
his pontificate both John XXIII and John Paul II were beatified and everything
was put in place for their canonisation.
So it would be very appropriate that he should be involved in their
canonisation ceremony.
When
Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was elected in 1959 and took the name John XXIII he
was less than a month short of his seventy-seventh birthday. He was only a few months older than Pope
Francis was when he became Pope. (Pope
Francis will be seventy-seven on 17th December) Three months after his election Pope John
announced that he was planning three important projects. As Bishop of Rome he would hold a Diocesan
Synod in Rome. As Pope he would call a
General Council of the Church and would also bring about a revision of Church Law
– there would be a new Code of Canon Law.
The old guard at the Vatican was appalled, which was why Pope John had
not consulted them in advance. The Curia
had been accustomed to doing things their way and were horrified at the idea of
thousands of Bishops swanning in with their ideas of how things should be done.
The
Diocesan Synod of Rome – the first in Papal history was held in the Lateran
Basilica – the Cathedral of the Diocese of Rome – in January 1960. The Second Vatican Council – the Twenty-first
General Council of the Church – did not open until nearly two years later – on
11th October 1962. The
opening session in St Peters’ was attended by two thousand, five hundred and
forty delegates, mostly Bishops and heads of Religious Orders, making it by far
the largest gathering of any Council in Church history. In addition there were representatives of
seventeen Orthodox and Protestant Churches and Theologians. Eight months later, after the shortest
pontificate – until then – for two centuries – Pope John died of cancer. The Council had been his idea and very
largely his creation and though most of the Council work took place under his
successor it continued to be imbued by his spirit. In five short years he had opened up the
Church to the Twentieth Century and had reached out to the other Christian
Churches and to the Jews to whom he always showed a special affection. As Apostolic Delegate in Turkey during the
Second World War he had saved the lives of several thousand Jewish children
from Romania and Bulgaria providing them with blank baptismal
certificates. On the night before his
death, Rome’s Chief Rabbi, together with many of the Jewish faithful, went to
pray in St. Peter’s.
Karol
Wojtyla was elected Pope John Paul II in 1978 at the age of fifty-eight, on
only the second day of voting. He was
the first ever Polish Pope and the first non-Italian since Hadrian VI from the
Netherlands in 1522. Wojtyla’s dazzling
talents and experience as a Bishop in Cold War Poland seemed outstanding
qualifications for resolving the tension in the Church. He was a survivor of Nazi occupation, an
accomplished skier and mountaineer, fluent in many languages a published poet
and playwright and a professional philosopher.
After the German invasion of Poland on 1st September 1939
when Wojtyla was nineteen, he worked at many manual jobs including one in a
quarry. In 1944 the Gestapo rounded up
eight thousand young Polish men in Cracow.
He escaped by hiding in a basement. He became a Bishop at the age of
thirty-eight and five years later Pope Paul VI appointed him Archbishop of
Cracow. AS Bishop he gave every
encouragement to the Polish Solidarity movement and its leader, Lech
Walesa. Mikhail Gorbachev – the Soviet
president said: ‘the collapse of the Iron Curtain would have been impossible
without John Paul II’. During his
pontificate he returned to Poland nine times, far more than to any other
country. In May-June 1982 – despite the
Falklands War – he came on a six day visit to Britain, the first ever by a
Pope. In 2001 in Damascus he became the
first Pope ever to pray in a mosque.
Apart from one thousand, three hundred and forty men and women whom he
beatified, he canonised four hundred and eighty three new saints – more than
had been made in the previous five centuries.
He
strove to unite the world’s religions in proclaiming human dignity and the
goodness of God. He inaugurated at Assisi
a series of spectacular assemblies of the world’s religious leaders. In the Jubilee year 2000 he presided at a
series of public acts of repentance for the sins of the Catholic Church against
human dignity. These culminated in a
visit to Jerusalem where the frail and trembling Pope prayed at the Wailing
Wall. No Pope in history had done more
to heal the ancient wounds of Christian anti-Semitism. His last years were an agony as his health
failed and as traumatic revelations about sexual abuse by clergy came to
light. His death brought about an
extraordinary expression of grief. His
funeral was the largest media event in history; two hundred world leaders and
Heads of State attended. The Prince of
Wales postponed his wedding to be there.
The chants of ‘Santo subito’ – ‘canonise him now’ have been listened to!
