WE FILIPINOS feel Pope John Paul II’s special kind of love. His beatification is a source of joy for us. My personal experience with John Paul touched me forever. During his last visit, he gave an audience at the Convention Center. I was seated at the side entrance when suddenly the door swung open and there he was! Pope John Paul II back-lighted by the afternoon sun. He was smiling like a baby. I felt his gaze, an individualized kind of gaze, in the middle of a jampacked auditorium. It was a holy man’s gaze.
John Paul II literally fell in love with Filipinos at first sight. It happened many moons ago when he was still Poland’s Cardinal Karol Wojtyla. He was flying home from Australia when his plane landed at MIA for maintenance routine. Since the stopover would take several hours, the future Pope asked permission to disembark so he could say the day’s Mass. Graciously he was allowed. Airport personnel recommended the nearest church, the Redemptorist Church in Baclaran. It was a Wednesday, and the church was bustling to the seams with devotees of our Mother of Perpetual Help. John Paul was overwhelmed as he said his Mass before such a huge crowd. He hadn’t seen anything like it in the churches of Europe. In fact, most of them were empty. European societies had gone secularist. Frederick Nietzche’s “God is Dead” attitudinal drift had gone into the heads of European bureaucrats, intelligentsia and constituents as the new humanism.
John Paul carried that image of a huge and vibrant Filipino Catholicism forever in his memory. When he became Pope he came to our country twice to savor the robust Catholicism that Filipinos generate. For him, it was elixir.
Pope John II was not only a loving Pope. He was also the bold one. “Be not afraid,” he said, knowing fully well that the challenges to live holy lives in a liberal and pluralistic world were beset with contradictions, doubts and lack of spirituality. He himself lived a life confronting fear. His youth was shattered by Nazism rule in occupied Poland. His early years of priesthood was a constant struggle under the communist totalitarian rule.
During his 27 years as Pope, he stood out as a moral leader to the world. He reached out to people of all faiths, always invoking universal peace in echoing the teachings of Jesus Christ in the Gospel.
When defending the faith needed muscle, he used his Petrine strength. His was the spirit in alliance with the Solidarnosc (solidarity) movement in Poland. Solidarnosc was credited as the flame that ignited the gradual fall of communism, which coincided with the ferment Mikhail Gorbachev introduced in “glassnost” in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which led in turn to the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
He entered the lion’s den of the Marxist’s movement (clothed by radical Jesuits as liberation theology) in South America where he endured humiliation heaped by a mob insulting the papacy and Catholic orthodoxy.
It pained him so much that the Magisterium’s teachings on Humanae Vitae, on the evils of divorce and abortion were not heeded by some Catholics in lifestyle centers of the world. He called the prevalence of killing the unborn “Culture of Death.”
John Paul was in the thick of involvement with the ills and dysfunctions of the 21st century. World leaders sought his prayers and counsel in solving racial bigotry, war of attritions, self-destructive terrorism and ecological devastations. As Vicar of Christ on Earth, he stood tall with the humility of Jesus Christ doing his Father’s will.
John Paul changed the image of the papacy, from Vatican-centric to world-centric. He was the peripatetic Good Shepherd looking out for lost sheep. He endeared himself to the flock from the seminal Catholic Church of Africa and Asia, to the modern societies of America and Europe. The World Youth Day in Manila gathered for John Paul the biggest multitude ever for the Pope.
Pope John Paul grew old hunched and shaken with Parkinson’s disease. But he never lost one muscle of his Christlike inner strength. He died in front of Satellite TV with the whole world in Vigil together with the huge crowd at St. Peter’s Square. He died like Christ on the cross, watched by both his enemies and loved ones. Like a wounded lion he growled his prayers. His last move was to raise his trembling hand to bless the people worldwide.
Minyong Ordoñez is a freelance journalist and a member of the Manila Overseas Press Club. Email: hgordonez@gmail.com