What St. John Paul II means to me: On the 45th anniversary of his election
October 16, 2023 marks the 45th anniversary of the election of Karol Wojtyła as Pope (now Saint) John Paul II. And, like 45 years ago, the anniversary falls on a Monday.
One could reminisce about the great achievements of the 26-year pontificate of the Polish Pope. I am going to follow the model of Monika Jabłońska’s Pope for All Seasons (Angelico Press, 2023) and reflect on what John Paul II meant to me.
I recall the afternoon of Wojtyła’s election. I was a college sophomore at St. Mary’s College, the now-defunct undergraduate college of the Orchard Lake Schools in Michigan. We were going to have a midterm in American History at 2 pm and some of us were studying for it when one of the priests ran through the building shouting “They elected a Polish pope!”
From the perspective of 45 years, people today might think that natural in a Church that considers itself universal. It may seem that way, after a quarter century of the “Polish Pope” followed by a German and an Argentine.
In 1978, after almost four-and-a-half centuries of Italian popes, it was something wholly new. I guess many people thought someday that trend would end, but not necessarily in 1978—and almost certainly not with a Pope coming from behind the Iron Curtain, from a country imprisoned in the Russian gulag of nations.
We also found that Orchard Lake was discovered! We had a Mass of Thanksgiving at 5 pm, and the media descended on Orchard Lake. Then-Archbishop of Detroit, John Cardinal Dearden, whom I never saw as a freshman, suddenly showed up to announce how much he loved Polish people!
Fast forward three years. I had just entered graduate school at Fordham University in the Bronx, New York. In my first semester, I was enrolled in a “Seminar on Christian Sexuality” taught by Fr. Robert Gleason, S.J. I would have to prepare a seminar paper and deliver a synopsis of it to class.
Those were the days of revisionist theology, when Catholic moral theologians in the United States (including my former professor at Orchard Lake, Fr. Anthony Kosnik of Human Sexuality infamy) were churning out books and articles about how wrong the Church was in this area. (Plus ça change—except today it’s dressed up as “pastorally” dissembling). I had heard that John Paul was a “personalist” yet he defended Humanae vitae: how did he do that?
Apart from that curiosity, it happened by chance (and, as I’ve learned from John Paul, there are no “chances” in God’s Providence) that Fordham abutted the Little Italy neighborhood, where I did my shopping and sometimes went to Mass. Next to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the Daughters of St. Paul ran a bookstore with lots of religious books, most of them priced at levels I could afford. Wandering through there one day, I found a little book, Original Unity of Man and Woman, a compendium of the first year of John Paul’s “theology of the body” Wednesday general audiences.
Long story short, those first audiences became my seminar paper. They exposed me to John Paul’s thinking, which intrigued me for three reasons.
First, unlike Western revisionists who babbled about “personalism” but rejected the integral person, John Paul was affirming the Church’s teaching.
Second, he was a serious thinker: it wasn’t just “obey because the Church said so” but he offered truly deep grounds for that teaching that I wasn’t hearing among those rejecting it. (After Anthony Kosnik, I was convinced a Catholic moral theologian of Polish-American descent could do better).
Third, and maybe most importantly, as hard as it was sometimes to figure out John Paul’s reasoning (there’s an apocryphal story that a priest who once absolved a great sinner assigned him a penance of reading one chapter of Wojtyła’s horribly mistranslated Acting Person) once I did figure him out, I found he was saying in very sophisticated language the basic insights I learned from my mother. Perhaps mom did not go into depth, but the idea that a person is to be loved, not used, was something I heard at her knee first and, I figured, if the Pope and my mother were in agreement with everything the Church taught up until now, it had to be right.
