The End and the Beginning by George Weigel

Author:George Weigel
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307715869
Publisher: The Doubleday Religious Publishing Group
Published: 2010-09-14T04:00:00+00:00

The following day, a Sunday, John Paul II celebrated yet another in his series of colossal outdoor Masses on the Błonia Krakowski, the Kraków Commons, where in June 1979 he had begged his people never to lose touch with the Christian roots of their nation and culture. The holiness that had nurtured those roots was the theme on this occasion, as the Pope beatified four Poles: Sancja Szymkowiak, a sister who had died in 1942 from the hardships of the Nazi occupation; Jan Beyzym, a missionary to the lepers of Madagascar who died there in 1912; Jan Balicki, who had suffered much from both the Nazi occupation and the communist usurpation of Poland’s liberties before dying in 1948; and Zygmunt Feliks Feliński, the archbishop of Warsaw in 1862–63, who spent twenty years in Siberian exile before his death in 1895. John Paul returned to Rome on August 19, having said Mass once again at one of his favorite spots for meditation and reflection during his years as a bishop in Kraków, the Holy Land shrine of Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, which was on the road to his boyhood home, Wadowice.

After presiding and preaching at the September 20 funeral Mass of another twentieth-century confessor, Cardinal Francis Xavier Nguyên van Thuân, whom he described as a man “who lived his whole life under the banner of hope,” John Paul led a joint Catholic-Lutheran Vespers service in St. Peter’s on October 4, marking the seventh centenary of the birth of St. Bridget of Sweden. Two days later, before a tremendous crowd in St. Peter’s Square composed in large part of members of Opus Dei, the Pope canonized Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, the founder of “The Work.” In his homily, the Pope stressed the ways in which the new saint had helped others to see that “work, and any other activity, carried out with the help of grace, is converted into a means of daily sanctification.” St. Josemaría, John Paul continued, had taught a “supernatural vision of life” in which every activity is undertaken in the midst of a “life in which God is always present.” What can seem monotonous to us is in fact the way that God comes to us, and the way that “we can cooperate with his plan of salvation.” Yet for all his determination to see Christians convert the world through apostolic witness in their daily lives, St. Josemaría had recognized “what is not a paradox but a perennial truth: the fruitfulness of the apostolate lies above all in prayer and in intense and constant sacramental life.” Conversation with the Lord was “the secret of holiness and the true success of the saints.”80

The next day, while more than 100,000 pilgrims remained in Rome after the Escrivá canonization, John Paul II welcomed Romanian Orthodox Patriarch Teoctist to Rome, formally greeting him at the end of an audience for the pilgrims and entrusting Teoctist and his ministry to the pilgrims’ prayers. It was, papal spokesman Navarro-Valls remembered, another way to underscore the ecumenical

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