Sanctity is Always Timely
The Catholic Thing
By Stephen P. White The death of Pope Paul VI on August 6, 1978 – the Feast of the Transfiguration – was not a great surprise. The pope had been in poor and declining health for some time. He had retreated to the papal summer residence at Castel Gandolfo a month before and had been bedridden for several days when he suffered a massive heart attack. Twenty days later, the Patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Albino Luciani, was elected to succeed Pope Paul. The death of Pope John Paul I, after just 33 days in office, was a tremendous shock to a Church already reeling from some very turbulent years. The Church, most especially in the developed world, had been tossed about in the wake of the Council. It had been more than a decade since the last papal encyclical, Pope Paul VI's Humanae vitae. The reception (or the opposite, as the case may be) of that papal teaching was emblematic of the era. The Church seemed to be teetering between self-inflicted irrelevance through wholesale accommodation to the spirit of the age, on the one hand, and on the other, the obsolescence that comes from a stubborn refusal to have anything at all to say to a rapidly changing, modern world. For Catholics of a certain age, these are familiar events in a familiar story. To those with faith, or at least the advantage of hindsight, it might be clear that neither was likely to be the ultimate fate of the Church. As the second conclave of 1978 opened in Rome, one can imagine the uncertainty and disquiet that loomed over both the Church and the world in those tumultuous days. Yet it was precisely at that moment in history that Karol Wojtyla, a man "from a far country" behind the Iron Curtain, was elected to the See of Peter, and the history of the late 20th century and the post-Conciliar Church took an unexpected and dramatic turn. These events are on my mind just now because of the proximity of the dates of Pope John Paul II's election and his Feast Day (October 22) but also because I have recently been re-reading George Weigel's magisterial first installment in the biography of the Polish pope, Witness to Hope. If you have never read Weigel's magnum opus, or if you have not read it in many years, I encourage you to take it up again. For one, if you begin now, you might finish it (along with the second installment, The End and the Beginning) in time for the 50th anniversary of Pope John Paul II's election in October of 2028. On a more serious note, for those of us who know the story so well, it helps to be reminded now and then of just how dramatic and improbable were the series of events that formed the man, Karol Wojtyla, and that led to the election of Pope John Paul II. For those who don't know the story – and a majority of Catholics, at least in the United States, are too young to remember – the life of John Paul II is a powerful testament to Divine Providence. Which brings us back to those days in the early autumn of 1978. I don't know if Karol Wojtyla slept well after the first day of the year's second conclave or not. He probably had some sense of what the next day would bring. Was it a sense of foreboding? Of trepidation? Of resignation? Of peace? What is clear, and what Weigel is so adept at teasing out, is just how well matched were the man and the moment. John Paul II was not dropped into history like some ecclesial superhero. He had been formed by a very particular, if extraordinary, set of circumstances. Here was a Pole who understood in his bones the role of culture in shaping history at a level deeper than politics or economics. Here was a man who understood the roots of human freedom through the harrowing experience of living under successive totalitarian regimes. Here was a man with experience as a laborer, as a university chaplain, as a pastor, an intellectual, a mystic, a polyglot and a bishop – all before the age of 40. Here was a man schooled in the fundamentals of Thomism yet convinced that modernity needed to be engaged on terms it coul...