Archbishop's web site Denver Catholic Register Parishes Catholic Pastoral Center
May 22, 2002
The blessing of a disabled pope
Pope John Paul II continues to minister in infirmity
By Cyril Jones-Kellett
Pope John Paul II has given witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ in just about every way a person could. Maybe it is time, some say, for him to retire.
He has traveled to every continent preaching the good news. He has served the poor and counseled the powerful. He has left a legacy of written insight into the meaning of the Gospel and of the Church that is staggering in depth and scope. He has led the Church through one of its most tumultuous periods and has never let the faithful lose sight of our primary call: the mission to evangelize the whole world. He has gathered with millions of young people and invigorated them for lives of love and service, most especially at World Youth Days around the globe.
He created the "Catechism of the Catholic Church," he revised the Code of Canon Law, he promoted popular piety and empowered lay spiritual movements. He worked tirelessly for liturgical renewal and he appointed a whole generation of truly missionary bishops. To cap it all, he both named and powerfully challenged the "culture of death."
And now he is seriously disabled. It is common knowledge that he suffers from Parkinson's disease or something similar. Much of his body is gripped by paralysis. His speech is slurred and his facial expressions have lost their once inspiring vigor. He is sometimes in too much pain to walk. He has all but given up his penchant for travel.
Isn't it time to go?
Radio shock-jocks make fun of him. Talking heads deride his ability to lead, calling him an "old, tired man," as if these things were the very marks of irrelevance. News people openly speculate on whether he is aware enough to continue leading the Church.
For those who have loved and admired him, and found in him a dynamic champion of Christ in an age of Christlessness, this is a painful time.
He is not the physical force he once was. His demeanor, far from startling the world with the energy of the Gospel as it once did, now seems to confirm the decrepitude of all that the Church holds dear. He is old, and tired, and hard to understand. He has no sex appeal and little physical appeal of any kind.
He is not even one of those graceful old folks in whose sparkling eyes one finds the glint of joy that caps a life well lived. Mother Teresa was one of these. His face is dull and bloated.
In fact, were we to run across another person in the pope's condition in, say, a nursing home, would we not see that person as an object of pity, an opportunity for us to minister lovingly?
Yet the pope insists on continuing to minister to us.
There are hundreds of thousands of such older folks all around us. They are mostly out of sight and we, younger and more vigorous, have the luxury of ignoring their existence. There are also young disabled folks — the mentally retarded, the psychotic, the paralyzed, the palsied. The list goes on and on.
The pope is one of them. In this he is witnessing to the Gospel with more vigor than ever he has before.
God is the God of the poor, the broken, the ashamed, the forgotten.
He calls champions forth in the service of the Gospel, and our pope has been one of these champions. But mostly, he calls forth the mentally retarded, the psychotic, the paralyzed, the palsied, the poor, the broken, the ashamed and the forgotten.
We are a church of the needy, the anxious, the sin-wracked, and the defeated, and we have been blessed with a disabled pope. He is a sign of contradiction in a world that worships youth and beauty and the visage of competence.
What does this sign say?
The Gospel is not just true in the springtime of life, but in its winter, too. And it is those who are made humble who are closest to the kingdom of God.
How many more, who are like the pope, have we hidden away? We, the builders of our own busy world, have we not rejected God's cornerstone a hundred thousand times over?
That tired, old man in the Vatican, he is a rebuke to us and to all the ways our culture spells death to our humanity. He is also a sign of great hope, pointing us, by his heroic service, in the direction of true life. Life does not depend on our sex appeal, but on the promise of our heavenly Father. We have nothing to fear in the loss of our youth; it is but a moment, and then he shall make all things new again.
When we have lost everything, he still has a place for us. For one tired, old man, that place, thank God, is the throne of Peter.
Cyril Jones-Kellett is editor of The Southern Cross, newspaper of the Diocese of San Diego. The column first appeared in the May 9 issue of The Southern Cross.
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