{"id":22,"date":"2008-04-02T08:14:24","date_gmt":"2008-04-02T08:14:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/benedictions\/2008\/04\/john-pauls-white-martyrdom.html"},"modified":"2008-04-02T08:14:24","modified_gmt":"2008-04-02T08:14:24","slug":"john-pauls-white-martyrdom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/2008\/04\/john-pauls-white-martyrdom.html","title":{"rendered":"John Paul’s “white martyrdom”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"JohnPauloncrucifix2.jpg\"
\n<!–\"John%20Paul%20on%20crucifix.jpg\"–> Wednesday marks the third anniversary of the death of John Paul II, a passing that provoked such an enormous outpouring that the world\u2014and even the College of Cardinals who gathered with the unenviable task of choosing his successor\u2014was transfixed for weeks. We hardly need much prompting to remind us of the emotions and images of the \u201cavvenimenti di Aprile<\/em>\u201d\u2014the events of April\u2014as Vatican officials, in their reflexively understated curial way, took to describing them. Almost immediately, crowds in the piazza beneath the late pope\u2019s window started with chants of \u201cSanto Subito<\/em>,\u201d calling for John Paul\u2019s instant canonization. Many commentators dubbed him (as a few die-hards had for years before his death) John Paul the Great, conferring an honorific granted to just two other pontiffs, and none since the Dark Ages when Barbarian armies threatened the Eternal City.
\nThis anniversary, coming in the run-up to Benedict\u2019s own inaugural visit to the United States (during which he will mark his own 81st birthday, on April 16, and the third anniversary of his election, on April 19), would seem to shadow once again Benedict\u2019s papacy, as John Paul\u2019s legacy was perhaps bound to do. Many commentators lament that comparisons between the two popes, apparently unfavorable to Benedict, continue to be made. Yet such contrasts are inevitable, I think, and justifiable in that these are two different men, and should be judged on their own merits. Americans should also know what to expect of Benedict, so that they can better appreciate what he says (or does not say).
\nWhat I think too few stop to appreciate is that for all their notable differences, there is a great continuity between John Paul and Benedict in the amount of energy they bring to the papacy. Why is that the case?<\/p>\n


\nBecause of the length of John Paul\u2019s pontificate (26 years, the third-longest in history) and the grandezza<\/em> of his early years as pope\u2014leaping the Berlin Wall, surviving a near-assassination in St. Peter\u2019s Square, etc\u2014it is often hard to remember that the last half of his pontificate was marked by illness and growing immobility. The man who chafed at being a prisoner of the Vatican spent much of his reign as a prisoner of his own body.
\nThat he bore his sufferings with such dignity and even joy\u2014ever the \u201cHappy Warrior\u201d of Longfellow\u2019s poem, as George Weigel wrote in his biography of the pope\u2014was as important to the acclaim and affection that accompanied his later years as the obvious heroism of his early years in Rome and abroad. Indeed, John Paul bore his condition with such grace that too few realize how difficult it was for him.
\nI was always struck by a story that John Paul told in a little-known 1982 biography by a French journalist, Andr\u00e9 Frossard, of the moment of his election as pontiff in 1978. John Paul told Frossard that at that instant, in the brief seconds before Karol Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II, he plunged his face in his hands at the gravity of what had befallen him, and his first thought was of his long-ago pastoral work as a priest in Poland working with bed-ridden patients, \u201cthose incurable invalids condemned to the wheelchair or chained to their sick bed; people who are often young and conscious of the implacable advance of their illness, prisoners in their sufferings for weeks, months or years.\u201d John Paul found in the \u201cterrible irreversibility\u201d of their condition a parallel to his own new circumstances as pope.
\nYet it was also a foretaste of his own physical decline decades later. None of us, I think it is safe to say, will ever know the drama\u2014or trauma\u2014of becoming pope. As the conclave vote swung inexorably toward Joseph Ratzinger in April 2005, the cardinal said he prayed not to be chosen. “As slowly the balloting showed me that, so to speak, the guillotine would fall on me, I got quite dizzy,” Benedict, told an audience of German pilgrims a few days after his election. Little wonder that the sacristy off the Sistine Chapel where a new pope is first vested is called the Sala della Lacrime, the Hall of Tears.
\nYet the fear, or reality, of losing control to illness can seem a fate worse than death, and is all-too familiar for many of us. As John Paul grew more frail, he made many moving efforts to underscore the value of the elderly, and to encourage them by his example much as he invigorated the church with his energy in earlier years. “It is important to speak of suffering and death in a way that dispels fear,” he told hospice workers in Austria in 1998. In a letter addressed to the elderly for the 1999 World Day of the Sick, he described the achievements of the elderly Moses: “It was not in his youth but in his old age that, at the Lord’s command, he did mighty deeds on behalf of Israel,” he wrote. In August 2004, during a visit to the Marian shrine at Lourdes that commemorates miraculous healings. John Paul directly addressed his own condition in speaking to the ill: “With you I share a time of life marked by physical suffering, yet not for that reason any less fruitful in God’s wondrous plan.”
\nThey are moving words. But it is how John Paul lived those words, in his \u201cwhite martyrdom,\u201d that makes them resonate. And in his own way, the octogenarian (but still vigorous) Benedict faces similar challenges, both because of his age and energy level, but also because of the papal legend he follows, and, in his own way, mirrors. Inspiring others while living within the limits of our temporal conditions is perhaps the greatest grace the elderly give to those who will inevitably come after them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<!––> Wednesday marks the third anniversary of the death of John Paul II, a passing that provoked such an enormous outpouring that the world\u2014and even the College of Cardinals who gathered with the unenviable task of choosing his successor\u2014was transfixed for weeks. We hardly need much prompting to remind us of the emotions and images…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nJohn Paul's "white martyrdom" - Benedictions: The Pope in America<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/2008\/04\/john-pauls-white-martyrdom.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"John Paul's "white martyrdom" - Benedictions: The Pope in America\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"<!––> Wednesday marks the third anniversary of the death of John Paul II, a passing that provoked such an enormous outpouring that the world\u2014and even the College of Cardinals who gathered with the unenviable task of choosing his successor\u2014was transfixed for weeks. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}