Tragedy Didn’t Dampen His Faith

The Boston Herald

Instead of gaping at the horror in the world and the baseness, which is what we're usually doing, we're transfixed, for now, by the goodness and faithfulness of a single man. This is what one good person can do: change hearts, and heart by heart, little by little, make great changes in the heart of the world.

You think people are born to greatness. That it's a straight trajectory from here to there. That, somehow, for some people life is easier.

But there was nothing easy about the life of the man who became Pope John Paul II. When he was 8 years old, his mother died. He came home from school and she was gone. When he was 12, his brother died.

“My brother's death probably affected me more deeply than my mother's, because of the peculiar circumstances, which were certainly tragic, and because I was more grown up,'' he told the French writer Andre Frossard. His brother, a doctor, contracted scarlet fever after spending a night at the bedside of a stricken patient. Eight years later his father died.

“At 20 I had already lost all the people I loved, and even those I might have loved, like my older sister who, they say, had died six years before I was born,'' he told Frossard. He had no one. He could have become bitter. Instead, he did what his father had done. He turned to God.

You wonder how he kept his faith. His country was overrun by Nazis; his church shut down. He was even run down by a truck driver and left for dead on a street.

He turned closer to God. He became a priest. And then at the age of 58 he became the spiritual leader of the Roman Catholic Church.

We lament the lack of role models these days. This man was one. Personal tragedy never separated him from God or stopped him from seeing God in others. Through it all - the deaths of his family, the Third Reich, communism, a bullet, Parkinson's, arthritis, old age, infirmity - he kept on believing.

I saw him kneel and kiss the ground in New Jersey. I saw him blessing babies, touching hands and hearts. He traveled the world touching hearts, visting 129 countries. He was seen by more than a billion people.

“If St. Peter was the `rock' on whom Jesus said he would build his church, Peter's 263rd successor was a rolling stone,'' Rick Hampson wrote in USA Today Monday. He saw God in everyone. No ifs, ands or buts. Jesus did it. And he did it. He even forgave the man who shot him.

“He resisted self-pity,'' New Orleans Archbishop Alfred Hughes said at a Mass at St. Louis Cathedral Sunday. The Mass was a scheduled memorial for victims of crime. John Paul was a victim, too. ``But he refused to remain a victim,'' Hughes said.

This beloved pope's message was simple. It was Jesus' message: Love one another. He preached it. And he lived it.