Peggy Noonan - John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father

JohnPaul the Great

Remembering A Spiritual Father

PEGGY NOONAN

For Bently Elliot

andMichael Novak

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

All books are brought into being by littleplatoons. I thank my son Will for his patience, and my friends Stephanie and RansomWilson, Tom Clancy, Bill Sykes, Marie Brenner and Ben Elliott for theirencouragement. Thanks also go to Michael Novak and Father Richard John Neuhaus , for their inspiring words and writings.

My friend Joni Evans,whom I met when she helped edit my first book, is everything one wants in aliterary agent (insightful, honest, stalwart) and needs in a friend. I amdeeply grateful to her.

At Viking Penguin Ithank Susan Petersen Kennedy, Clare Ferraro, Pam Dorman, and Rick Kot . I sometimes worked on this book at Armando'srestaurant in Brooklyn; I thank its owner and staff for their graciousness andgood cheer.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

Some historical events are spiritual events. Onethat was both led to this book.

In the days and monthsafter 9/11/01 something beautiful happened in America. The event seemed todeepen us. We had up to that point as a nation been on quite a tearofmaterialism, of carelessness. But then the shock came, and the grief, and anational sense of being violated and brought down. And in that terriblegravityin the falling of the buildings, if you willa liberation of sortsoccurred.

If you were in New Yorkthat day you remember that the terrible fall of the buildings created a rush ofair upwards. It sent paper in the air, it whooshed thousands of pounds of paperinto the air so that people's business cards and wills and employment datawound up scattered all over within a radius of miles.

The great fall unleashedsome things and pushed them up. And in my mind or imagination that upward forcehelped disperse a new and beautiful liberation as to faith and religion, oflove of country and love of our fellowman. I remember the little religiousshrines that popped up all over Manhattan. I remember the air of reverence. Itseemed an appropriate response to what we then knew was the beginning ofdifficult times. We had entered the age of terror. Now we know what time it is.

In the years since, thatspirit has lessened, but it has not gone away It will come up again when wehave bad times again.

As for me, after 9/11 myown thoughts were in a way liberated. My subject matter changed, turning moretoward my faith, and I found myself more and more looking toward Rome, and thegreat old man who lived there until the past year. I found myself writing abouthim in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere with a new question in mind: Why do those of us who love him lovehim? How to explain it to those who did not or could not?

And so this book, aremembrance of John Paul II, and an attempt to capture some of his greatness.It is written with the conviction that the great deserve our loyalty and thatthose who have added to life, who have inspired the living and pointed to abetter way, should be learned from and lauded.

chapter one

I Saw a Saint at Sunset

Itwas early morning in the Vatican, July 2, 2003, a brilliant morning in themiddle of the worst Roman heat wave in a century. The city was quiet, thestreets soft with the heat. It was the summer of the dress code battle betweenthe tourists and the guards at St. Peter's Basilica. The tourists wanted towear shorts and halter tops; this was in violation of the Vatican dress code(slacks, shirts with sleeves), and the guards wouldn't let them in. There were argumentsat the entrance, and angry words. Soon a Roman compromise was achieved: No onelost face; everyone got what they needed. The vendors in St. Peter's Squarewere allowed to sell paper shirts and pants for a euro apiece. The touristswould put them on over their clothes, walk past the guards, and tear the paperoff as they entered the dark cool of the church.

By 7:45 a.m., hundreds of us had gathered in the Piazza del Sant'Uffizio ,in the shadow of Bernini's colonnade, the marblecolumns that curve outward to embrace St. Peter's Square. Already the heat wasgathering, and we fanned ourselves with thin green papal audience tickets. Thecrowd was happychirping nuns, clicking tourists. We were about to see thepope. We were about to see John Paul. We are a mix of tourists, the curious,and the faithful: a group of deaf Italian adults in white baseball caps, withsilk Vatican flags tied around their necks; members of a choir from theArchdiocese of St. Louis, Missouri; a group of nuns from the Little Mission forthe Deaf in Bologna. There was a man from Monterey, Mexico, with his wife andtwo children. As the crowd grew, we were pressed so close I could smell thespray starch on his green cotton shirt.

"Why are youhere?" I asked.

"To see thepope," he said. "He is the most important Christian in the world. Heis the follower of Christ." When, a few minutes later, I read the quoteback to him from my notebook, he edited it. "He is the most important person in the wholeworld."

I talked to a woman in ahat made of hay. Spiky yellow straw, actually, the brim down to shade her face.She was forty-five or fifty years old and looked like pictures of the older,weathered Greta Garbo . She told me she was on apilgrimage. She had walked hundreds of kilometers in a circuitous tour ofMarian sites. She and her husbandbearish, gray beardedhad departed upperAustria in May and had arrived here yesterday, on July 1st. They had walked onhighways and small roads. She showed me her diary of the pilgrimage: In neatprecise script she had documented every church they had seen along the way. Herhusband had drawn pictures of cathedrals in blue ballpoint ink. He had takensnapshots of little chapels and pasted them in the diary. "Here," shesaid to me, indicating a page on which she had made comic line drawings. Theyshowed angular feet bruised by exaggerated calluses. Next to them she had drawnthe lotions and bandages she had put upon her wounds. They had gone to massevery day of their six-week journey, she said.

Why had they come here?

"Why? To see Il Papa!" She gestured asif to say: This is theculmination.

Wefiled through metal detectors that did not seem to work, no beeping or bopping,no one watching things closely. It is surprising to see metal detectors here,for a crowd like this, but the last time someone planned to kill the pope, inthe Philippines, the would-be assassin meant to dress as a priest. Soon we weredirected through a paved area just off St. Peter's Square. (Later, when I wouldreturn to it, a young priest would tell me, "We think he may have beencrucified under here." I shook my head. "Saint Peter. It may havebeen just about here, down there." And he pointed at the pavement.)

We entered the Paul VI Audience Hall, anenormous concrete structure, cavernous and modern, like a big suburban church,or an evangelical McChurch at the edge of a city.Rows of fixed seats were aligned toward the stage. People were coming in singlefile and in groups, hundreds of them and then thousands. As I walked amongthem, I heard the languages of France, England, Mexico, Austria, the CzechRepublic. There were groups from West Africa, Germany, Poland, Scotland,Portugal, and Brazil. A Romanian chorus of middle-aged women began to singsoftly in their seats. When they finished, a choir from Bialystok ,Poland, thirty young women and men, began to sing lustily.