Pope John Paul II - four years on

Yesterday was the fourth anniversary of the passing of Pope John Paul II. Let us thank Go for that beautiful life.

(Source: Fr Selvester)


(Via Amp)

In at least some of his allusions to springtime, John Paul II intended to make an objective statement about the world. In his comment before the UN—“We will see that the tears of this century have prepared the ground for a new spring of the human spirit”—John Paul referred not simply to his unwavering theological hope, nor to a supposed optimism, but to contingent historical events that would encourage a more hopeful reading of humanity’s proximate future. Similarly, when he claimed that “God is preparing a great springtime for Christianity, and we can already see its first signs” he evidently had something concrete in mind.

So what did he discern? The first significant sign of spring does not involve twittering birds and pink buds. What we see first is slush and mud: The world in spring gets uglier before it gets prettier. That, after all, is why T.S. Eliot called April the cruelest month: Winter kept us warm, covering earth in forgetful snow.

In the slush and mud of his own day, John Paul II saw something emerging: a meltdown of formerly frozen ideologies and consolidated problems. People’s disillusionment with the therapeutic promises of Freud, the voluntarism of Nietzsche and the utopianism of Marx may not lead to a sudden embrace of Christian faith, but it does prepare the way, just as the Prodigal Son’s hunger brought him back to his father’s house. We can witness an opening to and hunger for spiritual realities, located in a generalized dissatisfaction with what the world offers.

Joseph Ratzinger, too, saw that melting ideologies offer a new chance for the Christian message. Delivering the 1988 Fisher Lecture at Cambridge, Ratzinger emphasized “an intense, new desire for moral values like freedom, justice, and peace.” “Ideologies have been cast aside,” he said, “and so one can directly recognize what is good once more. In point of fact, this may be welcomed as an element of hope: God’s profound message can be smothered and distorted in man. Nonetheless, it is constantly bursting forth anew, working a way out for itself.”

In Salt of the Earth, Ratzinger similarly described the opportunities opened by melting ideologies:

The internal dead-ends and contradictions, as well as the internal falsity of such theories [Marxism, Freudian psycho-analysis, the ethics of the sociologists] will emerge. And that is, in fact, already happening to a large extent. We are experiencing the demythologization of many ideologies. For example, the economic explanation of the world that Marx attempted and that at first seemed so logical and so compelling and therefore could exercise such fascination, especially because it was associated with a moral ethics, simply doesn’t correspond to reality. Man is not comprehensively described in these terms. It has become plain that religion is a primordial reality in man. And the same holds in relation to all these other things.

This first sign of spring—winter’s loss of power and influence—does not guarantee future flourishing, but it does make spring possible. Springtime is not a period of reward but a time of labor. Unworked land will produce acres of weeds rather than rows of wheat. No harvest can be expected if no seed is sown. In the Christian life as well as in business there is such a thing as a missed opportunity. Springtime offers a temporal window in which to invest one’s efforts for future gains. It is a call to earnest effort, not a promise of guaranteed success.

- From "The Springtime of John Paul II", First Things.

John Paul II, pray for us!