Rome
MARIA, a twentysomething from Poznan with a gentle face, looks at me through bleary eyes. She has slept all night on a low wall that surrounds the Castel Sant’Angelo, a perch with a distant view of St. Peter’s Basilica. Given that the wall looks about 10 inches wide, and that she seems to have had only a thin plastic mattress for comfort, I say to her that this is quite a feat. She shrugs and insists she’s not so tired. The rims of her eyes tell a different story, but the redness may just be from the tears she has been shedding all week.
Even as Maria contemplates returning home–she’ll have to catch another ride from a stranger and drive another 25 hours–she is unfazed. “I could not have missed this. It would be like not going to the funeral of a close member of my family.”
Maria is one of an estimated two million Poles who in the last week boarded trains, clambered onto already full buses, hitchhiked, or, if they were really lucky, found space on crowded charter planes before the Roman authorities closed one of the city’s airports, to express their unbounded gratitude, respect, and above all love for Pope John Paul II. Here they met with perhaps three million others from all over the world who poured into this eternal city, and waited–waited more than 36 hours to glimpse the dead pontiff’s body or waited in a sports stadium that gave them a distant, half-obscured view of the funeral ceremony last Friday.
Much has been said already about the extraordinary legacy of Pope John Paul II, but it was only at his funeral that I truly grasped the scale and range of this man’s achievements. It was, curiously, in the choreography of the occasion that the impact of the late pontiff on the spiritual, social, and political life of humanity could best be seen.
Encased in a simple coffin made of cypress, marked only by the sign of the cross, Pope John Paul II’s remains lay on a small bier, resting on an ornate carpet before the altar on the steps of St. Peter’s. Behind the altar sat 180-odd cardinals, the princes of the church, resplendent in red robes.
To the cardinals’ right sat a fair number of the world’s religious leaders. In the front row sat the archbishop of Canterbury, the first ordained head of the Anglican church ever to attend such an event. There were Eastern Orthodox prelates and representatives of other Christian denominations. But there were also rabbis and imams, a powerful reminder of another achievement of the late pope. It is easy now to take for granted friendly relations among Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and moderate Muslims. But it was during John Paul’s pontificate that the biggest advances were made: He was the first pope to visit a synagogue and a mosque.
To the cardinals’ left sat the temporal leaders of the world, monarchs, presidents, prime ministers–from Europe, America, the Middle East, Asia. They had seen a papacy that not only played a pivotal role in liberating millions of people from communism, but also led millions of Catholics to see their faith as a practical guide to their earthly life, not some remote function of the soul. The brave stands John Paul II took on abortion, euthanasia, marriage, and other matters may have been ignored by some Catholics, but they helped promote these issues in the public consciousness. Every one of those leaders who attended the funeral knows better now than ever that one billion Catholics are willing to play a positive role in politics–and that they will not be ignored.
It would be expecting too much to ask that the next pope step up to John Paul’s level, even if the Holy Spirit is working overtime. But this great man’s legacy will live on, in any case. He has already changed the world, made it freer, more spiritual, more aware of the challenges to human dignity and life. As Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the archbishop of Westminster, said in Rome last week, John Paul’s legacy is assured. It is “the legacy of a papacy that was not only in the service of the church but in the service of the world.”
Gerard Baker, U.S. editor of the Times of London, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
