Weigel on the Soul of Pope John Paul II: Part II
Notes from a lecture given at the Domus Sanctae Mariae Guadalupe in Rome by Professor George Weigel on 15 October 2003

5. The Pope has a lay corner in his priestly soul

Weigel himself admitted this was a peculiar way of putting it; he was speaking in a pyschological rather than theological sense when he said this. The Pope, first and foremost, is a man in love with and in awe with the gift he received when he was ordained to the priesthood. After all, Weigel noted, the Pope's been the best vocations director the Church has ever had. What is important here is to note the way the Pope's priesthood was formed during his early years of service. Previous popes had spent their days as young priests as junior diplomats or seminary professors, and often knew they wanted to be a priest from an early age.

The Pope, then Karol Wojtyla, well, he wanted to be an actor, and had to be dragged by the Spirit into the priesthood as he expected he would fulfill his vocation in the church as a layman. Furthermore, rather than filing reports or grading papers, he spent his early days as a pastor essentially hanging around with kids. He made a series of close friendships with the university students under his care, and that resulted in a profound exchange of gifts. He formed them into good Christians and they formed him into a profound and articulate minister of the Gospel. It wasn't a case of him trying to be like them and get down to their level; they wanted to be like him. The result has been one of the the rallying cries of this papacy, that of the universal call to holiness.

6. The Pope has an Apostolic Soul

Well, of course, he would. He's the successor of Peter, and like any other bishop, is the inheritor of the authority and charism of the Apostles. That being said, his Apostolic soul goes farther back than that. His belief in the universal call to holiness is to be lived out in service to equip us to be God's presence in the world. The Church has a distinct and correct view of history which sees it as stretching from creation and fall through the Incarnation and finally to the Kingdom of God, and that must be apostolically preached, and best preached by example, like the Pope's own, or by the likes of the soon-to-be-beatified Mother Teresa.

7. The Pope has a humanistic soul

First, a story. In 1959, when Bl. John XXIII sent out a memo to his bishops about what to talk about at the upcoming council (or at least how to organize a commission to discuss how to organize a commission on what to talk about at the upcoming council), he got a lot of rubbish in response. Most bishops sent vast, dull laundry lists about niggling liturgical changes and shuffling the odd paragraph around in canon law. Weigel cites the spectacularly ridiculous proposal by the then-archbishop of Washington, who, after a number of forgettable ideas, wrote down that the Church, in light of developments in science, should make a pronouncement on the possibility of intelligent life on other planets. Weigel reports it's even funnier to read in Latin. Having lived in that area, he tells us probably the good archbishop should have been more interested in finding intelligent life in his own diocese, let alone Mars.

That being said, young Bishop Wojtyla sent in, not a list, but a philosophical essay. His question was simply: What happened? What had gone wrong with the twentieth century? His answer was it was a crisis in the idea of the human person, which had philosophically gone off the rails in high culture a few centuries earlier. These ideas of the "Enlightenment" era, when mated with modern technology and science produced, not peace and prosperity, but Hitler, Stalin and two world wars. The Council, he said, should try to restore that idea of the human person lost so long ago. And that idea is ultimately rooted in Christ, the image of our humanity. Only in contemplation of the Holy Face, a devotion dear to his heart, would we come to know ourselves. Instead, there's only the possibility of a brave new world, as Weigel said, "a world ultimately without love."

Weigel concluded by saying that, simply, all the Pope has done during his reign is the product of this great soul. "This," he said, "is the great Christian witness of our time, because for him, Jesus is the answer to the question that is every human life."

Part III, the final installment, will cover some interesting comments on Theology of the Body that Weigel had to say in response to one of my own comments at the Question-and-Answer session afterwards.