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

The learned Professor Weigel, on the eve of the anniversary of the Pope's election, spoke to us on the subject of seven facets that gleam most brightly in the "multisplendored soul" of Pope John Paul II, something he has come to understand through his own meetings with the Pope, his contemporaries and exhaustive bibliographical research that has been most fruitfully expressed in his book Witness to Hope.

Before starting, he told us a rather amusing anecdote about Notre Dame football that occurred around twenty years ago. At a pre-game dinner held jointly by the Notre Dame and Miami U teams, a Protestant chaplain gave a length oration on how he hoped God would help both teams do their best in the next day's game because "God doesn't care who wins and loses." He repeated this refrain over and over again. After dinner had ended, Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz got up and thanked the chaplain for his truly inspiring speech, telling him how true he was...except, while God didn't care about football, His Mother sure did! We applauded, of course.

But seriously, here are the first four categories he spoke on this evening, with a brief synopsis below. It was truly inspiring stuff, and I hope this does as much good for those who read it as for those who heard it.

1. First and foremost, the Pope has a Polish soul

Besides stating a matter of anthropology, Professor Weigel means that Poland and the Poles have learned by their geopolitical sufferings over the last two centuries that what drives history is, as he put it, "not politics or economics, or some combination of politics and economics but culture. And at the hear of culture is cult...what we cherish, what we honor, what we worship." For example, in those pivotal nine days in 1979 during his trip to Poland, he spoke not of politics but reminded his people of their authentic Catholic and Polish identity, and the result, thirteen months later, was the Solidarity movement. This upbringing has given the Pope an advantage over those of us in the west, who no longer see holiness as a force for change; however, the Pope knew it was the only way Poland could survive the dark night of the twentieth century.

2. The Pope has a Carmelite soul

The Pope himself has said he wears the scapular (itself the subject of a forty-eight hour media tempest-in-a-teapot); and this great love of the Carmelite mystical tradition stems ultimately from his days in Wadowice. The leader of his parish's underground youth group during the days of the Nazi occupation was a semi-educated tailor named Jan Taranowski who had, despite his lack of learning, taught himself a vast amount on the subject of the Carmelite mystical tradition. Taranowski established a number of sub-rosa "living rosaries" of fifteen young men led by a particularly mature "animator," one of which was the twenty-year-old Karol Wojtyla. From Taranowski, Karol learned of St. John of the Cross, and of the Carmelite theology of the Cross which sees the self-emptying, self-gift and self-surrender of the Passion as the central pillar of history. History is His story, Professor Weigel concluded.

3. The Pope has a Marian soul

Of course, we already know this because of his writings on the Rosary, even his motto of Totus Tuus (roughly, "All for You," addressed to Mary) and the Virgin's monogram beneath the cross of his Papal coat-of-arms. However, the nature of his Marianology is very important. It too can be traced back to his mentor Taranowski, who introduced him to St. Louis de Montfort's classic devotional manual True Devotion to Mary. Karol, then, was frustrated by traditional Polish Marian piety as inconvenient and obstructive to his relationship with God. However, St. Louis taught him that Mary, who says "Do whatever He tells you," leads to Christ, and through Christ, to the Trinity.

Furthermore, Professor Weigel continued, his Marian piety is influenced by the speculative theology of Hans Urs von Balthazar, who has written in his work The Office of Peter that the Church has often been shaped in the image of great figures from the New Testament. The Church of Contemplation is that of St. John; the Church of Proclamation, St. Paul; the Church of Authority, St. Peter. But behind those figures is the Church of Mary, who was, by virtue of Her fiat, the very first disciple of Jesus as well as Mater Ecclesiae. The Pope laid this out clearly in his 1987 Christmas audience with the Curia (which Weigel jokingly says "is the closest thing the Vatican ever gets to having an office party") where he reminded his cardinals and priests that the Church of Authority, the Vatican, exists for the benefit of the Church of the Disciples, that of Mary.

Lastly, his Marian soul is full of a spirit, and a spirituality of Trust, inherent in Mary's double fiat: enunciated before Gabriel and silently expressed by Her trusting acceptance of the dead body of Her Son beneath the cross.

4. The Pope has a dramatic soul

Professor Weigel doesn't mean simply he wanted to be an actor, but that his love of drama and his mental formation by it led to his belief that life is a drama in both the Greek and Hebrew sense. Life is a drama because we are in constant tension between who we are today and who we should be ideally. Bridging this gap lies at the heart of life, and we have to "mind the gap," as Weigel noted, recalling the signs on the London Underground. Our lives are dramas in a larger drama in which God is the playwright and protagonist. Exactly "one year after being shot in his front yard," as Weigel put it, the Pope went to Fatima where he declared, "In the designs of Providence, there are no mere coincidences." And no matter how quotidian your life is, that's pretty darn dramatic.

The final three categories of the Pope's soul will be detailed in a future post, discussing Weigel's thoughts on the lay/priestly, apostolic and humanistic aspects of this marvelous man.