Monday, March 07, 2005
EVEN now, when he is unable to give his Wednesday audiences, meet foreign diplomats or travel, he is still on active service. Having spent so much of his pontificate encouraging the world to respect life, he is pursuing another agenda in his last days. It has to do with the central human problem of pain and suffering. This Pope is teaching us how to die.
Perhaps it’s a message that the world needs to hear. We want to deny ageing, sickness and death more than we ever did before. It’s not just that many of us botox our bodies out of their natural state. Sick and elderly people are made to believe they are a burden on society or their relatives and are encouraged to despise their condition. In Holland, what started out as ‘mercy killing’ soon became voluntary euthanasia. Before long, it wasn’t even the elderly person’s call any more. Now relatives and friends are the ones to determine a sick person’s ‘best interests’. Involuntary euthanasia is widespread and some old people in Holland prefer to attend doctors over the border in Germany because they are apprehensive about what might happen locally. Meanwhile, Britain’s best-known bioethicist, Baroness Warnock, who was feted by the Irish Commission for Assisted Human Reproduction at a recent conference here, has suggested that elderly people should request euthanasia rather than linger on as a burden on their families.
That is the culture which JPII is determined to counter. As a young man in Nazi-occupied Poland he immersed himself in the writings of the suffering Carmelite mystics, St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Avila. Today, a not-so-naïve old man clings to the image of the crucified Christ abandoning himself utterly to the will of the Father and being vindicated in that self-sacrifice by the resurrection. As his physical burdens intensify, his life becomes more unmistakably a prayer of self-sacrifice, spending himself in service to the truths on which he has staked his life.
That is the Pope from Galilee. The point of it all is to embrace the human condition fully. As a young man, a lover of sport and deep friendship, he could get ready and go where he wanted. Now, bound up in old age, he enters deep into the world of suffering where, like any human being, he would rather not go. Yet by witnessing to the dignity of human life in the midst of pain and suffering, JPII is doing what he always did: leading by example.
In a world grown suspicious of the idea of heroes, here surely is a man who stands out. Get to know him while he’s still with us. Something tells me you’ll be talking to your grandchildren about him.
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