Faith and Culture

Our Dear Sweet Christ on Earth, John Paul II, Has Died

by Mark and Louise Zwick
In trying to think of where to begin our reflections on the death of our Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, we remembered that when Pope Pius XI died, Dorothy Day placed the following banner headline on the front page of The Catholic Worker: Our Dear Sweet Christ on Earth Has Died. The phrase was borrowed from Saint Catherine of Siena, whom both Dorothy and Peter admired. It was in this way that Catherine had spoken of the Pope: "Our Dear Sweet Christ on Earth." By this she meant that the Pope represented Christ, was his representative. (Catherine also did not hesitate to dialogue with Popes.) We can think of no better headline.

The Holy Father tried to respond to contemporary concerns with the mind and heart of Christ. As he did so, he impressed all who visited him with the intensity of his prayer and profound spirituality.

He framed his response to the culture in terms of the tremendous dignity of the human person made in the image and likeness of God and a consistent ethic of life. His encyclical The Gospel of Life brought together respect for the life of the human person in all its phases and stages, including life in the womb and euthanasia, but also made economics, questions of war and peace, and the death penalty life issues. He wove them into a seamless garment like the Lord's tunic without seams. We found ourselves being against war and aggression and at the same time assisting many poor women have their babies as an alternative to abortion.

With the death of John Paul II we find his name strangely invoked to defend even the incursion into Iraq and the laissez-faire capitalism which includes slave wages.

Before the U. S. invaded Iraq he clearly declared many times that that war would be a defeat for humanity and that it was immoral and illegal. He condemned laissez-faire capital-sm in Ecclesia in America, in Laborem Excercens, in Solliticudo Rei Socialis and in many other places. These would not allow taking the Pope's name in vain.

For us, one of the best encomiums on the Pope came several years ago from John Cardinal O'Connor, when he said that Dorothy Day anticipated the thought of John Paul II. Cardinal O'Connor, a great admirer of the Holy Father, expressed his gratitude to Dorothy not only in words, but also by his actions when he opened her cause for canonization, the final gesture of his life. The Cardinal found that what some had considered very radical in Dorothy to be with the heart of Church teaching and tradition. As he said, "Much of what she spoke of in terms of social justice anticipated the teachings of Pope John Paul II and lends support to her cause."

Readers of the Houston Catholic Worker know that on many occasions we have featured John Paul's writings, reflections, and exhortations to world leaders.

We didn't always appreciate his greatness, however. Like many others, we had been impacted by the post-Vatican II maelstrom, the euphoria created by the expectations of what might come out of the Council. Many American and European Catholics embraced that euphoria and a new dream for the Church. Unfortunately, some of that euphoria eventually had little to do with the documents written by the Catholic Bishops of the world or the decades of profound preparation for the Council. Some of the post-Council enthusiasm did not focus on following the Gospel, giving up all and following Jesus. At the time of the Council, and in succeeding years, the press kept up a negative drumbeat that helped to skew the vision of the Church in the United States and Europe.

Like many others, we were not always enthusiastic about John Paul II in the first years of his Pontificate. He didn't seem to fit in to the euphoria dream church that didn't materialize. The fruit of the euphoria and the criticism eventually resembled another Protestant sect within the Church. Some even tried Protestantism and ended up empty-handed there also.
In the time before the Council we had always been attracted to the radicality of the Catholic Worker Movement in following the Gospel. We believed that one's faith must be lived out. Even though we had a lot of questions after the Council, while we were working full time and then half time in order to have time for service, we helped out at a Catholic Worker soup kitchen. We helped the United Farm Workers in their struggle for those who labored in the fields to bring food to our tables. When we became frustrated that we could not speak Spanish, we moved to El Salvador to get to know the small base com-munities and learn Spanish. We lived there with the poor and listened to criticism from some clergy and journalists about the hierarchy and the Church. We questioned all this papal and hierarchical emphasis. But Archbishop Romero became Archbishop while we lived in El Salvador and that turned us around. The Catholicism of El Salvador and Romero was so different from the living room Catholicism we experienced in our home church in California.

We were faced with the reality of violence. One weekend we attended the retreat of the base communities. The next weekend soldiers broke into the same retreat center and killed the priest and three retreatants. We made it by one week.

After returning to the United States we were faced with many homeless refugees from El Salvador who were escaping the war we escaped with our children. This is the reason we started Casa Juan Diego, the Houston Catholic Worker, although we used all kinds of casuistry to get out of doing it. After we started Casa Juan Diego, we continued to hear and read harangues about how terrible the Pope was.

It was Dorothy and Peter who gradually brought us back to our senses. Prompted by Peter Maurin, who said we needed to make the encyclicals click, we began to read John Paul's encyclicals with other Catholic Workers in Houston as a part of our clarification of thought. We were quite surprised to find that they read very much like the writings of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, although phrased a little more formally. Another important factor was the encouragement John Paul II gave us. We began to be very supported by what he had to say about immigrants and refugees, not to mention war and peace and economics.

In the mid-1990's we began to study and publish articles about the roots of the Catholic Worker movement. We discovered that Dorothy's Catholicism was core to her being in all that she wrote and lived out. We had been peace activists like Dorothy, but were more challenged by her profound Catholicism. We read William Miller's A Harsh and Dreadful Love and his Biography of Dorothy and two books on the life and thought of Peter Maurin, as well as, of course, Peter's Easy Essays. Around this time Brigid Merriman's book, Searching for Christ: The Spirituality of Dorothy Day came out. There was also A Revolution of the Heart: Essays on the Catholic Worker. As we began to become more interested and excited in the philosophers, theologians, saints and cultural and economic critics who had influenced Peter and Dorothy in developing their synthesis of ideas that became the Catholic Worker, we read those writers in the original.

As we came to know the writings of French communi-tarian personalists and the teachings from the early Church on the universal destination of goods and nonviolence, we began to understand why Cardinal O'Connor and we had seen similarities in Dorothy's writings and those of John Paul II. The profound faith of the Pope and that of the founders of the Catholic Worker movement was a faith that had to be lived in the world, that engaged the world, that brought the witness and love of Christ to it.

An awareness of the influence of French personalism on the CW movement helps to under-stand what the Cardinal called her anticipation of the thought of John Paul II, Polish personalist. Those involved in the CW movement realize that the Works of Mercy not only benefit those served, but the action of serving leaves traces, marks, on those serving in a way that impacts their future as well as those around them. Anyone who has ever spent a few months or even days at a Catholic Worker is changed forever in some way. Mounier, French personalist, spoke of how a person becomes a person through acting. John Paul II called this the "intransitive." His "intransitivity thesis" tells us that "in acting we change the world around us, but more importantly we change and transcend ourselves." The Pope emphasizes how the intransitive dimension of our actions shapes our characters: "Human actions once performed," he observes, "do not vanish without trace: they leave their moral value, which constitutes an objective reality intrinsically cohesive with the person, and thus a reality also profoundly subjective."

One of the most important contributions made by the Holy Father was the liberation of the Polish people from the oppressive Communist government. He and his people had lived through the Nazi oppression, only to have it replaced by Communist oppression.

But JPII responded with peaceful means in overthrowing the Communist state. He did not recommend violence or arms (arms are for embracing), but appealed to the people not to be afraid.

Like St. Francis of Assisi, the great pacifist who conquered the face of Europe without firing a shot, so JPII changed the face of Poland that helped to shatter the Iron Curtain.

Never again will we even sing the song "Be Not Afraid" without thinking of our beloved Pope, "Our Dear, Sweet Christ on Earth" and what he accomplished-and what we can accomplish in Christ if we are not afraid.

Houston Catholic Worker, Vol. XXV, No. 4, Special Edition 2005.