Page 1297 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 5 April 2005
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There was the attempted knifing. He had a run-in with cancer and, indeed, his recent illness. At all times the pope not only maintained his own personal dignity, he also showed that he never lost the knowledge that others also suffered and at all times needed his support and succour, and he was able to give that without reservation. I think that is what people admired most about Pope John Paul II.
He was a controversial pope who will no doubt be reviewed by history. Some will condemn him for being too conservative and some will say he was not conservative enough. You have to admire the man’s dedication, his conviction to his cause and his consistency in the things that he was always unwavering about—attacking poverty and addressing injustice, particularly about the rights of indigenous people. It was not just here in Australia that he spoke about the rights of the indigenous, it was also in Africa, Asia and South America. For me, it is that consistency of approach that lingers in my mind.
He took the role of pope to a new level. Archbishop Francis Carroll, the archbishop of the Canberra archdiocese, said, “Pope John Paul has been a much-loved leader of the church who took the papacy to the people, becoming the most travelled pope in history.” That accessibility impressed people.
It was unusual for a pope to go somewhere once but, with a country like Australia, the fact that he got back here twice in his official role I think is amazing—without the trips he had to do to all the other countries. It was his understanding that leadership is not about living in an ivory tower; that it is not about being isolated; that it is actually about serving the people he understood so well that drove his travels around this world.
I also believe that his personal courage impressed people. Stalin is reputed to have asked one day why he should be afraid of the pope. He said, “How many divisions does he have?” This was a man who did not have a single division; he did not have a single bullet; but he had his faith and his conviction. We see Lech Walesa’s words often repeated about the courage he gave the Solidarity movement to fight something that seemed unable to be fought by ordinary people.
We see his support for Mother Teresa in her work in Calcutta and in truly addressing some of the most shocking poverty in the world. We see his personal attempts to reconcile the faiths, whether it was the Catholic and Protestant arms of the Christian church or whatever.
The pope worked with the Muslim faith; he was one of the first popes to go into some of the significant mosques. He worked with the Jewish religion, and there were his visits to Israel. Without forgetting Palestine: he worked with the Palestinian people in their search for self-determination.
The pope was a man who was not afraid to address the failings of his own organisation—and he acknowledged those. They were as diverse as things like calling the American bishops to Rome and saying, “What is going on?”—and then having the courage to apologise to those who were victims of the church through some of the practices of those priests who did not carry out their tasks well.
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