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Well, he has always said that he was going to keep going till the very last. Is this foolish? Maybe. No one could begrudge the great man, who has just embarked on his 97th pilgrimage abroad, a well-deserved rest. Admittedly, it's a sad day when the barest performance minimum ("He's walking! He's talking!") is seen as an unexpected triumph. Nevertheless, the Roman Catholic Church's supreme pastor is giving the last full measure of devotion to his Church and his calling, turning himself into a living icon representing the virtue of suffering for the sake of others. Whatever one's criticism of his pontificate, it is impossible not to be moved by his enduring sense of mission. Why does he do it? I once spent an hour standing ten feet from him in a Jerusalem courtyard, as he waited in an SUV to leave for the airport. I studied his face, especially his hooded, fathomless eyes. He seemed as old as the world, lost in a mystical cloud of prayer and contemplation. Or maybe he was just tired. Nevertheless, in that moment I thought of Dostoevsky's holy monk Elder Zosima, about whom Alexei Karamazov said, "He is a saint, and his heart knows the secret of regeneration for all, the power that will finally establish the rule of truth on earth." I choose to think that's why he carries on, despite it all. If the glory days of this papacy have faded into a troubled twilight, so, it seems, has World Youth Day. There are dramatically fewer young people to greet the pope in Toronto than there have been in 18 previous World Youth Days. Organizers expect the numbers of youth pilgrims not to exceed 200,000 — still the size of a small city, but half a million less than was predicted two years ago, when Toronto was chosen as the site for this year's event. The sex-abuse scandal in the American branch of the Church may have something to do with the depressed numbers (still, more than one out of every four registered participants comes from the United States). There are several more likely explanations, however, offered by World Youth Day officials and others. For one, holding the event in Canada has proven problematic. The Catholic Church there, like most Canadian churches, has been in steep decline, and the government is aggressively secular. The Canadian bishops are weak and ineffectual, and the Catholic Church itself has been weakened by its own child sex-abuse scandals in years past. Canada has a relatively small population spread out across a continent, making the ratio of host-country participants small. And, the Canadian government, citing immigration concerns, denied an unusual number of visa requests. Furthermore, WYD officials reportedly discouraged youth under 16 from coming, in an attempt to return the annual event to its original vision, which was to be a meeting for older teenagers and young adults. Younger Catholics swamped the 1993 WYD in Denver, boosting its attendance numbers considerably. Given the precarious state of the pope's health, there was no way to guarantee that John Paul would be present at the event, which surely kept a number of pilgrims who might otherwise have gone from spending the money for the trip. Finally, there's no getting around the effect of September 11. Given the world situation, would you be willing to send your children to another country, one where Islamic radicals are known to be active, to attend a large, explicitly Christian public event that would present a near-irresistible target for Muslim terrorists? Along those lines, it has to be counted a loss to American Catholics, and to America itself, that John Paul did not schedule a visit to Ground Zero in New York as part of this North American pilgrimage, which will take him to Mexico and Guatemala as well. There was speculation last fall that the pontiff would stop at the disaster site to pray, but Vatican officials insist that was never considered. "There were some people in New York who hoped that he would come simply to visit or pray at the World Trade Center, but there's no way he can just skip in and skip out," the Jesuit father Thomas J. Reese told the Associated Press. "If he comes to New York, he has to meet with the president, meet the governor, go to the United Nations, and lead a big mass." Really? President Bush, Governor Pataki, and Mayor Bloomberg could have arranged to meet him there, pray with him, and even allow the pontiff to celebrate an onsite mass for the families of the dead, if the pope so chose. No one would have expected the frail pontiff to undertake a full schedule in New York. The missed opportunity for evangelical witness almost breaks one's heart. The sight of this brave and tireless successor of St. Peter, standing once again at a site of one of history's most notorious mass murders and prophetically preaching the gospel of life to a world hell-bent for death, would have been breathtaking the world over. It is hard to believe that John Paul, the old actor who has always shown a profound appreciation for the power of theatricality, didn't understand this. John Paul need not have said much about the scandal had he come here, but anything he would have said, no matter how brief, indicating that he knows how much faithful American Catholics are suffering these days-especially the youth who have suffered directly — and encouraging them to remain steadfast in the faith, would have been like balm in Gilead. Well, however disappointing for us Americans, that may be expecting too much from a man who has already given more than anyone can reasonably have expected from him. His surprising liveliness upon arriving in Canada surely has something to do with the well-known fact that John Paul loves young people, and draws strength from their presence. Watching televised images of that dear old soul reaching out with trembling hands to draw an adoring 10-year-old girl in for a kiss on the cheek (she had said to him, "I love you"), I thought of old Zosima again, saying to his followers, "I shall not die before enjoying one more talk with you, my dear ones, before once more looking at your dear faces and once more pouring out my soul to you." |
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one could have failed to have been moved — first to shock, perhaps
pity, then to admiration — by the sight of the frail and stooped
Pope John Paul II descending under his own power from the papal plane
in Toronto yesterday. On his previous pilgrimage, he had to be taken off
the aircraft by an elevator device, the 82-year-old pontiff being too
weak to walk. But arriving in Canada, John Paul showed himself stronger
than he has been in months (at least in public), and in his welcoming
remarks, spoke with a much clearer and firmer voice than he has used of
late. The pontiff's flesh is weak, but the spirit is clearly willing —
and sometimes it conquers. 
