For my installation as Minister of Word and Sacrament at Second Church in Richmond, Hanover Presbytery, at my request, invited Father William Stickle to sit with the Commission and take part in worship. Bill was priest at St. Peter’s, the oldest Roman Catholic congregation in the city. I remembered my friendship with him and with his successors as I watched John Paul II’s funeral.
I also recalled that at Union Seminary (now Union-PSCE) in John Leith’s theology class I learned what papal encyclicals are. Like no one else in my experience, Leith caused us to understand their importance — not only to Roman Catholics, but to theological and ethical discourse in the holy universal church for the common good of the world’s peoples. We studied Rerum Novarum (1891) and Mater et Magister (1961). My final year at seminary we joined an ecumenical conference of students and faculty at St. Mary’s Catholic Seminary in Baltimore on the place of Scripture in our tradition.
These experiences prepared me to watch the funeral mass on television with great respect for the church that was the enemy of all Protestants in my childhood and youth. What a long, long way we’ve come from sermons in prestigious churches against the election of John Kennedy, and from Sunday School lectures by missionaries from Brazil who said that the evils they faced in preaching the gospel were Communism and Catholicism.
After all, it was this remarkable pontiff who was instrumental in disarming communism — not only in his native Poland, but also in many parts of the world through his own encyclicals on socialism, capitalism, and the value of labor for human life. He was not simplistically anti-communist; he was equally harsh on a capitalism that refused to allow for strong governments to order and control unrestrained market forces. Like John Calvin, he applauded free enterprise, even wealth, but not for the privilege of one individual or a small, precious elite. Wealth generated by individuals and corporations is for the well being of the whole society.
I also learned in seminary to distinguish the Protestant (especially the Reformed) impact on culture from hierarchical, anti-democratic Roman Catholic influences. For most decades after the Protestant Reformation, that was a valid distinction — with the very existence of America and the evolution of the English parliamentary system giving evidence to that claim.
John Paul II relegated that claim to history. He came to personal and theological maturity in a church that was threatened by Nazism and totalitarian socialism. He had to work out his own “confession of faith” under regimes that were willing to destroy any human life and to curtail any freedom to achieve their ends. Therefore he became the single most recognized, visible, and articulate theologian for human rights, for peace, for democratic government, and for the just war tradition that the world has yet seen. He personally visited 139 countries not only as an advocate for those values, but as a living example of their political and governmental necessity.
Lamin Sanneh of Yale has written in Whose Religion Is Christianity? that equality of persons is a theocentric notion. [That same notion] “is the essential thread of the fabric of a free society based on the rule of law, and has been a major force in the rise of national communities in the West.” (p. 73). Until John Paul II, even allowing for the Second Vatican Council and John the XXIII, the genius of that essential concept was carried by Protestants and especially the Reformed. (Look at the difference between those nations whose colonial overseers were Protestant and those who were Catholic — the Congo versus Ghana for example.) That has changed. Not only has John Paul been an advocate for human rights and religious freedom, he has tried to right the wrongs of a hierarchy of power throughout history, apologizing for the Inquisition, and for the silence of the church against the Nazis. He celebrated mass in Jerusalem and understands Jews as does Paul: as the root of the tree on which God’s people who know Jesus as Lord also flourish.
Finally, his visit to the man in prison, his would-be assassin, marks a fidelity to Scripture and to the teachings of Christ that ought to be the envy of every devotee of the Bible. But I say unto you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous (Mt.5: 44-45).
God made his sun also to shine on his servant John Paul II, who out of the sufferings of this present age in 20th Century Poland, and in the name of Jesus Christ, and on the seat of St. Peter, glorified that same God, and gave evidence of what it means to enjoy him forever. By his witness he has connected the world’s peoples into a holy family. What a long, long way we have come. Thanks be to God.
