A Saint for Our Time
John Paul II was one of the most influential men of our time. The spiritual leader of over a billion Christians, he was a recognized world leader as well.His moral authority helped break the grip of communism on his native Poland and jump-start the velvet revolutions that brought down the Soviet Union in 1989. He tirelessly urged nations to find nonviolent alternatives to war, reduce poverty and discrimination, and eliminate abortion, euthanasia, and capital punishment. He reached out to tens of thousands of young people in annual worldwide rallies, championed the natural environment before doing so became fashionable, encouraged ecumenical collaboration and interfaith dialogue, and despite his opposition to ordaining women, defended gender equality in the workplace.
John Paul wrote poems and plays, several books on philosophy and theology, fourteen encyclicals, thirty-six apostolic letters, and thousands of pages of magisterial documents. He traveled around the globe several times over to deliver nearly four thousand sermons and speeches to millions of people, Christian and non-Christian alike. Known as a firm ruler of the Church, he also humbly begged forgiveness for past crimes and misdemeanors committed by churchmen. And he showed the world how to die with patience, grace, and faith. Within hours of his passing, people were calling him “John Paul the Great” and shouting “Santo subito!”—“Sainthood now!”
Serving as pope doesn’t by itself warrant sainthood. Fewer than a third of the pontiffs have been canonized. Nor is performing great deeds in the world, however admirable they may be, a sufficient qualification. Still less is mere celebrity.
Perfection isn’t a necessary condition for sainthood either. Such purity is reserved for God alone, and we risk transforming genuine saints into saccharine caricatures if we try to bestow it on them. Saints throughout the history of Christianity have wrestled with shortcomings, doubts, weaknesses, confusions, and occasionally outright sinfulness. St. John Paul is no exception in this regard. Critics as well as many of his admirers have pointed out that his pontificate was a bit too magisterial and his response to the scandal of sex abuse in the Church a bit too slow. He was a man of incredible faith and uncommon decency. But he was, after all, human, as all saints are.
What makes a saint—what makes John Paul a saint—is not ecclesial and worldly titles or unquestionable moral and spiritual purity, but a yearningly tenacious cleaving to the Creator, a heartfelt resolution to embrace in word and deed our own God-likeness despite the realization that we’ll often fall short, and a willingness to spend ourselves in loving service to God and one another. John Paul himself described sainthood in terms of holiness. “Holiness,” he wrote, “is to raise one’s eyes to the summits. It is intimacy with God the Father who is in Heaven. In this intimacy, each one of us is aware of our nature, with all its limitations and difficulties.”
Reading the lives of holy men and women can inspire us to strive for holiness in our own limited and difficult lives. But sometimes they can seem too historically remote to serve as fruitful role models for us. Not so with John Paul II. He was a man of our time. Now he’s a saint for our time.
—from the book John Paul II: A Short Biography, by Kerry Walters
John Paul II: A Short Biography
In John Paul II: A Short Biography, Kerry Walters depicts the highlights of the pope’s life in an easy-to-read style. Pick up this book in our online store for just $4.99!While you’re shopping, check out Kerry Walters’s newest biography: Saint Oscar Romero: Pastor, Prophet, Martyr.
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