The following is by Susan Hanssen, a colleague of mine at Princeton this year, and a professor of history at University of Dallas.
An escape from the ephemeral: a reflection on days in Rome for the Beatification of John Paul II
Rome is at all times the Eternal City. And this past week, during the festivities for the Beatification of John Paul II, Rome was more than ever a monumental reminder of the difference between the human, the catholic, and the eternal and the “daily news blurb” world that we so often live in.
The royal wedding of Princess Diana and Prince Charles and the assassination attempt against John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square shared the news back in 1981—the decade of “The End of the Cold War.” And it has been six years since John Paul II’s death in 2005 and the stunning experience of 4 million people attending the memorial services in Rome while billions watched on television—the largest funeral in world history, far surpassing Princess Diana’s funeral 14 years ago in 1997. This past week, 400,000 people traveled to London to watch the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton and 1.5 million people traveled to Rome for the Beatification of John Paul II.
The Beatification was a massive live event. You had to be there.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Henry Adams compared modernity’s “religion of world’s fairs”—those great every-10-years public displays of the latest technological and commercial progress, “pageants as ephemeral as stage flats”—to the religious celebrations that could be seen in any wayside town in Europe: “The streets were filled with altars to the Virgin, covered with flowers and foliage; the pavements strewn with paths of leaves and the spring handiwork of nature; the cathedral densely thronged at mass. The scene was graceful.”
Educating man to the worship of “The Dynamo” was a mind-boggling project—each generation has to be trained in the use of the latest gadgets and their teachers could hardly keep ahead of them. Educating man to the worship of “The Virgin” had been at least a coherent program; the nature of man—fallen and free and open to faith—didn’t change from generation to generation, but rather generations upon generations contributed to an accumulated understanding of what it means to be fully human.
This past week, Rome and “The Virgin” manifested their perennial contrast to the ephemeral. The arms of Saint Peter’s Basilica are at their most magnificent when embracing the global church—Lebanese and Mexican, Polish and Vietnamese, Chilean and American, Nigerian and Italian. In fact it seems that after 500 years, the Renaissance piazza of the Borgias is now fulfilling its role as host to a more truly catholic Christian people than ever the Roman church was before 1492. The image of the Mater Ecclesia that John Paul II placed in the piazza after the failed assassination attempt in 1981 looked down on a youthful church responding to an ancient liturgy in a catholic tongue.
Henry Adams was right, religious celebrations continue at their own rhythm, with an inner meaning for live participants, which is ever harder to capture in the thirty-seconds of a podcast. Meanwhile the modern media and modern academia still so often see only what can be seen in a minute-long broadcast: weddings and funerals are measured by how many watched and what everyone wore. As C. S. Lewis once said, fashions are always coming and going, but mostly going. The gap between perennial and ephemeral cultures is widening.
The Beatification of John Paul II was contemplative and retrospective—a service in memoriam for one of the great figures of the 20th century.
Benedict XVI said that the Church declared him “blessed” because of his heroic practice of the Gospel virtue of faith: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” (Jn 20:29); “Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven” (Mt 16:17); “Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her by the Lord” (Lk 1:45).
And a lot of faith was needed in the 20th century—faith in the dignity of man despite the horrors of genocide, faith in human freedom despite the failures of the utopian project of communism and the more banal and vulgar displays of commercial capitalism, and faith that God was with his people despite the many scandalous failings of the Christian people.
Some pilgrims camped in St. Peter’s, others attended a three-hour vigil in the Circus Maximus, some arrived at 5 a.m. for the ceremony that lasted until noon; most were still in the piazza at 6 p.m. waiting in line to file reverently past his tomb. There was plenty of time for reflection for the 1.5 million pilgrims.
As the generation of young people who made up the John Paul II Youth Generation come into their own as adults in the 21st century, in the Third Millenium of the Christian era, it was impressive to be once again, all together, reflecting on the example, re-listening to the words, re-hearing the voice of this “grandpa” to so many Christians around the globe. We recalled his loss of his entire family in early youth, his school days in the underground university studying Polish poetry and theatre, his secret years in seminary under the Nazi regime, his long struggle as a young priest and bishop to keep families and church communities alive under the rigors of the Communist regime, his efforts to explain the meaning of Vatican II to a global Church in confusion, his efforts to work with world leaders to end communism and relieve poverty in the Third World . . . efforts that went ahead with the rhythm of his daily prayer.
John Paul II as a man of faith, lost in intense prayer, is the image that the crowd in Rome remembered, remembers, and will remember most.