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I remember as a boy of 11 the second time the
newspaper headline read "The Pope is Dead!" I initially thought it was an old
paper that had not been discarded, but it was not. Pope John Paul I died after a
little over a month in office. A short time later the first non-Italian in over
450 years, Karol Cardinal Wojtyla, ascended the throne of Peter.
To be honest, over the next few years, through high
school, that is, I don't have distinct memories of the Pope. We prayed for him
in every Mass and his picture was in every rectory and in the hall at our high
school. It really wasn't until I went to college, however, that I slowly begin
to realize what an awesome gift he was to the Church.
While an undergraduate, at a Catholic University
mind you, I first encountered open hostility to the Pope. It perplexed me. I had
known lax Catholics, but even they had some respect for the Pope and the
teaching of the Church-even if they weren't ready to live by it! Now I found
myself engaging peers and professors who thought that the Pope was wrong, out of
touch, and outdated. We all can rehearse the list by now. Divorce and
remarriage, married clergy, women priests, homosexual acts, artificial
contraception, so-called abortion "rights", and other issues were burning then
just as they still are today-though not as brightly now, thanks to JPII! Some
wanted to be in dialogue with His Holiness and not to be taught by him. The
world and the critics would discover that had a marvelous way of teaching
through dialogue, a dialogue that was rooted in divinely revealed truth and
natural law, so it was a dialogue with a purpose and an end that was faithful to
the Gospel! As a result, twenty-six years after his pontificate began, the whole
world knows with even greater clarity what the Catholic Church believes and
teaches, even if some within and without the Church continue to place themselves
obstinately in opposition to it. That is the job of a shepherd, to feed his
flock in the green pastures of truth and Pope John Paul II kept us in verdant
fields.
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