Inspiring Man Represents All Of Us

Why would hundreds of thousands of Mexicans camp out overnight at a chilly racetrack to gain a glimpse of Pope John Paul II? Why would 20,000 St. Louis teenagers chant “We love you” at a youth rally, or 100,000 attend a Mass at the city’s Trans World Dome?

As the head of a church with a billion members, any man would attract crowds. But not with the fervency and love that this man sparks. Though he is now very frail, with a visibly trembling hand, when he speaks, he moves crowds deeply. Why?

First, all know this may be his last visit. Second, he speaks in the language of whatever people he has visited in his 85 trips abroad. We admire a man whose native tongue is Polish, who took the time to learn our language whether it’s English, Spanish, French, Italian.

Third, he has keen insight on each culture and senses the deepest feelings of those he is visiting. In his fourth visit to Mexico, he mentioned the Virgin of Guadalupe six times in his brief arrival statement. She appeared to an Indian peasant named Juan Diego in 1531, a decade after the brutal Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire. She asked him to tell the bishop to build a church on the hill where she appeared.

But the bishop did not believe Juan Diego. On Dec. 12, 1531, she appeared again and told him to pick flowers from the hillside, gather them in his cloak and take them to the bishop. When he opened his shroud, it bore her image, that of a dark-faced woman.

The garment has hung ever since in series of churches built on the site. The newest basilica, a cylindrical building built in 1976, is the most visited shrine in the world, after St. Peter’s in Rome. “For us, she is the mother of Mexico, and she is my mother. She is dark like us. We adore her every day,” Clara Frias Tapia, 55, told a reporter.

In St. Louis, the pope insightfully recalled the 1857 Dred Scott decision, a Missouri case in which the Supreme Court declared “an entire class of human beings, people of African descent, outside…the Constitution’s protection.

“America faces a similar time of trial today,” he said. “Today the conflict is between a culture that affirms, cherishes and celebrates life and a culture that seeks to declare entire groups of human beings: the unborn, the terminally ill, the handicapped and others considered `unuseful,’ to be outside the boundaries of legal protection.”

Finally, John Paul is inspirational in what he says.

He challenged Catholics to “stir up a new springtime of holiness” across the Americas, linking North and South America against the “social sins” of violence and injustice. In the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, he spoke in English, calling for “No more violence, terrorism and drug trafficking. No more torture or other forms of abuse.” Applause erupted after each sentence.

In St. Louis he thanked “the American people for the countless works of human goodness” which “have been such a part of the history of your country. I know that you will hear my plea to open wide your hearts to the ever-increasing plight and urgent needs of our less fortunate brothers and sisters throughout the world.”

In his first major message to the Americas as a whole, a 135-page exhortation, “Ecclesia in America,” he acknowledges that many of the hemisphere’s 500 million Catholics are only nominally Catholic, but called on them to engage in intense prayer, and to seek “a personal encounter with Christ.” He said the church needs “new order, methods and expression” for a “new evangelization of America.”

He noted the Americas are tied together by immigration and Latin America’s $697 billion debt. “The decision to speak of `America’ in the singular,” John Paul explains in the document, “was an attempt to express not only the unity which in some way already exists, but also to point to that closer bond which the peoples of the continent seek and which the church wishes to foster.

“In America as elsewhere in the world, a model of society appears to be emerging in which the powerful predominate, setting aside and even eliminating the powerless.” While he called for a “preferential love for the poor,” he added, “If evangelization of the leadership sector is neglected, it should not come as a surprise that many who are a part of it will be guided by criteria alien to the Gospel and at times openly contrary to it.”

This pope speaks to all of us, inspiring any who listen. That is his appeal.