The funeral of Pope John Paul II was unlike anything the current generation of college students had ever seen on television: a massive spiritual event half a world away; studded with the ancient and the sacred. Gregorian chants instead of chattering pundits. Classical Latin meets FOX News.
Perhaps because of this lack of precedence, media covered the papal funeral in much the same way they once covered national political conventions — long stretches where a viewer could enter an event and simply experience it, unencumbered by rolling punditry and commercial interruption.
We need more of this, and not just in politics.
This was also the first true “mega-event” to occur anywhere near a church or infused with such pure spirituality in our lifetimes. Few undergrads can recall the wedding of Diana and Charles, and that was little more than a soap opera infused with spires and organs. As Americans, our public history and its imagery has confined itself largely to functions of the state, or the state of the economy.
Christmas specials aren’t even clothed as religious events anymore, unless you pray at Marshall Fields’. The Olympics and their pomp glorify the perfectibility of Man on Earth, humanism at its pinnacle. Presidential Inaugurations or national political conventions have a sense of grandeur; and in their observance we may bow our heads to God. But the entire exercises are nothing if not obeisance to the state. We need more of what we got last week: Ancient and powerful spiritual traditions given place in our public identity and respect in our discourse. If television and other electronic media are the real educators of Generation Y, the molders of our collective consciousness, we need more of this.
A Protestant, I knew precious little about Karol Wyotola before last week. Frankly, I didn’t know who he was at all. If you aren’t Catholic, or even if you are, maybe you didn’t either. But here was a man of history, in every sense of the word. I’ve been gobbling up all that’s been written since then, from pullout sections in most every newspaper to hour-long C-SPAN specials with papal biographer George Wiegel. There is much to know.
How many of us can explain the significance of Lech Walesa and the Polish Workers Movement? Or the historical importance of Vatican II? The tenets of Liberation Theology? Likely few.
In the academy we know, connections to modern and ancient are rarely discussed. Ancient is ancient; then was then. Faith is tradition at best, corrosive to free thought at worst. Politics is secular, and history is distant. “What they did then” and “what we do now” have clear delineations.
Yet here was a man who smashed those notions to bits. He became a political force because he dared travel the globe to preach with vigor and certainty that there is nothing new under the sun. Truth is absolute, there is right and there is wrong. To deny man God is to deny man freedom, and to deny God is an injustice that cannot long endure. John Paul II was a rare intellectual figure, the first “modern pope,” as he has been anointed, who drew on ancient, fixed ideas that hadn’t changed. To many this made him a doctrinaire conservative or a reactionary who wouldn’t change with the times. To him, it seemed, times didn’t merit any changing. And yet pundits, left and right, international or domestic, agree on one thing: he changed the world. It’s big stuff, with implications for our society and our world.
As a moment in time, connotations in religion or politics aside, John Paul’s death marks another closing demarcation on the 20th century. Ronald Reagan’s death was a bit of this as well. When Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev leave us, what will be left? To most of us these people are the newsreel snapshots of memory from childhood. But our childhoods were carved amid big things in the world. 1979 meant we were a gleam in the eyes of our father. It was the year John Paul returned to Poland and sparked a revolution with the power of faith. 1989 found many of us in little more than playpens while the foundations of the world we are about to inherit shook violently from Beijing to Berlin. It’s time for our history books to catch up. John Paul’s greatness is that he simply can’t be written out of them, and neither can his ideas. Neither can his faith.
Faith is a touchy subject at this and other universities like it. But they should, at the very least, realize how far removed so much of history is to their students. Examine the late pope as a pedagogical device, as a mover of history, and give him the best compliment of which secular institutions are capable: make “John Paul the Great” required reading.
Eric B. Cullen ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in history.
