Friday, April 08, 2005
”IF YOU LOVE ME, KEEP MY COMMANDMENTS”
“John Paul, we love you.” Karol Wojtyla heard it chanted by countless crowds around the world. In what may go down in history as the largest funeral in the West has seen, their presence told him one more time, “John Paul we loved you.”
He lost his mother in childhood and his father by the time he was twenty. He witnessed the horror of Auschwitz 20 miles away from the town where he grew up. He watched his neighbors being marched away never to return. His love and his need for love was generated in the midst of one of the greatest tragedies that man has wrought. Perhaps it could be said that his love was a reaction to that horror—a reaction that never went away. His Pontificate was a never-ending expression of that tragedy that shaped him. The 264th Pope of the Roman Catholic Church substituted the family of God’s Church for his own lost family. Perhaps he needed the love of the crowds as much as they needed to give it to him.
Always the crowds knew that he loved them back. Unconditionally. He loved the world with no strings attached, and the world got the message. This love could be had for free.
If he is now called “Great” it is not for the end of communism he was instrumental in bringing about; it is not for his teachings though he was an untiring teacher right up to the day he died, and left writings that will be studied for generations. If he is called “Great” it is for those exchanges of love that took place whenever people were in his presence.
Emotions are running high today. In time they will cool. Then the reality must be addressed. While the world loved him, Catholics in the Western world often ignored what he had to say. There may be more Catholics in the world today than ever before. Do they practice the faith? Are they all at Mass on Sunday? Are there unprecedented numbers of students in the seminaries? Are marriages healthy? Are families counted as the greatest value the world offers? Is all life treasured? Are we witnessing unprecedented holiness in the clergy?
Love, it would seem, has not generated goodness. Love, it would seem is little more than high emotion. If he convinced the world to love, he did not convince the world to keep God’s Commandments. He did not draw the world to the practice of the faith. Love as merely emotional outpouring, is not worth much.
John Paul II was no disciplinarian. He couldn’t bear to impose consequences. Did he see Auschwitz in the very effort to govern, and so rejected it? He didn’t uphold standards in the way that he was uniquely suited to uphold them. Perhaps he couldn’t bear the thought that the world would love him less for doing it.
He invited the world to come through the Needle’s Eye, and the world trampled down the gate in the name of love.
What will be the legacy of the man who loved? Now that he has gone and the love fest has ended, will the world finally get around to listening to what he told us, that Jesus Christ is Lord, and that He gave us Commandments and a Church to mold us into the people He wanted us to be? Or will the emotion cool and the world move on its merry way still trying to mold Christ into whatever image the mood of the moment dictates?
Love is worth little if it excuses vice, if it fails to draw forth holiness, if it doesn’t change us. Love is worth nothing if it ignores the God-Man of Love who came to draw all of humanity to Himself.
