John Paul: Our Holy 'Grandfather'

By Elizabeth Foss
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 10/16/03)

I was 12 when John Paul II was elected Pope. I remember the day — it was handled in my family much as other days of historical significance. My mother put us in front of the television and said, "Remember this. This is history." In my mind, the file of events worthy of watching TV was rather slim. I remembered the POWs coming home at the end of the war in Vietnam, the landing on the moon, Nixon’s resignation speech and the election of John Paul I. Honestly, this particular event felt a bit like a re-run.

For my father, however, it was a big deal. What my Italian mother never imagined was that this Pope would be Polish. My father, whose own last name rivaled Wojtyla as an unpronounceable string of consonants, was beside himself. From that day on, I have always thought that the Pope really resembled my late grandfather and I have felt proud to be an interesting blend of Italian and Polish Catholicism.

Through my teen years and in college, I drifted from Catholicism. I went to a public university and was active in inter-denominational Christian fellowships. My understanding of Catholicism was stuck somewhere around the fifth grade. I entered adulthood without any real sense of what it was to be an adult in the Church.

Like so many people of my generation, it was with marriage and children that I began to look at what it meant to be Catholic. Young, idealistic, madly in love and giddy with the joy of a newborn child, I wanted to raise the perfect family and I wanted to right all the wrongs in the universe so that my children would grow up in a beautiful world. I wanted to believe in the power of a good family to nurture souls within its bosom and to change the world outside itself. I knew I needed a mentor on my mission. I found one and he looked eerily like a grandfather I’d scarcely known.

He wrote me letters — letters on the family, on women, on the sacredness of life, on hope. He even wrote letters to my children. I found them all, neatly bound by the Daughters of Saint Paul. The Holy Father quickly became my favorite author. And I read what he wrote voraciously, wondering all the while at the wisdom and the charity of his message. John Paul II believes that "The history of mankind, the history of salvation passes by way of the family ... The family is placed at the center of the great struggle between good and evil, between life and death, between Love and all that is opposed to Love "("Familiaris Consortio"). I believe that too, and I look to him, more than anyone else here on earth, to tell me how to live.

John Paul II extricated for us, from Scripture, a theology of the body that deepens and strengthens our understanding of marriage. He has been steadfast in the tide of culture to protect the sacredness of marriage, of human sexuality, and of the roles to which men and women are called. He exhorts couples again and again to be fully open to each other and therefore to grow in love and to be fully open to God. From this rock-solid foundation, he guides them in the rearing of holy and sound children. He affirms the role of the Church as teacher and mother for families. At once, he charges families with the grave responsibility that is ours because "the future of humanity passes by way of the family," and he offers the warm, wise fatherly guidance that we need to meet that responsibility.

So often, when I am speaking with Catholic parents who admit to knowing little about the faith or who refuse to "follow all those rules," I wonder whether they have read any of John Paul II’s encyclicals. I don’t think we can understand the Church in the third millennium without reading them. More than that, I think to disregard them is to deprive ourselves of a priceless treasure. It is as if our father had taken the time to write beautiful, moving readable letters where all the wisdom of the ages had been poured out lovingly, eloquently for us to read and to ponder and we had left them, unopened, on the counter for years.

For me, the Holy Father has been a personal father, Polish resemblance aside. In our home, we speak about him, pray for him, learn from him. We tell stories of his childhood and his youth, much the way we tell stories about the children’s grandfathers. A particular blessing was the publication of George Weigel’s Witness to Hope. With that book, we were given the treasury of the life story of the man who is our family hero.

I was newly pregnant with a baby to be born at Christmastime the first time I read Witness to Hope with my eldest child. There was never any question that the baby’s middle name would be Karol, after the Polish priest who became Pope. Like Michael and Stephen, whose middle names are that of their grandfathers, Nicholas was given the name of the wise, gentle, Holy Father of us all.

We are blessed, we are privileged, to pray for him daily, to look to him continually for guidance and for safe harbor. Even as he ages before our eyes, he teaches us. With dignity and with grace, he moves ever closer to his Lord. We watch him and we know: he knows Truth; he knows Faith; he knows Love. And he has told us all our lives how we can know as well. He has spoken — your father and mine — are you listening?

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