The Pope's Health

By Russell Shaw
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 12/25/03)

As Pope John Paul II proceeds to live out a lesson that earlier he preached, the rest of us can only watch in awe. Writing about old age in his 1995 encyclical on human life "Evangelium Vitae," John Paul said this:

"In old age, how should one face the inevitable decline of life? How should one act in the face of death? The believer knows that his life is in the hands of God. … In life and in death, he has to entrust himself completely to the ‘good pleasure of the Most High.’"

That act of entrusting is being performed daily now by John Paul before the eyes of the world. Again this Christmas season we shall watch it taking place as he carries out a schedule of ceremonies and events somewhat reduced in comparison with earlier years yet still taxing.

Recently the head of the German bishops’ conference, Cardinal Karl Lehmann of Mainz, chastised media for speculating about the pope’s health. With due respect to Cardinal Lehmann, that’s unrealistic.

For one thing, some of the most notable public speculation hasn’t come from media but from cardinals. Cardinal Lehmann may be following the time-honored custom of using journalists as surrogates to complain about what others do.

More to the point, the speculation in this case inevitably results from John Paul’s choice to remain in the public eye. Not many elderly people in his condition would. For a Pope to do it invites conjecture about how long he can keep it up.

Perhaps — and this also is speculation — John Paul knows, or strongly suspects, that he doesn’t have much time left. In that case, he might reason, it would serve no good purpose to resign. Better to give good example by soldiering on to the end.

But all such speculation must be taken with a grain of salt. Over dinner in Rome some nine years ago, a prominent writer on Vatican affairs assured me with absolute certainty that the pope would die within six months. Within three months, the Vaticanologist unexpectedly had died. The moral is: Bet on the pope.

For obvious reasons, there is much talk these days about the need to make canonical provision for conducting the Church’s affairs if a pope is seriously disabled. This is a serious point.

But what’s envisioned is not as easy as it may sound. Given the dogmatically defined reality that the pope is the highest authority in the Church, how can anyone make decisions of the kind reserved to him over his head?

It may be that this contingency could be handled by a prior agreement to which the pope himself agreed. There are occasional hints that such ad hoc understanding already exists under John Paul. But the whole question calls for close and careful study. It is likely to receive it — in the next pontificate.

Meanwhile, we have a pope who is — and who chooses to be seen as being — in visible decline. Some people find this fact disturbing, others edifying, still others a bit of both. Plainly it flies in the face of today’s cult of youth, and that is by no means a bad thing to do.

In "Evangelium Vitae" John Paul makes the point that the visible presence among us of the elderly is an opportunity to reestablish a "covenant" among the generations — to affirm the human solidarity of the young, the middle-aged, and the old. Now, in his own person, he is giving the entire Church an opportunity to do that. We need to make the most of it.

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