Fr. Roger J. Landry
The Landing
Editorial
The Anchor
June 2, 2006
Last weekend Pope Benedict embarked on the first foreign pilgrimage of his own design. As he stated in his inaugural talk at Warsaw’s airport, he went to Poland in order to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor’s dramatic life. But his deeper purpose was, as he mentioned in his final homily in Krakow, to inspire Polish Catholics to follow in those same footsteps.
Even before his election, Pope Benedict described that John Paul II’s most salient trait was his faith. In his famous homily at the largest funeral in the history of the world, then Cardinal Ratzinger said that Pope John Paul II was more than every other attribute a disciple of Jesus Christ. The greatest way for the Polish people to honor the memory of their famous countryman, he said, was to inhale deeply the same air of faith that Karol Wojtyla breathed and then exhale that faith to Europe and the world just like Wojtyla did “with extraordinary power and effectiveness.”
Benedict stated that just as Wojtyla had a special vocation for the good of the Church and the world, so do the Polish people. He told the two million Poles assembled in Krakow’s Blonie Park, “When Karol Wojtyla was elected to the See of Peter in order to serve the universal Church, your land became a place of special witness to faith in Jesus Christ. You were called to give this witness before the whole world. This vocation of yours is always needed, and it is perhaps even more urgent than ever, now that the Servant of God has passed from this life. Do not deprive the world of this witness!” Benedict called them repeatedly to “stand firm in faith,” just as John Paul II stood firm in the midst of repeated attempts to eliminate it faith or push it to the boundaries of modern life.
To illustrate the stakes of the vocation and mission to which he was calling them, Benedict visited the concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau. There he described that the deepest motivation behind the Holocaust was not the Nazis’ brutal anti-Semitism and anti-humanism, as real and destructive as those were. It was rather a desire to kill God — and annihilate faith in him.
“The rulers of the Third Reich,” he said in a paragraph that deserves to be read at least a thousand times, “wanted to crush the entire Jewish people, to cancel it from the register of the peoples of the earth. … Deep down, those vicious criminals, by wiping out this people, wanted to kill the God who called Abraham, who spoke on Sinai and laid down principles to serve as a guide for mankind, principles that are eternally valid. If this people, by its very existence, was a witness to the God who spoke to humanity and took us to himself, then that God finally had to die and power had to belong to man alone — to those men, who thought that by force they had made themselves masters of the world. By destroying Israel, by the Shoah, they ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful.”
Benedict wanted the Polish people to be aware that the human tendency to try to kill God and extirpate faith in him in order to supplant it with a “faith of their own invention” and “in the rule of the powerful” did not die when the concentration camps ceased functioning. In a homily in Warsaw, he alluded to an idea he first articulated in his headline-grabbing sermon the day before he was elected pope: that there is a new scourge of totalitarianism in the world which needs to be resisted by people standing firm in the faith. It is the “dictatorship of relativism.” This new intellectual despotism, like Nazism, has no room for God or for faith in him, for with God comes moral absolutes of right and wrong. These oppose the new tyrants’ humanly invented belief structure that “does not recognize anything as certain and has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.”
One of the principal reasons for the growing anti-Catholicism — both close to home, in Europe and in places like China — is because the Catholic Church is now the most consistently palpable witness to the “God… who spoke on Sinai and laid down principles to serve as a guide for mankind, principles that are eternally valid.” The relativist tyrants who oppose those principles — for example, with regard to the dignity of human life or the truth about human sexuality — now with increasing virulence oppose the Church, which remains “by its very existence… a witness to the God who spoke to humanity and took us to himself.” As many observers noted during the pontificate of Pope John Paul II, the Catholic Church has become the moral conscience of the world. Those who deny the voice of conscience not only find the Church’s meek message deafening, but are going after the messenger.
It is in the face of this new totalitarianism that Benedict is trying to inspire Polish Catholics, who are on the front lines in the cultural battle for the future of Europe, to “stand firm in faith,” just as their celebrated countryman did. His call is equally urgent and important to all of us who, without inhaling the same Polish air, viewed Pope John Paul II for a quarter century as our saintly spiritual father.