I Saw a Saint at Sunset

John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father
by Peggy Noonan

As the leader of the Catholic Church, the oldest continuing institution in the Western world, Pope John Paul II was a giant in every sphere he touched - personal, theological, political, ecumenical. In an age rich with heroes, Pope John Paul II was truly the great man of the past century - a man who personally confronted its tragedies, from Nazism to communism. A paradoxical figure, Pope John Paul II was an intellectual animated by confidence and joy, a poet and playwright, a supporter of freedom who decried its abuse, a tough political gamesman, and a mystic convinced that the bullet that nearly killed him in Rome was directed away from his heart by the hand of the Mother of God.

Here, bestselling author Peggy Noonan brings her sharp observations, acute sensibility, warmth, and wit to the life of the pope and shows the personal effect his journey had upon her and millions of others throughout the world. Written with heart and depth, this book is at once a moving elegy and a brilliant celebration of a man whose life taught us the greatest lesson of all: how to live.

Chapter 1

It was early morning in the Vatican, July 2, 2003, a brilliant morning in the middle of the worst Roman heat wave in a century. The city was quiet, the streets soft with the heat. It was the summer of the dress code battle between the tourists and the guards at St. Peter's Basilica. The tourists wanted to wear shorts and halter tops; this was in violation of the Vatican dress code (slacks, shirts with sleeves), and the guards wouldn't let them in. There were arguments at the entrance, and angry words. Soon a Roman compromise was achieved: No one lost face; everyone got what they needed. The vendors in St. Peter's Square were allowed to sell paper shirts and pants for a euro apiece. The tourists would put them on over their clothes, walk past the guards, and tear the paper off as they entered the dark cool of the church.

By 7:45 a.m., hundreds of us had gathered in the Piazza del Sant'Uffizio, in the shadow of Bernini's colonnade, the marble columns that curve outward to embrace St. Peter's Square. Already the heat was gathering, and we fanned ourselves with thin green papal audience tickets. The crowd was happy - chirping nuns, clicking tourists. We were about to see the pope. We were about to see John Paul.

We are a mix of tourists, the curious, and the faithful: a group of deaf Italian adults in white baseball caps, with silk Vatican flags tied around their necks; members of a choir from the Archdiocese of St. Louis, Missouri; a group of nuns from the Little Mission for the Deaf in Bologna. There was a man from Monterey, Mexico, with his wife and two children. As the crowd grew, we were pressed so close I could smell the spray starch on his green cotton shirt.

"Why are you here?" I asked.

"To see the pope," he said. "He is the most important Christian in the world. He is the follower of Christ." When, a few minutes later, I read the quote back to him from my notebook, he edited it. "He is the most important person in the whole world."

I talked to a woman in a hat made of hay. Spiky yellow straw, actually, the brim down to shade her face. She was forty-five or fifty years old and looked like pictures of the older, weathered Greta Garbo. She told me she was on a pilgrimage. She had walked hundreds of kilometers in a circuitous tour of Marian sites. She and her husband - bearish, gray bearded - had departed upper Austria in May and had arrived here yesterday, on July 1st. They had walked on highways and small roads. She showed me her diary of the pilgrimage: In neat precise script she had documented every church they had seen along the way. Her husband had drawn pictures of cathedrals in blue ballpoint ink. He had taken snapshots of little chapels and pasted them in the diary. "Here," she said to me, indicating a page on which she had made comic line drawings. They showed angular feet bruised by exaggerated calluses. Next to them she had drawn the lotions and bandages she had put upon her wounds. They had gone to mass every day of their six-week journey, she said.

Why had they come here?

"Why? To see Il Papa!" She gestured as if to say: This is the culmination.

We filed through metal detectors that did not seem to work, no beeping or bopping, no one watching things closely. It is surprising to see metal detectors here, for a crowd like this, but the last time someone planned to kill the pope, in the Philippines, the would-be assassin meant to dress as a priest. Soon we were directed through a paved area just off St. Peter's Square. (Later, when I would return to it, a young priest would tell me, "We think he may have been crucified under here." I shook my head. "Saint Peter. It may have been just about here, down there." And he pointed at the pavement.)

We entered the Paul VI Audience Hall, an enormous concrete structure, cavernous and modern, like a big suburban church, or an evangelical McChurch at the edge of a city. Rows of fixed seats were aligned toward the stage. People were coming in single file and in groups, hundreds of them and then thousands. As I walked among them, I heard the languages of France, England, Mexico, Austria, the Czech Republic. There were groups from West Africa, Germany, Poland, Scotland, Portugal, and Brazil. A Romanian chorus of middle-aged women began to sing softly in their seats. When they finished, a choir from Bialystok, Poland, thirty young women and men, began to sing lustily.

Suddenly a rustling up front. Dozens of tall African women danced in, laughing and clapping in floor-length white cotton dresses. On the hems were sewn the words "Archdiocese of Freetown," in Sierra Leone. They sat next to Catholic schoolchildren from Rwanda, who were clapping and shaking tambourines.

I thought: The whole church is here.

The room rocked. Cheering here, drums there, an American spiritual crooned somewhere in the back. The choruses would pick up one another's sound, so that a group from Santo Domingo would sing, and as they finished, a young male choir from Poland, in white tie and tails, would take up the song. Then as they finished, a group of Indians of the Americas, in native dress and full headdresses - they looked like beautiful peacocks - would beat native drums. It was as if the disparate but unified members of the audience, as they echoed and supported one another, were a living symbol of the church every day in the world. And now something came alive on the stage. Two Swiss Guards in their purple and orange uniforms, big red plumes on their black helmets, entered the stage and stood erect in the middle, with halberds. Then a flurry of cardinals and bishops in black, with red and purple sashes. Then two papal chamberlains in white tie and tails.

We looked to the left of the stage. There was movement.

It was him, the pope - twenty minutes early. The woman next to me, a regular audiencegoer, laughed. "When he's ready, he's ready these days," she yelled to me over the noise.

John Paul was rolled slowly onto the stage. He was seated in a brown wooden chair that rested within a kind of wooden rig on little wheels. It was like a wheel-throne; it was like the kind of big wooden roller they use to get something off the top shelf at Home Depot. It looked both practical and absurd.

Everyone applauded, and as I clapped, I looked around me and saw faces set in a determinedly pleasant look, as if they were thinking, I am so happy to see you, but the sight of you is breaking my heart.

© 2005 Viking, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Peggy Noonan was a special assistant to President Ronald Reagan from 1984 to 1986; in 1988, she was chief speechwriter to Vice President George Bush during his campaign for the presidency; in 1989, she left Washington, D.C., for her native New York, where she completed her first book, the bestselling What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Years. Since that time, her articles and essays have appeared in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, and many other publications. She is also author of The Case Against Hillary, a #1 New York Times bestseller. Currently, she is a columnist and contributing editor at The Wall Street Journal and a political contributor for Fox News.