Part 2

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

(Page 2 of 3)

He was dressed all in white, bent forward in his chair. White surplice, white zucchetto - the skullcap popes wear - white gold-fringed sash. As the wheel-throne reached the center of the stage the pope was surrounded by a scrum of aides and cardinals. They helped him to his feet, helped transfer him to a white upholstered high-backed chair. Then they turned it toward us.

He looked out at us. We looked back at him. His face was - oh, his face!

I thought of the girl on his last trip to Canada, a year before. She was a child, six or so, and she had it in her head that the pope was the best person in the world. So her parents brought her to a big outdoor Mass, and she was chosen to give him flowers. She walked up to him with her little bouquet and held it toward him. He leaned his upper body toward her in his chair. Then she turned and ran sobbing from the stage with what seemed like panic. Because he was old and his head was big and his neck and back were curled, and the effort to lift his head so you could see his face drew his features down, and the parkinsonian mask that froze his face made him look angry, or ill-meaning, or sad. The poor child ran.

Now the crowd took to its feet and the applause was continuous. But it was also muted, not full of joy as the crowd had been before the audience had begun.

His cassock was too short - six inches off the floor. We could see his white cotton sports socks. We could see his worn brown shoes! He wears old loafers, like a workingman, and not the traditional dainty slippers of a pope.

"We love you, Papa!" someone called out. "We love you, Holy Father."

He lifted his head with effort. We took our seats. Suddenly I realized the purpose of a Vatican announcement that had been issued the week before. The Holy Father, the press office said, would not go hiking in the hills this summer as he had in the past, but instead would work through his vacation writing a memoir of his early years as priest and bishop. Tourists buzzed about this: How amazing that the old man would produce a book on his time off! What they didn't notice, what had been cleverly obscured by the announcement, was that the pope's legs don't work anymore. Of course he wasn't hiking.

When I mentioned this later to a priest in Rome, he laughed. John Paul, he said, has grown sensitive about speculation regarding his illnesses and had recently groused, half comically, to an American cardinal, "Tell those American journalists the pope doesn't run the church with his feet."

The pope read to us from remarks typed on white letter-sized paper. His voice was blurry and thick. The papers trembled in his hand. He spoke in Italian. The thin-neck microphone into which he spoke was sensitive; we could hear him breathe between the sentences. People in the audience became distracted. Then the pope spoke in Polish and his voice became stronger, and even though most of the people in the audience didn't understand what he was saying, they quieted, and leaned forward.

He had a pronounced tremor in his left arm, and during the translation he leaned his head and rested his chin on his left hand, to stop the shaking. Then he cleared his throat and spoke in English. But the only words I could make out were "the spirit of the Beatitudes." Later I read the Associated Press report of the pope's message. He had spoken of Psalm 145, which he called "a song of praise for the morning." It ends, he said, "in a proclamation of the sovereignty of God over human history." It reminds us, he said, that "the Lord shall reign forever."

Schoolchildren from Santo Domingo cheered the old chant: Juan Pablo Segundo, te quiere todo el mundo.

He raised his right hand to acknowledge the chants. The playfulness of the past - the way he used to wave with both hands, up and down, and say "Woo woo!" to the children who cheered him in New York and Chicago so long ago - was not possible for him anymore.

And yet as I watched him, I realized I did not see him as ill and frail. I saw him as encased - trapped in there, in an outer immobility. Outside he is old and frail, but inside he is John Paul, the one who had walked out on the Vatican balcony and dazzled the crowd twenty-four years before. And for the first time I thought: He is a victim soul. His suffering has meaning, it is telling us something. He is giving us something, a parting gift.

He sang to us a little at the end, like an old man sitting in the sun. Most of us couldn't tell the words or the tune, but he was doing it for us, and there was something so beautiful and moving in it. I turned to a friend. "We are hearing a saint singing," I said. I wanted to put my hands over my ears so I could hold the sound in my head forever.

Throughout all this I would look over now and then at a young woman, a red-haired girl sitting with a Polish choir. She was nineteen or twenty, clean faced, pale. From the moment the pope had entered the room she had not taken her eyes off him. And she had not stopped weeping.

Now John Paul made the sign of the cross. The cardinals came and knelt before him and kissed his hand. The Indians of the Americas mounted the stage to kneel before him. Dozens of newlywed couples in gowns and tuxedos mounted the stage two by two to receive his blessing. Then the sick - children rolled out onto the stage in hospital beds, people in wheelchairs.

I always got the feeling with John Paul that if he could have narrowed down the people he met and blessed to those he loved most, they would not be cardinals, princes, or congressmen, but nuns from obscure convents and Down syndrome children, especially the latter. Because they have suffered, and because in some serious and amazing way the love of God seems more immediately available to them. Everyone else gets themselves tied up in ambition and ideas and bustle, all the great distractions, but the modest and unwell are so often unusually open to this message: God loves us, his love is all around us, he made us to love him and be happy.

© 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.