John Paul II

John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus and Today’s Debates

In a recent article on the social doctrine of John Paul II in the Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica, Fr. Fernando de la Iglesia Viguiristi, S.J., had this to say about one

May 24, 2023

John Paul II
Knowing Suffering from Inside

Imagine yourself as a twenty-year-old Polish worker living in a dingy apartment in Dębniki, a working-class neighborhood of Kraków, in early 1941. After a brilliant beginning to your university career,

April 20, 2023

John Paul II and Me (and the Poles)

In the first chapter of Profiles in Courage, John F. Kennedy quoted an exasperated congressman, John Steven McGroarty, who wrote an irritating constituent in these neatly acerbic terms: “One of the

March 29, 2023

Another Assault on John Paul II

On May 13, 1981, Pope John Paul II had lunch in the papal apartment with Dr. Jerome Lejeune, the renowned French pediatrician and geneticist who identified the chromosomal abnormality that

July 27, 2022

Recycling the Same Old Same Old

In December 2021 and May 2022, I had the pleasure of teaching a mini course in Rome, exploring the life and thought of St. John Paul II. My students came

June 22, 2022

On John Paul II’s 75th Anniversary

By any worldly measure, 1946 was an annus horribilis in Poland. With the exceptions of Cracow and Lodz, every Polish city lay in ruins. The homeless and displaced numbered in the millions.

November 3, 2021

The Casaroli Myth

When I met Cardinal Agostino Casaroli on February 14, 1997, the architect of the Vatican’s Ostpolitik and its soft-spoken approach to communist regimes in east central Europe in the 1960s and 1970s

September 29, 2021

The Educational Pilgrimage of St. John Paul II and Its Impact on the World

Editor’s note: The Pioneer Institute, a Boston-based public policy research center, has just published a groundbreaking study, A Vision of Hope: Catholic Schooling in Massachusetts. The book explores the history and achievements of

February 22, 2021

From Christendom Times to Apostolic Times

Thirty years ago, on January 22, 1991, John Paul II’s eighth encyclical, Redemptoris Missio (The Mission of the Redeemer), was published. In a pontificate so rich in ideas that its teaching has

February 10, 2021

Fr. Maciej Zięba, O.P. (1954–2020)

A wretched year came to a sorrowful end when Father Maciej Zięba, O.P., died in his native Wrocław, Poland, on December 31. The birthplace of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Wrocław was also

January 15, 2021

“Those Who Question the Sanctity of John Paul II Don’t Know What They’re Talking About”

From 1991 until 2005, Cardinal Camillo Ruini served John Paul II as the papal Vicar for Rome—the man who handled the daily affairs of the diocese of which the pope

December 9, 2020

American Democracy’s Moral and Cultural Foundations

This essay is in response to James M. Patterson’s “Do We Still Hold These Truths?” For someone who was arguably the most prominent Catholic intellectual in the United States in

November 12, 2020

Meeting with Moscow, Rome Must Refuse to Bend to the Putin Storyline

February 9, 2017

Acts and Us

June 27, 2018

On the Tenth Anniversary of a Breakdown

September 5, 2007

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ROME. On the third floor of the Lateran Palace, home of the Vicariate of Rome, is a most remarkable mail-stop. Its official title is non-postal: “The Postulation for the Cause of the Beatification and Canonization of the Servant of God John Paul II.” Mail arrives in this small office from just about everywhere, bearing witness to favors received through the intercession of the late pope, requesting prayers, telling stories. The letters come in a daunting variety of languages, and some of them are addressed, simply, “John Paul II — Heaven.” The world’s postal services, not typically known for courtesy or efficiency, seem to have figured out the appropriate terrestrial destination of such correspondence.

In the minds of hundreds of millions of people, there is little doubt that John Paul II is a saint. The man who would succeed him described John Paul, at the late pontiff’s funeral, as being at the window of the Father’s house, seeing those present and blessing them. The hundreds of thousands present in St. Peter’s Square that day spontaneously proclaimed him “John Paul the Great” (the first such demonstration since the death of Pope St. Gregory I in 604), and there were innumerable signs that day reading “Santo subito” — “Make him a saint now!”

Happily, wiser counsels prevailed. Pope Benedict XVI’s approach, as described to me by the Postulator of John Paul’s cause, Msgr. Slawomir Oder, has been prudent: let’s get the process done as quickly as possible, but let’s also get it done right. Which is precisely how things should be. Any rush to judgment here would have several unhappy effects. It could cast doubt over the integrity of this particular cause. It would reinforce the world media’s tendency to think that the entire process of saint-making (better, recognizing-the-saints-that-God-has-made) is essentially political, when it in fact is essentially a matter of spiritual discernment. It would give the late pope’s enemies — and they exist — another cause to demean his memory and his achievements.

So Msgr. Oder and his colleagues are working steadily, but without undue haste. They are also conducting a process notable for its precision, as I can personally testify.

In October 1996, John Paul II gave me an unpublished memoir entitled “Curriculum Philosophicum,” which traced his first steps in philosophy, his later studies in the German phenomenologist Max Scheler, his philosophical work at the Catholic University of Lublin, and the origins of his Person and Act at the Second Vatican Council. My hunch then, as now, was that “Curriculum Philosophicum” was originally intended for one of John Paul’s books, perhaps Gift and Mystery, but, on further reflection, didn’t seem of sufficient general interest. I was, of course, delighted to be given such a gem, and used it in preparing my biography of the pope, Witness to Hope. A few months ago, Msgr. Oder wrote me, asking if the Postulation could have a copy of “Curriculum Philosophicum,” which they had been unable to find — which means that someone in the Postulation had dug through the forest of endnotes at the end of Witness to Hope to identify a Wojtyla text with which those responsible for the beatification process were unfamiliar. That’s the kind of research for which the phrase “fine-toothed comb” was invented.

The Postulation hopes to finish the local, diocesan process in 2007, after which the positio, the annotated biography prepared for every candidate whose cause makes it to this stage, will be written. The positio will use sworn testimony from a host of personalities, drawn from every state of life in the Church; some of the most insightful testimonies, Msgr. Oder told me, have come from lay people.

Meanwhile, every day, some twenty thousand people come to the grottos of St. Peter’s Basilica to pray at the tomb of the man many of them think of as John Paul the Great. They have no doubt that he is in the Father’s house, and they believe in his power of intercession. Knowing that, they — and the rest of us — can be patient with the process, which seems to be proceeding with the deliberate speed appropriate to such a worthy cause.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. and holds EPPC’s William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.

John Paul II

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