“For I am already on the point of being sacrificed; the time of my departure has come.  I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race.  I have kept the faith” (2 Tim.4:7).  These were St. Paul’s words of farewell to Timothy at the approach of death.  His words come to mind this evening as the 264th successor of Peter has come to the end of his twenty-six and a half year pontificate.  He has been in the “shoes of the Fisherman” all that time but he has regularly put on the seven league boots of Paul also and gone on missionary journeys all around the world. The Preface of the Mass of the Feast of June 29^th thanks God for the two Apostles;

“Peter, our leader in the faith, Paul its fearless preacher.

Peter raised up the Church….Paul brought your call to the nations and became the teacher of the world”.

Both shared a martyr’s death and are praised throughout the world.

Pope John Paul II was the Bishop of Rome and the successor of Peter as Vicar of Christ.  He was an ardent but gentle preacher of the Gospel.  His fourteen encyclicals, five books and many other writings have covered a vast range of subjects.  He conducted 1200 Great Audiences which were attended by an estimated eighteen million people.  He made nine hundred visits to different places in Italy and three hundred visits to the parishes of Rome, his diocese.  That would have been a full-time job in itself, but his mission was broader still.  He felt compelled “to go out to the whole world and proclaim the Good News”. Thus, his pastoral visits, one hundred and four in all, took him to every corner of the earth, to one hundred and seventeen countries, including our own, the third, after his native Poland and Mexico.  “Let history record that at a difficult moment in the experience of the people of Ireland, the Bishop of Rome set foot in your land, that he was with you and prayed with you for peace and reconciliation, for the victory of justice and love over hatred and violence”. 

He did not die a martyr’s death like Peter and Paul, but he came within a hair’s breath of doing so in 1981, after little more than 1000 days in office.  But he survived and, as the word “martyr” means “witness”, he bore witness to the redemptive value of suffering during the remainder of his life but especially in the final years when the man who had bestrode the world stage was confined to a wheelchair.  He was not ashamed to let the world see the ravages which illness had caused his body.  He taught the world not only how we should live and but also how we should die.

Innumerable tributes have flowed in since the sad news of his death was flashed all across the world on Saturday evening last. People of all religions and none have praised his contribution to peace, justice, human rights and the environment – even the Chinese communist government have paid tribute to him as has Fidel Castro of Cuba.  Even the Rev. Ian Paisley has given a guarded expression of sympathy to Catholics for their loss.

As at any wake, people are telling of their personal experience of the deceased.  Permit me to give you a few of my memories.  In October 1992, I went to Rome to the Ad Limina visit together with all my colleagues.  We began by going to Castelgandolfo for Mass with the Holy Father.   We arrived in the chapel to find John Paul II kneeling in front of the altar, in his white soutane and skull cap.  He was deep in prayer.  He had risen, as always, at 5:30 am and came to the chapel at 6:00 am.  We were quickly drawn into his prayer.  You could not fail to be, since he was totally absorbed.  At 6:45 am, he rose from his knees, vested and concelebrated Mass with us in English.  He celebrated with great concentration and devotion.  I believe that his prayer and Mass were the source of his spiritual strength, courage and physical stamina.  It is no accident that his final letters were an appeal to the faithful, “to rekindle our sense of amazement and gratitude for the gift of the Eucharist which is  not just any gift but the gift par excellence”.

After Mass, he invited us to breakfast, all twenty-six of us!  We didn’t refuse it at 8 o’clock! Then he began his private audiences with us, one by one, beginning with the eldest.  When I came to his study, he welcomed me and asked me to point out my diocese in a map which lay open on the desk.  I pointed it out.  “How does it happen that you are the Archbishop of Cashel but that you are living in Thurles?” he asked.  I explained the historic reasons for being so displaced.  Then he asked about the faith of the people, their attendance at Sunday Mass, the state of family life, vocations, and the problems of unemployment and emigration.  Then he said, “You are very fortunate to be bishop of a rural people.  Country people are close to nature and close to God.  Take my blessing and good wishes to the faithful of Cashel & Emly”. 

He invited the bishops to lunch, half of us one day, the other half the next.  These were very relaxed and informal occasions.  He told us that he would dearly love to beatify three people, Damien of Monokai, Cardinal Newman and Matt Talbot.  He had written a biography of Matt in Polish in his young days. He asked us to pray for a miracle since Matt’s example could be very valuable for those who are addicted to alcohol and drugs.  Damien is canonised and Newman is beatified but Matt Talbot is still awaiting a miracle.

When he enquired about my family, I told him about my aunt, who was in a nursing home.  She had put my picture over her bed and people who came to visit her ward would stop to chat with her about the picture.  “That is my nephew, the Archbishop of Cashel.  Not boasting about him, but he is very good to me and visits regularly”.  The old lady in the next bed became increasingly jealous as my aunt was getting all the attention.  So, one day, a large picture of the Holy Father appeared over her bed!  That put the Archbishop and his aunt in their place.  The Holy Father chuckled, “proper order”!

At the end of three or four days, the Holy Father assembled the bishops again and gave us an address for half an hour.  He praised the priests, the teachers and the missionaries and urged us to promote the “new evangelisation” in the Third Millennium.  He had been speaking of the Jubilee Year 2000 from his very first days as Pope.  He always seemed confident that he would be around to ring it in and so it transpired.  I was amazed at the time and trouble he took with the bishops of one small country.  When you consider that he went to the same trouble with the 6,000 bishops of all the countries of the world, I wondered how he found time for anything else!  Particularly, how was he able to find time to travel the world! I still marvel at how any one man could physically endure the gruelling schedule which he undertook daily and stay the course for over a quarter of a century. 

That brings me to his visit to Ireland in 1979.  That visit is now part of history and folklore.  Even though we celebrated the 25^th anniversary last September, the memories are being recalled again this week.  From the magic moment when he landed in Dublin airport and kissed the soil of Ireland, the whole nation was walking on air for three days. It was the “the alleluia weekend” as Bishop John Magee calls it.  The Pope’s strong physical presence then, his extraordinary charisma and his courteous manner won the hearts of young and old alike. 

Everybody was in good humour.  People who had never met before greeted each other amiably and fell into conversation.  Though there were huge traffic jams on the roads, there wasn’t even a hint of road rage.  Perhaps it had not even been invented yet!  On my way to Galway from Killarney, a journey of 130 miles which took five hours, I was forced to brake suddenly near Oranmore and the car behind struck me with a loud bang.  I got out and so did the driver of the other car.  It was dark, but we could see with the lights that there was severe bumps on both cars.  After we each surveyed our brokenness for a moment, my man said, “I’ll pay for my own repairs and, sure, you can send the bill to the Holy Father!”  We shook hands and drove on!

During those three days there was virtually no crime.  Of course, “criminality” was not the vogue word then that it has recently become!  Even though most houses were empty for long periods and almost all the guards were on traffic duty, there were no burglaries.  The pick-pockets had their hands joined and all the thieves were trying to be good thieves for the duration at least!

The Holy Father’s homilies during that weekend were prophetic.  Neither he, nor we, in our wildest dreams, could have envisaged the “Celtic Tiger” then, but his challenge to materialism and greed should have been better heeded by all of us:

“The prospect of growing economic progress, and the chance of obtaining a greater share of the goods that modern society has to offer, will appear to you as an opportunity to achieve greater freedom.  The more you possess – you may be tempted to think – the more you will feel liberated from every type of confinement.  In order to make more money and to possess more, in order to eliminate effort and worry, you may be tempted to take moral shortcuts where honesty, truth and work are concerned”.

Had we listened we might have avoided the tribunals and enquiries which have proved so costly and damaging to the good name of Ireland, now among the richest countries in the world.

It was in Galway, we first came to know of Pope John Paul II’s exceptional ability to relate to young people.  “I believe in youth.  I believe in youth with all my heart…in every one of you.  Young people of Ireland I love you”.  A momentary intake of breath and then an explosion of cheering, singing, clapping and general exultation by 300,000 young people for a full fifteen minutes!  I  heard Bishop John Magee say the other day that the experience in Galway had a large bearing on the inauguration of World Youth Day, where even larger gatherings have taken place – two million in Rome in 2000 A.D., the million plus in Toronto in 2002.  The young people were drawn to the Holy Father in the way children are to a grand-parent.  And he took to that role with ease.  In Toronto he told them;

“You are young, the Pope is old, 82 or 83 years of life is not like 22 or 23. But the Pope identifies with your hopes and aspirations.  Although I have lived through much darkness under harsh totalitarian regimes, I have seen enough evidence to be unshakably convinced that no difficulty, no fear is so great that it can completely suffocate the hope that springs eternal in the hearts of the young.  You are our hope, the young are our hope”.

Then the Pope used a building metaphor;

“The twentieth century often tried to build without the cornerstone and attempted to build a city of man without reference to God.  It ended by actually that city against man.  A new generation of builders is needed.  Moved, not by fear or violence but by the urgency of genuine love.  They must learn to build brick by brick the city of God within the City of Man.  Dear young people, he continued, you must be those builders.  God is entrusting you with the task at once difficult and uplifting of working with him in the building of the civilisation of love”.

The Pope condemned both the Gulf war and the Iraq war while he is acknowledged to have played a vital role in the “velvet” revolutions which began in Poland and ended with the liberation of Eastern Europe from communist domination without bloodshed.

If you are in the company of young people, he said, it keeps you young.  So he sat after the prayer services and tapped his toes to their music at the concerts which followed.  He had been a teacher in his younger days and he had kept in touch with the young.  But in Galway, I always think it was that it was the actor in him which prevailed over the teacher.  The teacher’s instinct is to quell the first signs of exuberance lest the headmaster/mistress appear unannounced!  Pope John Paul II allowed, he even encouraged, the young people in Galway to pour out their feelings to their hearts content. Last weekend, young people gathered in St. Peter’s Square to pray for their beloved Pope as he lay dying.  He was told of their presence and he said, “I went out to the young people of the world and now they have come to me”. 

As I left the Papal Mass in Limerick, I was walking up the street when a group of people, who were having an open air meal, greeted me and said, “Father, come over and have a bite with us”.  We had never set eyes on each other before.  But it was that kind of weekend.  I got a mug of tea and a generous slice of blueberry pie from the good lady who was in charge of the picnic basket.  It was wonderful being a priest that weekend, it beats being an Archbishop today!

Ten years passed and I had been ordained Bishop and living in Tipperary Town.  I received a telephone bill which seemed to me to be a thousand pounds more than normal. I rang Telecom to protest.  Before I got very far, the woman at the other end said, “Father, don’t you remember me? “No”, I said, “Should I?”, “You should, I am  the woman who gave you the blueberry pie in Limerick the day the Pope came”.  What could I say?  Another bill for the Holy Father!

As I said earlier, few Popes have written as extensively on such a wide variety of subjects as John Paul II except possibly Pope Pius XII.  But, Pope John Paul was also adept in the use of symbols and gestures, which can be more eloquent than words.  His use of the pastoral staff with the crucified Christ on top in place of the traditional crozier is an example. His gesture of kissing of the ground when he landed in every foreign country was another.  This had to be modified when he could no longer bend down.  A basket of soil was provided but the point was even more forcefully made. When he kissed the soil of Scotland, in addition to that of England he affirmed the Scottish as a distinct nation.

In the Jubilee year he stood and prayed at the Wailing or Western Wall in Jerusalem and placed his written petition in the crevice as devout Jews have been doing for centuries.   Someone also pointed out that one of his longest journeys was one of just one kilometre!   It was to the Jewish synagogue down the road from the Vatican.  It was a journey which took two thousand years for a Pope to make!  And who will ever forget Easter Sunday last when words literally failed him.  He was reduced to a feeble blessing but the gesture moved people to tears in St. Peter’s Square and far beyond.  We realised that he had fought the good fight, he had finished the race and he had kept the faith.

As I said, the largest crowd which ever came together in one place in Europe gathered in Rome in 2000 A.D. for the Mass on World Youth Day.  The media are forecasting another gathering for two million or more for another Mass in Rome this Friday, the Pope’s funeral Mass.  In the country, the people always forecast a big funeral when the deceased has a large family.  If she or he comes from “a long-tailed family”, there will be a huge funeral they say.

Pope John Paul II had only one relative, a cousin, who could be invited to his inauguration as Pope on October 22 1978.  His parents, his brother and sister, died when he was quite young.  But, as the spiritual father of the long-tailed Catholic family and the families of many other faiths who acknowledge him as friend, he will have the largest funeral of any leader, religious or secular in history, if the predictions are borne out.

There is an old Irish prayer which was recited for those who are close to death.  It envisaged a second funeral or, more correctly, a welcoming party in the next world;

“Socrhraid aingeal, sochraid aspal,

sochraid naomh

ag teacht i d’choinnibh sa bhóthar caol,

ag breith an anam’ ar dheasláimh Dé”.

“A funeral of angels, a funeral of apostles,

a funeral of saints,

Comes to meet you on the narrow road,

to bring your soul to God’s right hand”.

In Pope John Paul’s case, many of those who will come to greet him will have been beatified and canonised by himself. So whatever the critics may have said, this was certainly good thinking on Pope John Paul’s part!

Ar dheis láimh Dé go raibh anam uasal ar bPápa Eoin Pól II.