St. John Paul II, Pope: A Testimonial

 

John Paul II was an athlete and an artist. A scholar and a saint. But to me and countless others, the Polish Pontiff was simply Papa.
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The Martyrs of Damascus (1860)

“The days in which we live now require heroic Catholicism, not casual Catholicism,” declared Peoria Bishop Daniel Jenky in 2012. “We can no longer be Catholics by accident, but instead be Catholics by conviction.” This is especially the case when religious tolerance is lacking and when faithfulness to Christ can – and often does – lead to death, a situation not restricted to our current age.

Consider, for example, the persecuted Christians of the Islamic Ottoman Empire. In 1856, following the Crimean War, the Ottoman Sultan granted full and universal religious freedom to his subjects. It was an unacceptable concession for the majority Muslim population, and it was particularly noxious in the view of the minority Druze sect, a gnostic offshoot of Shiite Islam.

In the spring of 1860, the Druze, egged on by recalcitrant Ottoman authorities, began methodically slaughtering Lebanon’s Maronite Christians. By early July, the violence had spilled over into Muslim-controlled Damascus, leading to thousands more Maronite deaths.

At the time, a small cadre of European Franciscans – six priests, two lay brothers, hailing from Spain and Austria – were ministering to the resident Christian population in Damascus. Led by the Fr. Emmanuel Ruiz, the missionary friars administered the sacraments, operated a small school, and did their best to tend their small flock.

When news of the Islamist uprising reached their convent, the Franciscans gave shelter to the Maronite locals, and Ruiz himself sought to consume the reserved Blessed Sacrament before it could be profaned. When the assailants arrived and confronted Ruiz in the chapel, they offered to spare his life if he converted to Islam. “I am a Christian,” came the guardian’s reply, “and I will die a Christian.” The attackers immediately cut down Ruiz and then butchered his body.

A similar fate awaited the rest of the Franciscan contingent, who all steadfastly refused to renounce the faith and accepted martyrdom readily. This heroic resolve even extended to members of their flock – specifically, three Maronite laymen, all blood brothers, who, like their Franciscan shepherds, preferred death to disloyalty to Christ.

In 1926, Pope Pius XI beatified Ruiz, his seven confreres, and the three martyred Maronite laymen. May their intercession lead to greater interfaith peace and tolerance, for, in the words of Pope St. John Paul II, “the church remains always open to dialogue and cooperation.”
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A version of this essay originally appeared in Franciscan Way, Franciscan University of Steubenville.

Required for Survival: Food & Water as Moral Default

The May-June 2005 issue of Liguorian Magazine featured an article by Mark Miller, CSsR, entitled “The Controversy Surrounding Feeding Tubes.” I sent the following letter in response. It was not printed, and I never received a reply.
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Editor:

The May 2005 issue of Liguorian includes several beautiful tributes to Pope John Paul II, for which I commend you. His life of love and service, particularly in his role as Pope, was marked by holiness, fidelity to Truth, and tireless efforts on behalf of the world's most vulnerable.

The quality of your memorial section devoted to our beloved John Paul II makes the brief article by Fr. Mark Miller, CSsR, on feeding tubes all the more jarring. Fr. Miller rightly refers to the Pope's March 2004 allocution making it clear that the provision of food and water – even through a tube – must always be considered a part of ordinary care. But then Miller completely undermines the weight of the Holy Father's teaching by contrasting it with the work of “other moral theologians” who see food and water as optional – depending on “context and circumstances.”

This is pure relativism and is exactly the kind of muddled moralizing that John Paul was addressing. The last paragraph of Fr. Miller’s essay refers to “no swallowing ability, no awareness, and no sensation” – an apt description of a person in a persistent vegetative state, or any unconscious state for that matter. Where Fr. Miller makes a serious error is in following that description with the phrase, “the body slowly shuts itself down in a painless process.” This would occur only if there were an underlying and untreatable pathology that would inexorably lead to death, or if the individual were denied the ordinary elements required for survival – including, namely, food and water.

That is the crucial point: When food and water are withheld such that a person dies as a direct result, the only conclusion possible is that a willful homicide has occurred. How can it be otherwise? Obviously, when the provision of nutrition and hydration are no longer serving any purpose at all, and in fact become burdensome – even to the recipient – then it may be discontinued. But such a situation was not being addressed by the Pope’s allocution in the spring of 2004; he was addressing a narrowly prescribed set of circumstances, and it seems providential that, almost exactly a year later, the exact circumstance he had referred to burst into the public eye with the battle over Terri Schiavo.

Of course consideration must be made for the particular circumstances of individual cases, but what the Holy Father did (and admirably well, in my own opinion) is to help us know the limits of what can be debated, even in the hard cases. No one is claiming that food and water must be provided at all costs until the very last breath has passed one's lips; what the Pope declared is that no one should ever die from starvation and dehydration – and that is precisely what happens when feeding tubes are discontinued in the absence of underlying pathologies that naturally lead to death.
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Custody of the Holy Land

Alongside the history of salvation there exists a geography of salvation.

~ Pope Paul VI

My first encounter with St. Francis of Assisi was at Seattle Pacific University, a Free Methodist institution.

I was taking a Church history class, and the cavernous reality of Roman Catholicism was just beginning to dawn on my evangelical consciousness. At one point, the professor gave us an assignment to read a biography of any prominent historical Christian. I headed to Weter Library, followed the Dewey numbering system over to the appropriate shelves, and there spied a small, worn volume with faded gold lettering.

“St. Francis of Assisi,” I muttered as I plucked it from the shelf. “I think he’s the bird guy.”

I checked it out.

Now, understand that I’d been a born-again Christian since grade school, and I was well familiar with the great figures of the Old and New Testament. Also, I was acquainted with many notable Protestant heroes – the missionaries who’d given their lives to bring the Gospel to forgotten lands, the martyrs of Nazi prison camps and Communist gulags, the fearless evangelists of our own country’s frontier territories and inner cities.

But this! I was unnerved as I read – nothing could’ve prepared me for it. Francis leapt from those pages fully alive, an icon of Christ, an affront to my tidy ideals and pious stratagems. What had been posed as a simple course requirement became a face smack: here was lived Christianity – an embodiment, not just an imitation. Could it be replicated? Who would dare?

Years later, after winding my way to Roman Catholicism, I had my answer: everyone must dare, even me. The Franciscan vision of nurturing mini-incarnations of Jesus in every place and everybody is the vision of the Church, bent on making saints of us all. “Every person must walk unhesitatingly according to his own personal gifts and duties in the path of living faith,” Lumen Gentium teaches, “which arouses hope and works through charity” (39). Francis’s life points the way for living the Gospel sine glosa – without excuse. No ginger tiptoeing around the minefields of sanctification; nothing short of total transformation will do.

Is it any wonder, then, that the followers of St. Francis are so closely identified with the Holy Land? We worship the God incarnate at Bethlehem, the one who wandered throughout Galilee and worked in the shop at Nazareth, a man-God who died atop Golgotha and was buried in a cave outside Jerusalem – these things all really happened, and so they happened somewhere. “One cannot desire to identify with Jesus,” writes Franciscan Father Pierbattista Pizzaballa, “and neglect the place where He lived.”

This is of particular importance to Pizzaballa, the major superior of the Friars Minor in the Middle East and the Custodian (Custos) of the Holy Land. He and his community oversee some 49 sacred sites associated with the life of Our Lord, not to mention numerous parishes and a wide variety of charitable works. 

The Franciscan relationship to the Holy Land is unique and stretches back to the earliest days of the order. The Saint of Assisi established his little community in 1209, and by 1217, a General Chapter was already divvying up the entire world into Franciscan provinces, including the territories of the Middle East – the “pearl” of the order’s realms of influence.

Starting most notably with a visit by Francis himself, a Franciscan presence in and around the Holy Land has been maintained with very little interruption for nearly 800 years. In fact, the order has long represented the primary continuity of Catholic influence in that volatile region, a state of affairs formally constituted by Pope Clement VI in 1342 and reiterated by Pope St. John Paul II 650 years later.

By order of the Holy See, the “friars of the cord” have a solemn responsibility to provide hospitality to pilgrims and to “animate” the land’s sacred geography. In short, as Father Pizzaballa puts it, they’re called to “to turn the stones into ‘living stones.’” Moreover, the sons of Francis join with all other Christians there in attempting to follow Pope Francis’s call, despite current hostile conditions, “to promote dialogue, to build bridges in the spirit of the Beatitudes (cf. Mt 5:3:12), and to proclaim the Gospel of peace.”
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A shorter version of this essay originally appeared in Franciscan Way, Franciscan University of Steubenville. 

In addition to contributing to the annual Good Friday Holy Land collection taken up throughout the universal Church, the faithful can further support the Holy Land Franciscans through prayer, voluntary service, and financial pledges. For more information, follow this link. 

A Person Must Never Be Allowed to Starve to Death

Theresa Marie Schiavo (1963-2005)

Thank you for the editorial "Every human life deserves dignity" (May 29, 2005), which comes significantly just about two months after Terri Schiavo's death. Since then, the issue of artificially supplied nutrition and hydration has virtually disappeared from the headlines, and it might seem that all the fuss about tube feeding has simply faded away. 

Nevertheless, the question of whether Schiavo was allowed to die or was killed is very much current for those who care for others in similar circumstances. While it is true that the courts allowed Terri's husband to remove his wife's feeding tube – thereby ensuring her death by starvation – they in no way legitimized what he did. Indeed, the drama surrounding Schiavo's demise only serves to illustrate how inhuman this practice is, and the revulsion most people of good will experienced during the ordeal makes it plain that it should never be allowed to happen again.

Unfortunately, as anyone who works in healthcare can attest, it is a situation that recurs with alarming frequency in our hospitals and nursing homes today – often with the prior consent of the victim. Many so-called "living wills" include clauses that allow signers to explicitly reject the artificial administration of food and water if they become incapacitated and unable to eat on their own. By signing these forms, people agree to accept a horrible death, whether wittingly or unwittingly, and too many doctors are all too willing to carry out those wishes once the circumstances present themselves. 

This is the kind of dangerous moral surrender that Pope John Paul II addressed in a speech he made back in March 2004. Speaking to a gathering of experts on persistent vegetative state (PVS), the pope made it very clear that the provision of nutrition and hydration must always be considered a part of ordinary care. Even when artificially administered, John Paul said, food and water "always represents a natural means of preserving life, not a medical act." The debate on this issue among moralists and theologians had gone on for many years, but the Holy Father's clear statement effectively put an end to the controversy. 

Even so, confusion on this issue is rampant, even among Catholics, and even those who were on the right side of the Schiavo issue are unaware of the full implications of her case. Much was made in the media of the question regarding Terri's wishes concerning what she'd want if she were in a PVS, but according to the Holy Father's instruction, a person's wishes are irrelevant to the provision of food and water. Simply put, a person must never be allowed to starve to death, no matter what that person desires or requests. 

A protestor outside the Florida courthouse where Terri's fate was decided.

Obviously, when the provision of nutrition and hydration is no longer serving any purpose at all – when nutrients can no longer be assimilated by the body or are not providing any comfort to someone whose death is imminent – then it may be discontinued. But such a situation was not being addressed by the pope in the spring of 2004; he was addressing a narrowly prescribed set of circumstances, and it seems providential that, almost exactly a year later, the specific circumstances he had referred to burst into the public eye with the battle over Terri Schiavo. We must never forget that Terri was not dying until her feeding tube was removed. This is the crucial point: When food and water are withheld such that a person dies as a direct result, the only possible conclusion is a willful homicide. 

Of course, consideration must be made for the particular circumstances of individual cases, but what the Holy Father has done is to help us know the limits of what can be debated, even in the hard cases. No one is claiming that food and water must be provided at all costs until the very last breath has passed ones lips; what the pope did declare is that no one should ever die from starvation and dehydration – and that is precisely what happens when feeding tubes are discontinued despite the absence of underlying pathologies that naturally lead to death. In fact, John Paul refers to such precipitate withdrawals of food and water as "euthanasia by omission."

No one would choose to be in a PVS for any length of time – whether 15 years or five years or even the required one year to attach that label to someone – but unforeseen and unfortunate things happen all the time, and it is in those very unforeseen and unfortunate situations that we are closest to the cross. Our brothers and sisters who are in a PVS (or "post-coma syndrome," as some Catholics writing on this topic are calling it to get away from the negative connotations associated with "vegetative") require our love an care. They are Christ, the Christ of Matthew 25 – "when I was hungry, you fed me; when I was thirsty, you gave me drink."

Can we do otherwise?
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A version of this essay originally appeared in Today's Catholic on June 19, 2005. Terri Schiavo died of marked dehydration on March 31, 2005.

Before a Mission Trip to Poland

A letter in response to a request for support from a short-term missioner.

People gather in Warsaw to mark Poland's Independence Day (Nov. 11, 2012)

Thanks for your letter and the opportunity to support you in your trip to Poland, both financially and through prayer. We’re not well off in the financial department, which is reflected in the paltry sum I’ve enclosed—sorry it can’t be more! Prayers, though, we’re loaded with, so we’ll be sending plenty your way. Count on it!

The trip sounds terrific, and I’ve no doubt you’ll be a true blessing to the students you encounter, work with, and befriend. And, as you noted, it will be an adventure that will help you work through some of your own questions and strengthen your faith.

One thing I wanted to mention, though. You wrote that many of the students grew up in an “atheist culture” and that they “do not know many Christian people.” While it is true that many Poles grew up during a time of atheistic Communist rule, their culture remained steadfastly Christian throughout. In fact, it is largely because of their strong Catholic Christian faith (and the encouragement of a strong Polish Pope) that the Poles were the first Eastern European country to challenge Russian-led Communist totalitarianism back in the ‘80s.

And “know many Christian people?” A quick check of Wikipedia (not terribly authoritative, I know, but a rough estimate) tells us that Poland is approximately 88% Catholic, with a smattering of other Christian traditions making up most of the other 12%. Obviously, large numbers of these folks may claim a church affiliation without any real faith commitment, but that’s no different than it is here in the U.S.

St. Mary's Basilica in Krakow, Poland, a day before President Lech Kaczynski's funeral there

All I’m suggesting is this: It might be helpful to conceive as your trip as primarily an opportunity to fellowship with other Christians rather than a missionary trip to evangelize the unchurched. Sure, you’ll meet some young people who don’t know the Lord and who are hungry for the Gospel—maybe even some who grew up in practicing Catholic and Protestant homes—but it’s still a good idea to take into account their Christian upbringing and traditions, and encourage them to discover Jesus Christ anew.

God bless you! I remember when my parents and sister travelled to Poland, and it delights me that you’ll be following in their footsteps. We’ll definitely be praying for you, and I hope you’ll keep us updated while you're there!