No man in the history of the world has ever been seen in person by so many people as Pope John Paul II.  Millions of people attended his pilgrimages.  He was the leader of over a billion Catholics.  Million if not billions more held him in respect.  And yet, he made contact with each of us.  Now  we each feel that we have lost a personal friend, the father of our family.  That is what the Holy Father did.  He became our father.  Sometimes he scolded us.  Sometimes he laughed with us. Always he loved us.  And we could feel it as individuals.  That’s why we all hurt so much.  We know that we have lost a loved one.

At the end of his book, Witness to Hope, George Weigel listed eight great accomplishments of Pope John Paul II.  The first of these is the most significant: Pope John Paul II restored the primary role of the pope from administrator of a vast Vatican bureaucracy to proclaimer of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. He returned the papacy to the ministry of Peter.  Evangelization, the spread of the Gospel, took precedence over every other function of the papacy.  Members of the Vatican Curia, or offices, often complained that their jobs would be easier if only the pope would stay home more.  Pope John Paul II didn’t agree.  He felt the need of each of us to experience the presence of the Lord through the Vicar of Christ.

The Pope made us so proud to be Catholic.  Even if we didn’t attend any of the stops of his pilgrimages, or never got a glimpse of him in that little window in Rome,  we still  viewed the hundred of thousands who did see him and we swelled up with pride: This is our pope!  This is our faith!And what did the Holy Father do to command such respect?  He called us to a strict following of the faith and morality.  He called us to be committed Catholics, not cafeteria Catholics who pick and choose those items of faith and morality that appeal to them.  He made us proud to be Catholic, but he also made us look within ourselves to see if we really were committed Catholics.

And those who are not Catholic felt the call of John Paul II to be devout Christians, to be true, believing Jews, to be holy Moslems, etc.  That is why so many leaders of the Protestant Churches, so many rabbis, so many leaders of Islam have joined the mourning and celebration of John Paul II’s life.

“Seek the Lord where he may be found,” Isaiah proclaims in the first reading.  The Holy Father sought the Lord in the dignity of every person God created.  He called upon us to look deep within ourselves, our true selves, and recognize the image of God we carry in the fragile vessel of our humanity.

Isaiah goes on to say that the Word of God goes from the Mouth of the Lord and does not return empty, without accomplishing God’s desires, without succeeding in the matters for which it was sent.  What good did all these papal pilgrimages do? Maybe we could see it in his youth, but why did a sick and infirm man of the last ten years suffering from a medical book’s worth of ailments, bother to continue exhausting trips?   And all those writings and sermons.  What was the use of this voluminous literature?

 It was all worth it, infinitely worth it.  The Pope proclaimed the Word of God to us and to all who attended, or watched, or read or all of these, and we shouted out the Word of God back
to the Father.  The Word proclaimed by one, was returned by millions.

You’ve heard the stories about Karol Wojtyla’s life.  You’ve  heard how his mother died when he was nine, his brother when he was 12.  You’ve heard how he suffered through the Nazi invasion and their determination to eliminate the Polish people, beginning with the intellectuals and clergy.  You’ve heard how he was forced by the Nazis to work in a quarry and kept on a starvation diet.  You’ve heard how he was a clandestine seminarian together with another seminarian, Jerzy Zachuta, and how the Nazis learned about Jerzy and killed him, but never learned about Karol Wojtyla.  You’ve heard how he was hit by a Nazi truck and survived.  Perhaps you’ve read that as a young priest he began intellectual gathering of college students to keep the Catholic culture of Poland alive under Poland’s new oppressor, the Communists.  And when as Archbishop of Krakow the communists said, “You will not build a church for the thousands of workers in Nowa Huta,” the communist city that housed steel workers in a human ant farm, Archbishop Wojtyla beat the communists at their own game and drowned them in enough paperwork to make the construction of Church seem less stressful than opposing it.

Nothing, not even the bullets of an assassin, nothing was going to keep this man from accomplishing the task God set out for him, to care for and to spread the Kingdom of God.  “If God is with us, who is against us?”, Paul proclaims in Romans, our second reading.  The Pope refused to give up, no matter what the oppressors latest tactics might be.  And as a result he taught us, “Never give up! Be not Afraid! Never Give Up!”

In all these things we are more than conquerors through.Him who loved us.  For I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the Love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

When does the giving stop in our lives?  When does charity end?  When can we say, “I’ve done my part.  I’ll do no more.” Only when there are no more people who are hungry, no more people who are thirsty, no more who are estranged, no more who are naked, or sick or unjustly imprisoned.

Or only when there is no longer time left on the clock of our lives.  Pope John Paul II refused to stop, refused to quit, because Jesus was still calling out to him in the suffering of the world.  All of us look to those who tell us to do this or do that and respond, “How about you?  Are you giving us an example or just dictates?”  We can’t do this with this Pope.  His life was led as Jesus’s life, it was a sacrificial offering for the People of God.  There was no stop, no quit in him.

No stop, no quit, not until the Lord said, “Enough. Come home, Good and Faithful Servant.”

We commend our Holy Father to the Lord today. But we do not consign his life to history.  Instead, we pray that we might have the courage to allow that Spirit, that dynamism, that Power of the Gospel that flowed through his life to transform us into that image of God we were created to become.

May he rest in peace.