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A true ambassador of Catholicism
By McGreevy
Hugo Young, the journalist and committed Catholic, died last year from cancer at the relatively young age of 64.
In the months leading up to his death he was asked to sum up what being a Catholic meant to him.
“Catholicism,” he said, “is a hard religion to live up to but a great religion to die by.”
The death of a Pope is always a major event but this time round the Pope’s dying transfixed the world in a way that none of us who have followed his slow, painful decline will ever forget.
What happened over the last week was best summed up at the weekend by the Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin.
“The Pope has shown us how to diw which is an inspiration to us all,” he said.
There were hundreds of millions of people across the world who watched those lighted squares of window in the Vatican over the weekend and wondered how they would meet their own death.
The reality of death is at the heart of the Christian message. Without the belief in the resurrection, Christianity is just another belief system, one of many; without His Resurrection, Jesus would be just another well-meaning preacher.
All of us fear death, yet there was great consolation in the manner in which the Pope died at the weekend. Cardinal Angelo Sodano said the serenity that the Pope had shown in his last hours was the “fruit of faith”.
In death, as in his final years, the Pope set an example of Christian witness for us all to follow.
Last year, when a second Papal visit to Ireland was mooted, I wrote in this column that such a visit would be counterproductive.
An enfeebled, barely sentient Pope would only serve to underline how much the Church in Ireland has declined since those heady days of 1979.
But I, along with numerous commentators who called for the Pope's retirement, missed the point.
Nobody would have blamed the Pope had he stood aside years ago when the effects of Parkinson’s Disease were all too apparent.
By carrying on despite his decrepitude, the Pope made a more powerful statement of the true nature of the Christian faith than all his encyclicals and speeches could ever do.
In the brilliant film 21 Grams, Jack Jordan is an ex-con who has found God. He strives to live a blameless life and studies the Bible assiduously, but one night on the way home from work he runs over a woman and her child killing them both and ends up in jail.
Inconsolable, he rages at his Pastor who had taught him that finding God was the way to a better life. His Pastor replies: “Jesus didn’t come to free us from pain. He came to give us the strength to bear it.”
The Pope understood this from an early age. By the time he was 22, he lost his entire family. A sister died before he was born, his mother died when he was eight, his beloved older brother Edmund succumbed to scarlet fever when the Pope was 12 and his father of a heart attack 10 years later.
He was almost killed several times during the Second World War, most notably when he was hit by a German truck.
He saw at first hand the depths of human depravity and the murderous ideologies of Fascism and Communism. His travails would have broken a lesser man.
Only a person who had endured such suffering could say with such conviction when he was elected Pope: “Be not afraid.”
It was the central message of his Papacy. With faith, any suffering can be endured.
He knew that his painful and very obvious physical decline would be difficult for his followers to see, but, perhaps, he wanted it that way.
He wanted to show that there is dignity in suffering and old age. By carrying his cross in such a public way, he exhorted others to do likewise.
Commentators often exaggerate the influence of any given Pope. The Church is never, in its essence, about one man.
There has been a great turning away from the strictures of Catholicism in Ireland and the Western World. The Pope can cajole or attempt to lay down the law, but, in essence, all he can do is lead by example.
This Pope did that with an indefatigable will and a belief that the better nature of man can triumph because God is on our side.
Agree or disagree with him, he was a truly great man. His life was a triumph for Christian fortitude and the human spirit.
If there is a better world that this one, he assuredly is in it.
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