The Pope's Last Prayer
By A.M. Siriano (04/04/05)
As I watched the sudden shift in the news from the death of Terri Schindler to the death of Pope John Paul II, I had to wonder if the significance of the latter was truly greater than the former. It seemed almost shameful that the rightful passing of an old man should relegate the issue at hand—the wrongful torture and execution of a young woman—to a place of “so five minutes ago.”
I soon realized that if any meaning was to come out of this at all, these events must be taken on the whole—even more so because they happened together. Within a two-week span, the world watched the murder of an innocent woman whose life was deemed expendable, followed by the passing of her greatest advocate. If love of life is a matter of faith, as I believe it is (if you try to build that love on a bioethical view, you will come up clinically short), then Terri Schindler was, in a very real sense, a martyr for the faith.
The Pope understood the ramifications of her death and came to her defense as one of his last acts. But he also understood the nature of evil and the nature of suffering. To the Pope, suffering was a gift of God because it was an opportunity for identification with the Suffering Savior—a theme prevalent throughout his remarkable life. Could there have been a greater contemporary picture of this theme than the suffering of Terri Schindler by the careful plotting of evil forces, a suffering whose denouement was not her own passing, but the passing of the Vicar of Christ himself? Just as Charles Krauthammer* finds “it hard not to suspect some providential hand at play” in the election of this Pope, I find it hard not to see that same hand at work in the events leading up to his death.
The Vatican claimed that the Pope was communing with the Lord even before he was pronounced dead—for the faithful, not hard to believe—and it is easy to imagine that Terri Schindler, herself a Catholic, was waiting in the wings to be embraced by her ecumenical Father. It is a comforting thought, and perhaps one that has already given the Schindler family peace. But if there is truly meaning in the suffering and sorrow of Terri Schindler (and the Schindler family), we must carry on the work of the Lord as championed by the Pope, and by so many other Christian and Jewish leaders.
James Bowman lamented in his on-line diary [1] that public capitulation to darkness in the Schiavo case is what is most disturbing about the last few weeks:
What is shocking, what makes some of us wonder what kind of barbaric world we suddenly find ourselves living in, is the apparent majority of Americans—a large majority, we are told by the pollsters—who are quite happy that what has now been done to poor Mrs Schiavo should have been done to her. And presumably to others in her situation.
He ends his post (written on the day that Terri died) by suggesting that paganism may be reasserting itself, especially “now that the traditional moral compass supplied by Christianity is gone.” I don’t know if I believe it is yet gone, but two short days later, as we tried to find our way through the smoke of a brutal defeat, the world’s leading Moral Compass, the Pope himself, was dead. Have we just witnessed the last glimmer of hope die with him, or will we find it within ourselves to allow the symbol of Martyr and Saint open our eyes to a monstrous Evil that is looming ever larger in our world?
* Townhall, April 3, 2005, “Pope John Paul II,” http://www.townhall.com/columnists/charleskrauthammer/ck20050403.shtml
[1] JamesBowman.net, “Diary of March 31, 2005,” http://www.jamesbowman.net/diaryDetail.asp?hpID=113
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