Special Mass for Pope John Paul II
April 1, 2005
First Friday

Fr. Abbot Denis celebrated the First Friday Mass on April 1 for Pope John Paul II, who was in danger of imminent death. The gospel for the day was John 21:1-14. His homily follows.

If I were to make a video about the Pope’s life, I would entitle it “The Miraculous Fishing.”

I see him at the end of his life, hauling in a multitude of fish and arriving to the shore, the other shore of life, with an abundance of accomplishments, with an impressively long and powerful chapter in the modern history of the papacy, in which he carried the message of Christ from one end of the world to the other.

What moves us tonight is the recognition, the realization that in the boat of Pope John Paul II we find ourselves among those in his fishing net, among the thousands and millions who have been brought closer to Christ through his ministry, as a result of his faithful and zealous ministry by which he announced to the world the truth of the Gospel.

The life and ministry of Pope John Paul belong to the marvels by which God has visited his people in modern times. You know most of the stories of his life, and you know that his story is full of miraculous manifestations of the Lord’s presence among his people

I cannot read about the beginnings of his priestly vocation, his courageous participation in the clandestine Catholic resistance against he Nazis, the days in which he gave himself over to his call to follow the persecuted and humiliated Christ and to commit his life to study, ministry and service.

We are all impressed by the way his young, powerful figure emerged slowly from the challenging years of the Second Vatican Council. How marvelous it was that upon the death of Pope Paul VI, and after a few months of hesitant search for a new leader of the Church, he emerged as an astonishingly vigorous man in full faithfulness to the Council and uncompromising in his stand for the Truth of the Gospel. We all remember the fearful event of the attempted assassination with its apocalyptic implication: right there in front of the place where St. Peter had suffered martyrdom, the blood of the Pope was spilled on the ground again and in a most realistic, not only symbolic, way the blessed Virgin reached out to protect her Son’s vicar against the power of violent death.

And we saw John Paul II returning to Poland and millions of Catholics gathering around him with no more power than the power of faith, assembling at huge celebrations in Krakow and in Czestochova. And you cannot deny that just as in the biblical account of Jericho, at the trumpet blast of the Gospel, with nothing else working for the truth than the power of faith, walls have crumbled, dictatorships collapsed. In a chain of political earthquakes an empire built on hatred and lies, an evil empire, collapsed before our eyes. Those were spectacular events of global proportions. And the Holy Father untiringly continued his ministry, visiting every continent, gathering the youth, promoting the dignity of the human person, standing up for the values of faith, family, marriage, the human body, the invincible rights of the Truth, the unborn, the elderly, the impoverished and marginalized.

We have seen marvels in the life and work of this Pope. We have seen him aging, becoming exhausted, his health undermined, his head and hand trembling, but his dedication undiminished.

His motto was TOTUS TUUS. Whatever motto this man would have chosen for his lifetime work, it had to include the word totus. He was totally yours: when he turned to God he was totus tuus, entirely yours. When he spoke to the faithful, he was totus tuus, yours in the personal and individual sense of the word. When addressed by him, you never felt as if you were part of a crowd. His approach to his listeners, the way he regarded you and spoke to you, led you to discover your dignity. And he was, in a true sense TOTUS – TOTUS HOMO, a full human being, TOTA PERSONA, a full personal being, TOTUS VIVUS, fully alive, TOTUS CHRISTIANUS, a fully integrated, humanly fulfilled, body and soul, intellectual and poet, a contemplative soul and public servant to Christ, a man on a worldwide stage, and a man surrounded with splendid and transcendent, God-bearing solitude.

The person of John Paul II means most for me when I realize how his single, personal, shining example has validated, restored, re-kindled the splendid ideal of consecrated life. I see in his legacy a call to young people to become fully given away, fully devoted, dedicated, committed to Christ, leaving behind preoccupations about the self and opening themselves to the call of grace, walking in the footsteps of the master in search of the Truth and in service of their fellow human beings. As his papacy and life close and end, we are not only astonished at the immense need we have for such people as he was to save human dignity, save the legacy of Jesus, save the future of the Church, but we also feel enriched by the imprint and memory of his life as he has left it in our hearts. We thank God for having given him to us. We ask God to help us carry the heritage he left for us.

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