Saint John Paul the Great: A Light in a World in Crisis

Karol Wojtyla became a priest on All Saints Day 1946. On Divine Mercy Sunday 2014 the Church affirmed what the world already knew: he is Saint John Paul the Great.

November 1, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae

Two names were added to the Communion of Saints on Divine Mercy Sunday 2014, and midway through this third decade of the 21st Century, one of them still looms large in the living memory of billions, Catholics and not. I must write especially of Saint John Paul II because his Holy Father-hood is like a set of bookends framing my life as a priest. I have written of him before, and of the origin of his being dubbed “John Paul the Great” for his monumental impact on the state of world affairs.

That post, which we will link again at the end of this one, was “A Tale of Two Priests: Maximilian Kolbe and John Paul II.” It began, ironically enough, in the era in which Angelo Roncali became Pope John XXIII. It’s an ironic twist that John XXIII was beatified by John Paul II, but on Divine Mercy Sunday 2014 they were canonized together. So in a sense, this tribute to one is a profound bow to the sainthood of both.

I don’t want to begin with the negative, but sometimes it’s best to just get the detractors out of the way. The Media Report had an article about a 2014 PBS Frontline presentation entitled “Secrets of the Vatican.” The Frontline piece was co-produced for PBS by Jason Berry, and it was clear, for those who would see, that the agenda behind it had nothing to do with the Truths about the Catholic Church.

The triple crown PBS and Jason Berry aimed for was Holy Week, Easter, and the Divine Mercy Canonization of Pope John Paul II. One prisoner who watched it thinking it might be a tour of the Vatican Museum called it “Jason Berry’s hatchet job on the Catholic Church.” Had PBS settled on that more honest title, its ratings might have been higher. The timing of such productions is carefully choreographed, of course, to coincide with any big Catholic news coming out of Rome.

As the Canonization of these two 20th Century popes made headlines, so did the predictable efforts to defame them. I wrote of the timing of such ploys recently in “Benedict XVI Faced the Cruelty of a German Inquisition.” It has become a tradition of sorts in modern media to deck the halls with anti-Catholic slurs during the seasons of both Christmas and Easter. The strategy is that if enough mud can be thrown during times when Catholics on the fence assess their faith, some will ultimately abandon it.

It must be terribly frustrating for those behind such campaigns that at Easter every year, tens of thousands of adults thinking for themselves in the U.S. alone are received into the Catholic faith. Thousands more return after decades away. Our readers heard from one of them in the moving post, “Coming Home to the Catholic Faith I Left Behind.” Will such stories find their way into Jason Berry’s next PBS Holy Week special? Don’t count on it! But there is now a far more important story to tell.

A Pope’s 33 Days

The summer of 1978 was a strange one for me. I had graduated early that summer from Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire. A life-changing discernment to leave the Capuchin order to become a diocesan priest had culminated in sweeping change for me that summer. I became a priesthood candidate for the Diocese of Manchester and was assigned to commence graduate studies toward M. Div. and S.T.M. degrees at St. Mary Seminary and University in Baltimore, Maryland, a Pontifical Institute and the nation’s oldest Roman Catholic seminary. It was a summer of transition, and in the background of its whirlwind of change for me was the death of Pope Paul VI and the election of Albino Luciani, Archbishop of Venice, who became Pope John Paul.

Thirty-three days later, on the morning of September 28, 1978, came a knock on my seminary room door. “The Pope has died,” said an unidentified voice on the other side. “Um . . . that was a month ago,” I responded. “No,” said the voice, “the NEW Pope has died.” I never knew who the voice was, but as I made my way through the cavernous corridors toward class that morning the shock of the story was everywhere.

Eighteen days later, on October 16, 1978, the same Conclave of papal electors, who chose the first Pope John Paul just 51 days before, elected a successor. Karol Jozef Wojtyla, Archbishop of Krakow, Poland, became the first non-Italian pope since 1522. He took the name, John Paul II in honor of the first whose reign was the shortest in Church history. The new pope was 58 years old, spoke 14 languages, and would reign for 27 years — one of the longest in Church history — until his death on April 2, 2005.

With my nose buried in a textbook when that knock came on my door in 1978, I had no way to know of the long, twisted road upon which priesthood would take me. I instantly remembered that day as though yesterday, however, when 27 years later on April 2, 2005, a knock came on my cell door as a prisoner’s voice reported the news: “The Pope has died.” In between these two events, Pope John Paul the Great visited 129 countries, beatified 1,342 souls, canonized 483 saints, declared one Doctor of the Church, promulgated 14 encyclicals, and in his spare time he dismantled the Soviet Union, tore down the Berlin Wall, and brought European Communism to its knees.

Is that last point an exaggeration? Not according to the KGB. When John Paul II and John XXIII were canonized in April 2014, Catholic press was filled with accounts of the legacies of both, but for John Paul II the secular media were also filled with tributes to him, and foremost among these was John Paul’s role in the collapse of the Soviet Union. I rely on some of these tributes more than I do the Catholic press for this post because we might expect all but chronically dissenting Catholics to hold John Paul in high regard. The key to his witness, however, is found elsewhere.

One such source is a superb book by Eric Metaxas entitled Seven Men and the Secret of their Greatness (Thomas Nelson, 2013). Seven Men is a profile in courage with subjects chosen by Eric Metaxas because they were exemplars of manhood, bravery, and public witness to the courage of their convictions. Among them, for this prolific and highly regarded non-Catholic writer, was Pope John Paul II:

“Of all the men in this book, there is only one who has come to be called ‘the Great.’ John Paul the Great . . . . The man whom the Polish authorities once regarded as harmless became one of the key figures in the collapse of communism across Europe.”

— Seven Men, pp. 141, 157

The threat this pope posed to the communist agenda did not go unnoticed by the KGB. In “The Enduring Legacy of John Paul II” (Catalyst, December 2010) Ronald Rychlak chronicled Soviet KGB involvement in the assassination attempts, first of John Paul’s reputation and character, and then of John Paul himself. Reviewing Witness to Hope (HarperCollins 1999), George Weigel’s magisterial biography of Pope John Paul II, Ronald Rychlak described the KGB anxiety about this pope:

“Within months of his election, John Paul II ignited a revolution of conscience in Poland and it ultimately led to the collapse of European Communism and the demise of the Soviet Union.”

— Ronald Rychlak, Catalyst

I also wrote of the story of KGB targeting of both Pope John Paul II and Pope Pius XII in “Hitler’s Pope, Nazi Crimes, and The New York Times.” I was not at all alone in seeing the great thorn in the side that Pope John Paul had courageously become for communism and its intent to dominate Europe, and then the world. In “Popes, Atheists and Freedom” (WSJ, December 30, 2010) Daniel Henninger wrote of Pope John Paul’s courageous confrontation with the Soviet Union:

“In 1984, after John Paul had completed two pastoral pilgrimages to Communist Poland, a conference was convened by members of the KGB, Warsaw Pact, and Cuban intelligence services. Its purpose: to discuss joint measures for combating the ‘subversive activities’ of the Vatican.”

Pope John Paul II and the Miracle of Fatima

I sometimes think that I am among the priesthood’s worst skeptics. I write of measurable things, after all: history and science, the Voyager Spacecraft among the stars, and “The James Webb Space Telescope.” If someone told me when I was ordained 41 years ago that I would one day be writing about a connection between Pope John Paul and the Miracle of Fatima, I would not have believed it.

It was Father Michael Gaitley, MIC, who opened my eyes. The great Marian author of 33 Days to Morning Glory wrote something about John Paul II that did more than open my eyes. It shook my world. What follows is a summary.

In 1917, during World War I, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to three shepherd children in Fatima, Portugal. I have always accepted this because the Church accepts it, but I have also always tried not to think too much about it. No, it’s much worse than that. I once, as a much younger priest, scoffed at it all. I kept my scoffing to myself, but the whole story of Fatima was reduced in my mind to a lot of pre-scientific nonsense.

It was Mary herself who straightened me out, aided somewhat by Father Michael Gaitley. I wrote about some of this in “Behold Your Son, Behold Your Mother,” a feature article at Marian.org. I wrote that Father Gaitley’s presentation on Pope John Paul II was powerful and compelling.

The first vision at Fatima took place at 5:00 PM on May 13, 1917. After the prophesies about the conversion of Russia, the child visionaries saw a “bishop dressed in white” who “would suffer much and then be shot and killed.” This became known as the last secret of Fatima, and was kept hidden, for a time, by the Church.

Exactly 64 years later, on May 13, 1981 at exactly 5:00 PM, Pope John Paul II was shot four times as he blessed the crowds in St. Peter’s Square. One of those bullets would have surely killed him had it not missed his abdominal artery by a tiny fraction of an inch. John Paul attributed the guidance of this bullet to the hand of Our Lady of Fatima whose first apparition shared that same date.

The Soviet Empire was created in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution, and it became the largest nation on Earth. In his 1948 book, The Gathering Storm, Winston Churchill wrote of a proposal to the ruthless Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin. The proposal was that the Soviet Union should not suppress Catholicism, but should rather encourage it in order to build a relationship with the Pope. “The Pope?” Stalin famously retorted. “How many divisions has he got?”

That conversation took place on May 13, 1935, 46 years to the day before the Soviet Union tried to eliminate Pope John Paul II because he became communism’s biggest obstacle in all of Europe. The Pope survived. Stalin’s successors in the Soviet Union learned the answers to his questions far too late for their own survival.

As a wise friend once said to me, “There are no coincidences, only signs.” My scientific mind could still have dismissed all this had I not witnessed what up to then I thought to be impossible: the 1989 fall of the Soviet Empire and the collapse of communism in Europe. On November 9, 1989, thousands danced upon the Berlin Wall before it finally crumbled. I scoffed no longer as I pondered “How Our Lady of Fatima Saved a World in Crisis.” As Communism swept Europe and threatened to engulf the world in Godless darkness, Pope John Paul II was her instrument of powerful resistance.

Karol Wojtyla was ordained a priest on All Saints Day, 1946, and is now in the company of the Communion of Saints, including the 483 saints who were canonized by a Saint. As a priest and bishop, he studied Sister Faustina’s Diary and promoted her devotion to Divine Mercy, and later her cause for sainthood. He once wrote that as a priest he always felt spiritually close to Sister Faustina. Karol Jozef Wojtyla surrendered his Earthly life on the Vigil of Divine Mercy Sunday, 2005.

Saint John Paul the Great, pray for us as we face, yet again, a world in crisis.

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. For the Feasts of All Saints and All Souls, you may also like these related posts which we hope you will share with others:

A Tale of Two Priests: Maximilian Kolbe and John Paul II

Of Saints and Souls and Earthly Woes

The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead

The Holy Longing: An All Souls Day Spark for Broken Hearts

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Be Wary of Crusaders! The Devil Sigmund Freud Knew Only Too Well

Some of Sigmund Freud’s map of the human psyche has been debunked in modern psychology, but Freud also knew well that some moral crusaders doth protesteth too much.

I have debated this post in my mind for days, arguing with myself whether I really wanted to write it. I have always dreaded offending people, and there’s just no way I’m going to be able to write this without someone feeling offended. But I also believe that simply not ever offending anyone is not a worthy goal for either a writer or a priest. I once asked a priest why he decided not to preach on the sanctity of life on “Respect Life Sunday.” He responded that he just doesn’t like offending anyone and someone is always offended when he preaches a pro-life homily. Sometimes, not offending anyone means avoiding ever speaking the truth.

It takes a degree of courage to point out the truth to ears that would rather not hear it. One newer reader of this blog has a recent example. Chris Tressa discovered Beyond These Stone Walls because Spero News reprints some of my posts. Spero News is sort of the online frontier. Like many sites, civil discourse takes a back seat to free flowing reader opinion. So Spero News  posts pretty much anything anyone wants to say.

We can’t really fault Spero News for this when standards for civil discourse don’t apply on many Catholic sites as well. Some of the comments posted on just about any subject in the Catholic Church by readers of the National Catholic Reporter  demonstrate the steep decline in online Catholic civility.

Spero News seems to have a lot of readers, but not a lot of comments. The relatively rare comments on my articles there are often printed and mailed to me. Some are very positive, but some are just outright attacks. I’m never offended, however. Invariably, the attacks are turned around by other readers and often backfire on their authors — who never identify themselves, by the way.

Sometimes this is even humorous. One writer identifying herself as an unnamed SNAP leader wrote in a comment that she finds it “despicable and deplorable” that an accused and convicted Catholic priest is given a voice online at a site called Beyond These Stone Walls. The sole comment posted in response made me laugh out loud:

“I clicked on that link and just spent several hours reading Beyond These Stone Walls. I found it to be riveting and uplifting. Thank you for telling us of this wonderful site.”

I don’t think that’s the response the SNAP writer hoped for, but Chris Tressa learned of BTSW in just that way. A man who leaves negative comments about priests throughout the Catholic online world posted a really toxic one on the Spero News reprint of one of my recent posts there. It was obvious that he didn’t actually read that post before spouting off, because he demonstrated in graphic prose the very points I set out to make. What was really of interest to me, however, was Chris Tressa’s comment in response:

“In one brief comment, the writer above used the term ‘pedophile priest’ five times, along with multiple variations of ‘child rape’ — all in just a few sentences of text. Who does that? To paraphrase Shakespeare, ‘The man doth protesteth too much, me thinks!’ This sounds to me like classic reaction formation. Is it time to visit the shrink?”

From an analysis of typical comments in Catholic media, it might appear that a lot of people have ongoing and extremely negative views about Catholic priests. That may not be the case. What’s really going on is that a relatively small number of crusaders are “seeding” the Internet with their comments. If you take the time — and have the stomach for it — to track comments throughout the Catholic online world, and at mainstream media articles about Catholic scandal, you’ll see the same few screen names over and over.

They seem to be everywhere, and Chris Tressa ran into one of them. They are on a very personal crusade, but what makes this so personal for them? As Chris Tressa asked, “Who does that?” Is it because they are victims of sexual abuse? Perhaps so, but I know MANY adult victims of sexual abuse who are not crusaders. This prison and prisons everywhere are filled with men who were seriously victimized as children. A number of the readers and supporters of Beyond These Stone Walls  are survivors of childhood sexual abuse who resent the venom being spewed in their names.

But it’s also a fact that many of the most vocal crusaders at SNAP, Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), and Bishop-Accountability are not victims of sexual abuse. So what’s behind the nasty crusade of vilification and suspicion?

SNAP leaders offered to provide protesters with fake “Holy Childhood photos” to hold up for news cameras.

Classic Defense Mechanisms

We got a hint of the answer in the case of Dr. Steve Taylor, a Louisiana psychiatrist and member of SNAP who has been one of the more vocal advocates for an end to all civil rights for accused priests. Dr. Taylor has argued loudly for an end to any state respect for the seal of the Catholic confessional. Dr. Taylor was also the founder of a local chapter of SNAP. “We have faces now,” he bitterly exclaimed to legislators and news cameras while SNAP members held up the contrived “Holy Childhood photos” described in “SNAP Exposed” by Catholic League President Bill Donohue.

Over the last three years, Dr. Steve Taylor has lost his medical license to practice psychiatry. He is now serving a sentence in a federal prison convicted on multiple charges of possessing child pornography.

Before he was sentenced to prison, SNAP founder Barbara Blaine and anti-Catholic author Jason Berry both pleaded for leniency for Dr. Taylor citing that his “problem” does not undo or overshadow all the good he has done. I had this solidly in mind when SNAP leaders vilified Bishop Robert Finn, charged with a misdemeanor for not reporting a priest fast enough when the priest was allegedly discovered with child pornography.

The crusade against accused priests that Dr. Steve Taylor was on has many of the elements of classic reaction formation, a concept first proposed by the father of modern psychiatry, Sigmund Freud. His descriptions of human ego defense mechanisms and hysteria included this entirely unconscious phenomenon which he described as an attempt to cover up something unacceptable in oneself by adopting a stance in opposition to it. It is the formation of a reaction to an encounter with self. When something disdained is discovered there, defense mechanisms like reaction formation can develop into an elaborate ruse in which the thing feared in oneself becomes the thing attacked in others.

There are many modern examples. Congressman Mark Foley railed in Congress for bills targeting those who would sexually exploit young people. In 2006, Congressman Foley resigned after he was confronted with sending sexually explicit e-mail and text messages to teenage male pages working for the U.S. House of Representatives.

The televangelist scandals of the 1980’s involving famed TV preachers Jimmy Swaggart, PTL’s Jim Baker, and others also come to mind. Week after week, they railed against the licentiousness of the modern era while caught in their own sexual and financial scandals. Former New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer mercilessly prosecuted officials caught in prostitution and other crimes before he was himself arrested in a prostitution sting. In the 1970’s, Covenant House Founder, Father Bruce Ritter testified before Congress to expose what he called the rampant exploitation of homeless youth on America’s streets only to leave the country when several of the very young people he claimed to be saving accused him of sexual abuse.

Debbie Nathan on “Sybil” and Hysteria

Much of what Sigmund Freud brought to the field of psychology and its understanding of hysteria has been debunked. One of the latest debunkings — and one of the finest — is a book by Debbie Nathan entitled Sybil Exposed (Free Press, 2011). Debbie Nathan serves on the advisory board of the National Center for Reason and Justice. (For full disclosure, I should tell you that this heroic organization endorses Beyond These Stone Walls and assists in sponsorship of my own defense).

Debbie Nathan is also the author (with Michael Snedeker) of an earlier landmark book, Satan’s Silence, which exposed the great fraud behind the ritual sex abuse stories of the 1980’s. Debbie Nathan continues this theme in Sybil Exposed, a riveting account of the fraud perpetrated in the story of Shirley Mason, known to the world as “Sybil.”  Debbie Nathan here exposes the truth behind the world’s most famous case of multiple personality ever brought to print and the silver screen.

Sybil, aided by an ambitious psychiatrist, claimed to have sixteen separate personalities brought on by a childhood traumatized by sexual and physical abuse. But Debbie Nathan exposed that it was all an elaborate hoax, a hoax that sold six million copies of Flora Rheta Schreiber’s 1973 book, Sybil. It turns out that neither the abuse nor the multiple personalities were real. In Sybil Exposed, Debbie Nathan has performed a great service to victims of the “hysteria prosecution” craze.

The story of Sybil was also a fraud on the American courts. The two decades from 1980 to 2000 saw multiple cases of “victims” claiming to have trauma-induced repressed and recovered memories of sexual abuse. Many men — including some Catholic priests — went to prison on those fraudulent claims. Some are still in prison. Writer Ryan MacDonald wrote of how the “psychological trauma” fraud played out in my own case in “Psychotherapists Helped Send an Innocent Priest to Prison.”

But “reaction formation,” one of Freud’s signature theories about hysteria and ego defense mechanisms, has survived all the debunking. One of the most advanced modern psychology studies demonstrating the power of reaction formation (Adams. Wright & Lohr, 1996) was on the topic of homophobia. It pointed out the difference between a moral belief that society should not promote homosexuality as a social good, and a more personal belief that society should persecute homosexuals. They are not one and the same. The 1996 study found that people who cross the line between a moral opposition and a moral crusade are often “protesting too much” a tendency in themselves that they find unacceptable.

Reaction formation also influences our views about what constitutes prejudice. Political or religious opposition to same-sex marriage, for example, is often — and wrongly — interpreted as active persecution and outright bigotry. I have known gay rights activists who interpret any opposition to their political goals and social agenda as religious persecution and a denial of their civil rights. This is the second way reaction formation is manifested. People who see all disagreement as judgment, condemnation, and persecution may really be passing judgment on themselves. I have read repeatedly that the Catholic Church “condemns gay people.” This is simply untrue.

Reaction Formation against Prejudice

American society since the 1960s has been especially conscious of any appearance of racial bias or prejudice, and has widely endorsed strong norms condemning prejudice. If Americans are led to believe that they may hold unacceptable prejudiced beliefs, or if they even believe that others are seeing them in this light, “they may respond with exaggerated displays of not being prejudiced” (Adams, Wright and Lohr, 1996).

The debate that surrounded same-sex marriage may have been an example of that response. When concerns were raised that same-sex marriage laws are an example of legislation and social reform by judicial fiat instead of by a democratic process, gay rights activists typically, and wrongly, dismissed the objection as bigotry. The media has given strength to that interpretation by underwriting it, and many Americans have withdrawn or silenced their opposition to same-sex marriage because of a politically correct fear of appearing prejudiced.

A striking example of how the fear of appearing prejudiced creates reaction formation is something that occurred in the Episcopal church in New Hampshire. The World Wide Anglican Communion has been in a state of civil war since the 2003 election of Bishop Gene Robinson. At the time he was nominated as bishop, he was a divorced, openly-gay man in a relationship with another man. This has played out in New Hampshire almost perfectly parallel to the Catholic sexual abuse crisis, but never the two shall meet.

And yet I have no doubt whatsoever that if Gene Robinson was not a gay man — if he was simply a heterosexual divorcee living with another woman, he would never have been a candidate for bishop in any U.S. Episcopalian diocese. This seems an example of a group so wishing to demonstrate its lack of prejudice that a new standard for its episcopacy was created. Bishop Robinson was not elected bishop in spite of being openly gay, but because of it. The global Anglican Communion has been torn asunder by this one example of reaction formation. Yet I have read repeatedly that one of the goals of “reform” groups like Voice Of the Faithful is to foster an American Catholic church that mirrors the Episcopal church and its “sensitivity” to politically correct American values. Thanks, but no thanks.

In New Hampshire, Bishop Gene Robinson campaigned for the passage of a same-sex marriage law. Once it was passed, he and his partner were among the first to enter a same-sex marriage in this state. Then he checked himself into rehab. Then he got divorced. Finally, having torn the entire Worldwide Anglican Communion asunder, he retired.

This same politically correct fear of appearing prejudiced has also radically altered the U.S. Bishops’ collective response to the Catholic sex abuse scandal. When the John Jay College of Criminal Justice was commissioned to study the causes and contexts, both the researchers and the bishops were left with a conundrum. The results were clear that this was not a crisis involving pedophilia as it is clinically defined — though that did exist on a much smaller scale. The problem was predominantly, and clearly, claims of homosexual predation of adolescent and young adult males during the sexual revolution of the 1960s to 1980s. There is no greater evidence of the power of reaction formation than when an entire institution would prefer the term “pedophile scandal” to “homosexual scandal” even when the facts say otherwise.

Truth and honesty are truly golden things, and most of you, in your own heart of hearts, know them when you see them. We are in a culture, however, in which the views of many are manipulated by the agendas of a few. But sometimes the few are themselves manipulated by the quirks of their own psyches. Be wary of crusaders. Freud and Shakespeare both knew the truth about them. Sometimes they doth protesteth too much.