Our Sunday Visitor

March 27, 2005

INTO THE DEEP

The Pope and the Cross

Pope John Paul II Is Living the Christian Message of Suffering and Salvation

By Colleen Carroll Campbell

A few years ago, when asked if he would step down from the Chair of Peter due to his deteriorating health, Pope John Paul II answered with a question: “Did Jesus come down from the Cross?” 

Many have mocked the Pope’s answer, as they have ridiculed his refusal to resign the papacy.  They say that the Pope is simply too frail to run the Church, and that Catholics deserve better than a leader so broken and weak, a man whose suffering is so painfully apparent to all. 

But the Pope’s critics have forgotten a central truth about Christianity: Christians are a people redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ, a man whose very brokenness, weakness, and suffering made possible our salvation. 

The Pope knows this truth well.  More than two decades ago, he wrote an encyclical on the mystery of suffering, Salvifici Doloris (“The Christian Meaning of Human Suffering”), in which he explored the connections between the suffering of Jesus on Calvary and the suffering in our own daily lives.  The Pope urged his readers to use their trials to draw closer to God, and he emphasized the power of physical suffering and sickness to kindle conversion in the soul. 

“Down through the centuries and generations it has been seen that in suffering there is concealed a particular power that draws a person interiorly close to Christ, a special grace,” the Pope wrote. 

“To this grace many saints, such as St. Francis of Assisi, St. Ignatius of Loyola and others, owe their profound conversion. A result of such a conversion is not only that the individual discovers the salvific meaning of suffering but above all that he becomes a completely new person. … When this body is gravely ill, totally incapacitated, and the person is almost incapable of living and acting, all the more do interior maturity and spiritual greatness become evident, constituting a touching lesson to those who are healthy and normal.” 

The Pope teaches that people who suffer deeply have a unique opportunity to know Jesus more deeply and to lead others to Him.  As he told the members of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Workers in January, the sick have a “special mission” in the Church: “In union with the suffering Christ, they can cooperate in the salvation of humanity, increasing the value of their prayers with the offering of their suffering.” 

Given his convictions about the redemptive value of suffering, it is not surprising that the Pope has resisted calls to resign the papacy for health reasons.  John Paul is embracing his physical suffering as Christ embraced his Cross.  He refuses to hide his frailty from public view because he wants to show us what it means to trust God completely, to depend entirely on God’s grace rather than on our human strength. 

In the course of his 26-year pontificate, the Pope has traveled to more than 130 countries, held talks with more than 850 heads of state, canonized nearly 500 saints, named more than 230 cardinals, written 14 encyclicals and 14 apostolic exhortations and added five new mysteries to the Rosary.  Yet his greatest accomplishment may be the one we are witnessing today: The Pope’s patient endurance of suffering for the love of Christ and His Church. 

Pope John Paul II has consented to become weak in the eyes of the world so that God’s power might shine through his weakness.  He is living the words he wrote about suffering so many years ago: “In so far as man becomes a sharer in Christ's sufferings—in any part of the world and at any time in history—to that extent he in his own way completes the suffering through which Christ accomplished the Redemption of the world.”

We owe our Holy Father gratitude not only for preaching the truth about the Christian mystery of suffering, but for living it, and for showing us how to do the same. 

Colleen Carroll Campbell is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. and author of “The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy” (Loyola Press, $14.95).