When too many are tempted to despair about the state of the world and not a few are wondering about the condition of the Church

ST. JOHN PAUL II AND THE “TYRANNY OF THE POSSIBLE”

by George Weigel

The reputations of the great often diminish over time. Ten years after his holy death on April 2, 2005, Karol Wojtyla, Pope St. John Paul II, looms even larger than he did when the world figuratively gathered at his bedside a decade ago: tens of millions of men and women around the world who felt impelled, and privileged, to pray with him through what he called his “Passover”—his liberation through death into a new life of freedom in the blazing glory of the Thrice-Holy God.

On this anniversary, as at his canonization last year, what seems most memorable about the man, at least at this historical moment, is that he refused to accommodate to the “tyranny of the possible”: the idea that some things just can’t be put right; that we’re stuck with the way things are, however much we may dislike them.

There was a lot of demoralized resignation in the Church and the world when Karol Wojtyla was elected Bishop of Rome on Oct. 16, 1978. The world from San Francisco to the Ural Mountains seemed permanently divided into two hostile, ideologically opposed, nuclear-armed camps, along a fault line defined at the end of World War II. Thirteen years after the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church seemed permanently divided, too—and perhaps condemned to the fate of mainline liberal Protestantism, which (to borrow from Richard John Neuhaus) had become the oldline on its way to becoming the sideline. Robust and evangelically vibrant Catholic conviction, it seemed, had no more place in the “real world” of late modernity than did the dream of a Europe without the Berlin Wall.

Yet John Paul II, who combined mystical insight with remarkable shrewdness, refused to bow passively to the dictatorship of the inevitable. The Lord had said to the prophet, “Come, now, let us set things right” (Isaiah 1:18): and that’s exactly what the 264th Bishop of Rome proceeded to do.

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