Santo Subito!

Peggy Noonan:

'On June 2, 1979, he arrived at an airport outside Warsaw, walked down the steps of the plane, and kissed the tarmac. The government feared tens of thousands would line the streets for the motorcade into town. More than a million came.

'In a mass in the Old City, John Paul gave a great sermon. Why, he asked, had God lifted a Pole to the papacy? Why had Poland suffered for centuries under political oppression? Perhaps because Poland is “the land of a particularly responsible witness.” The Poles had been chosen to give witness, with humility, to the cross and the Resurrection. He asked the crowd if they accepted such an obligation.

'“We want God,” they roared. “We want God!” This from a nation occupied by an atheist state.

'John Paul said the great work of God is man, and the great redeemer of man is Christ. Therefore, “Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe, at any longitude or latitude. . . . The exclusion of Christ from the history of man is an act against man!”'

George Weigel:

'John Paul II’s radical Christian discipleship, and his remarkable capacity to let that commitment shine through his words and actions, made Christianity interesting and compelling in a world that thought it had outgrown its “need” for religious faith. He was a man of extraordinary courage, the kind of courage that comes from a faith forged in reflection on Calvary and the murder of the Son of God. He demonstrated, against the cultural conventions of his time, that young people want to be challenged to live lives of heroism. He lifted up the dignity of the human person at a moment when the West was tempted to traipse blithely down the path to Huxley’s brave new world of manufactured and stunted humanity. And he proclaimed the universality of human rights in a way that helped bring down the greatest tyranny in human history.'