The Death of the Pope

Pope John Paul II died at 9:37 PM on Saturday, 02 April 2005 [3:37 AM, 03 April 2005, Manila time].

I'm not really sure what that means for me. I'm sure to millions of people, especially to young people like myself, the pope's death means mourning of the type they have never done before, a kind of mourning that is reserved especially for a pope. And there is only one pope, and the pope has been pope for more than 26 years. How many of those people 26 years and below (I probably should add at least five years to that age bracket, since those people weren't old enough to have memories of their of the last pope's death)... How many of them are going through the same search for meaning about the pope's death?

Then again, it might just be me. My sister, a mere three years older than I, teared up as we were watching re-runs of the death announcement on BBC. Perhaps I took the pope for granted? The news was there; I encountered a good number of his encyclicals in my theology classes; he came to Manila twice, though the one I remember was in January 1995, when I was ten years old; I've been to Rome and St. Peter's and the Vatican Museums. But I think none of that did anything to make him a real, living, breathing human figure. To me, Pope John Paul II belonged to the pages of a textbook, right beside the pages that said something about dead historical figures. He was a portrait on the wall. He was a remote character. I didn't see him the way I saw other big people of our times, like Bush or Kofi Annan. They were moving in time; he was frozen in time.

That perhaps is the cause of ambiguity. Perhaps I am coming to terms with the death of a person I didn't really see as living. The public image of the pope has two dimensions: first, as a pope, a title in the Church and all the meaning that goes with it, second, as a human person who fills that title. A blessing given by a pope certainly is special, but the same as any blessing given by any other pope, say Pope John Paul I. But if we put a more personal dimension to it, that it was a Pope John Paul II blessing, that certainly is a unique blessing and the only one of its kind. The knowledge that John Paul II will no longer be there to give his blessings in the future is a cause for sadness. I think the personal dimension is the one I haven't come to realize. His passing, to me, is part of the cycle of church leadership, and not the passing of a pope who has made so many changes while in that leadership.

And perhaps our sadness, sorrow, and mourning belong only to who people are, not what they were called.