May the angels lead John Paul into Paradise

I'm breaking one of my own rules today, allowing purely personal observations (and therefore of no general interest). Yet somehow I wanted to record the context of learning of John Paul's death. I finally read the confirmation on Yahoo news, and turned on the BBC coverage, which I'll undoubtedly have on for hours to come. I joined in the Italian prayers and hymns, so wishing I could be in Rome today.

I admire John Paul's integrity - and indeed crossed the Tiber because of my own. I just cannot 'sign on the dotted line' on everything, and too much local RC public worship had become an intellectual and aesthetic wasteland. :) I also am more of the patristic "Rome, Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, (Canterbury, Moscow)," mindset than the later papal model. How well I remember John Paul's election. I was in graduate school then, and for some reason was with my mother and father that afternoon. When my dad heard the Dean of the College of Cardinals announce the new pontiff was Ka-ROL Wo-TEEE-ya, he told me that an African pope had been elected.

John Paul was the 5th pope to reign during my own lifetime. I was a small child when Pius XII died; old enough to remember warm, merry, and homely John XXIII; came to maturity during the time of insightful, aristocratic Paul VI, whose later papacy would be a time of such grave tumult. Before his election to the papacy, Karol Wojtyla was hardly more than a name to me.

He was a man of strength and conviction - I never saw him as the autocrat that some others do, but he always gave a sense of tough-mindedness. I greatly admired his concern for social justice; his opposition to war; his frank condemnation of the atheistic, materialistic 'religions' of both communism and capitalism; his meeting with and gathering those of all faiths, Christian or not. As Eamon Duffy aptly mentioned today, John Paul had a total dedication to respect for life in what he saw as a culture of death. (They were by no means the only tyrants in John Paul's lifetime, but heaven knows that Death was a very close friend of Hitler's and Stalin's, and Karol had ample acquaintance with the tactics of both. I, too, have yet to see evidence that a culture of death is a thing of the past... but I doubt anyone will see that day.)

I am very glad that a pontiff of such intellectual abilities, and extraordinarily diverse life experience, could reign for a quarter of a century. Gladder still I am at the glory he must be contemplating right now! What a wonderful close to the octave of the Resurrection... and isn't tomorrow's gospel that of the Good Shepherd?