Posts tagged john paul ii

Karol Wojtyla before he was Pope John Paul II.  This will always be my favorite picture of him.  Here are a ton more pictures of him before he became Pope!

Karol Wojtyla before he was Pope John Paul II.  This will always be my favorite picture of him.  Here are a ton more pictures of him before he became Pope!

Amazing video on the life of Blessed John Paul II!  Take a moment, kick back, and be inspired!

Why We Are Celebrating John Paul II by Fr. Robert Barron

Just after his conversion to Catholicism, Thomas Merton, who would become one of the greatest spiritual masters of the 20th century, was walking with his friend, the poet Robert Lax. Lax said to him, “Tom, what do you want out of life?” Merton replied, “Well, I suppose I want to be a good Catholic.” And his friend said, with a hint of impatience, “No, you should want to be a saint!” Lax was right: The ordinary goal of the Catholic life is to become a saint, which means a friend of God, a person of holiness.

Someone who understood this in his bones was Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II. And this is why, as pope, he declared more blesseds and saints than all of his predecessors combined. He wanted to show that holiness is not the exclusive preserve of biblical figures and ecclesiastical heroes from long ago. He wanted to vividly demonstrate that being a friend of God is a lively, indeed thrilling, option on the table for people today. 

The pure white light of the sun, as it passes through a prism, breaks into a variety of colors. In a similar way, when the light of God’s holiness passes through the prism of the saints, it displays itself in an array of diverse colors: It appears as the simplicity of Therese of Lisieux, as the deep intellectuality of Thomas Aquinas, as the nonviolence of Francis of Assisi, as the courage of Edith Stein. And this is precisely why the church takes the saints so seriously: It sees them as icons of God’s life, signs of hope in a dark world. John Paul II, in accord with the uniqueness of his personality, radiated something of the holiness of God to us — and that is a thing eminently worth celebrating.

Read the whole article in the Chicago Sun-Times here.

“The vitality of the Church depends to a great extent on the Sunday Eucharistic celebration, in which the mystery of salvation is made present to God’s people and enters into their lives.  In the expression of Lumen Gentium, God wills to save and sanctify us as a people, and there is no moment in which we are more intimately united as a community than during Sunday Mass.  It is at this moment that the Eucharist builds the Church and is, at one and the same time, the sign of the community and the cause of its growth.”   -Pope John Paul II, Ad Limina Address to the Bishops of the United States, 1983. Image from lifeteen.com.

“The vitality of the Church depends to a great extent on the Sunday Eucharistic celebration, in which the mystery of salvation is made present to God’s people and enters into their lives.  In the expression of Lumen Gentium, God wills to save and sanctify us as a people, and there is no moment in which we are more intimately united as a community than during Sunday Mass.  It is at this moment that the Eucharist builds the Church and is, at one and the same time, the sign of the community and the cause of its growth.”   -Pope John Paul II, Ad Limina Address to the Bishops of the United States, 1983. Image from lifeteen.com.

“Eight months after his election to the papacy on October 16, 1978, John Paul had ignited a revolution of conscience in his native Poland - a moral challenge to the Cold War status quo that helped set in motion the international drama that would culminate in the collapse of European communism in 1989 and the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.  The Millenial Pope’s impact on the world was not limited to his native region, however.  Over the first two decades of his pontificate, John Paul also played important roles in democratic transitions in venues ranging from Central and South America to East Asia, even as he established himself as a universal moral witness to the dignity of the human person and the world’s principal exponent of the moral witness to the dignity of the universality of human rights.  As he neared the end of his earthly pilgrimage, John Paul II - of whom the world knew very little at the beginning of his papacy - had become the singular embodiment of the trials, tragedies, and triumphs of the second half of the twentieth century for billions of human beings.” -George Weigel, The End and the Beginning

“Eight months after his election to the papacy on October 16, 1978, John Paul had ignited a revolution of conscience in his native Poland - a moral challenge to the Cold War status quo that helped set in motion the international drama that would culminate in the collapse of European communism in 1989 and the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.  The Millenial Pope’s impact on the world was not limited to his native region, however.  Over the first two decades of his pontificate, John Paul also played important roles in democratic transitions in venues ranging from Central and South America to East Asia, even as he established himself as a universal moral witness to the dignity of the human person and the world’s principal exponent of the moral witness to the dignity of the universality of human rights.  As he neared the end of his earthly pilgrimage, John Paul II - of whom the world knew very little at the beginning of his papacy - had become the singular embodiment of the trials, tragedies, and triumphs of the second half of the twentieth century for billions of human beings.”

-George Weigel, The End and the Beginning