Lunch with the TV

It was the same at Madonna House where people were watching the TV as they ate lunch. “The room was filled with joy,” someone later told me. “I never remember such a sense of united joy among us.”

A few days ago in poustinia, that memory came back to me, and it led to others—memories of Pope John Paul II and of Madonna House.

I wasn’t much into news in the early days of the papacy of Pope John Paul II, and I had always taken the pope for granted. It was only slowly and gradually that I came to appreciate the greatness of this pope. It was only slowly and gradually, too, that I came to love him.

Then as time went on and I read some of his writings, heard him speak on television, and saw some of what he did, I became more and more grateful to him.

For as the darkness increased throughout the world, he was a rock, our mighty leader, our father, holding the evil back, protecting us. What could we have done without him?

We Need Him!

Then as he aged and his health deteriorated, I prayed, “Lord, please keep him with us longer. We need him.” I did not even want to imagine what the world would be like without him.”

In some ways, we had had a similar situation in Madonna House; for we too we had had an extraordinary leader — Catherine Doherty.

When she was alive, visitors would often ask, “What will happen to Madonna House when Catherine dies?” I, being young, didn’t think about it much. Catherine told us that Madonna House would continue—if we were faithful to the spirit that God had given her.

What would Madonna House be like without her? It was hard to imagine.

Catherine’s Death

When Catherine died, she did so very slowly and gradually. (I have always thought that God did that at least partly for us, so that we would have time to prepare and to let her go.)

As happened with Pope Benedict, we women very quickly elected for our director general the person who had worked very closely with Catherine. For it was obvious that Jean Fox was the person God had in mind.

There were, of course, as time went on, changes—unessential things never stayed the same when Catherine was alive either—but the essence, the spirit that Catherine had given us—remained the same, and the community continued to thrive. There was, in fact, an increase in vocations in the years immediately following Catherine’s death.

Jean was a very different sort of person from Catherine but she, like Catherine, had the essential quality of a leader of a Catholic community: she was surrendered to God. She was willing to undergo the painful process, the crucifixion, of God’s purifying her so that she could be a clear channel through which the Holy Spirit could move.

Yes, like Catherine and like Pope John Paul II, Jean was, for a time, the human instrument through which God gave the community and each of us personally, in fact thousands who touched Madonna House in various ways, God’s wisdom and love.

When God took Jean, he did it suddenly and without warning. And one thing that consoled me at that time was a deep sense that it’s God who took Jean. He knows what he’s doing. He will give us what we need.

The Final Ballot

This time the election took longer—a few months. When the results of the final ballot came in, Susanne Stubbs, the one the women elected as our director general to serve with the directors of priests and laymen, was on vacation.

When she returned, in fact as she walked in the door, the women staff welcomed her with a party. I will never forget the joy of that evening—both Susanne’s and ours.

Joy

Like the joy at the pope’s election, it was a joy deeply of God. For like the cardinals in the conclave, through prayer and fasting, we had sought to know whom God had chosen. And God had answered our prayer and given us a leader.

And now God has given the universal Church a new pope.

In Pope John Paul II, God had given us an extraordinary man, and it is fitting to thank and praise God for him.

It was God who gave him the gifts he needed, and God who had formed him throughout his life—through his deeply Catholic Polish culture, through his acting, through his experience of living under both Nazism and Communism, through his work as a young priest with young people, through his study of philosophy, and so forth.

Then when he was pope, it was with God’s power and wisdom that he acted, with God’s love that he loved us. How else to explain the incredible, more-than-human fruitfulness of his actions? How else explain why people wept in his very presence?

St. Paul said, I have been crucified with Christ, and I live now, not with my own life but with the life of Christ who lives in me (Gal 2:20). Could not Pope John Paul II have said the same?

So we need to thank him, too. For it is he who surrendered to God, he who over and over, whatever the cost, said “yes” to what God asked him to do.

And now God has given us Pope Benedict XVI.

Now, because he is the direct successor of St. Peter, it is to him that these words Christ said apply: I say to you. You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it (Mt 16:18).

For it is through the papacy itself, regardless of the person of the pope (and there were a few who were scoundrels) that the Church has been safeguarded for two thousand years and will be safeguarded until the end of time.

So let us praise and thank God for the inestimable gift of the papacy. And let us praise and thank him, too, for all that he wrought through the holiness of such popes as John Paul II.

Now we can look forward to what God will do through Pope Benedict XVI!