GUADALAJARA, Mex.—This diverse nation of 100 million is 95% Roman Catholic and even on a regular Sunday most cathedrals and churches overflow so full with worshippers that many people have to stand outside to hear Mass.
Yes, Mexico is a nation with strong traditional values.
Ah, if only our own nation had such a quality.
Naturally, Pope John Paul II’s death dominates newspaper and magazine headlines.
Affectionately, the glossy magazine Quien says, “Adios, Juan Pablo II”
Goodbye, John Paul II.
From Milano comes, “El papa cambio al mundo.”
The Pope who changed the world.
Coincidentally, down the street from my home here they have recently built a small synagogue and a Jewish friend brings up John Paul’s admiration for the Jewish people and his defence of Israel.
She mentions a column I penned several years ago that goes to the bottom of this extraordinary friendship.
Well, I recall it often, I say, but in one of those inexplicable situations, it is one of those important columns I never saved.
Caramba!
My friend actually did save a photostat of the column, “Quest rooted in friendship: Overture changed relationship between Catholics and Jews,” (Feb. 20, 2002).
The spur for that column was a book, The Hidden Pope by Darcy O’Brien (Daybreak-Rodale Books, $33.95), and it’s the story of how a single lifelong friendship dramatically changed the relationship between Roman Catholics and Jews.
Daybreak-Rodale should immediately reprint a million copies of this work.
This spellbinding and moving story tells of the Pope (then Karol Wojtyla) and his childhood Jewish friend, Jerzy Kluger, in the small Polish town of Wadowice.
It talks abut their separation at the beginning of the Second World War, and their individual experiences under the tyrannies of both German Nazism and later Soviet Communism, and their reunion more than three decades later.
Both friends, from different religious faiths, were victims of the same two evil political philosophies.
O’Brien takes the reader back into the daily life in Wadowice before the war where Christians and Jews lived peacefully side by side before the Nazi invasion.
The story upsets the frequent charade about Polish anti-semitism—and reveals for the first time how Wojtyla entered the priesthood, which had been outlawed by the Nazis, as he reacted to Nazi terror, and how his friend suffered Soviet oppression and fought in the beleaguered Polish army.
O’Brien recounts how in 1979—and for the next 15 years—John Paul enlisted Kluger to secretly work with him toward Vatican recognition of Israel.
The book not only charts the enduring friendship of the two, but paints a portrait of John Paul’s loyalty, abhorrence of bigotry and embrace of Judaism as the indispensable ancestor and fraternal partner of Christianity.
In that column, I said The Hidden Pope is a book every Roman Catholic and Jew should read, for it can’t help but make Catholics and Jews look on each other as soulmates with a similar mission.
The outpouring of affection for John Paul from Jewish men and women around the world surely demonstrates that.
Indicatively, there isn’t a political world leader alive today who has either the stamina or the staunchness that John Paul had.
He never wavered.
Never played to popularity.
Yet he became the most admired and most popular leader in the world.
There must be a lesson here.
Copyright ? 2005 Paul Conrad Jackson.
Click here to read Paul Jackson’s full and fascinating biography. Paul Conrad Jackson is one of Canada’s most distinguished and thought-provoking journalists. He is currently senior political commentator for the Calgary Sun and other related newspapers, after being both Editor and Associate Editor for a number of years. Mr. Jackson has interviewed such world famous political figures as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev, John Diefenbaker, Brian Mulroney, Pierre Trudeau, Yitshak Rabin and Benjamin Netanyahu.
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