An Angel Has Landed!
“An angel has landed in Ukraine!” my wife exclaimed as she watched the Pope on television as he sat next to President Kuchma and read his message in much better Ukrainian than many in his audience. The consistent message has been that he recognizes everybody else’s heritage, Orthodox, Muslim, Jewish, or whatever, but those distinctions pale next to our common love of God. His hands shake, and he does not get around quite like he used to, but old age is no crime. My mother is eight years his senior, and after a number of minor strokes she cannot remember like she used to but gets along on her own quite well. We will all get old if we live long enough.
My thoughts inevitably drifted back to my graduate school days when I began to correspond with a nice young lady from Krak Ч w. Once she wrote how she had got pregnant but Cardinal Wojtyla had given her money not to get an abortion and at the time she had a wonderful little girl. All of us who followed Polish affairs knew about him, of course, for he had been obviously groomed by Cardinal Stefan Wyszy л nski, the Polish primate, as his successor.
Then in 1978, while visiting Ukrainian friends in Toronto, word came that events had taken a different turn: the cardinal everyone expected to one day run the Catholic Church in Poland had been elected to lead all the Catholics of the world. Some of my young acquaintances were outraged. “A thousand years of Polish oppression; we shall never forget,” they said. This did not seem a terribly good argument to me even then: after all, just about all nations that have lived in close proximity can find grievances against each other if one delves into history deeply enough, and Ukrainian history has its own bloody pages, as, for that matter, do the major churches. But perhaps it was his awareness of such feelings that kept the Holy Father from Ukraine for so long, despite the fact that he has some Ukrainian blood. He seems to have gone everywhere else first, but thank God he has now come here, bestowing his blessing on this tragic land.
The hallmark of His Holiness’s pontificate seems to me, at least, to have been his unceasing effort to bring people together without compromising the fundamental moral content of his own faith. Living in a predominantly Orthodox land, I especially appreciate his efforts to end the Great Schism (1054 and all that) with Orthodoxy. Today Catholic and Orthodox (except perhaps for the Moscow Patriarchate) Christians recognize each other as members of sister churches that are in communion with each other. This is an achievement worth waiting for, although a thousand years seems a bit long. But perhaps it took that long for Christians to outgrow their own dogmatic prejudices and return to Christ’s message of love.
Having written a novel on how the Apostle Andrew came to Ukraine, my wife has wrestled with problems of faith and confession a bit more intensely than most. And is often the case, this time she was right. A great man of the highest righteousness, the closest thing to an angel we are ever likely to see in this world, has graced Ukraine with his presence.
