John Paul II's Legacy: M.J. Akbar's View

M.J. Akbar, editor of the Asian Age, an Indian, and a Muslim, recently wrote about John Paul II's legacy.

The Vicar

M.J.Akbar

For the full essay, click here.

Karol Jozef Wojtyla … became convinced of his destiny not when he became Pope on 16 October 1978 after the sudden death of John Paul I, but after an assassin’s bullet failed to kill him on 13 May 1981.

The strange story goes back to another 13 May, during the First World War. On 13 May 1917, the Virgin Mary … appeared in a vision to three peasant children in a Portuguese village called Fatimah, and told them three things about the future. … The third revelation was considered so volatile that it was kept secret in the archives of the

Vatican

. There would be an attempt on the life of a Pope by an atheist, after which the atheist empire would be brought down. …

On 13 May 1981, a Turk called Mehmet Ali Agca, in the pay of the Soviet bloc, fired twice at the Pope in

Rome

. A bullet lodged in his body, but he survived. Later, the Pope visited Agca in his prison to forgive him, and heard Agca say, in astonishment, "How is it that I did not kill you?" Pope John Paul II offered the bullet extracted from his body at the shrine of Virgin Mary in Fatimah. He knew who had saved him. He also knew that it was his destiny to make the revelation come true. He had in fact started such a mission much before 1981.

When Karol Wojtyla became Pope, Yuri Andropov, the celebrated chief of the KGB and later head of the

Soviet Union

, apparently warned the Politburo that there would be trouble ahead. They did not have to wait long. Within a year of his election he visited

Poland

, then still a member of the Communist bloc, and told a million-strong crowd, "You are men. You have dignity. Don’t crawl on your bellies." Now that much more than a decade has passed since the collapse of the

Soviet Union

, and we have the virtue of hindsight, those three sentences sound very much like the beginning of the end. …

He was a believer in the classic mould, without private doubt or cynicism. His crusades were against atheism, rather than another faith. He made no secret of his antipathy to Godless communism…

Faith is such a rarity now even among the faithful…

Personally speaking, and without meaning to hurt any sentiment, Pope John Paul’s contribution to the edifice of the international Church that was his parish is less important than his contribution to the idea of faith. The battle between faiths has been superseded by the battle for faith against the spreading triumph of rationalism. … Faith believes that there are limits to man’s knowledge: he can, for instance, understand how he is born, but not why. He must leave the why to God. As the verse from the Quran that is recited during a funeral ("Inna li-llahi wa inna ilay-hi raji’un") puts it, we belong to God, and we return to God. In an age that raises intellect to the power of prophecy and science to the status of a religion, John Paul believed in a faith that could move mountains. He did move one whole range of mountains, when he took on the Soviet empire. He was never ashamed of the tears shed in prayer. A sufi would have understood this. You do not have to agree with Pope John Paul in order to respect him.

For a believer the strange tale of the prophecy of the Holy Mother in the

village

of

Fatimah

would not have been strange at all. His sense of history would be deeply imbued with the doctrine of predetermination, the belief that nothing happens except by God’s will. Does that make him "backward" and "pre-modern", a dinosaur from some "pre-enlightenment" age? There are doubtless people who think so. Strangely, the one quality that unbelief does not possess is humility. It needs must condemn the other to contempt. Three centuries ago the Church sent the heretic to the stake; today, the heretic sends the believer into the bear’s pit of ridicule. The behaviour of reason has not been as reasonable as you might expect.

Pope John Paul II believed in miracles. He lived beyond the age of reason.