The assassination attempt on St. John Paul II - 40 years later
Old age creeps up on you. I was surprised to note that the assassination attempt on Pope St. Paul II was 40 years ago from yesterday. I remember it like it was yesterday, even though I was only a young teen at the time.
It's worth reading that story and passing it on to your children and grandchildren. It is an astonishing story about how one of the greatest of popes was almost miraculously spared from death (he credits the Blessed Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Fatima) and an extraordinary story of forgiveness: the saintly pope went out of his way to visit his would-be assassin in prison, embrace him, and forgive him as soon as he recovered (photo above).
I know that St. John Paul inspired a great many priests of my generation, including myself, to follow his footsteps into the holy priesthood.
Here's just a brief excerpt from a short story on this event by Russell Shaw of the Our Sunday Visitor weekly magazine.
There is one other twist to this story. John Paul was shot at the exact time of day on the exact day of the year that the Blessed Virgin first appeared to three peasant children at Fátima in Portugal in 1917. The pope credited his survival to Mary
We certainly invoke the intercession of this saintly pope in our own times. Among his voluminous writings, one of his greatest works was an encyclical letter on how to preserve the sacredness of life as our culture descends into what he prophetically termed a "culture of death" (advancement of the destruction of innocent life) and how to live and proclaim a culture of life. He was certainly prophetic as we have seen so many deeply troubling signs of the advancement of that culture of death: once proudly Catholic Ireland now promoting the destruction of the innocents, many very prominent baptized Catholic leaders in the U.S. aggressively promoting the destruction of innocent children (and continuing to receive Holy Communion) and so on.
Pope John Paul II always spoke with a crystal clarity on the questions of how lawmakers' duties and the right to life interacted. Let us pray for our bishops and Holy Father that, following in the footsteps of St. John Paul II who challenged people in love and corrected them when necessary, that they find the courage and boldness to do the same.
