by ARCHBISHOP CHRISTOPHER J. COYNE
When I was ordained a priest in 1986, John Paul II was pope. He was a man of prayer and deep faith. His papacy began in October 1978 and ended with his death in 2005. For the first 19 years of my priesthood, St. John Paul II was our pope. When he was elected, he was young as popes go. He was incredibly charismatic and he traveled all over the world, on hundreds of trips, speaking to children, the young, adults, husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, older people, widows, and widowers. He continually encouraged the clergy and religious of the church to be evangelizing disciples and faithful servants of the church.
He wrote numerous encyclicals, exhortations, and letters of all kinds and on all subjects. He was John Paul the Great. Towards the end of his papacy as his health began to unravel, he suffered the toll of the wounds that he bore from the assassination attempt against him early in his papacy. We all stood by and watched him linger in sickness and infirmity until his mortal life ended and God called him to himself. He served the Church well. His successor, Pope Benedict XVI, was a brilliant man and theologian. He was a man of prayer and deep faith. As Joseph Ratzinger, he was named a full professor of theology at the age of 31.
After a long career as a professor of theology at several German universities, he was appointed an archbishop and later created a cardinal by Pope Paul VI in 1977 and later Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the faith. He served there until he was elected pope in 2002. He was learned, a prolific writer and one who set his heart and his papacy on combating the scourge of relativism in western culture. (And he named me a bishop.) He was also a humble, reserved, and quiet man who was more at home in a study or chapel than in front of large audiences. He served the Church well. On Sat., June 29, I concelebrated a Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica presided by Pope Francis and received the pallium from him. He is a man of prayer and deep faith. He is the first pope elected from the Americas. A Jesuit, he brings the charism of that community to his papacy. His is a prophetic voice, constantly seeking to move us out of the comfortable middle of life and faith to the margins of society. While doing so, he continues to maintain the Church’s deposit of faith and dogma.
His off-the-cuff remarks and interviews are honest, sometimes out- rageous, and always interesting. Francis is our pope. He serves the Church well. Three different popes, three different men. Each were chosen under the guidance and power of the Holy Spirit by their fellow cardinals in conclave and placed on the chair of St. Peter. What unifies them and the Church with them is the reality of that chair. They were and are the successors of St. Peter who Jesus Christ himself named as the “Rock upon whom I will build my Church.”Regardless of the humanity of the man who sits in that chair, we honor and respect him as a successor of St. Peter knowing that our faith grounded on the “rock” of St. Peter is guided by Jesus’ own prayer that “all may be one.