We Want God

SOURCE:  "A Key Coronavirus Question: Do We Want God?" by KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ; May 25, 2020. https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/coronavirus-john-paul-ii-centenary-we-want-god/
KEYWORDS:  hunger, desire, love, God-shaped hole, humanity

Do you remember when Pope John Paul II went back to his native Poland, about eight months into his pontificate? The Communist officials couldn’t not let him in — he was too beloved. But when they did, they didn’t stand a chance. And, as Pulitzer Prize winner Peggy Noonan, author of John Paul the Great: Remember a Spiritual Father, has written, from the moment he arrived there, “the boundaries of the world began to shift.”

Despite the government’s attempts to keep Poles from getting too emotionally invested in the visit, the people lined the streets to see him. During his first Mass there, in Victory Square, the crowd thundered the declaration that “we want God,” stopping a powerful homily with a cry from the human heart so deep and insistent — and resilient — that the coming victory over the evil of Communism was beginning to be seen, in the victory of Christ over death.

It was the vigil of Pentecost, when the Apostles were given the Holy Spirit to set fire to the world. And the Poles were ready, too. Their Polish pope was a sign like no other that freedom was coming, that God was not leaving them orphaned in their suffering. In his sermon, Pope John Paul II said: “Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe, at any longitude or latitude of geography. The exclusion of Christ from the history of man is an act against man. . . . The history of the nation is above all the history of people. And the history of each person unfolds in Jesus Christ. In him it becomes the history of salvation.”

He went on to say: “It is right to understand the history of the nation through man, each human being of this nation. At the same time man cannot be understood apart from this community that is constituted by the nation. Of course, it is not the only community, but it is a special community, perhaps that most intimately linked with the family, the most important for the spiritual history of man.”