Catholic Faith and Reflections

The following was written by Edward W. Scott, then Moderator of the Central Committee and Philip A. Potter, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches in September, 1978 following the death of Papa Luciani. It was sent as an expression of condolences to Catholics.

“Pope John Paul will long be remembered for this open-hearted simplicity, his spontaneous warmth, his quickness of mind and action, his pastoral concern for all, especially the poor and needy and above all his utter commitment to Christ and his Church. The promise of his pontificate was that he would deploy these gifts of the Spirit to continue to work for the renewal of the Church, for the proclamation in word and deed of the good news of salvation, for promoting dialogue with people of all faiths and cultures, for pursuing peace and justice in the world and for working without hesitation for the unity of all God’s people, according to our Lord’s prayer as a sign and sacrament of the unity of all peoples…… We give thanks to God for a great pastor who in his steadfast and immovable faith was always abounding in the work of the Lord. We pray that in the communion of the saints this faith and work in the Lord will guide and govern the life and witness of the Roman Catholic Church and of all Churches for the sake of the world for which Christ died and rose again.”

(You can read the entire letter on the Vatican’s website, www.vatican.va. Click on Acta Apostolicae Sedis, then again on the link with the same title, then on “1978”. Scroll down to page 842.)

I suspect that these kind words used to describe John Paul I accurately would have predicted the course of a lengthier pontificate, if God would have so desired.

The following was written by Stefania Falasca in 30Days an Italian international monthly edited by Giulio Andreotti. It is a reportedly true story of a miraculous healing of Giuseppe Denora attributed to Pope John Paul I in 1992.

Giuseppe Denora, sixty year-old inhabitant of Altamura, a former bank clerk, is the beneficiary of the intercession of Pope Luciani. Sixteen years ago he was healed of a malignant stomach tumor. A sudden recovery, complete and lasting, so that his case led to the opening of an investigation into the prodigious happening that will now be studied by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. He speaks now for the first time of what happened in 1992, only now that the enquiry set up by the diocesan ecclesiastical court of Altamura is about to officially terminate its sessions….. 

“… I bought a copy of Avvenire newspaper with his photograph and took it home. I even framed it….. and put it in the bedroom….when I fell sick, I would look at him, there in front of me. But I have to be honest, I didn’t pray to him like you do to great saints. I didn’t turn to him as a great saint… No, I spoke to him man to man.

“I went to a doctor here in Altamura. He did a gastroscopy on me. He said, ‘Here, unfortunately, things are looking bad, very bad, so and see this oncologist at Bari hospital.’ The oncologist made me do another gastroscopy. Same result. ‘Non-Hodgkins’s gastric lyphoma’. I came home and started chemotherapy…. I could hardly get out of bed. I lay there, with the photo of this man in front of me. I’d look at him, I let him in on my worries and we’d talk in silence, in the way that I said: ‘Look at the state I’m in. I can’t walk anymore… What can I do?’ … At other times, ‘you know them well, those upstairs, those that are higher than you. You ask those who are higher up than you what I’m to do, if they’ll help me. If they can help me. You tell them’. On the night of 27 March I felt I was dying from the pain. A furnace in my stomach, I felt it burning so much. And I was burning inside with the pain of having to leave my family. I looked at him and said again: ‘If I have to die now who’s going to think about feeding those children….’. The room that night was lit up as always by the lampposts in the street… I saw it at the foot of the bed: a dark shadow that came forward and passed alongside me rapidly with a hand stretched out, a hand, an instant, and in that exact instant it was as if that fire I had inside was dowsed  with water. I fell asleep and in the morning I woke rested, reborn…. from that moment on nothing more, I immediately felt just as I am now; in full health. That’s how it was…. seeing the results, the doctors wrote: ‘Complete Remission’…

“Listen, I don’t know, I don’t know how I snatched this favor from him. My own deserts, certainly not. Perhaps the way I asked him… I don’t know…”

As I have said several times in the past, I believe Papa Luciani is a saint. His simplicity and joy were qualities that endeared him to all of us who were able to draw near to him and serve him during those short 33 days as our Holy Father in 1978.

You may read Stefania Falasca’s entire article at:  www.30giorni.it/us/articolo.asp?id=18978

The following are excerpts written by then Cardinal Luciani, later Pope John Paul the First. He wrote this as an “intervention” at the Synod of Bishops many years ago.

“Catechesis must be concerned not only to transmit revealed truths, but to transmit them in such a way that the one who receives them will received them with faith and be impelled to live them. To narrate and speak, yes, Augustine said, but in such a way that the listener ‘audiendo credat, credendo speret, sperando amet’. Credat: that he may catch a glimpse of God behind the catechist ‘God’s postman’. Speret: that he may rejoice, perceiving that he has before him a doctrine which will fulfill him in a noble way both as a man and as a son of God. Amet: that, feeling he is loved by God, he will set out ‘like a shot’ towards the good works to be done for God, his neighbor, for himself….

“A well-chosen Hagiography may be a great stimulus to the commitment of the young. ‘The Saints are to the Bible as a piece of music performed by skillful artists is to the written score; they indicate how this or that Bible teaching is expressed in real life, in such circumstances, and they sweep people along with their example’….

“In the sense also that faith, especially the faith of the young, prospers – usually – only in the warmth of a milieu of life lived in a Christian way; that the parents – above all – must feel they are the first catechists of their children, the bishops and parish priests, so to speak, of the home….

“Faced with… culture, two principles must be asserted and carried out.

1. Catechesis must try to instill faith into all these various cultural manifestations, provided they are not in evident contrast to the Word of God.

2. Catechesis must exploit in favor of the Word of God all the good elements that are in these cultures. It does so our of love for the Word of God itself which must be able to travel with all means; and it does so without fear of facing up to some risks and introducing new things. It does so with the spirit of Pope John, who in the opening address of the Council (11.X.1962) spoke on the one hand of presenting truth in new forms, and on the other hand demanded ‘the renewed, serene, and tranquil adherence to all the teachings of the Church in its entirety and preciseness, as it still shines forth in the Acts of the Council of Trent and First Vatican Council’….

“… let catechesis stress that the Gospel is the News that makes people joyful.…. Let Morality be presented as man’s magnanimous response to God’s love; a response which cannot be made without God’s help and which gives happiness not to him, but to us.

“The dominant note must, therefore, be joy.…..”

(Taken from L’Osservatore Romano, archives, 1978. Italics mine.)

I offer this post for three reasons. For all of us who catechize, I think these are good principles to consider; secondly, these excerpts and the complete text from which they were taken, are examples of Papa Luciani’s intellect, which some had characterized as “lacking”; and finally, it is a beautiful example of his underlying character, and maybe a glimpse of where he would have taken the Church had he lived longer: to joy, his most enduring legacy to us all.