Many people -- Catholic or not -- felt a deep connection
to pope
By Tom Kisken
tkisken@VenturaCountyStar.com
(April 2, 2005)
Terri Dillon remembered holding Pope John Paul II's hand,
gazing into his face and wanting somehow to help.
She remembered how slowly he walked across St. Peter's Square
at the Vatican, his body bent in a withered arc. She remembered
he wore red shoes — a color, she thinks, that symbolized
his condition.
"What I saw is suffering and pain," she said of
the April 2003 visit with her husband, Thomas Dillon, president
of Santa Paula's Catholic Thomas Aquinas College. "I
just wanted to kiss his ring and tell him I love him. That
was in my heart."
Born in Wadowice, Poland, as Karol J—zef Wojtyla and
elected pope 26 years ago, the leader of the Roman Catholic
Church died Saturday. He was 84.
As the world mourns his passing, the ways in which he changed
how people view faith and unity were remembered by Southern
Californians who felt his influence as firmly as a hand on
their shoulders.
The Dillons said they met him twice. About seven years ago,
in a trip arranged by the U.S. ambassador to the Holy See,
they gathered with about 25 other people in a private Vatican
chapel.
Thomas Dillon said he felt as if he didn't belong. His friend
and the college's chaplain, the Rev. Thomas Conn, was dying
of cancer in a Los Angeles hospital. Dillon made the trip
only at Conn's urging and then pledged to ask the holy father
for a special prayer.
In a fracture of protocol comparable to break-dancing at
a wake, he bolted from the chapel line and strode toward the
pope. They stood eye-to-eye, each man clasping the other's
forearms. Dillon asked him to pray for his friend.
"He said, 'We will pray together,'" remembered
Dillon, crying as he told the story.
He and his wife returned to Los Angeles and went from the
airport to the hospital. Terri Dillon wrapped rosary beads
the pope had given her around Conn's hands. The chaplain wasn't
able to speak but the Dillons could tell by his breathing
he heard their story. The next day, Conn died.
When the Dillons, in a private audience during their trip
two years ago, showed the pope plans for a $12 million chapel
at the college, he seemed to care. His eyes brightened as
he looked at the drawing.
Though burdened with church crises, the pressures of the
world and his own mortality, he seemed always focused on people
— their pain and accomplishments.
That compassion was etched in the face Terri Dillon studied
from her knees in St. Peter's Square.
"I felt like I mattered to him. Everyone in the world
mattered with him," she said.
Pastoring to the world
The streets of Boston were packed on Oct. 1, 1979. Lights
from police squad cars were flashing.
Guy Erwin, a history student at Harvard who was raised Lutheran,
stood with his Catholic friends in the rain to see the Polish
cardinal who had been elected pope. For a 21-year-old fascinated
by the Reformation, it was a magical day with peace and unity
seeming like reachable goals for a pope so full of vigor he
insisted on having a swimming pool built at a papal summer
residence.
Most of what the pope said faded long ago. But Erwin remembers
feeling that words weren't just aimed at his friends —
at Catholics — but at him as well.
"He always made it clear that his message is for the
world," Erwin said, recalling how the pope was the first
to meet with a Kremlin chief, to preach at a Lutheran church
and to visit Auschwitz.
He was the world's pastor.
"He gave me hope for Christian unity," said Erwin,
a California Lutheran University religion professor sitting
in a Thousand Oaks office crammed with books on ecumenism
and Lutheran history.
The dream hasn't been completely fulfilled, Erwin said. The
pope's tenure has carried the message that change sometimes
inches through, over lifetimes and generations.
But his visibility — his goal of representing not just
Catholicism but spirituality — represented a life dedicated
to transforming the world.
It's been more than 25 years since Erwin stood mesmerized
in the Boston rain. He has difficulty merging that vigorous,
physical man with the stooped figure wracked by Parkinson's
disease and age that the pope had become in recent years.
And yet, Erwin believes, the pope saw his suffering as part
of his ministry, insisting on appearing in public though he
sometimes shook as he spoke and had trouble finishing homilies.
"I'm quite sure that's what he wanted us to see,"
Erwin said. "He doesn't want our pity. He wants to show
that life in Christ is not something that grows weaker when
the body grows weak. This part of his life was as important
as the young, vigorous part was."
Setting an example
Three summers ago in Toronto, Katie Parziale was waving and
crying and praying and hollering and holding a tape recorder
over her head.
She and hundreds of thousands of teenagers from everywhere
had washed cars, sold candy and raised enough money to be
part of the Catholic Church's World Youth Day. They walked
several miles and spent the night in the rain to hear the
pope talk about how they were the light and salt of the Earth,
how they were obligated to serve others, to illuminate those
living in darkness.
Parziale was close enough that, with the help of binoculars,
she could see tears on the holy father's face. At one point,
the "popemobile" passed several feet from her. She
thinks that maybe, for a moment, their eyes met.
"It felt pure," she said.
Remembering the moment at her Ojai home more than a year
ago, Parziale was a blur of motion. She dumped souvenirs out
of a backpack signed at World Youth Day by kids from across
the world. She whipped through a photo album of the journey.
She paged through a John Paul II photo book, stopping and
caressing a full-page picture of the pope's face.
"It's like wisdom right there," she said, pointing
at the picture. "He understands."
Parziale is 19. She played volleyball, basketball and softball
at Villanova Preparatory School and is now a student at Loyola
University Chicago and wants to be a nurse. She talks of one
day working in the Peace Corps.
She wants to serve, to bring people together, to build bridges.
The pope seemed like almost a family member, a grandfatherly
man who showed people that life is about making the world
better. She looked again at his portrait.
"I want to get it like he gets it," she said.
Feeling others' pain
Mordechai Bryski was born three years after Karol Wojtyla,
not that far from Wadowice in a Polish town called Chmielnik
that no longer exists. Its life ended with the Holocaust,
in which almost all of its residents perished, many of them
at the Treblinka death camp.
Bryski's parents, grandparents, siblings and cousins all
died. He alone survived — because a Japanese diplomat
gave him a visa. He fled to Shanghai, then to San Francisco
and finally to Brooklyn, where he got married and helped raise
11 children.
When Wojtyla became pope in 1978, Bryski was afraid. He worried
that a Holocaust-era priest from Poland placed in the most
visible pulpit in the world would mean bad news for Jews.
He worried the new pope would be revealed as an anti-Semite.
Instead, the pope reached out to Jews as he did to everyone
else. He visited a synagogue in Rome. He visited Auschwitz.
And five years ago, Bryski's son watched on television as
the pope prayed in Jerusalem at Judaism's holiest site, the
Western Wall.
In the cracks of the limestone structure, he left a written
prayer expressing sorrow for the suffering of Jews because
of Christianity.
At his home in Agoura Hills, Bryski was near tears.
"He really felt the pain of Jewish people," said
the rabbi who leads the Chabad of the Conejo in Agoura Hills.
"He went out of his way to let it be known that there
needs to be healing."
Bryski was angered when, on the same Holy Land pilgrimage,
the pope offered his support to Palestinians and suggested
Jerusalem be shared by Jews, Christians and Muslims. But he
still saw the pope as a man who understood history, persecution
and the power of religious identity.
He remembered the oft-told story of how the Rev. Wojtyla
was once asked to baptize a boy adopted by a Catholic family.
When he learned the boy was Jewish and had been orphaned because
of the Holocaust, he refused, acting instead to protect the
youth's heritage.
"Even before he was a pope, there was a part of him
that had this compassion for the Jewish people," Bryski
said. "This is what was in his heart and soul."
Linked by drama
Before he became a priest, Wojtyla was an actor and playwright
who used underground theater to protest Germany's occupation
of Poland. According to the biography "Witness of Hope,"
he wrote biblically inspired dramas and once played the role
of a king who ordered the murder of one of his subjects.
Bob Garon worked for 14 years as an actor. He did improvisational
theater along with bit parts on soap operas and a small role
on the cartoon "Bobby's World." He was the voice
of Bobby's best friend's father.
He learned of the pope's foray into acting several years
ago, just as he was beginning to discern his own calling to
the priesthood. The shared background tugged at him. He saw
it as proof that theatrical expression could be a medium that
helps people understand how God fits into their lives.
Garon, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley, is now 46
and working his way toward the priesthood. In his final year
of studies at St. John's Seminary in Camarillo, he keeps cards
that bear the pope's photo in his Bible and prays for him
often.
"I think a lot of people are going to feel, as you say,
'We've lost a friend,'" he said. "I think part of
that is you feel there can't be anyone else like him."
Garon once heard a story of how the pope slipped away from
his attendants while staying at a cardinal's home during a
visit to the United States. They found him in a kitchen, adding
ingredients to a soup. The scene and its message of humility
fascinates Garon.
"I see different people," he said, offering his
analysis of the pope. "I see someone who wants to be
like every one of us. I see someone who tries to imitate Christ
the best way he knows how. I also see someone who was very
broken physically. Mentally, he was still sharp."
Garon views the pope as a guide without whom he might not
be Catholic, much less a seminary student. That he's never
been closer to him than a television set is a source of regret.
"It's kind of funny, like the song, ÔYou don't
know what you've got until it's gone,' " he said.
Inspired silence
Jerry Dunlap of Ventura has a nameplate from the room at
St. Vibiana's Cathedral where the pope stayed during a 1987
trip to Los Angeles. He has souvenir crosses, wallet-sized
photos, rosary beads and a bottle of ros? specially made for
the holy father.
Once the athletic director at Ventura College and now a semi-retired
work experience coordinator at the school, Dunlap was recruited
by his friend, Monsignor Terrance Fleming, to be his right-hand
man during the papal visit. Fleming, then the archdiocese's
vicar of clergy, coordinated the trip to Los Angeles.
Dressed in a black suit and what he calls an FBI tie, Dunlap
was at every site five minutes before the pope arrived. It
was his job to make sure the pope didn't stumble as he got
out of a helicopter at Dodger Stadium. He had to get priests
to squeeze together into pews to make sure everybody fit into
a special Mass at San Fernando Mission Rey de Espa–a.
"I was everywhere the pope went," he said, showing
pictures to confirm the statement and remembering escorting
the pope through a rose garden. He gazed so intently at the
flowers that Dunlap found himself checking things out a second
time.
"I thought maybe he sees something better than I do,"
he said.
Dunlap, who is 63, loves to talk. Coaches, teachers and students
file into his office to dip into a never-ending river of chit-chat.
A former football and wrestling coach, he jumps to his feet
to act out a favorite story or to clap a friend on the back.
But the funny thing about being that close to the pope is
that Dunlap became quiet. He shook the pope's hand several
times during the L.A. trip. He nodded and smiled. But he didn't
say a word. Didn't want to. Didn't have to.
"You just want to think. You think of all kinds of things,"
he said.
He found himself contemplating the power of prayer, the role
of God in his life and ways to live better.
It's kind of what the pope was about, Dunlap said. He was
a symbol that pushed people to think about themselves and
their lives.
"I think he just renewed your faith in faith,"
he said.
This article originally appeared in the Ventura County
Star on April 2, 2005. Reprinted from venturacountystar.com
with express permission.
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