Be Not Afraid

From “The Best of the Web”, a story originating from the IHT which would never appear on the BBC’s “Have Your Say” section under something like “The Pope: your memories…”

Roger Cohen of the New York Times' Paris edition tells a moving story about how the young man who was to become Pope John Paul II saved the life of Edith Zierer, who became Cohen's grandmother-in-law, in 1945 after Edith, then 13, had been liberated from a Nazi camp in Poland:

In a corner of the [train] station, she sat. Nobody looked at her, a girl in the striped and numbered uniform of a prisoner, late in a terrible war. Unable to move, Edith waited.

Death was approaching, but a young man approached first, "very good looking," as she recalled, and vigorous. He wore a long robe and appeared to the girl to be a priest. "Why are you here?" he asked. "What are you doing?"

Edith said she was trying to get to Krakow to find her parents.

The man disappeared. He came back with a cup of tea. Edith drank. He said he could help her get to Krakow. Again, the mysterious benefactor went away, returning with bread and cheese. . . .

"Try to stand," the man said. Edith tried--and failed. The man carried her to another village, where he put her in the cattle car of a train bound for Krakow. Another family was there. The man got in beside Edith, covered her with his cloak, and set about making a small fire.

His name, he told Edith, was Karol Wojtyla. . . .

I do not know what moved this young seminarian to save the life of a lost Jewish girl.

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That was no mere display, it was a passion for the support of life and a defiance of the devil. It was a matter of morality, not a “those were the days” things. Evil was as real then as it is now. So what to make of our actions? American commentator Mona Charen touched on it in a recent column pointing out that we are faking our emotions as we’ve seen with the impersonal outpourings for a pop-culture type like Princess Diana, but are at something of a loss when we deal with the death of a man who every action and reminder point to a well developed relationship with moral precept:

Culture, Weigel argues, determines civilization. Without its distinctly Christian history, Europe would not be what it is. To cite just one example, Weigel recalls the 11th century "investiture" controversy between Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII. The pope won, and the victory established an important principle that would have profound consequences for the development of what would later be called "civil society." The principle established was that the state "would not occupy every inch of social space."

She also quotes Weigel thus:

George Weigel, the theologian who produced John Paul II's masterful authorized biography "Witness to Hope," has a new slender volume out that addresses Europe's sickness of the soul. In "The Cube and the Cathedral," Weigel begins with a series of questions that limn the problem:

«What accounts for disturbing currents of irrationality in contemporary European politics? Why did one of every five Germans (and one third of those under 30) believe that the United States was responsible for 9-11, while some 300,000 French men and women made a best-seller out of 'The Appalling Fraud,' in which author Thierry Meyssan argued that the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were destroyed by the U.S. military.»

It’s not about the times we live in, as though we have no control over our appetites and thoughts, it’s about what we choose to find important to our very beings. When we refuse to see things for what they are at the risk of our feelings and our feelings alone we try to concoct facts to support them. Fear takes over, and we could never be that one person who simply looks into the face of evil and bundles the suffering in a cloak, risking something that is nothing more than an earthly life for what’s right.