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Saying Goodbye to John Paul II
By Anne Cassidy
He was younger then, and his voice was deep and strong. When a throng of young people chanted, “We love you! We love you!” he responded almost playfully, “Perhaps, I love you more.”
This was the Pope John Paul II who visited Catholic University on Oct. 7, 1979. A video clip of that visit played repeatedly on screens in the lobbies of the Edward J. Pryzbyla University Center, McMahon Hall and the Columbus School of Law from April 4 to April 8 as part of CUA’s tribute to the late pontiff. Students clustered around the video screens on their way to and from class.
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Students pay tribute to Pope John Paul II April 6 at a candlelight vigil outside McMahon Hall.
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One of those students was Jennifer Jones, a sophomore English major from Mullica Hill, N.J., who says that every time she watched the pope she felt he was saying those words directly to her. “And they challenged me to love more. He was truly inspiring, and the world was blessed to experience such love,” she reflects.
The video was one of many memorials to the Holy Father at CUA, which enjoys a special relationship with the pontiff based on the school’s unique status as the national university of the Catholic Church. In the case of Pope John Paul II, the relationship went even deeper, back to 1976, when Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Poland came to campus at the invitation of Jude Dougherty, now dean emeritus of the School of Philosophy, to give an academic lecture.
Bells Tolling, Flags at Half Mast
With the pope’s passing on Saturday, April 2, the campus went into mourning. Bells at Caldwell Hall and the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception began tolling; the papal seal, draped in black fabric, was hung at the entrance of McMahon Hall and campus flags were lowered to half-mast. Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament took place at Caldwell Chapel.
On a sunny Tuesday, April 5, Very Rev. David M. O’Connell, C.M., CUA’s president, concelebrated a memorial Mass at the basilica. He based his sermon on the words “Be not afraid,” a phrase that defined John Paul II’s papacy and was now inspiring his flock to continue without him.
“My dear sisters and brothers in Christ, my dear students and community of CUA,” Father O’Connell said, “the truest legacy of our Holy Father Pope John Paul II, as profound as it is, can be summed up most simply in the words he chose to begin his work: ‘Be not afraid.’ Hear them. Live them. Love them. Make them your own so that your last word on this earth can be as it was for Pope John Paul II last Saturday evening: ‘Amen.’ ”
Eight hundred people heard Father O'Connell's words in the basilica’s Great Upper Church. One of them was Shalom Black, a CUA graduate student in education. Black is a Protestant and had never been to a Catholic Mass before. “The pope was such a peacemaker and created such a commonality among faiths — that’s why I wanted to come,” she said. “I admired and looked up to him. The Mass really spoke to me.”
A Message for Youth
The tributes continued on Wednesday evening with a candlelight vigil in front of McMahon Hall. Several hundred people heard a selection of quotations from the pontiff’s messages to youth, including one quote from a youth meeting in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, in 1999: “Dear young people, the Church looks to you with hope; she counts on you.” That same quotation was featured on poster boards displayed in campus buildings.
Most of the people at the evening vigil were students, and their comments underscored the pope’s appeal to the young. “He understood that the future of the Church was with the youth, and that’s going to benefit the Church for years to come,” said CUA sophomore Dan Kochis.
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| Rev. Bob Schlageter, O.F.M. Conv., director of campus ministry, oversees the online papal tribute page with help from CPIT's Edward Trudeau. |
Students who wanted a more lasting way to express their grief and admiration for the only pope they’d ever known could pen messages on tablets placed in Caldwell Hall or submit an online tribute (http://ministry.cua.edu/tribute/).
Jennifer Jones, the student who had been inspired by the 1979 video of the pope, inscribed these words on the Caldwell tablet: “I love you, PJPII. Thank you for your beautiful and unwavering service and faith. Your influence on our world is eternal, as is our love for you.”
Freshman Joanna Berry from Joliet, Ill., wrote on the Web site: “Holy Father, your example has truly changed the world. Your life and witness helped lead me, a convert, to understand the Catholic faith. Thank you for that gift. Your devotion to young people gives us great hope for the future.”
The tablets will be stored at University Archives and the Web tributes will remain online until the end of the semester.
As CUA celebrated the late pope and his mission, local and national TV stations made CUA’s president, faculty and students into major presences on their newscasts. Media trucks camped out on CUA’s campus and the nearby basilica and the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center. Father O’Connell and more than 20 faculty members made a variety of media appearances on CNN, ABC, NBC, PBS, CBS, BBC, Voice of America, Fox News Channel and other television and radio stations. Five CUA students together with five counterparts from Georgetown University were featured on ABC’s ”This Week With George Stephanopoulos” discussing the Catholic Church. (For details, click on the link "CUA in the News" above this article.)
Saying Goodbye
On Friday, April 8, about 35 students gathered in the predawn hours in the "House" to watch the pope’s funeral taking place at the Vatican. The students who rose early (or in some cases never went to bed) said it was worth the effort. “It was really different seeing the funeral live. I felt more like I was participating in it,” said freshman Karen Mahowald.
For those who slept in, a video recording of the Mass and ceremonies in Rome played throughout the day in Great Room A of the Pryzbyla Center.
Meanwhile at Caldwell Chapel, exposition of the Blessed Sacrament took place from 9 a.m. until the 12:15 p.m. Mass and then from after Mass until 5 p.m. Anca Nemoianu, director of the intensive English program and assistant dean of study-abroad programs, attended the Friday Mass to pay tribute to the man she now calls John Paul the Great. “The addition of ‘the Great’ is done by public acclamation, and I would like to contribute to that. I feel as if I’ve lost a second father,” she said.
By late Friday afternoon, the sky had darkened and it felt like rain. At the School of Architecture and Planning’s Koubek Auditorium there was a screening of the film, “Witness to Hope: The Life of Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II,” with a presentation afterward by the maker of the film, Judith Dawn Hallet, wife of CUA architecture Professor Stanley Ira Hallet.
At the Columbus School of Law, the Guild of Catholic Lawyers decided to turn their weekly Friday rosary into a “Rosary and Remembrance” in honor of the pope. “Upon the news of the pope’s death we asked ourselves what the law students could do,” said Machalagh Proffit-Higgins, a third-year law student. “We knew the Holy Father’s favorite prayer was the rosary.” So the group invited the campus community, readied some rosaries and moved from their regular meeting place, the small Mary Mirror of Justice chapel, to the more spacious Slowinski Courtroom to pray the glorious mysteries together.
The rosary ended at 4 p.m. A busy, momentous week was drawing to a close. Pope John Paul II was passing into history. But on a television screen in the lobby of the law school, the video of the 1979 papal visit was still playing, with one lone spectator glued to the set. It seemed as if — like the funeral-goers in Rome who kept applauding as the pope’s casket was borne from sight —the CUA community could not quite let him go.
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