Yi-Fu Tuan - Dear Colleague

April 12, 2005

Dear Colleague,

The enormous fuss over the death of John Paul II--five million pilgrims, two hundred kings, queens, presidents, and premiers--is quickly undermining my faith in Christianity and in my fellow human beings. What is it we have here? Surely not a religious event. Only three kings attended the birth of Jesus and only his mother and a handful of disciples were at his death on the cross. Poor John Paul! In heaven, how is he to explain this vast discrepancy in the people's adulation to his Savior? Will he feel deep shame and cry out that he is not responsible for the imperial pageantry, this elevation of himself into a pagan god, that he has been totally misunderstood? How will the Pope be received in heaven? Will there be a blast of trumpets from the angels and archangels as he walks to a high chair to the right hand of the Lord? Or is the following scenario, based on a straight reading of the Gospels, more likely? At the precise moment of the Pope's death, an African child dies of starvation and AIDS. The child runs toward Jesus and Jesus runs toward the child. They embrace. From the corner of his eyes, Jesus sees John Paul approaching, and says, "Hi there! Good to see you," and then quickly turns his attention back to the child.

Will John Paul find my scenario more plausible than the extravaganza that the Princes of the Church and the Potentates of the World have in mind? I would like to think so, but I am a little doubtful, and the reason is that John Paul is a creature of our Age, a mastermind of media events, of crowd hypnotism, that is the envy of rock stars, tele-evangelists, and politicians. "Make sure you don't perform your religious duties in public so that people will see what you do," says Jesus (Matthew 6). Of course, the Pope had to perform his religious duties in public. It was required of him. But his visit to his would-be assassin in prison? Did he make sure that no journalists or photographers were anywhere in sight? It's curious how few humane stories have built up around John Paul II, as compared with John XXIII. When John XXIII was told that he couldn't raise the salary of the Vatican work staff without having to draw on money assigned to charity, he replied, "Justice comes before charity." When he was dying and visited a hospital for dying children, he was overheard to murmur, "In our closeness to God, we are the same age."

As for the adoring, tearful throngs who came to Rome to see the body of Karol Wojtyla, they no doubt loved him, but did they love him as an exemplary Christian, or did they "love" him to the point of worship as an Oriental potentate? Don't the crowds in Italy realize that crowds almost as large and almost as tearful poured into the Red Square upon hearing the news of the death of Stalin? Of course Stalin was a bad man and John Paul II was a good man. But goodness has nothing to do with the size of the crowd or the extent of the homage. If it did, Mother Teresa's death--a death, by the way, upstaged by the sudden demise of Princess Diana--should have drawn far larger crowds.

A final point. The masses are sadly deluded to think that, at the Pope's theatrical funeral, they are witnessing a turning point in history. The greatest turning points in history are nearly invisible. Christians should be the first to know: they know, after all, how quietly Christ entered and departed from the earth.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu