It is a privilege to be given the opportunity to speak about the late Pope and, on behalf of the people I represent, I would like to add my thoughts on the life and times of an outstanding human being.
The late Pope was born in Poland in 1920 and, in fact, I have met constituents in my electorate who hail from the same village as the Pope. They are very proud to be associated with him in this way. Pope John Paul II lost his mother and brother at a very young age and was brought up by his father who was a retired army officer and had experienced the trauma and horror of the Nazi occupation of Poland.
The late Pope was a very gifted man. He was gifted in many ways. He attended university, indulged in some acting and worked in quarries and chemical factories, but it was not until 1942 that he began to study in secret for the priesthood.
In 1962, the year Vatican II began, he was named Bishop of Cracow. His attitude to communism would be substantially influenced and shaped by the years he spent as a priest and bishop under the communist government. He was elected Pope on 16 October 1978. He was the first Slav Pope and the first non-Italian Pope in more than 450 years. The Pope was a former professor of philosophy, published poet and playwright, mountaineer and skier. He was influenced very strongly by his Slav identity.
Historian Eamon Duffy, in his book Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes , commented that the profundity of his thought was quickly recognised as well as his markedly conservative character. Yet, in a series of social encyclicals, the Pope demonstrated a deep suspicion of Western capitalism and denounced:
A fundamental defect, or rather a series of defects, indeed a defective machinery is at the root of contemporary economics and materialistic civilization.
These are defects which trap the ‘human family’ in ‘radically unjust situations’ in which children starve in a world of plenty.
On 2 October 1979, while addressing the United Nations, he acknowledged that it was the painful experiences of millions of people which led to the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which he also viewed as the basic inspiration and cornerstone of the United Nations. He was a fearless man and never refrained from speaking his mind and, as such, he strongly condemned the war in Iraq.
The Pope was proficient in many languages and his multilingual capability made him more effective in his travels to all continents and most countries. It is now legend that he travelled the world more widely than any other Pope had previously done before him.
He defended religious liberty, promoted ecumenism and interfaith understanding. On 29 November 1979, he visited the ecumenical patriarch, Dimitrios I, in Constantinople and stated that the Second Vatican Council declared that the shared riches and traditions of the Eastern and Western Christian churches should help overcome their divisions. He was the first ever Pope to visit a Roman synagogue and established formal relations with Israel in 1993. He visited leaders of other churches and welcomed them at the Vatican. He organised a gathering of representatives of all major religious faiths including Jews, Muslims and Buddhists at Assisi. Such was his embrace of multifaith dialogue that the present Archbishop of Canterbury made the unprecedented decision to attend his funeral.
The Pope first visited Australia in 1973 as cardinal for the International Eucharistic Congress in Melbourne. He became the second Pope ever to visit Australia in 1986 and met religious and political leaders of all persuasions. He met people of all backgrounds, praised Aboriginal culture, participated in ecumenical services and spoke to leaders of other religious traditions. In 1995, he performed the first beatification of an Australian, Mary MacKillop, in Sydney. He declared that she devoted her life to the poor and that, as a result, she stood for a new attitude of human dignity which will take precedence over material gain. Penola Catholic College, in Broadmeadows in my electorate of Calwell, quite proudly takes its name from the place of Mary MacKillop’s first school in Adelaide.
It is no wonder that the Pope was an outstanding man. I have made reference to his promotion of interfaith dialogue. I know that he was very strong on that and I saw it work effectively here in Australia, particularly in my home state of Victoria and my own community where the Catholic church has been at the forefront, together with representatives of the Jewish and Muslim faiths, of promoting interfaith dialogue in a world where such dialogue is absolutely pivotal, not only to the security of the world but also to the interactions between people from whatever religious or faith persuasion they come from.
In conclusion, I would like to draw on a comment that was made by the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, who said that history would place Pope John Paul II ‘alongside St Francis of Assisi as one of the great witnesses to the power of the word over that of the sword’. This is a very true and fitting tribute to Pope John Paul II who was, indeed, an outstanding human being.
