Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and Dante: Good Company on Good Friday

National Catholic Register, 02 April 2021

Poignant memories of Good Friday 16 years ago carry special significance today.

When St. John Paul II was beatified in 2011, his feast day was fixed for Oct. 22 — the date of the inaugural “Be Not Afraid!” homily — rather than the customary date of death, April 2. The death anniversary would too often fall during Holy Week or the Easter Octave, and thus could not be celebrated. 

This year St. John Paul II’s death anniversary falls on Good Friday, which invites us to remember the final Good Friday of his earthly life. 

In 2005, Good Friday fell on March 25, as it did in the first Holy Week of John Paul’s life, 1921. It fell on that day again during the Jubilee of Mercy declared by Pope Francis in 2016. It happens rarely, but when it does it is the perfect alignment. 

The early Christians held that the first Good Friday was on March 25, the same date as the virginal conception celebrated at the Annunciation. That’s why, incidentally, the Good Thief’s feast day is March 25, his death date, Good Friday.

By Good Friday 2005, the world had already followed John Paul to the hospital and back several times. In late March it was clear that he was not going back to the hospital; he had come home to die. 

Two dominant memories remain from Good Friday 2005: what Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said at the Via Crucis at the Colosseum and what John Paul did not say, watching from the papal apartment. 

The Good Friday papal custom is to pray the Stations of the Cross in the darkness of the nighttime Colosseum. John Paul usually invited different people to compose the meditations. In 2005, perhaps sensing that this would be his last Good Friday as pope, he turned to his most trusted collaborator. Cardinal Ratzinger composed the meditations. 

In the event, John Paul was too frail to go to the Colosseum himself. Papal biographer George Weigel sets the scene:

“The Stations of the Cross played an important role in Karol Wojtyła’s spiritual life for more than seventy-five years. As a boy, he had seen Christ’s passion dramatically re-enacted at Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, the Holy Land shrine near his hometown of Wadowice, shortly after his mother’s death. 

“On Good Friday 2005, his health rapidly failing, Pope John Paul II once again led the Church through its walk with Christ … albeit at a distance and in a different way.

“[John Paul] could barely whisper. But as Cardinal Ratzinger led the solemn procession through the ruins of antiquity, John Paul II prayed the Via Crucis while watching the ceremony at the Colosseum on a television set that been placed in the chapel of the papal apartment. A television camera at the door of the chapel showed the world John Paul’s prayer. He was seated, and grasped in his arms a large crucifix, as he prayed through the fourteen stations with the congregation near the Roman forum. Those watching at the Colosseum and on television could see only John Paul's back; his face was never shown. Contrary to press speculation, however, he was not hiding his pain or the ravages of the weeks of illness. Rather, he was doing what he had always done, which was not to say, ‘Look at me,’ but rather, ‘Look to Christ’” (The End and the Beginning, pp. 370-371). 

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