A tale of two papal visits to Canada, two decades apart

National Post, 21 August 2022

Indigenous Canadians were a focus in 2002 visit as well as in 2022

In addition to writing columns for these pages, I covered the recent visit of Pope Francis for the Eternal Word Television Network, the world’s largest religious media network. Toward the end of our coverage I realized that it had been exactly 20 years since I covered the visit of St. John Paul II to Toronto in 2002.

That was just days after my own priestly ordination and marked the beginning of my writing frequent columns for the National Post. Twenty years of blessings on both counts, to be sure, and a certain remarkable continuity. Twenty years later to the hour, the Pope was offering the Holy Mass in Canada, and I was again providing commentary on television.

The coincidence of the two visits, two decades apart, was remarked principally in terms of contrasts.

In 2002, the charismatic colossus of history, John Paul II, gathered 800,000 youth from around the world in a triumphant festival of faith that utterly fascinated the city of Toronto. He sent them out as bold evangelists to be “salt of the earth and light of the world” as trumpeted by the biblical theme of that World Youth Day.

In 2022, Pope Francis came on what he called a “penitential pilgrimage.” The emphasis was apologizing not evangelizing, and the crowds stayed away in droves. A challenge in studio was discreetly noting that the aerial shots revealed — in Edmonton and in Quebec — some of the smallest crowds in the history of papal travel.

Yet, upon reflection, the two visits offer continuity, too. John Paul’s Toronto visit was his first to the Americas after the Boston clergy sexual abuse scandal erupted in January 2002. The white-hot heat of those first months had only slightly cooled when John Paul arrived; he had to address it on his visit.

The greater continuity is in relation to Indigenous peoples and their life in the Catholic Church. The majority of them are Christian and many are Catholic. They are not passive parishioners, only to receive what is proposed to them, but also called to be proclaimers of the gospel in their own distinctive voice. They, too, are included in the “salt of the earth, light of the world” that Jesus speaks of in the Sermon on the Mount. The Canada-Guatemala-Mexico visit of 2002 emphasized just that.

In Toronto, John Paul encouraged the immense throng to look to an Indigenous saint buried near Montreal: “At difficult moments in the Church’s life, the pursuit of holiness becomes even more urgent. And holiness is not a question of age; it is a matter of living in the Holy Spirit, just as Kateri Tekakwitha did here.”

Continue reading at the National Post.