ROME
National Review (US)
By Kathryn Jean Lopez
May 1, 2014
Rome – For the past several days in the Eternal City, I’ve watched as people with varying degrees of interest and devotion stream in and out of St. Peter’s Square. The pope fascinates them by joy, by beauty. Whether or not all realize that Christ and Church teaching are the joy and the beauty behind he who their iPhones are snapping photos of is unclear, but their desire and the fact that there is something fulfilling here is quite obvious.
As at the Thanksgiving Mass celebrating a God who would give us holy men like the newly declared saints John Paul II and John XXIII, people of all ages applauded mentions of the family and the need to renew and preserve it. This seems a world away from most of ours — where often a lack of common vocabulary and experience brings us deeper into a chaos that divides and confuses.
These past few days here have been about unity and renewal. The “doubleheader” canonization here this weekend was a message in continuity — he who opened the Second Vatican Council and he who brought the Church into the modern world as he witnessed to bold, radical, courageous love. At the same time, it was about reform and renewal. Both sainted popes worked toward changes in the Church and the world — not to adapt the Church to the world but to be better missionaries in the world. The models of their saintly lives are examples and challenges: real people can live lives of heroic virtue — that is, in fact, what Christians are called to.
This all seems a world away from Geneva, where the United Nations Committee Against Torture will soon be hearing testimony from and about the Holy See. The Holy See will testify voluntarily, along with other countries, having signed the Convention Against Torture. And the U.N. Committee best keep in mind that the world is watching.
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