A Change of Heart
In an Oct. 7 blog item, I came out pretty strongly in favor of the pope stepping down now for the sake of his health. In the weeks that followed, I changed my mind, primarily because I heard from several women and men in their 80s in those weeks. They called me on many topics, but I was struck with one similarity: How tightly they held on to their roles in life, in much the same way the pope hangs onto his papacy. Jungians would say this was no accident. Spiritual folks might call it a conversion experience. It was odd enough for me that I columnized about it in the newspaper Saturday Oct. 25. Here's the entire column, for the blog record.
Rebecca Nappi
The Spokesman-Review
Everywhere I go in Catholic Land these days, people are buzzing about Pope John Paul II. He's been out in public a lot recently -- celebrating his 25th anniversary as pope, celebrating the life of Mother Teresa, celebrating the creation of 31 new cardinals.
The pope looks terrible. His head tilts sideways. His eyes are nearly closed when he speaks, and he speaks hardly at all. He sometimes grimaces involuntarily from pain he cannot control. A Canadian broadcast station caught the pontiff napping.
The pope is 83 years old, and Parkinson's disease shakes his body. Though the chair that he's hauled around in looks lush, it's really just a fancy wheelchair.
The Catholics I speak with divide into two camps. There are those who believe the pope should resign and focus on his journey to death privately and with dignity. And then there are those who think the pope should hold onto his papacy to the very end, no matter how impaired. The pope has basically said -- and I paraphrase -- pray for me and I'm not budging.
For weeks, I've sided with the resign-now camp. I even wrote an Internet blog item more than two weeks ago that accused the pope's handlers of elder abuse. I also compared the macabre way they seem to be forcing the pope into public life with the tasteless movie "Weekend at Bernie's." Two guys in that 1989 film pretend that their dead boss is still alive by propping him up in lifelike positions.
Slowly, I've started to rethink my opinion on the pope's resignation. Maybe it was the coincidence of running into several women and men in their 80s these past few weeks. Some of them talked to me about how they power through their ailments and hold onto the things that make them feel most alive -- their work, their homes, their friends, their interests.
Some complained about their middle-age children who give them advice, such as slow down, sell that big house, move into an assisted-living unit.
Then I got a call from Maurice Hickey. He's 80 and lives at Royal Park Care Center on Spokane's North Side. He loves it there. He's a retired public relations executive, and he called to pitch me a story. Seems a Royal Park resident was Spokane's first woman bus driver. He thought I might like to do a story on her. Maybe someday.
But I really wanted to ask him his view of the pope, because they are in similar situations. Hickey's mind is probably sharper and he's not as physically impaired as the pope, but he does use a wheelchair and relies on oxygen to help him breathe.
Hickey, a lifelong Catholic, is firmly in favor of the pope not resigning.
"I think God will take him in his own time," Hickey said. "And I don't think he's that far away from his demise."
In his younger years, Hickey belonged to the Rotary, Kiwanis and Lions Club. He gave more than 1,000 speeches as part of his civic and work life. He loved talking in front of crowds.
I posed a hypothetical to him. Say someone asked him now to give a talk to 100,000 Rotarians outside in the warm sun. Would he do it?
Absolutely, he said. "I still have something to say."
Hickey acknowledged that the experience might exhaust him. He'd do it anyway and then rest up the next day.
Our hour-long visit at Royal Park made me realize how easily we can hide from our society's elderly in the United States. They don't show up in the media much. They aren't in movies either. They appear in commercials in stereotypical ways. We often don't live in the same communities with our aging parents, and if we don't have a good reason for hanging out in nursing homes, we stay away.
Pope John Paul II is hard to hide from right now. He's on TV, shaky and stilted and sometimes snoozing. The pope redefined the concept of forgiveness when he pardoned the man who shot and almost killed him in 1981. It was a radical gesture. Pope John Paul's refusal to sit in the Vatican and meekly wait for death might be just as radical.
I don't agree with some of this pope's teachings, especially concerning the role of women in the church, but on the issue of aging and death, I think he still has something to say. I'm listening.
