To Millions Worldwide, Pope Has Been Evangelizer

By JOHN THAVIS, CNS

Published: October 16, 2003

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – It was a warm summer evening in Casablanca, and at the local soccer stadium 80,000 young Moroccans were giving Pope John Paul II a rousing welcome.

Slovak Cardinal Jozef Tomko, who stood behind the pontiff in the tribute of honor, listened to the pope’s French-language speech and watched the crowd. He noticed an amazing thing: These Muslim youths were not just clapping out of excitement or out of respect for the man dressed in white.

They were hanging on every word.

“This was not preordained applause. They were responding to what he said. As I witnessed this, I was struck by the pope’s great talent for entering into the minds of his listeners,” Cardinal Tomko recalled in a recent interview.

In Cardinal Tomko’s view, the Morocco encounter in 1985 showed Pope John Paul doing what he does best: evangelizing in a way that respects the sensibilities of others.

To his non-Christian audience, the pope spoke not only about belief in God but also about the Christian conviction that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior of all. He acknowledged that was a deep difference in their faiths and said, “God will enlighten us about it one day, I am sure.”

The pope addressed the sensitive topic of religious freedom and highlighted the many beliefs and hopes shared by Muslims and Christians as they try to build a better world.

“It was very interesting. The pope knew how to speak about all these things in a way that moved these young people to applaud,” Cardinal Tomko said.

Cardinal Tomko, a longtime papal confidante who headed the Vatican’s Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples from 1985 to 2001, said he’s witnessed similar scenes on other continents, as the pope has taken the church’s message to people of every race and every belief.

With few exceptions, the pope has made a positive impression, the cardinal said. Although crowds of more than a million people have cheered him, the pope’s success as an evangelizer is not something that can always be measured by the size of his audience, he said.

“The approval of the masses is not his main purpose. He doesn’t go about this like a politician in search of votes,” Cardinal Tomko said.

“His purpose is to propose the message of Christ, in a spirit not of conquest but respect. If his listeners are a million people in Poland or a few hundred in Mongolia, that’s secondary to the pope,” he said.

Even where the crowds are huge, the pope succeeds in touching individuals, Cardinal Tomko said. The reason is that he speaks a “language of love,” he said.

“Not everyone may realize this, but the pope pleases because he loves every single person he encounters—and people understand this,” Cardinal Tomko said.

Pope John Paul has been a model evangelizer in many other ways, too, Cardinal Tomko said. He cited the pope’s parish visits in Rome, his weekly audience talks aimed at the church and the world, papal documents that reach out to specific groups and, above all, the 1991 encyclical on the church’s missionary mandate, “Redemptoris Missio” (“The Mission of the Redeemer”).

During much of Pope John Paul’s pontificate, the church has experienced a tension between proclaiming the Gospel and holding a dialogue with non-Christians. Some may see a conflict here, but Cardinal Tomko does not.

“Evangelization is a rich and complex reality. It includes personal witness, dialogue, human promotion, inculturation and especially proclamation,” he said.

But while proclaiming Christ is the apex of evangelization, it is not necessarily the first step, Cardinal Tomko said. He said that from the beginning of his pontificate the pope has made this clear and has also stressed that the church “proposes Christ, does not impose anything, and respects the conscience of every individual.”

Cardinal Tomko said that explains why even in places like India, where religious conversion is a highly sensitive topic, the pope was welcomed as a “white holy man” by 2 million people on the beach of Madras during his first visit there in 1986.