John Paul II and papal death and vatican city and 9:37 p.m.

It's been quite a while since we had a Pope die. Indeed, reports have come out of the Vatican that John Paul II (whom Catholics affectionately called J2P2 in the 1980s) was the third-longest serving Pope in the history of the Catholic Church. Though I remember Paul's death in 1978 and John Paul I's a few months later, I most vividly recall the death of John XXIII. At the time I was only 10 years old and, because I lived in a town with very few Catholics, I had no idea what a Pope was. When I heard the report of John XXIII's death on the radio in 1963 it sounded like the announcer said, "Hope is Dead." I suppose it was, for many people.

But now we live in a high-tech world, where marketers and marketing language are all around us. We cannot assume that any large event in world history happens without some attention to how it resonates in the ears of the common people. Thus, when we think of the Pope's death, we ought not only to try to commemorate his accomplishments, which every major media outlet in the world is doing now, but also to pay attention to the way the Church said he died. In a word, there were five stages in the Pope's death, with the Vatican trying out various words with the public until the word "serene" attached itself to his last moments. For all that any of us knew, the Pope may have converted to Methodism before his death--but in the finely-packaged rhetoric of dying, the Pope went through several distinct stages in the last 48 hours of life, stages that took us from a weak but determined man to one who was welcomed by Christ into heaven.

Stage I: Medical Terms

We were first informed that on Thursday evening the Pope was working at his desk on some paperwork when he experienced heart failure because of a urinary tract infection. The medical terminology was not too clear, but it was meant to sound very serious. But medical language doesn't resonate with the public; we need language of the heart, or language reflecting the human condition, to help us understand what is going on. Thus, beginning on Friday morning, all references to medical terminology dropped away, and all that was left was humanistic talk.

Stage 2: The Lucid Pope

One of the biggest concerns people have when another goes through a serious medical procedure is whether he has lost his mind. Indeed, sometimes people not only lose their minds but they also can conceivably curse God in the process. Because of the risk of someone saying, "The Pope is a vegetable with no discernible mental functioning," or, even worse, "The Pope is experiencing uncontrollable and excruciating pain that has led him to make uncharacterisic verbal outbursts," there had to be someone who said that the Pope was lucid, especially in the acts where one needs to be most lucid: the celebration of Mass. So, by Friday morning we had stories of a lucid Pope who was, with understanding, participating in, though not saying, the Mass. But once lucidity is established, you can play for higher stakes: serenity.

Stage 3: Serenity

The message througout the day on Friday was that the Pope was "serene." He first appeared serene in the Mass where he was also "lucid" and "conscious," but then, as the day wore on, lucidity and consciousness seemed to drop from the Vatican's vocabulary, and the Vatican only focused on "serene." Indeed, "serene" has a very nice ring to it: we can imagine a person sweetly looking on any activity and nodding or calmly smiling his approval. Since we know he was "lucid," we are meant to understand his serenity as a knowing serenity, a satisfied serenity, even an insightful serenity. Indeed, in the words of the Apostle Paul, John Paul II would have been experiencing the "peace that passes all understanding."

By the time the Vatican handlers have gotten to the word "serene," the battle has been won. We don't know in fact what the Pope's condition was, but when the picture emerges that he is in such a peaceful state, it is meant to give US comfort so that WE could accept his dying. There is nothing better than to die in faith, to die with the assurance that one has completed the course, has finished the race, has ended the journey with quiet assurance of God's goodness and presence. Thus, the Vatican was preparing the world for the Pope's death by using the word "serene." I wonder how much debate went into the verbal nuances of various words in the bowels of the Vatican in the days following Easter and before the Pope's actual collapse on Thursday. In any case, serene won.

Stage 4: Meeting Christ

Once the term describing the Pope's common human condition has been presented (serene), the Church could then feel free to retreat to specialized theological vocabulary to describe the next step on the Papal journey. By Saturday morning the words were that "This evening or night, Christ opens the door to the pope." Now we are taken away from the earthly toils, the urinary tract infections, the heart failures, and even the words of lucidity and serenity. The victory has been won in the media, and the Church is free to explain what comes next in theological terms. "Christ opens the door to the pope." A homey image, a comforting image, a triumphal image. So, in the midst of other statements about how hope was gone, we have the most optimistic statements about hope possible. The pope is not "in the arms of Christ" (that might sound too Protestant Evangelical), but Christ is opening the door to him. Metaphor now triumphs completely in the last hours.

Stage 5: He Dies

And so John Paul II died, age 84, at 9:37 p.m. Vatican time on Saturday night April 2, 2005. The announcement was terse. All felt like orphans once the Pope had died, said the Vatican Undersecretary of State. The interesting rituals of destroying the symbols of papal authority were recounted. But then, the next line in the news story was about the cardinals descending on the Vatican to plan the funeral and make arrangements for the next conclave. The work of the Church goes on, even as it has lost its most illustrious leader in many a year.

Conclusion

For me, the story of the last few days of John Paul II's life is not only how his story finally, and thankfully, took Terry Schiavo off the front page of American newspapers, but how the ritual language of his death was transmuted from medical to media-driven language in the 48 hours from his heart failure to his death. We are to understand that his death was a very good death, which capped off a very good papacy. Well, I will go along with that: there really has not been a lot of good news for Catholics recently.