I remember an episode in Brazil. The Holy Father entered the church to take part in the ceremony. Near the entrance stood a woman, leaning over a seven-year-old girl, maybe an eight-year-old girl. The mother explained to her daughter – blind – who the Pope is. And, he informed about this, approached the girl, knelt down to be at the same height as she, and began to say to her: “You know? The Pope is a man dressed in white who travels the world at Jesus’ request…” While he was speaking, the girl touched him, stroked him, trying to understand with her hands whether “true” is all she had heard, but she could not see. At the end, they said goodbye with a hug that seemed to have no end…
In these moments, for me, there was the same revolutionary “upheaval” as Jesus was doing. Everyone has said and still say today to children: you have to become adults; you have to be like adults. Jesus, on the other hand, spoke, and tells us today, that it is adults who should become like children: if they want to enter the kingdom of heaven, adults should have the same simplicity of life as children, their innocence, their transparency. And, it was Karol Wojtyła who was convinced that he too, as Pope, should “learn” from children, from their openness to the future, from their acceptance of life, even if this life turned out to be difficult.
With the permission of Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz – “At the side of the Saint”
St. Stanislaw BM Publishing House, Krakow 2013
