The celebrations of the Jubilee of the 40th anniversary of the John Paul II Foundation in Rome ended a significant period of the Foundation’s activity. Every Jubilee, the most important and the most beautiful, ends one day, but provides beautiful memories, new relations with people we met and new friendships. The words spoken by dear priests and lay people stay forever in the memory and in the heart. The memoirs will probably be published maybe in the form of a publication, a book or an album, to which we will be happy to come back and recall this special time of the Jubilee.
As we celebrate our Jubilee, we want to look back on the not so distant past. We recall the year 2000, the Year of the Great Jubilee of Christianity. We remember the pilgrimage of St. John Paul II to places connected with the History of Salvation, and especially to the Holy Land. We remember the Jubilee Year as a Year full of significant celebrations, taking place above all in Rome. We had this great grace to participate in the Jubilee Meeting of Families. The Holy Father John Paul II in his Apostolic Letter Novo milenio ineunte summarizing this Jubilee Year 2000 asked us a question – we close the Great Jubilee of Christianity and what next? Today we can ask ourselves a similar question, we are closing a significant period of the Foundation’s 40th anniversary and opening a new one, so we ask what next? Such and similar questions were posed by the participants of the Symposium held at the Pontifical Urbaniana University organized by the Center for Documentation and Study of the Pontificate of John Paul II. The Pope wrote in Novo milenio ineunte that the Jubilee is always an extraordinary time. After celebrating the Jubilee, we do not return to everyday gray, but we return to everyday life and ordinariness. The Pope described this ordinariness with a beautiful phrase: we return to the high standard of ordinary Christian life. And, this ordinary Christian life we are to realize through prayer, which must be treated with high standard, the Sunday Eucharist, which speaks of our Christian identity and the sacraments, especially the sacrament of Reconciliation and Penance. How beautifully the words spoken by Monsignor Paweł Ptasznik at the Tomb of the founder of the Foundation harmonize with the message of St. John Paul II – we must “realize anew that our task is to awaken memory, memory not only of himself, but of the message that he carried throughout his life, and especially during his pontificate, to the Church, to the world and to each and every one of us. And, it was a message about Christ present in this world, in this world, whose face He transformed through His life, death and resurrection. So, let us know Christ, whom St. John Paul II perfectly revealed with his life, let us love Him, let us imitate Him and together with Christ let us change the world.”
With expressions of gratitude and united in prayer
Irena and Tadeusz Olczyk guardians of the John Paul II Foundation Chapter in Radomsko
