The Pilgrim's Way: Man, The Way Of The Church

As we prepare for the feast of Saint John Paul II, we invite you to continue on this pilgrimage through our permanent exhibit, A Gift of Love: The Life of Saint John Paul II. We hope you will walk through each of the nine galleries with us, so that you can get a taste of the spiritual and informational journey that awaits you here at the Saint John Paul II National Shrine.

This week we will explore the fourth gallery: Man, the Way of the Church. John Paul II showed the world the Gospel message of faith in Jesus Christ and the sanctity of all human life. Visitors to the Shrine will see that, just as the Church walks with each person on his or her pilgrimage to God, this great saint travelled to the ends of the earth in order to be with his people. 

Visitors are invited to walk the footsteps of this pilgrim Pope, learning more about his early apostolic visits to Mexico, Canada, Africa, and the US. St. John Paul II visited 129 countries on 104 apostolic pilgrimages throughout his papacy, and our “World Travels Interactive” wall display traces these journeys and encounters with people throughout the world. Visitors can learn about each pilgrimage by reading memorable quotes from homilies and addresses, and they can also see artifacts from many of the Holy Father's journeys, including various papal vestments that he wore.

Pilgrims to the Shrine can learn more about St. John Paul II’s “Theology of Love,” which was developed during Wednesday audiences early on in his pontificate. Through these teachings, he invited men and women to live the vocation to love through a complete and sincere gift of self. He particularly focused on married love, and the importance of this self-giving love in building up the family. 

A Way For The Church

As he took the Chair of Saint Peter, Saint John Paul II challenged all people to open wide their hearts to Christ, for it is His “perfect love” that “casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). It is His love that gives man life. In his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, the late Holy Father wrote:

Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it.

St. John Paul II taught us much about this love that man cannot live without, and we remember this in our permanent exhibit: A Gift of Love: The Life of Saint John Paul II.

The sainted pontiff showed us this love by visiting his people. Early in his papacy, he made pilgrimages of love to the faithful in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and other places throughout the world.

Papal Intentions for June

This month, Pope Francis asks us to pray for the unemployed, that they “may receive support and find the work they need to live in dignity.”

He also asks to pray that, “Europe may rediscover its Christian roots through the witness of believers.”

Let us join the Holy Father this month, in praying for the unemployed and for the blossoming of the New Evangelization in Europe.

Mary, Star of the New Evangelization, Pray for Us!

The Conscience Of The Manager

In the spirit of St. John Paul II’s social encyclical Centesimus Annus, Pope Francis made remarks last week about the importance of solidarity and subsidiarity. As a challenge to those who work in business, the Holy Father said:

The conscience of the manager is the existential place in which this search takes place. In particular, the Christian entrepreneur must always measure the reality in which he works with the Gospel; and the Gospel requires him to make the human person and the common good his first priority, and to do his part to ensure there are opportunities for work, for dignified work. Naturally this 'enterprise' cannot be implemented in isolation, but rather in collaboration with others who share the same ethical foundation, and seeking to widen the network as far as possible.

Pope Francis encouraged those who work in business to seek nourishment from the Church in order to bring Catholic social principles about in their own field.

St. John Paul II, pray for us, especially all business owners, that they may truly live out the Gospel in the workplace. 

“Karol, You Should Be A Priest”

The Zakrzówek quarry, a pit hundreds of feet deep, mined limestone, essential for the production of soda in the Solvay chemical plant located in another Kraków suburb, Borek Fałęcki. Throughout the harsh winter of 1940-1941, in which temperatures dipped to -22 degrees Fahrenheit (-30 Celsius), Lolek shoveled limestone into miniature railway cars at the bottom of the pit, occasionally working as a brakeman on the trains. In the spring he received a kind of promotion, as an assistant to Franciszek Labus, a veteran dynamiter. Labus took a liking to the young man whose previous experience hadn’t prepared him for the rigors of the quarry and offered Lolek some career advice. “Karol, you should be a priest,” he told the novice blaster. “You have a good voice and will sing well; then you’ll be all set.”

-George Weigel, Witness to Hope, 56.

One might never guess that Blessed John Paul II, our theatrical and intellectual Holy Father, spent time working in a quarry. When the Nazis occupied Poland, though, they held stringent work requirements that forced even students to leave the books behind and participate in manual labor. This short story from John Paul II’s young adult life reveals that, even during this difficult time, Divine Providence was forming and shaping him for his vocation.

Keep following us here and on our Facebook page for more stories about the life of Blessed John Paul II as we prepare for his canonization.

Why We Work

The first day of May has much significance in our world and especially in our Church. It is May Day, the day of the worker, and for Christians it is also a day to remember the foster father of our Lord, St. Joseph the Worker.

Blessed John Paul II was beatified on this day two years ago. Early in his pontificate, he reflected on the meaning of human work, something that he thought much about as he performed forced labor in his youth and as he grew resisting a Communist regime’s materialistic understanding of man and his vocation.

In his 1981 encyclical, Laborem Exercens, he noted that the human person works for three main reasons.

First, there is a deeply personal dimension to work. Work is a good thing for man, and through it he realizes himself:

Work is a good thing for man-a good thing for his humanity-because through work man not only transforms nature, adapting it to his own needs, but he also achieves fulfilment as a human being and indeed, in a sense, becomes “more a human being.”

Work also makes family life and providing for one’s family possible. Blessed John Paul II writes that, “the family is simultaneously a community made possible by work and the first school of work, within the home, for every person.”

Why We Work

Today Americans celebrate Labor Day—a federal holiday that pays tribute to the achievements of American workers by giving them an extra day to rest.

Many of us live for these breaks from the normal work schedule. Many of us will have a hard time waking up Tuesday, knowing that there are four more days until the weekend. And many of us can’t stop thinking about the next job we’re working towards or the day we retire.

Even if you love your career, chances are that you’ve thought one of these things before. We are human, and these feelings are natural—especially the desire for rest. But God also made us for work, and He made us to work.

Blessed John Paul II explored this idea in his 1981 encyclical, Laborem Exercens. In his introduction, he reminds the faithful that, in being made in the image and likeness of God, we are made to work:

THROUGH WORK man must earn his daily bread and contribute to the continual advance of science and technology and, above all, to elevating unceasingly the cultural and moral level of the society within which he lives in community with those who belong to the same family. And work means any activity by man, whether manual or intellectual, whatever its nature or circumstances; it means any human activity that can and must be recognized as work, in the midst of all the many activities of which man is capable and to which he is predisposed by his very nature, by virtue of humanity itself. Man is made to be in the visible universe an image and likeness of God himself, and he is placed in it in order to subdue the earth. From the beginning therefore he is called to work. Work is one of the characteristics that distinguish man from the rest of creatures, whose activity for sustaining their lives cannot be called work. Only man is capable of work, and only man works, at the same time by work occupying his existence on earth. Thus work bears a particular mark of man and of humanity, the mark of a person operating within a community of persons. And this mark decides its interior characteristics; in a sense it constitutes its very nature.

Toiling for the Kingdom of God

Sweat and toil, which work necessarily involves the present condition of the human race, present the Christian and everyone who is called to follow Christ with the possibility of sharing lovingly in the work that Christ came to do. This work of salvation came about through suffering and death on a Cross. By enduring the toil of work in union with Christ crucified for us, man in a way collaborates with the Son of God for the redemption of humanity. He shows himself a true disciple of Christ by carrying the cross in his turn every day in the activity that he is called upon to perform.

…Let the Christian who listens to the word of the living God, uniting work with prayer, know the place that his work has not only in earthly progress but also in the development of the Kingdom of God, to which we are all called through the power of the Holy Spirit and through the word of the Gospel.

-Blessed John Paul II, Laborem exercens (1981)

Pope Benedict XVI asks the Church to pray for work security this month—“that everyone may have work in safe and secure conditions.” Let us join him in that prayer today, while also offering up the work that we do for the Kingdom of God.

St. Joseph the Worker

At the workbench where he plied his trade together with Jesus, Joseph brought human work closer to the mystery of the Redemption.

In the human growth of Jesus "in wisdom, age and grace," the virtue of industriousness played a notable role, since "work is a human good" which "transforms nature" and makes man "in a sense, more human."(34)

The importance of work in human life demands that its meaning be known and assimilated in order to "help all people to come closer to God, the Creator and Redeemer, to participate in his salvific plan for man and the world, and to deepen...friendship with Christ in their lives, by accepting, through faith, a living participation in his threefold mission as Priest, Prophet and King."(35)

What is crucially important here is the sanctification of daily life, a sanctification which each person must acquire according to his or her own state, and one which can be promoted according to a model accessible to all people: "St. Joseph is the model of those humble ones that Christianity raises up to great destinies;...he is the proof that in order to be a good and genuine follower of Christ, there is no need of great things-it is enough to have the common, simple and human virtues, but they need to be true and authentic."(36)

-Blessed John Paul II, Redemptoris custos

St. Joseph the Worker, Pray for Us!