A Gift Of Love

We are currently putting the final touches on our 16,000 square foot permanent exhibit on the life and legacy of Saint John Paul II. Titled A Gift of Love: The Life of Saint John Paul II, this exhibit will walk pilgrims through the entirety of the late Holy Father’s life, celebrating his teachings and his witness to the Gospel.

In Love and Responsibility, published almost twenty years before he became Pope, Karol Wojtyła wrote:

…the person is a good towards which the only proper and adequate attitude is love.

The only way to see another person, to think of another person, to speak of another person, and to treat another person is with love. St. John Paul II witnessed to this Christ-given truth through both his writings and his actions.

St. John Paul II also reminded us that the human person, who is worthy only of love, is made to love. Most of his teachings on the human person were grounded in this truth expressed in Gaudium et spes:

Indeed, the Lord Jesus, when He prayed to the Father, "that all may be one . . . as we are one" (John 17:21-22) opened up vistas closed to human reason, for He implied a certain likeness between the union of the divine Persons, and the unity of God's sons in truth and charity. This likeness reveals that man, who is the only creature on earth, which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.

As St. John Paul II showed us, it is through a gift of love to God and others that the person becomes who he or she is. It is through this gift that one glorifies God, and it is through this gift that the human person becomes a saint.

Our hope is that pilgrims leave the Saint John Paul II National Shrine with this sense of purpose. Just as St. John Paul II lived his life as a gift of love to God and others, so too are we called to live our lives as gifts of love. Through God’s grace, we pray that pilgrims realize who they are in this new and exciting way. We pray that they walk away realizing that, like John Paul II, they too are called to sainthood.

St. John Paul II, pray for us, that we may make our lives gifts of love.