The familial school of sanctity and mercy

Today is the anniversary of the death of Karol Wojtyla. Not of Pope John Paul the Great but of his father, Karol Wojtyla, senior. I also learned today—coming to the realization about four years too late—that the cause for canonization has been introduced for both of John Paul II’s parents, Karol and Emilia.

This should come as no surprise to students of Church history. There is St Sophia and her three daughters, Saints Faith, Hope, and Charity. In the Christian East, the marriage of Saints Basil and Emmelia produced the holy siblings Basil of Caesaria, Gregory of Nyssa, Naucratius, Peter of Sebaste, and Macrina. The West can offer Saints Monica, Augustine, and Adeodatus—mother, son, and grandson—as well as Saints Benedict and Scholastica, to cite examples that come immediately to mind.

Nor are more modern examples lacking. There are Saints Louis and Zelie Martin, the parents of St. Thérèse of Lisieux (and the cause for at least their daughter Léonie has also been introduced). There are Blessed Karl and Servant of God Zita of Hungary, and one must of course mention the martyrs of charity, the Blessed Ulma family, whose feast day is July 7, which is Blessed Józef and Wiktoria’s wedding anniversary.

These examples of heroic virtue within family bonds should serve both as examples of virtue and an examination of conscience. After all, should it not be the goal of Christian couples for the spouses to help each other get to heaven as well as any children God should grant them?

From the available evidence, it certainly seems to be the case that Karol and Emilia Wojtyla’s home was a school for sanctity. Witnesses have testified that Emilia wanted a window opened in the room where she was giving birth so that the first sounds her son would hear would be the singing of the Litany of Loreto. Emilia was the first to teach the future pope how to pray. He later recalled in his memoir Gift and Mystery how she instructed him to make the sign of the Cross: “This mystery was taught to me by the hands of my mother, who, by folding my little hands, showed me how to draw the Cross, the sign of Christ, who is the Son of the living God.”

A series of thoughts occurred to me reading about John Paul II’s mother. In my research into the Divine Mercy devotion, which the Polish pope did so much to encourage and spread, I learned that in the first third of the twentieth century, Warsaw was considered the abortion capital of Europe. What we now know as the Divine Mercy chaplet was given to St Faustina after a vision of a fierce angel about to destroy a great city in Poland for its sins. The invocation of God’s mercy through the prayers of the chaplet stayed the angel’s hand.

But what was the sin which merited such great divine wrath? We have it on no less authority than Blessed Michael Sopocko, St. Faustina’s spiritual director, that it was the sin of abortion.

Yet in learning about this, the thought had come to my mind, why Warsaw? Why Poland? Why was this place, above all other cities in Europe, a center of the scourge of abortion?

Then, just today, I read that, because of her poor health, Emilia Wojtyla’s doctor had advised her not to carry her youngest child to term but to have an abortion.

Imagine how different our world would be if she had listened! We would not have the inspiring texts of John Paul II’s encyclicals and apostolic letters, that give the Church her marching orders for the third millennium. Would we have the Great Jubilee of the year 2000, or the inspiring World Youth Days, or knowledge of the great cloud of saints John Paul II raised to the altar? Would Communist Russia, in its infancy in 1920, still exist to this day if Emilia had aborted her son, Karol?

Perhaps abortion flourished in Poland at that time because, like Pharaoh at the time of Moses, Satan knew that a liberator was soon to be born, and he chose to use the wills of evil men in an effort to kill that liberator in the womb. Although the Divine Mercy chaplet was not given until the 1930s, because God is outside of time it is not impossible that Emilia Wojtyla received the strength to say yes to life at least in part through the prayers of St Faustina.

Or at least that’s a possibility worth considering.

When Emilia died in 1929, the task of raising nine year old Karol Junior rested squarely on his father’s shoulders. In his reminiscences long after that time, one sees what a profound effect Karol Senior had on his son, by his example even more than his words:

Day after day I was able to observe the austere way in which he lived. By profession he was a soldier and, after my mothers death, his life became one of constant prayer… Sometimes I would wake up during the night and find my father on his knees, just as I would always see him kneeling in the parish church. We never spoke about a vocation to the priesthood, but his example was in a way my first seminary, a kind of domestic seminary.

At least in hindsight, John Paul II saw the first stirrings of his call to the priesthood in observing his father at prayer.

We await the decision of the Church as to the heroic virtue and sanctity of Karol and Emilia Wojtyla. Yet I think their story at the very least can be a reminder to look at our own families: How well are we doing at ensuring our homes are schools of Mercy? Parents perform the traditional works of mercy all the time: in our own families we regularly feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, visit the sick, and especially counsel the doubtful, instruct the ignorant, admonish the sinner, comfort the sorrowful, bear wrongs patiently, and pray for the living and the dead.

But do we perform these acts with true Christian charity, aware that our day to day lives in fact have eternal significance?

The example of Karol and Emilia Wojtyla should give all Christians a moment to pause and reflect. Through the intercession of the Servants of God Karol and Emilia, may God make us ever more grateful for and faithful to the souls He entrusts for a few years to our care.