John Paul’s Will Reveals His Doubts About Remaining Pope

It was March 2000 and Pope John Paul II had fulfilled his mission to guide the Roman Catholic Church into a new millennium. Stooped and slowed by Parkinson’s disease after nearly 22 years on the job and two months shy of his 80th birthday, he turned to God with a poignant question he never uttered in public:

How will I know when my time to serve is over?

Perhaps the moment had come, John Paul wrote that month, to repeat the words of the biblical Simeon after he had blessed the Christ child: “Now, Master, you let your servant go in peace.”

“I hope,” the pope added, that God “will help me to recognize until when I must continue this service to which he called me.”

John Paul’s private doubts, made public Thursday in his last will and testament, were widely interpreted as a revelation that he had considered stepping down as head of the 1-billion-member church. Although he stayed five more years in office, until his death Saturday, the disclosure caused a sensation among Catholics gathering for his funeral here today.

In the final years of John Paul’s 26 1/2 -year reign, Vatican officials insisted repeatedly that resignation was never an option because, in their words, a spiritual father cannot quit his job as head of a family.

But Thursday the late pope had the last word. His will is certain to energize a debate among Catholic cardinals, who will meet this month to choose his successor, over how long pontiffs should rule.

Though popes are elected to serve for life, canon law allows for their retirement, but the procedure is complicated. No pope has willingly stepped aside since Celestine V decided in 1294, after five months in office, that he wasn’t up to the job -- a controversial decision that some said earned him a place in Dante’s hell.

Modern medicine’s ability to keep the incapacitated alive for long periods has prompted calls by some in the church for papal term limits. Alarmed by John Paul’s protracted physical decline, a few cardinals have suggested that future popes might think about stepping down under certain conditions to avoid paralysis in the management of the world’s largest Christian church.

“Now that John Paul has acknowledged he actually thought about retiring, it will free future popes to think about that possibility for themselves,” said Father Thomas Reese, a Vatican specialist and editor of the New York-based Jesuit magazine America. “What he wrote might not have tremendous impact one way or another, but it keeps the question open.”

The pontiff’s 2,400-word will is a series of deeply spiritual reflections on his life and times: the “unspeakably difficult” persecution of his church under communist rule in his native Poland, the fall of the Iron Curtain, his outreach to leaders of other faiths at the turn of the millennium, his own mortality, his devotion to the church. At one point he thanked God for sparing the world a nuclear holocaust during the Cold War.

The document was written in Polish during seven pre-Easter retreats from 1979, the year after his election as pope, to 2000. The Vatican translated it into Italian.

John Paul had no living relatives. He said he left no personal property and asked his private secretary, Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, to burn all his personal notes, a practice not unusual for popes.

The pope used the document to ask forgiveness for any personal failings, thank the innumerable people he had encountered during his pontificate and say goodbye.

“As I reach the limits of my earthly life, my mind returns to my beginnings,” he wrote in March 2000, mentioning his late parents, brother and sister, his schoolmates, his co-workers at a quarry during World War II, his parishioners in Wadowice, Poland, and “the persons who were entrusted to me in a special way by the Lord” during his service as a bishop in Krakow and as pope.

“To all I want to say just one thing: ‘May God reward you,’ ” he wrote.

The pontiff thanked only two individuals specifically: secretary and compatriot Dziwisz, for his long service, and “the rabbi of Rome,” retired Chief Rabbi Elio Toaff, who hosted John Paul during his visit to the city’s central synagogue in 1986, the first papal visit to a Jewish temple.

“I was touched,” Toaff told Italy’s ANSA news agency. “The affection I felt for him was returned.”

The will contains another historical footnote. In 1982, it shows, John Paul considered the possibility of being buried in his native soil, asking the cardinals who plan papal funerals to “satisfy as far as possible” the desires of the church in Poland. But three years later, he wrote that they were no longer obliged to do so.

George Weigel, author of the John Paul biography “Witness to Hope,” said the shift marked the pontiff’s evolution from “faithful son of Poland” to a more acute understanding “that the pope belongs to the entire church, and St. Peter’s Basilica is where the servants of the entire church are buried.”

Others said the differing instructions over his burial reflected the document’s disjointedness. In contrast to his carefully organized encyclicals and other pronouncements, his will is a series of scattered diary entries that were not edited into a coherent document.

“It reads like an unfinished work in progress,” Reese said. “Maybe when his health began to give out, he decided he had other priorities.”

But two important themes run through the work. In almost every entry, including the first, when he was 58, John Paul said he was prepared to die and looked forward to death as “my Easter.”

And he wrote repeatedly that he had entrusted his papal mission to God.

The will concludes in Latin with the phrase Christ is said to have uttered to God before his death: “Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit.”

Some Vatican watchers said John Paul’s ponderings about resigning did not seem unusual or surprising viewed in that light.

In March 2000, the pope recalled the 1981 assassination attempt that had left him wounded. He said that divine intervention had “saved me in a miraculous way” and that from that moment on, his life belonged more clearly to God.

At that point in his reflections, he raised the question about the duration of his papacy, but left it to God to “call him” from service “when he saw fit.”

In the meantime, the pope said, he prayed that God would give him the “necessary strength” to carry out his duties.

Apparently, the call the pope waited for came only in death.

“Did anyone doubt that he would consider resigning? I certainly didn’t,” Weigel said. “This was entirely in character with the man I knew, including the kind of thinking out loud over the years and always coming back to that question: ‘What ought I to be doing to conform myself with the will of God?’

“But ultimately what he heard was a call to pour himself out completely for the life of the church.”