What God wants
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What God wants

Peggy Noonan, like so many others, discusses Pope John Paul’s role in the fall of Soviet Communism, but not in the political sense. She sees what so many others do not. John Paul did not defeat Communism, and certainly not through any political action.  He simply brought the Gospel to Poland, like a man bringing water to people long in the desert. He spoke boldly and without fear of the need for God, of a wholeness of being, of the power of the Holy Spirit. And the people heard and stored what he said in his heart.p>

The pope was speaking on the Vigil of Pentecost, that moment in the New Testament when the Holy Spirit came down to Christ’s apostles, who had been hiding in fear after his crucifixion, filling them with courage and joy. John Paul picked up this theme. What was the greatest of the works of God? Man. Who redeemed man? Christ. Therefore, he declared, “Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe, at any longitude or latitude. ... The exclusion of Christ from the history of man is an act against man! Without Christ it is impossible to understand the history of Poland.” Those who oppose Christ, he said, still live within the Christian context of history.

The people chanted, “We want God!” And that is what they got. What Poland received was not a call to revolution, but a call to holiness. The Communists were not prepared for that because they couldn’t understand the power of holiness. The power of guns and secular power they could understand, but not the power of the Gospel. I wonder if they ever learned their lesson or ever figured out what happened to them.

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