Local priest reflects on pope’s legacy

Published 11:13 am Thursday, October 2, 2008

SNOQUALMIE – The Valley isn’t the most Catholic place in the world, having only two Catholic churches. Still, the death of Pope John Paul II on April 2 was felt here just as much as anywhere else.

Both Our Lady of Sorrows in Snoqualmie and St. Anthony Catholic Church in Carnation held memorial masses last week, complete with flowers, photos and words about John Paul II’s life, just as churches all around the world did. More than 2-million pilgrims and 200 of the world’s political and religious leaders descended on Rome for a funeral Mass last week.

Rev. Jan Larson, who presides over both Catholic churches in the Valley, has lived to see five different popes in the Vatican. He became a priest in 1968 and has been stationed in the Valley for 13 years. Prior to this he served in five different churches around the Everett/Seattle area. Larson, 62, never met John Paul II, though he was once invited to.

“Anybody who is 30 years old or younger has not really known any other pope,” Larson said. “We hear so much on TV about the pope. It’s almost exhausting. This phenomenon of suddenly he’s not here anymore, I think is traumatic for a lot of younger Catholics.”

Before this pope, the world didn’t know much about popes due to the lack of television, Larson said.

“Before TV was around, no one ever heard about who the pope was. Now the pope goes into the hospital to get a check up, and immediately there are news reports.”

The invention of the jet plane also contributed to a wider knowledge of the pope, Larson said.

“Before that the pope stayed in Italy and maybe toured by train a little. This pope decided, ‘I’m going to travel if I’m the universal pastor, I’m going to make contact with people.'” For 50,000 years popes pretty much stayed in the Vatican and the average person didn’t know who the pope was, Larson said.

But it’s not that John Paul II’s fame isn’t deserved. In his personal ministry, the pontiff reached out to the Jewish community more than any other pope before him.

“I know Jewish leadership in the Seattle area was particularly impressed by those gestures,” Larson said.

John Paul II was also instrumental in the fall of the Berlin Wall, and took some unpopular stands in the interest of social justice.

“He was such a figure world wide, acknowledged as a holy man and someone who stuck to his principles,” Larson said. “He’s sort of like what Billy Graham is [to Protestants]. Catholics were happy to have someone like the pope who serves that same role.”

However, there are some church issues Larson feels John Paul II could have addressed more.

“I think he was more conservative than he should of been. He wasn’t willing to discuss matters that aren’t going away, like the role of women in the church, the issue of whether priests should be allowed to marry, how we should deal with gay and lesbian people in the church and the shortage of priests.”

At the same time, John Paul II had surprised a lot of conservative Catholics and conservatives of other faiths by condemning capital punishment and the war in Iraq, Larson said.

Larson does not have any predictions as to who might be the next pope, but said any baptized male can be elected.

“I’m in there, too, but I don’t like Italian food that well.”

Cardinals will gather in a Vatican conclave April 18 to elect a successor. Larson said usually cardinals are chosen because they already know the structure of the larger church.

Larson said that popes historically had always been Italian until John Paul II, who was Polish. They didn’t used to travel and so only needed to speak Italian. But the next pope will probably be more internationally savvy.

“Now they tend to pick a pope who speaks a number of languages,” Larson said. The chances the pope will not be Italian are considerable, too, as many current cardinals hail from South America and Africa.

But as the world grows more indifferent toward faith, the pool of cardinals to choose from has become smaller, as has the number of priests available to lead churches. Only half of all Catholic churches in France have resident priests, Larson said, and even predominately Catholic nations are struggling.

“I understand [Ireland] is short on priests now, they don’t have the numbers they used to. A lot of young Irish people aren’t going to church. That’s one thing cardinals are worried about as they go into elections – what to do about the state of the life of the church, particularly in Western Europe.”