The Saint Who Almost Never Was

In 1920s Europe, Emilia Kaczorowska was expecting her third child. She experienced complications during this pregnancy from rheumatic fever, which affected her heart. This left her health in a very delicate state. “You need to have an abortion,” her doctor Jan Moskala said, “in order to save your life.” But the devoutly Catholic Emilia refused to do so. She had a baby boy on May 18, 1920, and would live for another 9 years before she died. Her son would live for nearly 85 years. He would become Pope John Paul II. He’ll be canonized in Rome this April 27th, along with Pope John XXIII.

What would the world have missed out on if this man wasn’t allowed to live?

This moment in 1978 wouldn’t have happened: It’s two and a half weeks after Pope John Paul I died of a heart attack. The Cardinals are at the Vatican having a conclave to elect a new pope. The two leading candidates for the papacy are Italian: The conservative Archbishop Giuseppe Siri and the liberal Giovanni Benelli. The College of Cardinals can’t seem to break the tie between the two men. On the second day of the conclave, Austrian Archbishop Franz Konig suggests Karol Wojtyla as a compromise. Wojtyla is elected, and becomes the first non-Italian pope in 456 years. This blazes a trail for his next two successors: Pope Benedict XVI of Germany, and Pope Francis I of Argentina.

How about this: In the year 2000, 17 year old Australian Matt Fradd went to World Youth Day in Rome. He’d been raised in a Catholic family, but had become more or less an atheist after grappling with questions about life and its meaning and not understanding the Church’s stance on those issues. Fradd tells people, “I called myself either an agnostic or an atheist depending on my digestion any given day.” He had stopped attending Mass as a teenager, but his mother came home from church one Sunday in the year 2000 and told him that their family’s parish was taking people to World Youth Day. Matt initially saw it as a chance to explore Italy and meet girls, but he reverted back to Catholicism while he was there. He said, “I was surrounded by young Catholics who were very knowledgeable about their faith, and I never experienced anything like that before. So many of the philosophical questions I had about life were answered. Why have people from time immemorial believed there’s an omnipotent, omniscient higher power? Because such a being actually exists, and it’s God. Why do there seem to be universal moral laws governing the universe? Because there’s a God who is the moral law-giver.”

Since then, Matt has become an internationally known Catholic apologist, author and speaker. He has spoken to thousands of teenagers and adults about what the Church teaches and why. He spent time working with NET Ministries, which sends missionaries around the world to spread the Gospel to young people. He has also worked with the Catholic Answers radio program in San Diego. He lives in Georgia with his wife Cameron and their three kids.

Who knows how Matt’s life would have turned out if Pope John Paul II wasn’t around to invent World Youth Day. Would he still be an atheist or agnostic? Would he be married to Cameron, whom he met through NET Ministries? Would he have spent so much of his life teaching people about Catholicism?

Or consider this: During JPII’s reign, the Holy Father visited many English-speaking countries. And when he attended Mass in these countries, he noticed that their translations of the Liturgy and of the Missal were incoherent. They varied from nation to nation, and some of these were badly done. So, in the year 2000, the first order to reform the Liturgy came from Pope John Paul II. And the new Mass translation made its debut in November 2011.

The list goes on. Would Communism have collapsed in Eastern Europe? If so, how much longer would it have taken? Would the Church have begun taking greater strides to create understanding between Catholics, Protestant and Orthodox Christians, and people of other religions? Would the New Evangelization have begun? Would the Church have renewed its efforts to vocalize its fight against the “culture of death,” (a term the late pontiff coined)? We can only speculate.

All these wonderful things, and countless others, happened simply because this future saint’s mother allowed her little boy to live instead of aborting him. Some people might say that abortion is a way to weed out the Osama Bin Ladens and Unabombers of this world before they can wreak havoc on humanity. But no one knows how people’s lives will turn out before they’re born. And it takes a certain amount of hatred and self-loathing to see every person and one’s self as a potential terrorist instead of seeing them as beings worthy of unconditional love, and people who could become the next Mother Teresa or the next Pope John Paul II.

The first step towards anyone becoming a saint, just like that Polish baby boy Karol Wojtyla, is being born into this world. The path to sainthood is never easy, requiring tremendous selflessness and a willingness to cooperate with God’s grace to fulfill the great plans He has for us. But one of the greatest tragedies of contemporary life is that this opportunity to walk down the path to holiness is deliberately closed off to millions of unborn children around the world every day.

Millions of voices today we hear today are okay with denying the next Saint Peter or Ignatius of Loyola the chance to experience the gift of life and to use that gift to glorify God. And we should all thank God that Emilia Kaczorowska refused to listen to one of those voices. Countless souls have been touched either directly or indirectly because she gave birth to her son, and it truly is a gift that he will be canonized in the coming weeks.

But, to fully honor the memory of this extraordinary man, we must do two more things: we must protect all human life from the point of conception to the point of natural death. All of us have the potential to become saints. Therefore, all of us should be protected from premature death to fully take advantage of the chance to live out that calling.

Secondly, we should all recognize our own lives as gifts, and as tremendous opportunities to one day join the communion of saints in heaven. The late pontiff would want us to do so. In his address to World Youth Day attendees in 2002, he said, “Just as salt gives flavor to food and light illumines the darkness, so too holiness gives full meaning to life and makes it reflect God’s glory. How many saints, especially young saints, can we count in the Church’s history! In their love for God their heroic virtues shone before the world, and so they became models of life which the Church has held up for imitation by all….Through the intercession of this great host of witnesses, may God make you too, dear young people, the saints of the third millennium!”

Pope John Paul the Great is one saint who almost never was, since he narrowly escaped death before he was born. All of us run the risk of becoming saints who never were through our choosing to say no to God and the graces he wishes to lavish upon us, and by failing to recognize what a gift our own lives are. For Saint Karol Wojtyla’s sake, may that not be said of us.