“Blessed John Paul II teaches us a lot about the soul; Benedict XVI teaches a lot about the mind; and Pope Francis teaches a lot about the heart,” Dolan said.
John Paul II exemplified the virtue of courage from the soul; Benedict exemplified clarity from the mind; and Francis exemplifies charity that comes from the heart, he said.
“Do you ever need courage now to lead a faithful Catholic life,” Dolan said.
“On any campus these days you don’t have to be embarrassed about debauchery or misbehaving. But you do have to hide, to sneak around and practice your faith because it is not chic, it’s not popular.” John Paul II restored the Church’s soul, her “exhausted interior life,” by “placing Jesus Christ at the centre” and showing Jesus is the answer to every question posed about human life, he said.
The first words of his pontificate were “Be not afraid,” Dolan pointed out.
The restoration of soul became apparent early in his 27-year pontificate during his nine-day visit to Poland in June 1979, Dolan said. In public Masses that attracted millions, the Pope never used the words “Communism,” or mentioned the Russian bayonets lined up to quell any rebellion that might result from his visit, he said. Instead Pope John Paul II reminded his fellow Poles they were not alone, they were not animals or machines or part of a collective but that they had a culture, a community and a faith.
At his closing Mass in Warsaw, a million and a half people took up the chant, “We want God!”
“This restoration of the spirit, of the interior life, further enhanced as we watched John Paul II die in front of our eyes and his weakness and frailty took over a man we remembered as hearty, athletic and vigorous,” Dolan said. He recalled the testimony of a married couple who had visited Rome. The husband said he was tremendously moved to see the pope take out a handkerchief and “wipe his mouth because he was drooling.”
“The Vicar of Christ was drooling,” Dolan said. But the husband found it an amazing testimony of God’s grace moving through his weakness. John Paul II, the soul of the Church, reminds you not to be afraid, of the power of solidarity, and how God’s grace is strongest in our weakness, Dolan said.
“As John Paul II touched the soul, Benedict XVI touched the mind,” he said.
Benedict revived the ancient insight of the Church Fathers that reason and faith are not enemies but allies. “Reason is the greatest natural gift God gives us; faith is the greatest supernatural gift He gives us,” said Dolan. “Strange would be the God who would have those two supreme gifts at odds.”
Benedict’s clarity was “timely” in the world of the “new atheism where a secular culture on steroids attempts to reduce belief to a private hobby at best or some silly oppressive superstition at worst,” he said.
Reason shows us the truth and points to God, he said. Benedict XVI revived “the intellectual wattage of the Church” as “the engine of genuine human progress” and revealed her rich, intellectual tradition and timely and relevant to all that is good, beautiful and true in the human project. Benedict stressed the Church was about saying “Yes” to what is good, beautiful and true.
Benedict taught us how to avoid the two extremes of reason without faith, which would lead to the “dictatorship of relativism” with a guiding principle of “what I want to do, whenever I want to do it,” versus faith without reason, which “becomes a shallow, superstitious fideism that will not hold up to the logical scrutiny of the exterior world.”
His lesson for students on campus is that “we have nothing to fear of the truth,” Dolan said. “The truth will set us free as Jesus Himself said.”
Pope Francis is “restoring the heart of the Church” and “making charity a household word,” Dolan said.
In the first year of his papacy, he has exemplified a heart that “tells us to be like our sheep, a heart that encourages us to take risks, to dare, to not be afraid of accidents,” he said.
He also exemplifies a heart for the poor, and “a heart that is not afraid to be tender,” he said.
He recalled that another cardinal turned to him in tears during Francis’ installation ceremony, saying, “This man speaks like Jesus!” Dolan replied, “That’s the job description.”
“We live in a culture that believes that Christ is fine but the Church, forget about it,” Dolan said. “We’ll take God as our Father as long as we’re the only child, as our general, as long as it’s a one-man army.
“We want Christ without the Church,” he said. “Francis reminds us you can’t have one without the other.”
He urged the young campus missionaries to follow Francis in the expression of a genuine and authentic faith.