St Pope John Paul II, who passed away on Divine Mercy Sunday on 2 April 2005, wrote his last book, Memory and Identity: Personal Reflections, (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, published 2005), in the style of a series of interviews and questions, expanding on the themes that were much earlier examined in 1993 with two Polish philosophers, Jozef Tischner and Krzysztof Michalski, on the critical analysis of the defeat of two dictatorships that marked twentieth-century Polish history: Nazism and Communism.

It is not possible to recall the years of Pope John Paul II’s stewardship as Vicar of Rome from 1978 to 2005, and as St Peter’s successor and leader of the Roman Catholic Church, without reference to his Polish roots and identity, his experiences of the horrors of the Second World War years followed immediately by the rise of Soviet occupation and the Cold War, during which he was a central figure in the tumultuous changes that eventually freed Poland and eastern Europe.

In His Holiness, Pope John Paul II and the Hidden History of Our Times (Double-day; 1996), Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi, dean of the Vatican journalists, wrote a biography more attuned to the intrigue and style of All the President’s Men or the Cuban missile crisis than to the shepherd of the pilgrim Church on earth, to trace the life of the Pope as he navigated the Church and his beloved Poland in the end of the Soviet empire.

Certainly as part of the historical unfolding of this drama of man, played as it were, in the foothills on earth as heaven gazed from above, Memory and Identity provided an epilogue account (“Someone must have guided that bullet”) on the intrigue and mystery surrounding the ordeal and survival of the Pope after the assassination attempt by the Turkish Mehmet Ali Ağca on his life on 13 May 1981. The significance of the date itself would immediately ring bells in the minds of those who recognise the date of the attempt on his life to be an anniversary of the apparitions of Our Blessed Lady the Virgin Mary at Fatima and its private revelations on the ‘persecution of the Universal Church and the conversion of Russia’ . It would be hard in the context of religious sense-making not to place the assassination events in the far deeper meaning of the battle between the forces of good and evil, however plausible they were in the realm of the secular world.

It is in this context and views that Pope John Paul II began his final book with the question that continues to confound us today – why does evil exists and why does God allow it (the question of theodicy)?

Here, Pope John Paul II began by recounting the twentieth century that led to the historical and ideological ‘eruptions’ of the great evils and their ultimate defeat in Europe as part of a broader and longer sequelae in the modern history of Europe since the Age of Enlightenment, which had yield much positive fruits as well negative outcomes.  

St JPII characterised evil, in the tradition of the Church Fathers, St Thomas Aquinas and St Augustine, as ‘the absence of some good which ought to be present in a given being’; a ‘privation’ but never in the ‘total absence of good’. He referred to the roots of evil being grown ‘from the pure soil of good’ as a mystery of faith. Just as mysterious is the ability of good to continue to grow from the same soil as evil and yet is never destroyed by evil.

Here the theological definition of mystery of faith must be understood as a term that applies not to intrigue, but to the imperfect and unfolding understanding of God’s plan by humankind, a ‘mystery hidden in God, which can never be known unless revealed by God’ (Catechism of the Catholic Church (1997)).

St JPII cite from the Gospel parable of the good grain and the weeds (Matt. 13:24-30) to explain the foundation of this co-existence of good and evil:

He (Jesus) put another parable before them, ‘The kingdom of Heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field. While everybody was asleep his enemy came, sowed darnel all among the wheat, and made off. When the new wheat sprouted and ripened, then the darnel appeared as well. The owner’s labourers went to him and said, “Sir, was it not good seed that you sowed in your field? If so, where does the darnel come from?” He said to them, “Some enemy has done this.” And the labourers said, “Do you want us to go and weed it out?” But he said, “No, because when you weed out the darnel you might pull up the wheat with it. Let them both grow till the harvest; and at harvest time I shall say to the reapers: First collect the darnel and tie it in bundles to be burnt, then gather the wheat into my barn.”’ (Matt. 13:24-30)

New Jerusalem Bible

St PJPII pointed to the harvest as referring to the end of times or eschaton – the final event in the divine plan – the end of the world. He said the parable served as ‘key to the entire history of mankind’, the theatre of the coexistence of good and evil, the wheat and weeds growing alongside each other. Even if evil exists alongside good, good perseveres besides evil and grow from the same soil, namely, that of human nature. Despite original sin, the human nature has retained its capacity for good, and has not become totally corrupt, as historical events continue to confirm this.

This view of the co-existence of good and evil, in whatever context or form, in whichever trials and tribulations played out by man must surely be a source of encouragement and equanimity for us, as the battles of life-changing events continue to pummel the world and its earthly inhabitants incessantly. As C S Lewis puts it: ‘It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.’

G85 Lumix, 2018 Chojabaru in the foothills of Kuju, Kyushu Island, Japan;

2019 Copenhagen; Death and the Mother (Niels Hansen Jacobsen). SMK – Statens Museum for Kunst, National Gallery of Denmark

Chapter 1: Mysterium Iniquitatis: The Coexistence of Good and Evil. In Pope John Paul II, Memory and Identity: Personal Reflections, (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2005)

Carl Bernstein, Marco Politi, His Holiness, Pope John Paul II and the Hidden History of Our Times (Double-day; 1996)

Scripture readings from the Jerusalem Bible are published and copyright © 1966, 1967 and 1968 by Darton, Longman & Todd, Ltd and Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc,

Learning in War-Time, in C.S. Lewis. The Weight of Glory and other addresses. HarperCollins, 1949, C.S. Lewis Pte Ltd, 1976 revised,

Also See Remembering Pope John Paul II and the Message of Fatimah