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It was 100 degrees as the sun was setting and a toddler with red curls was running toward the Ferris wheel on the National Mall, part of the national State Fair for America's 250th birthday. The kid was trying to get my attention -- he seemed to like being the center of things. He seemed to want to be leading an army as he got others' attention, as he kept moving forward. I looked around to try to find an adult he belonged to. His young father found him -- too flustered, it seemed, to be worried yet. What an adorable kid. What a loving father, just still learning, perhaps, how much his life has changed.
Celebrating Mass on this same National Mall in 1979, Pope John Paul II said, "Nothing surpasses the greatness or dignity of a human person."
The closer I looked at the fair, there were pleasant surprises: artwork from a high schooler celebrating Nellie Gray, the founder of the March for Life. Official displays of Catholic nuns Katharine Drexel and Elizabeth Ann Seton. Pictures of American heroes, not all of them famous men. I saw tourists decked out in their red, white and blue, and Students for Life "We Are the Pro-Life Generation" swag.
While on the Mall, Pope John Paul said: "If a person's right to life is violated at the moment in which he is first conceived in his mother's womb, an indirect blow is struck also at the whole of the moral order, which serves to ensure the inviolable goods of man."
He went on: "We will stand up every time that human life is threatened."
There's nothing like people-watching to recognize the variety and uniqueness of each and every human life. I saw elderly couples, some of the men with caps indicating where they served. I saw young families, some with apologetic mothers as the kids pushed through doors for freebies. I saw friend groups in their 20s. I saw people by themselves, comfortable in their solitude. As JPII said: "Human life is not just an idea or an abstraction; human life is the concrete reality of a being that lives, that acts, that grows and develops; human life is the concrete reality of a being that is capable of love, and of service to humanity."
Now we have a pope who hails from the United States. A highlight of a new exhibit at the John Paul II Shrine elsewhere in D.C. includes a photo of a young Pope Leo with JPII from 1979. Also a part of the display is a replica of the replacement stone sent to the U.S. by the Vatican when the Know-Nothings removed a previous one from the Washington Monument, in an effort to de-Catholicize the nation's capital.
We can tend to act like we know nothing about the treasures we've been given. Taking stock, we can be better civic leaders, helping deliver a future of freedom for all those who long to live as we were made to. You, me, the popes, and that red-haired kid running ahead of us all, free of some of the ideological baggage and experiential wounds distracting us.