Reflection of Fr. Paul Marx, OSB on Pope John Paul II
Excerpted from, Faithful for Life: Autobiography of Fr. Paul Marx, OSB, Human Life International, 1979, pp. 159-162.



On 17, November 1979, I met Pope John Paul II. He stunned me by saying, “I know you.” I had been giving lectures against abortion in the previous five years, now and then in Europe, especially in German-speaking countries.

When Wojtyla was the Cardinal Archbishop of Cracow; occasionally he would read about a certain “Marx” who was flailing away against abortionists on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Fighting Marxists every day, he may have thought that perhaps there was at least one decent Marx in the world after all – and it happened to be me. At any rate, the Pope now said, “I know you. Is there a little bit of Karl in you?” I responded, “Only through Adam and Eve.” The Pope chuckled. I had a further comment on my tongue but didn’t manage to get it off: “Now that these wild theologians and so-called Scripture scholars have removed Adam and Eve from the Bible, there could be no connection whatsoever.” The Pope had just returned from his visit to the United States, where, speaking in Chicago to the American Catholic hierarchy, he had roundly condemned contraception. I thanked him for that. I told the Pope that I had been in forty-eight (today ninety-one) countries of the world and had always found that contraception inevitably led to abortion, that I could find no exception, that no one had ever been able to point out an exception to me. That lit him up, because he was thoroughly convinced of the same relationship, as evidence from his promotion of NFP and marriage preparation work in Polish parish centers, and also from his very many subsequent writings and lectures. I spelled out for him my conviction not only that contraception always leads to abortion but also that the legalization of abortion increases fornication and sexual recklessness, leading to ever more venereal disease, infertility, single-parent families, illegitimate births, and divorce. The legalization of abortion, I continued, dries up the adoption services, prostitutes the medical and legal professions, and inevitably ends in euthanasia. The Pope, in his very bad English (he has improved a lot since then), said, after a long pause, “You haf lots of experience. You must bring dis pro-life movement all over dee world; if you do dat, you will be doin dee most important work on ert. Surely dee Americans will help you.”

I don’t always catch on right away, nor did I in this instance. It was not until a couple of hours later that it occurred to me that, if there is no replacement birthrate in a particular country and in the Church, country and Church obviously have no future. Every worthy cause in the world assumes the reproductive progression of human life, ideally the fruit of generous husbands and wives in the loving commitment of marriage. I was, and am, thoroughly convinced that the pro-life/pro-family movement is quintessential, that nothing is more important, and that all depends on it – above all, Church, State, and humanity. As if to sum up my own experience-tested convictions, the Pope, in a brief encounter in 1991, called me “the Apostle of Life.”