In 1984, Pope John Paul II met in Rome with 300,000 young people from all over the world in a meeting that laid the foundations for today’s World Youth Day. / Credit: Gregorini Demetrio, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Vatican City, Apr 2, 2025 / 04:00 am (CNA).

Now 20 years since Pope John Paul II’s death on April 2, 2005, one of his closest collaborators says the Polish pontiff lives on in the hearts and memories of the many people who still feel connected to him today.

Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz, John Paul II’s personal secretary for nearly four decades, told EWTN News during an interview in Krakow that visitors to the saint’s tomb in St. Peter’s Basilica “don’t go to the dead pope, they go to the living pope. He lives in hearts, he lives in memories.”

“There is still this dialogue between the pope and the people and the people with him. This is how I feel,” the 85-year-old cardinal and former archbishop of Krakow said. “He departed but at the same time remained with us. … People cling to him, study him again.”

Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami, who has Polish parents, said John Paul II changed Poland and the world.

“The world that we live in today is in the shape it’s in, at least in some aspects, because of John Paul’s witness,” Wenski told EWTN News in Miami, “especially when he went to Poland in 1979 and inspired the people by saying ‘Be not afraid’ and asking the Holy Spirit … to change the face of this land, this Polish land.”

Dziwisz echoed this sentiment, noting that “many things changed in the Church and in the world under the influence of John Paul II and his activities. … In Rome itself and in the Church, there was a belief that the future belonged to Marxism. And the pope said that the future belongs to human rights, to the human person, to human freedom, and not to the enslavement that Marx gave.”

‘We want to be with him’

“I also remember his departure wasn’t a departure to history, to the archives,” Dziwisz said. “He works and you can see it. People run to God thanks to him and receive different graces.”

The cardinal remembered how emotional everyone was when they said goodbye to the Polish pope in the days leading to his final breath on Saturday, April 2, 2005: “How they approached the pope, crying, to kiss his hand and say goodbye.”

“It was only in the afternoon, on Saturday, the day of his departure and death, that the pope asked to have the holy Scripture read to him,” Dziwisz said, recalling that a priest there in his room “read the Gospel of St. John, nine chapters. And [the pope] followed, he didn’t say anything, he just followed and listened to the Gospel. He prepared [for death] simply, by reading the holy Scripture, consciously knowing he’s leaving.”

Then a priest, Dziwisz had been at John Paul II’s side as his personal secretary since 1966, when the future pope was the new archbishop of Krakow. He said he and others “opened the window discretely” of John Paul II’s apartment where he lay dying so he could hear the voices of the thousands keeping vigil in St. Peter’s Square outside.

“So that he could have the satisfaction [of knowing] that there are people with him,” Dziwisz explained. “There was this big, quite large youth group who had been camping for the second day [in St. Peter’s Square]. I said to them: ‘You are going home.’ They said: ‘He was with us, so now we want to be with him.’ And indeed, they were. The youth did not abandon him to the end.”

Umberto Civitarese, a longtime employee of Vatican Radio (now Vatican News) who covered up close John Paul II’s papacy, including many of his international trips, said the pope “never gave up, he didn’t give up, he managed everything until the end and he was trying in every way to be present.”

Civitarese told EWTN News he remembered an Angelus one Sunday in which John Paul went to the window but he couldn’t speak, but “that was enough” for his flock waiting below. People “didn’t expect anything else, it was enough just to see him,” he added.

Even when he was sick, he was active, Dziwisz said. “He had perfect awareness until the end, until the last day and hour.”

The retired Polish cardinal emphasized that even in suffering, John Paul II never complained: “What I know is what he said, that suffering has meaning. That’s how he approached it.”

‘A man united with God in prayer’

“Very early on, we, not only me, had the impression that we were dealing with a saint,” Civitarese said about his and his colleagues’ experience with the pontiff. “Because the example he set on a daily basis, in my opinion, remained inimitable.”

“So many times one asks but what does one have to do to become a saint? And I know, I understood — seeing him, yes, from following the example that he set … the commitment he put into his role, putting the meaning of being pope first,” he noted.

Dziwisz said John Paul II’s “holiness was because he was a man united with God in prayer.”

Civitarese saw this commitment to prayer in action on the pope’s many international trips, when, after a very long day, the first thing he would do is go to the chapel of the nunciature he was staying at to pray.

“While the others [traveling with him] maybe were refreshing, there were those who were eating, those who were phoning, those who were resting, he instead put prayer first,” the radio technician said, adding that these are the memories that have stuck with him and left a lasting impression.

“The thing I remember most strongly about him was this magnetism that he had,” he said. “When you are in contact with a personality like that I think it changes your life a little bit.”