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John Paul II visited Australia in 1986, as part of his apostolic trip to Oceania. While in Adelaide, after Sunday Mass and before praying the Angelus, the then-pope shared a rather short reflection on joy. The Angelus, he explained, is a prayer that takes its name from the angel’s message to Mary: “Rejoice […] the Lord is with you.” This joy “is the keynote of the Christian message.” About halfway through this speech, he said:
The attentive reader will notice the phrase “We are an Easter People […]” is enclosed within quotation marks. The Polish pope was obviously quoting someone else, but without attribution. The official text published by the Vatican does not include any references to the original source either.
John Paul II wrote his doctoral dissertation on Saint John of the Cross. One would assume that the phrase is his, especially because the Carmelite saint famously wrote the Spiritual Canticle (literally, a song) and because his mystical theology is profoundly inspired by Solomon’s Song of Songs. And still, he says nothing about Christians being an “Easter People,” not even in his noted collection of Sayings of Light and Love.
Unlike John of the Cross, St. Augustine did not bother writing short aphorisms. His professional rhetorical formation, and his tendency to repeat the basic verse structure of the Psalms (a pattern that informs much of Confessions, and which implies reversing, repeating, or elaborating in a second line what had been stated in the first) invite the reader to discover multiple layers of meaning in virtually every single line of any of his writings. On top of that, he is the most prolific author of Late Antiquity: Isidore of Sevilla famously said that whoever claimed he had read all of Augustine was lying. Finding the exact quote in the more than 5 million words that comprise the Augustinian canon is not an easy task.
Thing is, John Paul II might have been quoting Augustine. In his Exposition on Psalm 148 (Psalms are songs, after all), Augustine writes:
Again, Augustine was a rhetorician, not an advertiser —he was certainly not writing slogans or selling bumper stickers. But tradition oftentimes extracts bits and pieces of longer texts and passes them on in rather “quotable” formats. Augustine is indeed saying Christians are a Halleluia-singing, Easter people who shall have their own Resurrection after the Lord’s. Even if this is not literally what John Paul II “quoted,” it certainly conveys the same message.
