For reasons I will never understand, it took far too many years for the Vatican to acknowledge that Pope John Paul II has Parkinson’s disease.

This unnecessary secrecy cost the pope many valuable opportunities for ministering to others in pain.

Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, who heads the Vatican’s Congregation of Bishops, finally made the Parkinson’s disclosure in a recent interview with a Milan newspaper.

The pope, who just celebrated his 83rd birthday, has suffered for years from what seemed to be symptoms of Parkinson’s, such as trembling hands and occasionally slurred speech.

Despite this degenerative ailment, however, he has remained active and maintained a vigorous travel schedule that in June will send him to Croatia on the 100th foreign tour of his 25-year papacy. This former skier also suffers from knee and hip ailments that now make walking almost impossible.

The secrecy surrounding the pope’s Parkinson’s diagnosis has been unfortunate on many levels. For one thing, such efforts at privacy from such a public figure inevitably lead to false speculation.

But beyond that, the pope’s secrecy means he has passed up opportunities to show people how to confront (by naming) and live with serious disease.

That’s the wiser approach that the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago took when diagnosed with cancer in the mid-1990s. His openness allowed Catholics and, indeed, many other Chicagoans to share his pain and draw strength from the dignity with which he approached what turned out to be his death sentence.

By showing people how to die, Barnardin modeled how to live. His was a remarkable display of courage that should be a lesson to all of us.

Failing to share troubles with the people one loves deprives those people of opportunities to minister to the one in trouble. I’m not recommending that each time some minor distress afflicts us, we take out an ad in the paper and announce it to the world to gain sympathy and visitors who will bring us comfort food.

But if people are supposed to be compassionate and helpful to others in need – and this is a clear calling for people in the pope’s church and for religious people generally – they are denied the opportunity to serve in that way if the sufferer never discloses that something is wrong. In the pope’s case, it eventually became clear that he was physically burdened with something, but it took time for even well-informed speculators to reach consensus on the nature of the problem.

Imagine the comfort it might have been to other sufferers of Parkinson’s to hear the pope disclose that he had contracted the disease. He could have used his illness to educate others about it and to show that he was going to carry on in spite of it. He has indeed carried on, but without taking advantage of the chance to share his experience with others who care about him.

Even Jesus shared his suffering with those he loved.

The gospel of Matthew, for instance, reports that not long before his arrest, Jesus went to the garden of Gethsemane with his disciples and confessed to them, “I am deeply grieved, even to death …” It seems like a useful model of openness and vulnerability.

The pope, of course, is far from the first public figure to clam up about maladies. Perhaps there was no more egregious example in our era than Franklin D. Roosevelt, who ran for a fourth presidential term despite knowing his heart was in desperately poor shape. That decision soon made Harry S. Truman president. But the people who voted for FDR in 1944 were fooled into imagining he would live out his term.

One danger of calling attention on one’s own ailments, of course, is that people will focus on nothing else. The pope, for instance, still wants to make sure his native Poland joins the European Union. He spoke about that recently, declaring that “Europe needs Poland,” which this pope helped to free from the bondage of communism.

But on the whole, much earlier disclosure of his Parkinson’s would have served the pope, his church and the world better.

Bill Tammeus is an editorial page columnist for The Kansas City Star. His e-mail address is: tammeuskcstar.com.