http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=627506
Pope John Paul II: Bad for the church but good for the
world?
Paul Vallely studies the impact of a figure of paradox
08 April 2005
Reaction to the death of Pope John Paul II has been
starkly polarised. Awed enthusiasts have been
unstinting in their praise. Critics have been
withering in their condemnation of his reactionary
views, particular in sexual matters. But many within
the church have been muted while the body of the Pope
lay unburied.
Now that the funeral is over, and as the 116 cardinal
electors begin their secret discussions in the run up
to the conclave to choose the next pope, evaluations
of the last Pope's 26-year ministry will attempt to
reach a more balanced picture. For from a considered
verdict will flow the analysis of what is needed in
John Paul II's successor as the Roman Catholic
church's 265th pope.
In an age of democracy when few international leaders
remain for long in the public eye Pope John Paul II
bestrode the world stage like a colossus across four
decades. The statistics piled up in recent days have
shown that by any standards he was an extraordinary
figure. He was the first non-Italian Pope for 456
years. He travelled almost a million miles to 129
countries to visit the world's one billion Catholics.
He set 1,351 individuals on the road to sainthood -
more than all the other popes of the 20th century put
together. He created 232 cardinals. He was one of the
most prolific popes, with encyclicals, letters,
sermons and speeches which fill nearly 150 volumes. He
had a gift for memorable gestures from kissing the
soil on his first visit to a country to inserting a
prayer scroll into a crevice of Jerusalem's Western
Wall. His was the third-longest papacy in the 2,000
year history of the Catholic Church.
His impact on the secular world was far-reaching. He
played a key role in the collapse of Communism, not
just through his visits to his homeland in 1979 and
1983 but also through his support for the Polish
independent trade union, Solidarity, which gave his
countrymen a vehicle for resistance. Though it was not
known at the time, the Pope wrote letters of support
to activists imprisoned by the communists; and after
private meetings with the US President, Ronald Reagan,
he co-operated with the CIA in the supply of
clandestine materials with priests and bishops, who
were immune from body searches, acting as couriers.
But he touched world affairs far more widely. He had
more than 1,475 meetings with Heads of State and Prime
Ministers and sent envoys across the globe on the eve
of wars. Small wonder that many tributes have
described him as a "superpope".
Yet above all Pope John Paul II was a figure of
paradox. A radical voice on social issues he
challenged much that the secular world deemed as
inevitable: the abysmal gap between the wealthy and
the wretched of the earth, the scandal of the
international arms trade, the death penalty, and the
assumption that profit should take priority over
people in the "savage capitalism" of the new
globalised economy.
But in other things he was indeed deeply reactionary.
His staunch defence of the Roman Catholic Church's
hard line on the sanctity of human life - "from
conception to natural death" - led him to decry
abortions even for women raped in the Balkans wars,
denounce the use of condoms in Aids-ravaged Africa and
condemn attempts to introduce family planning despite
a global population explosion.
The secular world never understood this man of
contradictions. In part that was because much of his
work was kept as hidden as the bare little third-floor
room in which he lived for almost 30 years overlooking
the baroque splendour of St. Peter's basilica. As
spare as any monk's it contained a single bed, two
straight-backed chairs, a desk and a floor which,
apart from a small carpet near the bed, was bare; its
walls too were unadorned apart from a few icons
brought from Poland.
But from there Karol Wojtyla brought the long-term
financial problems of the Vatican under control,
promulgated a new code of canon law for the Catholic
Church (supervised from his sick-bed while recovering
from an assassination attempt in 1981), and oversaw
the creation of its first new Catechism since the 16th
century summarising all the essential beliefs and
moral tenets of the church. Any one of these alone
would have constituted an impressive legacy but John
Paul II did much else, including the establishment of
new rules for the election of his successor - making
members of the College of Cardinals ineligible once
they reached the age of 80. (At present that means
there are 117 cardinals who will elect the next pope).
But there were other reasons the last pope was hard
for our secular age to fathom - his Polishness, his
profoundly pessimistic temperament, his distrust of
democracy and his moral certainty. But, perhaps most
perplexing was attitude of the Pope to the revolution
the Church had made with its Second Vatican Council.
His words always paid lip service to Vatican II's
central aim of turning the Church towards the world
rather than away from it. But his actions,
increasingly so in his later years, seem intent on
reversing many of the Council's changes.
In the 1960s, after 2000 years of talking to itself in
Latin, the Catholic Church had decided it must stop
focusing inwards on its sacramental life. Instead it
was to embark on a strategy of "reading the signs of
the times" to discover where God's spirit was at work
in the wider world. As a bishop Karol Wojtyla had been
part of that movement. He had even helped draft the
council's radical new constitution Gaudium et Spes
(The Church in the Modern World). But soon after
becoming Pope he evidently decided that progressive
ideas and practices had gone too far. A kind of
post-conciliar drift had set in which had to be
arrested.
Those who, after Vatican II, had hoped for a less
monarchical and more collegial style of papacy were to
be disappointed. Rome became more centralised. The
papal role was slowly shifted from being
first-among-equals with his brother bishops to one of
absolute autocrat. The power of national conferences
of bishops was undermined. Vatican II episcopal
progressives were gradually replaced by bishops whose
conservatism often outstripped their pastoral ability.
Nuns were told to resume wearing their habit.
Theologians were instructed to be docile. The faithful
were simply to pray, pay and obey.
He had a stated commitment to ecumenism - the idea of
bringing together Roman Catholics together with other
Christians. Early in his pontificate he became the
first pope to travel to the UK where he met Queen
Elizabeth II, the Supreme Governor of the Church of
England and in a dramatic symbolic gesture knelt in
prayer in Canterbury Cathedral with the Archbishop of
Canterbury, Robert Runcie. He gave higher priority
still to conciliatory gestures towards the Greek
Orthodox church so that the Church could once again
"breathe with two lungs".
Even so the Pope clearly worried that too many
concessions to ecumenism were blunting the edges of
Catholic identity. And so he repeatedly stressed the
things that separated Catholics from others: the
Virgin Mary - to whom he had a special devotion -
birth control, infallibility, the ban on communion
between denominations, celibacy, women priests and so
on.
The result was a ministry of contradictions which
stretched throughout his reign. In search of
rapprochement with the Orthodox he went to Athens and
issued an unprecedented apology for 1000 years of bad
relations - but then ruined the effect by insisting
that they cannot be called a ‘sister church' since
Rome has to be the mother. The result is that good
relations with the Orthodox are further away now than
they were when John Paul II was elected.
It was the same story with the Anglicans. He delighted
them in 1995 by asking other Christian denominations
in his encyclical Ut Unum Sint how the papal ministry
could be exercised in ways more acceptable to them.
But then he cold-shouldered or disciplined Catholics
who took up the invitation and wrote on the subject
and then in 1998 reiterated, with no apparent
provocation, Rome's ruling that Anglican priestly
orders are invalid.
There has been similar ambivalence towards other
faiths. John Paul II became the first pope in history
to enter both a mosque and a synagogue. He went to
pray at the Western Wall and issued an apology for
Christian anti-semitism at the Holocaust Memorial in
Jerusalem. But he irritated many Jews by blaming
individuals rather than the teaching of the Church for
centuries of hatred and suspicion - and he annoyed
many more by supporting a Catholic convent at
Auschwitz and beatifying Pius IX, the pope who
kidnapped a Jewish boy. With other faiths too he has
been equivocal, embracing the notion of inter-faith
dialogue and inviting the leaders of other religions
to prayer gatherings at Assisi, but then suppressing
theologians working on it. It was a strategy which
drove away as many as it attracted.
Those who dared to disagree were branded dissenters.
Many of the church's leading thinkers - Hans Küng,
Charles Curran, Leonardo Boff - were stripped of their
official positions or silenced. The techniques used
even led one troublesome theologian, Bernard Haring,
to compare the questioning he underwent at the Vatican
to the treatment he once received under Hitler.
Liberation theologians were suppressed as ungodly
Marxists; one, Father Tissa Balasuriya, a priest from
Sri Lanka who had been engaged in dialogue with Hindus
and Buddhists, was even excommunicated. Clerics and
theologians were bound to a "loyal assent", as the gag
was euphemistically called. Bishops, like the saintly
Dom Helder Camera in Brazil, who strayed from the
papal line, were systematically replaced.
Instead free reign was given to extremist right-wing
movements like Opus Dei which saw unquestioning
loyalty to the Pope as their first duty. (It was
significant that the founder of Opus Dei, Josémaria
Escrivá, was fast-tracked to sainthood, where Oscar
Romero, the martyr of El Salvador, was totally
overlooked, revealing how John Paul II's record number
of saints were chosen to fit his ideological
worldview.)
All of this was underpinned by Karol Wojtyla's
cultural background. He grew up in Poland where the
Church was persecuted first by the Nazis and then by
the Communists. A church always under attack developed
a cultural and spiritual laager mentality. That sense
never left the Polish pope. Even after the fall of
communism, he continued to see the Church as under
siege - by secularism, materialism or relativism.
More than that, moving from Nazism, through Marxism,
to the Vatican meant he never lived outside a
framework of dictatorial absolutism. He never had any
real experience of a pluralistic democratic society.
He tried to connect with the modern world, grounding
his approach in the worldview that had most appealed
to him as a philosophy don - a tradition of thinking
called "personalism", a kind of Christian
existentialism which insists that it is through
creative action that human beings realise their
potential. From this perspective he wrote some 60
major documents. These sought to embrace the notion of
human rights (which the church had traditionally
opposed) and create a Christian alternative to the
philosophies of the 20th century - Marxism, humanism
and post-modernism.
But Pope John Paul II could never overcome his
suspicion of democracy. He was a strong advocate of it
when totalitarian communism was the alternative. But
its chief virtue for the Polish pope lay in the
greater evil it kept out. Once communism had fallen,
the faults of democracy were exposed. It might provide
individuals with the freedom to make choices but it
has no mechanisms to direct them to chose what is
right. The will of the majority, he said, can enslave
the truth.
This had implications inside the Church too. During
the 20th century Catholicism had moved away from
giving its blessing to authoritarian modes of
government. Instead it had endorsed the participation
of ordinary people which democracy provides. A
previous pope, Paul VI, had begun to come round to the
idea that Rome had to reconcile that with the Church's
own internal governance.
John Paul II squashed that notion. Democracy was OK
for the people of Communist Poland but inside the
church it was a threat to papal authority. Instead he
returned to the old incongruities which characterise
the Church's idea of the good Catholic citizen. (When
looking at the secular world he or she is supposed to
be adult, active, well-informed, educated, critical of
authority, sceptical, intolerant of injustice, ready
to participate and take responsibility. Yet when faced
with papal pronouncements he or she is expected
suddenly to become deferential, docile, obedient and
infantile.)
Much of this grew out of the Pope's profoundly
pessimistic temperament. For all his embrace of the
Christian virtue of hope, John Paul II was a man of
deep personal and historical pessimism who was not at
home with the mood of optimism, challenge and
confidence which had characterised the Second Vatican
Council. His theological outlook was Augustinian, it
did not go in for fine distinctions but offered
dramatic alternatives and highly charged opposing
poles. The Pope wrote, as one theologian put it, "like
Van Gogh paints: broad strokes, huge amounts of paint,
strong colours". Wojtyla's church was no place for
grey or ambiguity.
Nowhere was this clearer than in the metaphor which he
frequently used towards the end of his life. The West,
he said, was in the grip of "a culture of death". It
was there in everything: consumerism, personal
hedonism, sexual mores, medical ethics and the
over-emphasis on economic efficiency, personal freedom
and maximum choice which undergirds a lifestyle in
which morality is down-played in all aspects of life
under democratic capitalism.
As so often, the Pope over-stated his case. But he
also put his finger on uncomfortable truths about the
way we now live. He suggested that it was the greed of
the rich world which talks about a "population
explosion" and questions the right of the Third World
poor to reproduce. He insisted that in a society
dominated by materialism "the values of being are
replaced by those of having"; people have become
slaves to things. He repeatedly suggested that moral
and technological developments are out of kilter. He
warned of the danger of a liberal democracy elevating
freedom and choice to be the only virtue. He cautioned
against the interests of minorities becoming enslaved
to the will of the majority. He constantly reasserted
that rationalism is, by itself, not enough.
All these were messages unpalatable to the modern
world. In re-iterating them across four decades Pope
John Paul II became a contra-indicator to received
wisdom of Western society and acted as a moral compass
for believers and non-believers alike.
As he grew older his views changed. Previously he had
shied away from an absolute condemnation of capital
punishment, but later in life he seemed to acknowledge
that this was inconsistent with his views on the
sanctity of life; there were now no situations in
modern life where the death penalty could be
justified, he eventually said. As the Millennium Years
of 2000 approached he became seized with the need for
the Church to repent of past sins and apologised,
among other things, for the Inquisition, the
persecution of Galileo, the church's justification of
slavery, the mistreatment of indigenous persons, and
the Crusades. But in general, plagued by ill-health
and dogged by speculation about his resignation, he
became more doctrinaire and unyielding - stretching
the idea of papal infallibility into unprecedented
areas and attempting to bind the hands of his
successors over the church's opposition to women
priests.
In the early years his personal charisma and strong
moral lead brought many to suggest that Pope John Paul
II was good for the church but bad for the world. By
the end of his long reign there were grounds for
concluding that the Polish pope may, in fact, have
been quite the opposite: bad for the church but good
for the world. It may yet be some time before history
will offer a verdict.
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"[M]y ministry is that of servus servorum Dei."
--Pope John Paul II (Ut Unum Sint, no. 88)
"And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock
I will build my church, and the powers of death
shall not prevail against it."
--Matthew 16:18
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