John Paul II and the Papacy of Paradox
Episcopal News Service. April 2, 2005 [05-0227]
Peter Stanford, , London-based Writer and Broadcaster on Religious and Ethical Matters
[Ecumenical News International] John Paul II's papacy was one of notable firsts. The first non-Italian to lead the Roman Catholic Church for 455 years. The first Slav to sit on the throne of Saint Peter. The first pontiff in modern times to emerge from the citadel of the Vatican to claim a place among the world's political leaders.
Such a remarkable and very public break with tradition inevitably created an anticipation that John Paul II who was, when elected, the youngest holder of the office for more than 130 years, would be a champion of renewal. Under him, it was hoped, Catholicism would finally jettison the last vestiges of its splendid isolation from other churches and from the 20th century.
But with the Polish Pope the man and the message were not the same. His was a papacy of paradox. Although John Paul beamed at the cameras like a wise old uncle, speaking not in the Latin of church bureaucracy, but in sound bites, and made frequent use of the jet engine, his line on moral questions was seen as belonging to an earlier era.
Karol Wojtyla, the 58-year-old son of a Polish army officer and his teacher wife, was a totally unexpected choice for the papacy in 1978.
The modernising tendency in the Roman Catholic Church, at its peak in the years immediately after the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), slackened in the final years of the reign of Pope Paul VI. When he died in 1978, the world's cardinals chose as Pope the patriarch of Venice, Albino Luciani, who took the name John Paul. He lasted only 33 days.
Back in the Sistine Chapel, where popes are chosen, for the second time in a year, the clerical electors opted for the Archbishop of Krakow in Poland, a man of stern, conservative principles with a genial, populist touch. This former midfield player in his local soccer team would be the man to put a positive face on defending the church's corner in a world awash with liberalism, permissiveness and materialism.
Within three months of his election, he embarked on the first of the overseas trips that became such a feature of his papacy. John Paul II circumnavigated the globe many times over, visiting the world's billion plus Catholics wherever they were to be found, and occasionally where they scarcely existed.
It was a gruelling schedule, much reduced in later years because of ill health, though never abandoned. John Paul simply became more selective. He travelled to Cuba in 1998 and the Holy Land two years later, destinations that had long eluded him, though his hopes of going to Moscow and Beijing never materialised. The latter was ruled out when a proposed 1999 papal trip to Hong Kong was vetoed by the Chinese authorities, who have often faced criticism from the territory's bishop.
But despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that he was not able to visit Moscow, he became the first Pope in a thousand years to visit a predominantly Orthodox country. He visited Romania in 1999, and then Greece, Ukraine and Armenia, in 2001, in quick succession. His visit to the Holy Land in 2000 was the centrepiece of John Paul's efforts to mark the millennium, an occasion many had predicted he wouldn't live to see, in a fitting way. His stamina and diplomacy were judged extraordinary, even by his harshest critics, as he sought to bring Jews, Christians and Muslims back to the negotiating table.
Throughout his pontificate John Paul's aim in undertaking such a demanding global itinerary was twofold. Firstly to give a visible sign of the unity and significance of the world wide Catholic Church. And secondly to hammer home a basic set of beliefs around which all Catholics could rally.
Here there was a contradiction between John Paul the philosopher and John Paul the populist pastor, guiding his flock of uncomplicated souls. When he stood up in sports stadiums in Latin America or at Marian shrines in eastern Europe, he chose to abandon any notion of questioning what it was to be a Catholic in favour of promoting his prescription for a moral life. Top of the list was opposition to artificial contraceptives, abortion and divorce.
In the developing world, John Paul's very successful championing, on an international stage he often shared with presidents, kings and prime ministers, of the need for the industrialised nations to cancel the debts of poorer countries rang hollow when it was linked to a rear-guard fight at a series of UN sponsored conferences against any attempts to limit population growth.
While many agreed with the Pope that handing out condoms would not solve the problems of the developing world, they recognised too that all efforts to improve economic conditions there were doomed to failure unless the escalating birth rate could be tackled.
The role of John Paul in supporting and inspiring, and indeed funding, the Solidarity labour movement in his native Poland was his finest moment. He was, according to many seasoned observers, the spark that set off the revolutions that engulfed the Iron Curtain. They point to the attempt by Turkish gunman Ali Agca, allegedly in the pay of the Soviet secret service, the KGB, to murder John Paul in May 1981 as evidence of the paranoia the Pope prompted in the Kremlin.
Undoubtedly John Paul's courage in denouncing the communist rulers in the East made the church a rallying point for many disparate dissident groups. However, the speed with which the newly formed democratic governments of the former Soviet satellites moved to distance themselves from the idea of a confessional state even in Poland came as a deep sorrow to him. Poland's rejection at the polls of his old friend and ally Lech Walesa was a particular blow.
John Paul's preoccupation with Eastern Europe, and in particular his inbred distrust of socialism, caused problems in Latin America, home to half the world's Catholics. There bishops who had pioneered a radical "option for the poor" were silenced or removed from their posts by the Vatican. Despite his own example in Poland, John Paul told the Latin Americans that priests could not get involved in politics. A great gulf between that continent and Rome is one of the legacies John Paul bequeaths his successor.
Another problem the next Pope will have to face is the entrenched influence of the Vatican civil service, the curia. Because John Paul spent so long on his travels and, in his final years, was so exhausted fighting the debilitating effects of Parkinson's Disease, many day-to-day details fell into the hands of faceless cardinals, tucked away in the Apostolic Palace.
One Brazilian bishop, now dead, recalled being summoned to Rome to meet the Pope. He explained to John Paul the problems of his diocese and received sympathy and the promise of support. The next day the same bishop visited one of the curial offices where he was criticised for his "radical" policies. When he pointed out that he had the Pope's blessing, he was told that counted for little and was left in no doubt where the real power lay.
The dangers of an unsupervised bureaucracy were highlighted in the mid-1980s when the Vatican Bank became embroiled in a lengthy financial scandal following revelations of fraud that led to the collapse of its close ally the Milan-based Banco Ambrosiano.
Yet by the same measure the paradoxical John Paul could also provoke anger amongst his officials. Early in 2000, for instance, traditionally minded Vatican officials were wrong footed when Pope John Paul made grand millennial gestures of apology for 2000 years of Christian violence which included apologising for the Crusades, the Inquisition and the medieval witch-hunt.
John Paul's papacy, despite its outward show of modernity and beguiling moments of radicalism, was, however, at heart one of the most conservative of recent times. Despite his willingness to go outside the Vatican and find out what was happening at grass roots level, too often the Polish Pope appeared unable or unwilling to deal with what he saw. Faced by an exodus of priests - it is estimated a quarter of the world total has left the active ministry since the mid-1960s - he could offer only a restatement of the values that they were rejecting.
Yet the appeal to time-honoured models and patterns of behaviour, linked to the restatement of a black-and-white moral agenda, did have a certain appeal. John Paul recognised a need in people for reassurance and boundaries at a time of rapid change, an unsure moral climate and the looming millennium.
His very public devotion to one of the world's best known Marian apparitions, Our Lady of Fatima, whom he believed had saved him from Ali Agca's bullet, was part of his efforts to give timeless role models to those bewildered by the pace of change in the world. His own brand of Catholic fundamentalism was very popular with a sizeable minority of his own flock and won him praise from those outside the Catholic Church. Yet, for many Catholics it was too simple as a prescription, a formula that did not leave enough room for them to deal effectively with the everyday challenges of a scientific, rational and complex world. His ideals did not match the realities of their lives.
Ecumenism was seldom high on John Paul's crowded agenda. Again the first signs were good, but there was too little of substance to give momentum to initial enthusiasm. His historic visit to Britain in 1982 failed to advance the work of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC). Indeed in 1991 suggestions by the Church of England that "substantial agreement" had been found between the churches were dismissed by Rome to the despair of many involved on both sides of the process.
When the Church of England debated whether to ordain women priests, John Paul appeared to many to be trying to exert undue influence over the result with his threat that such a move would put back ecumenical dialogue. When the decision was taken, he was happy for dissident Anglicans to be accorded special treatment when they came over to Rome.
Lutherans and Baptists too grew increasingly frustrated at the lack of anything but gestures and fine words from John Paul. In 1992 some of their churches pulled out of Christian Unity Week negotiations in Rome in protest, detecting behind John Paul's velvet glove the steely triumphalism of traditional Catholicism. His May 1995 encyclical letter on ecumenism "Ut Unum Sint" ("That they may all be one") was full of fine words, talk of encouragement and commitment to on going dialogue and prayer, but contained no practical initiatives.
Fences were subsequently mended to some extent in 1999 when the Lutherans reached agreement with the Vatican on the old issue of justification, but less than a year later a Vatican document "Dominus Iesus" provoked protests by stating firmly that Protestant denominations were not churches in the real sense of the word.
If dialogue interested John Paul at all it was in the area of improving relations with Islam, as seen in his visit in to Syria in 2001. With a series of speeches and symbolic gestures, including becoming the first pontiff to enter a mosque, he attempted to forge new links with Muslims. During his visit later that year to predominantly Muslim Kazakhstan, planned well before the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, Pope John Paul tried to use all his moral authority to insist that Christians and Muslims shared common values.
Overall, John Paul's papacy, for all its eye-catching bustle and headline-grabbing pronouncements, was a period when the reforming drive of the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s was lost. The clock was not been put back, as some critics alleged. It merely stood still. Whether after such a long and influential pontificate that forward momentum can be successfully rekindled remains to be seen.