John Paul the Great
Revered or reviled, John Paul II has been a giant amongst popes. Eamon Duffy reviews the legacy of Karol Wojtyla, the Polish Pope
Over 26 years on the throne of St Peter, Karol Wojtyla has been an evangelist to the world, the last great anti-capitalist, champion of peace and human rights. He has also been a sign of contradiction
Only two of Pope John Paul II's 240 predecessors served so long. No one with a heart could withhold admiration for the indomitable courage and sense of vocation which drove him to such endurance. No one with a head can fail to ask whether the Church has been best served by the long infirmity of its chief pastor, or to wonder what weeds flourished round him as his energies and focus failed.
No Pope in modern times has aroused such conflicting feelings. For many he is, quite simply, John Paul the Great, mighty defender of the faith, tireless protector of the unborn, a wise and clear-sighted pastor who has brought order out of anarchy, raised the banner of life in an age in love with death, and drawn a clear line between the eternal truths of the Gospel and the fake freedoms of a world blind to the objective splendour of truth.
For others, he is reaction embodied, an authoritarian under whom the hard-won liberties of the Second Vatican Council have been reversed, local Churches disempowered, intellectual enquiry stifled, women disparaged, clericalism and curial bullying encouraged, and, in the Vatican's repudiation of liberation theology and its campaign against condoms in Aids-ravaged Africa, the poor betrayed.
Critics and admirers are liable to cite the same evidence. The tireless journeys which have made his the best-known face on the planet, for example, seem to some the self-immolation of a man consumed with evangelistic zeal and pastoral concern for all mankind - Peter strengthening his brethren. To others, they have distorted a healthy church order by the cult of celebrity, focusing the Church round a consummate populist, reviving an essentially nineteenth-century ultramontane understanding of the Pope as absolute, and in the process infantilising the laity and marginalising the bishops.
He became Pope in a time of uncertainty. In the last years of Paul VI many felt themselves adrift. Papal authority had been compromised by the hostile reception of the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, reaffirming the traditional ban on contraception. The conciliar reforms seemed stalled by that ageing Pope's worries about the "runaway" character of change, and by his deepening dismay at the haemorrhage of priests and religious seeking laicisation.
The election of a 58-year-old athlete and intellectual promised a renewal of vigour and direction. But everything about Wojtyla's previous life should have made it clear that his direction was likely to run against the grain of much that passed for renewal in the wake of Vatican II. It was a period of flux and experimentation, when Blake's motto "damn braces, bless relaxes" had a wide appeal. One need not share neo-conservative dismissals of those heady years as "the silly season" to recognise that a good deal that was ephemeral and shallow was taken at the time for the work of the Holy Spirit.
By contrast, Wojtyla was the product of a Slavic Christianity whose encounter with the twentieth century had been dominated by the conflict with Nazi and then with Stalinist oppression. From such a perspective, liberal Western Catholic enthusiasm for an accommodation with modernity was bound to seem naïve and self-indulgent. For him religious freedom, a life-long and passionate preoccupation, did not mean the right to question ancient Christian truths, but the right to respond in obedience to those truths, unhindered by tyrannical governments. Freedom is the freedom to do right: what right is, is revealed for all to see in the face of Jesus Christ, and in the heart of human nature as made known in Christ. The Church's teaching has thus been for him never a constraint, but the criterion of authentic freedom, the "splendour of truth". It is not to be questioned, but joyfully explored, the limits to that exploration to be determined by the pastors and especially the Pope.
For him, the questioning of traditional sexual teaching thus represented a tragic capitulation to secular relativism, in which the real dignity of human love as a reflection of God's creative self-giving was replaced by a demeaning materialism which made pleasure the highest good. Similarly, pressures for the ordination of women seem to him to spring not from Gospel imperatives, but from secular preoccupations, turning ecclesial vocation into a matter of human rights or the politics of gender.
The momentous chain of events triggered by his 1979 visit to Poland seemed to vindicate him. The Communist regime watched impotently as an evangelising Pope preached and prayed before ecstatic crowds holding aloft a forest of forbidden crucifixes. The future of Christianity - and of freedom - in Eastern Europe, it emerged, would be determined, not by Paul VI's cautious and intelligent accommodation with Marxism, the Ostpolitik, but by the spectacular collapse of Communism, to which Pope John Paul's more confrontational style undoubtedly contributed significantly. Against such a background, Papa Wojtyla's reservations about the Marxist dimension of liberation theology (to which he was not in fact uniformly opposed) should have surprised no one.
He has been indifferent neither to modernity - few churchmen have been better read in modern philosophy and literature - nor to the sufferings of the world's poor: he has preached tirelessly and stretched the Vatican's diplomatic services against unbridled capitalism, on issues like Third World debt, and he was a plausible candidate recently for the Nobel Peace Prize. But he has had a deep confidence in the Church's structures and distinctive styles of discourse. So for him the sexual scandals that shook the Churches in Europe, North America and Africa have been a matter of grief and disappointment, but are essentially explained by individual aberration, the remedy for which is greater personal holiness and stronger institutional discipline. They raised for him no fundamental questions about the humanity or integrity of the ideals embodied in the discipline of celibacy. For him the best hope for renewal lies not in abandoning old ways, but in movements, lay or clerical, which revitalise traditional resources with a zeal as fiery as his own - hence his regard for Opus Dei, the Legionaries of Christ, Communion and Liberation. So it is an irony that under this least churchy of popes, who has done so much to drag the Christian message out of the sacristy and into the marketplace and stadium, some of the more suffocating forms of clericalism should have become resurgent.
John Paul has been a prophet, not an administrator: he saw his role as Pope as that of a travelling evangelist, encouraging, exhorting, rebuking, proclaiming an ancient message he believed could renew the world. He has left the structures of the Church largely in the hands of others, sometimes with unhappy consequences. All bureaucracies become overweening given the chance, especially if they think they have a mandate to act tough. The widespread dissatisfaction of the world episcopate with curial methods transcends any obvious divisions between "left" and "right" and is a problem to which the next pope will have to give urgent attention.
All prophets in any case have the weaknesses of their strengths. The imagination and charisma which helped topple tyranny, and which made Papa Wojtyla so towering a figure on the world stage, made him also impatient of doubt and questioning. Like many of those larger than life, he has not been notably successful in choosing or enabling others of similar stature. Paul VI was a greyer and more tentative man, but his episcopal and curial appointments were both riskier and more imaginative: in John Paul's Church, the adventurous have rarely received bishops' mitres.
The stature of this pontificate, and its contradictions, are nowhere clearer than in Jewish-Christian relations. Reputed to have played goalie once in a Jewish football team, Papa Wojtyla has had lifelong friendly engagement with Jews and Judaism, and has unquestionably done more than anyone else to remove the ancient stain of Christian anti-Semitism. He recognised the State of Israel, is the only bishop of Rome to have visited and prayed in the Roman synagogue, and in the jubilee year, in a magnificent and unforgettable gesture, the fragile pilgrim Pope placed a prayer of penitence for Christian atrocity and a pledge of friendship with "the people of the Covenant", into a crevice in the Wailing Wall. Yet not long before, in the teeth of Jewish opposition, he had canonised as a Christian martyr the convert nun Edith Stein, gassed by the Nazis as a Jew. For John Paul her canonisation was a healing gesture, a bridge thrown across the ancient divide: to Jews it was bound to seem Christian imperialism, sanitising and annexing an unspeakable Jewish tragedy with a sprinkling of holy water. Despite these protests, and his own theologians' doubts as to whether Stein's death could be considered martyrdom for the faith, he was not deflected.
After just over a quarter of a century as Pope, revered or reviled, there is no mistaking his greatness. For nearly 27 years the Catholic Church has been led by a colossus, whose personal experience encompasses the deepest horrors of the twentieth century, and who has proclaimed the Gospel as he understands it with the authority not only of his ancient office, but of rare intelligence, high courage and uncompromising integrity. No pope for centuries has had so direct – and, in Eastern Europe at any rate, so beneficial – an impact on human destinies, nor set so personal a mark on the Church he has served – and governed.p
Eamon Duffy is Professor of the History of Christianity in the University of Cambridge
This article first appeared in The Tablet and has been edited for reprinting in Village
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