The many faces of John Paul II
As the pontiff nears the finale of his triumphant visit to Canada, MICHAEL VALPY examines the Pope's lasting legacy
By MICHAEL VALPY, The Globe and Mail
Saturday, July 27, 2002
In one of the splendidly baroque meeting rooms of the Vatican's Apostolic Palace, the 263rd successor to St. Peter as Vicar of Christ hobbled slowly to his presiding chair before an assembly of bishops of the Roman Catholic Church.
It was 1994. John Paul II had fractured his right thigh in a bathtub fall, triggering a news-media torrent of frail-Pope-is-dying stories, but, more accurately, ending the 73-year-old Holy Father's getaways to the ski slopes.
The bishops watched him in silence. John Paul sat. He spoke.
"Eppur, si muove," he said. "And yet, it moves." One wonders how many bishops got the joke. Allegedly this was Galileo's defiant declaration to his Inquisition judges in 1633 after they sentenced him to life imprisonment for declaring the Earth orbits the sun, not the other way around as implied in Scripture.
The words also serve as a metaphor for John Paul's pontificate, for his astonishing determination over the past decade to keep his body moving, and, more important, for how, 50 years or 100 years from now, he will be deemed to have moved his church and the world.
Has he been an irresistible force of spiritual and humanistic enlightenment, or an obdurate barrier to humanity's moral and dignified progress?
The world has seen 82-year-old John Paul II in Toronto this week as the charismatic evangelist, his sparkle unfaded. It has seen the electricity that still flows between him and young people, the mystic holy man, the poster Pope for seniors, the moral beacon, the inflexible schoolmaster of theological orthodoxy.
U.S. Catholic theologian George Weigel notes toward the end of his 1999 biography of John Paul II that only two popes in history have been called "the Great," Leo I in the fifth century and Gregory I in the sixth century. He calls John Paul the most consequential pope since the reformation.
At the same time, another widely known U.S. Catholic theologian, Notre Dame's Rev. Richard McBrien, puts John Paul's name neither on his list of outstanding popes nor on his list of "good or above average" ones.
In sum, there is no consensus on his legacy. It will be definedby where the church goes after him. In the meantime, there are signposts:
1. The Pope of statistics
Of which he has plenty. Twelfth-longest-reigning pope. First non-Italian pope in 455 years. Most travelled pope (to 130 nations). Prolific pope (13 encyclicals). Most cardinals created (more than 200), most canonizations (more than 450), most beatifications (nearly 1,300). And on and on.
2. The evangelizing Pope
Definitely. John Paul has dramatically redefined the papacy, transforming it from a Vatican CEO's job to a global office of moral teaching and personal evangelism. He has attempted to make the papacy in reality what the Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar called "the external reference point" for the church's interior unity.
3. The communicating Pope
The jury is out. He has been called a great communicator, and unquestionably he is a spectacular showman, but it is moot how much of his theology gets through. Nigeria's Cardinal Francis Arinze gives it gloss, but you get his subtext: "People may not do what he says, but at least they have heard the Word."
His writing and speaking styles are dense. He has not communicated clearly his arguments against contraception and the role of women in the church. One of his favourite speeches, to UNESCO's executive council in 1980, borders on incomprehensible philosophical academic jargon.
Several theologians have suggested the task may fall to John Paul's successors to explain in more accessible language much of what he's had to say.
4. The ecumenical Pope
Not exactly as advertised.
Orthodox Christian leaders have shown little interest in his attempts to heal Christianity's great East-West schism. His church's relations with Islam are, at best, correct.
His 1998 changes to canon law rejecting the validity of Anglican ordinations dampened the bonhomie of Anglican-Catholic unity talks.
The Vatican's 2000 claim in its declaration Dominus Iesus -- that only a single church of Christ exists and that "this church subsists in the Catholic church governed by the successor of Peter" -- stunned Catholics and non-Catholics alike. A few months after his much-trumpeted apologies for Catholics' mistreatment of Jews, he began the canonization process of anti-Semitic Pope Pius IX.
5. The Pope who defeated communism
Indisputably he was a major player. Former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev wrote in 1992: "Everything that happened in Eastern Europe in these last few years would have been impossible without this Pope."
But very few historians think he played the central role -- as former U.S. President Ronald Reagan's covert and principal ally against the "evil empire" -- ascribed to him by journalists Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi in their 1996 book, His Holiness: John Paul II and the Hidden History of Our Time.
6. The Pope who torpedoed Vatican II
Hotly -- very hotly -- debated. While John Paul's critics accuse him of imposing martial law on his church in flagrant disregard of the spirit of collegiality evoked at Vatican II, his defenders say he has correctly interpreted what happened at Vatican II and the claims about Vatican II unleashing church democracy are false.
7. The conservative Pope in a liberal world
The labels don't really fit. "You don't put the Dalai Lama into a liberal-or-conservative framework. You can't do it with the Pope, either," says papal biographer Dr. Weigel, convincingly.
John Paul derailed the 1994 United Nations Conference on Population and Development and opposes birth control and abortion because he believes they are at odds with the sacredness of human life. He has written that sexual love within marriage is an icon of the interior life of God, and therefore conception replicates Creation.
He also has criticized unbridled capitalism, materialism and exploitation of workers and has outpaced most Western leaders, says Scott Appleby, "in blazing an alternative path to a more humane global economic condition."
8. The schismatic Pope
Arguable. The church of John Paul II has been described as teetering on the edge of silent schism: conservative Catholics versus liberal Catholics; Western Catholics versus Catholics everywhere else.
But what's often overlooked is that this is the church John Paul inherited.
A 1992 London Times article said: "It may be that hard-headed conservatism is the safest course for Catholicism in the modern world. A sudden liberalism and a dispersal of Rome's power could cause an explosive fragmentation of the church."
9. The Pope who said no to women
Yes . . .but wait for the sequel. He did say no to the ordination of women priests and declared the subject closed for discussion. Except some of his other statements on women may be used by a future pope to reverse his position.
In 1995, he apologized to women for systematic discrimination.How does a future pope undo the decisions of a predecessor? He begins by saying: "In accordance with the teachings of my predecessors . . ." John Paul may have done more for the cause of women in the church than he intended.
10. The Pope who said no to liberation theology
Yes and no. He rejected the underlying ideology -- violent class struggle -- of the 1970s liberation theology movement in Latin America. He did not reject liberation theology's objectives.
11. John Paul the Great?
George Weigel says John Paul II's greatest legacy will be his thesis on why atheism undermines human dignity and freedom. "If we fail to understand this," he says, "we fail to comprehend the Pope at all and he becomes just another 20th-century hero for the historians to squabble over."
Theological critics think this thesis on Christian humanism has been overrated and that much of John Paul's writings will not be well treated by time.
Maybe, with this Pope, history will set down a memory of a different sort: the unprecedented global manifestation of a spiritual man who sought union with God through prayer and meditation throughout his life, who celebrated the spirit in an age where the mystery of life was debased -- and who was able to make a noisy world, drenched in secular ideology and materialism, take notice.
|
Copyright © 2002 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc.
Advertisement