NEWS FEATURE: After 20 years, John Paul II’s mixed legacy for the church

c. 1998 Religion News Service UNDATED _ When the white smoke rose over the Vatican 20 years ago, few, even among the 111 cardinals casting votes, knew what sort of man they were choosing when on Oct. 16, 1978 they broke with more than 450 years of tradition and named Karol Wojtyla, archbishop of Krakow, […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ When the white smoke rose over the Vatican 20 years ago, few, even among the 111 cardinals casting votes, knew what sort of man they were choosing when on Oct. 16, 1978 they broke with more than 450 years of tradition and named Karol Wojtyla, archbishop of Krakow, the new pope.

The robust and athletic Polish-born Wojtyla, then just 58, took over a church still heady with the efforts to implement the radical reforms of the decade-old Second Vatican Council and still reeling from the shock of the death of two popes within less than two months.


Now, as he enters the twilight of a papacy that is the longest in the 20th century and the 12th longest in the nearly 2,000 year-old office, the pope _ who took the name John Paul II to honor his mentor, Pope Paul VI, and his immediate predecessor, John Paul I _ while increasingly frail and often ill, remains determined to lead the world’s 600 million Roman Catholics into the next millennium.

Without question, John Paul has, with his travels _ 84 trips abroad, including four to the United States and a fifth planned for January _ and his embrace of television and other modern media, already left his personal mark on the office, the first 20th century celebrity pope. But his larger legacy remains uncertain, a matter of intense debate in Roman Catholic and those non-Catholic circles where his influence has been most strongly felt.”His greatest strength is personal,”said E. Ann Matter, a professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert in religious history.

When he became pope, she noted, he was athletic, ruddy-cheeked and active, and his physical presence, so loved by the television camera, was in sharp contrast to the scholarly Paul VI and the avuncular John XXIII.”He (John Paul II) was almost macho, in a way. … a man among popes.”People identify with him very easily, and his human qualities are very well-loved.” That personal magnetism has not waned with age or the increasing frailties the pope has suffered as a result of the gunshot wound he suffered in a 1981 assassination attempt on his life or his other bouts with broken bones and illness.

Bishop Anthony M. Pilla of Cleveland, president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, also pointed to two of John Paul’s personal gifts that are”very appropriate to our age”and signs of his leadership.”One is his understanding of and exceptional talent for the media,”Pilla said.”He has brought the papacy close to the Catholic people _ to all people _ through the media in a way that previously could hardly have been imagined.

Pilla said the pope has also”been granted a `gift of tongues’ in his ability and enthusiasm for speaking many languages. To hear someone speak in your own language says with great immediacy that we are not strangers to one another.” In the larger sense, however, John Paul II gets more mixed reviews.”His papacy has been very strong in terms of foreign policy, and weak in terms of domestic policy, meaning the internal affairs of the church,”said the Rev. Richard McBrien, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame and author of”Lives of the Popes,”one of the definitive histories of the papacy.

In terms of Vatican foreign policy, McBrien cited two key examples _ church relations with the Soviet empire and John Paul’s reaching out to non-Christian religions.

John Paul’s fierce anti-communism, fueled on the frontlines of Poland’s subjugation by the former Soviet Union, is well-known. Less clear is the effect of the pope in bringing about communism’s European collapse in the years leading up to 1989.”He just shook the tree and the apples fell,”said McBrien.”They were ready to fall, but he had a catalytic effect.”He stood as maybe the key international challenger to the communist system,”McBrien added.


George Weigel, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Washington think tank, was even stronger.”John Paul II played an indispensable role”in the collapse of European communism by”igniting the revolution of conscience that made the nonviolent political revolution of 1989 possible,”Weigel said.

Protestant theologian Harvey Cox, a professor at Harvard University, says the result is less clear-cut, however.”As a Pole, he was determined that he was going to try to inspire the church in eastern Europe to resist communism, or at least the anti-religious aspects of communism,”Cox said.”Whether he’s done it or not is a big issue. The story isn’t over yet.” (BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

McBrien sees even less political efficacy in John Paul’s interventions in other parts of the world, especially in bringing about change in the autocratic or dictatorial regimes of Latin America and Africa.”He hasn’t changed any political systems,”McBrien said.”Is there evidence that these pastoral visits actually bring about a change, economic or political, or even religious?”he asked.”We’ve got to be careful not to claim too much for their impact.” Indeed, in one of the church’s worst embarrassments _ but an embarrassment shared with other denominations _ priests and other church workers have been directly implicated in the genocide that swept Rwanda in 1994.

Even the pastoral visits to the United States, McBrien said, have”no substantial, lasting impact. The real test is whether any longterm behavior has changed. These pastoral visits really have a very fleeting impact.” (END OPTIONAL TRIM)

The complexity _ some would say contradictions _ of the pontiff’s long reign are evident in the various reactions to the pope’s social teaching and in the way that teaching relates, or does not relate, to the internal life of the church.

Conservatives relish the pope’s anti-communism, his embrace of the free market as”the most efficient instrument for utilizing resources and effectively responding to needs”and his effort to rein in dissent in the church.


Liberals, on the other hand, point to his sharp criticism of capitalism and the consumer culture on which it depends.

They point to the pope’s words in his encyclical”Centesimus Annus”(1991), in which he writes that,”We have seen that it is unacceptable to say that the defeat of so-called `real socialism’ leaves capitalism as the only model of economic organization.” And they say his embrace of the”preferential option for the poor,”his call to make debt relief for poor countries a central part of the church’s celebration of the Jubilee Year 2000 _ a campaign that has been embraced across the religious spectrum in Africa, Latin America and Europe and just now beginning to catch on in the United States _ as well as toughening the church’s stance against capital punishment and his several interventions _ to no avail _ in U.S. death penalty cases all make him the”last socialist.””I once mentioned this description to Cardinal (Josef) Ratzinger (head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith), who laughed out loud,”Weigel said.”John Paul II does not think it is the business of the church or the pope to design economies.” But the Rev. George Higgins, the dean of America Catholic social action and the U.S. Catholic Conference’s liaison with organized labor, argued that John Paul has”gone further than any other pope toward supporting co-ownership and co-management of industry by workers and trade unions.” And, Higgins said, contrary to the kind of anti-communism American conservatives embrace, John Paul has more than once talked about what the pope calls the”kernel of truth”in Marxism’s criticism of capitalism.”I think the pope has done a lot to develop the church’s teaching about the preferential love for the poor _ that when people’s basic needs are not met, that has to take priority over the satisfaction of other wants, however good they may be,”said Sister Amata Miller, an economist who teaches at Marygrove College in Detroit and who has served as a policy adviser to the U.S. bishops.

She said that since the beginning of his pontificate, John Paul has addressed the question of moral priorities:”The needs of the poor have to take priority over the wants of the rich, the rights of workers over the maximization of profits, the production of social needs over uncontrolled military expansion.” But like others she sees paradox and contradiction in the pope’s teachings.”To me, one of the mysteries about John Paul is that his words are so eloquent _ and then how could he be so closed about other things? I don’t understand. He’s such a brilliant man.”She pointed to the church being”closed on so many issues that relate, for example, to the rights and the needs of women …. I don’t understand his resistance to hearing the crisis of the people in other areas.” Indeed, it is John Paul’s governance of the internal life of the church that has been most problematic for many Americans, Catholic and non-Catholic alike.”Someone who is close to the people in Rome told me that this pope came into office believing the church is under siege from within and it’s his responsibility to protect,”Miller said.

McBrien, too, said John Paul’s major shortcomings are in the internal life of the church, especially the recent crackdown on theological inquiry.”I think he has tried to impose too hard a line regarding matters of internal discipline,”McBrien said.”He has upset people who should be allies for him.” McBrien pointed to the pope’s life under communism in Poland as accounting for his effort to impose strict theological and ideological limits on the church.”He comes from a political situation where it was absolutely essential for the church to maintain unity against common foes, foes that were out not just to out-debate it, but to kill it, to oppress it. But the problem is, this isn’t Poland. We’re talking about the whole world now.” (BEGIN SECOND OPTIONAL TRIM _ STORY MAY END HERE)

Cox, said he believes John Paul came to the papacy with”a very, very ambitious agenda”that had as a major goal”the recentralization of the authority of the church in the Vatican, in the papacy, in the curia”and that has spilled over into Catholicism’s relations with other faiths, Christian and non-Christian alike.

While John Paul gets generally good marks for improving the church’s relationship with the Jews, he is faulted _ despite his frequent and often-eloquent pleas for Christian unity _ for not being really serious on the ecumenical front.


Part of the reason may be the Vatican hostility to increasing the power and authority of women in the church’s life while such denominations as the Lutherans and Anglicans are pressing forward with the ordination of women as priests and bishops.”He never was interested in an ecumenical detente with the Protestants, and if anything, that relationship has been set back considerably over 20 years,”Cox said.

It is a different world today than the one John Paul inherited 20 years ago when he became the 262nd pontiff. The bipolar world shaped by the U.S.-Soviet Cold War conflict has dissolved into a more tribal international arena marked by political diversity and religious pluralism. How John Paul’s vision and agenda will shape the church and world in the new millennium will continue to be debated as his reign comes to its inevitable end.

As Cox said,”If the last couple of popes have had to be preoccupied with atheism or scientism or something like that, the next pope will have to be preoccupied with the issue of religious pluralism.” Eds: RNS correspondents Holly J. Lebowitz and William Bole contributed to this story.)

DEA END ANDERSON

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