c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Pope John Paul II has cast such a long shadow across modern times that many admirers want to add “the Great'' to his name. His greatness, like that of all history's remarkable figures, is heavily seasoned with irony.

As often, for example, as his face has gazed off television screens and magazine covers, it was difficult to see directly into his eyes. His gaze scanned the crowd, often looking beyond or above the person whose hand he was holding. The smile that accented his Slavic features often seemed that of a man savoring an inner appraisal rather than sharing an outer wonder.

He appeared to be both open to and closed off from the world. Perhaps he shared the late French leader Charles DeGaulle's belief that great leaders project mystery by always turning slightly away from the people. John Paul II gave much to, but may have withheld as much from, the great crowds spread out around him.

Many observers attribute his success as a leader to his never modifying his convictions and never acting out of political calculation. Yet as a young bishop at Vatican Council II, he supported and voted for the restoration of the collegiality that recognized that bishops have their authority from their ordination and not as some delegation from the largess of papal authority.

As pope, however, he changed his attitude drastically, establishing a program to eliminate the collegiality that he had endorsed at the council and to rebuild the hierarchical system that once more centralized church power in his own hands.

As a Vatican II bishop, John Paul II supported the right of the National Conferences of Bishops to deliberate pastorally on the moral issues affecting their own countries. American bishops did this in the 1980s, focusing public attention through their pastoral letters on the issues of nuclear war and the American economy.

John Paul II moved against these national conferences with the cooperation, among others, of Cardinal Bernard Law whom he had made archbishop of Boston in 1984. Through his loyalty to the pope, Law quickly became the most powerful figure in the American church. He saw to it that the bishops did not murmur when, in a 1998 document, Apostolos Suos, John Paul gutted the principle of collegiality for good by requiring national conferences to submit all their pastoral letters to Rome for approval before they could be issued.

Law's rise in influence paralleled and illustrated the dangers of returning to a top-down administration of American Catholicism. During a generation of imposing tight control on American Catholicism, the inner controls were ignored so that the sexual conflicts of some priests were suppressed in accord with the hierarchical style that wanted to control rather than examine the problem or its victims.

The sex abuse scandal exploded out of everyone's control in 2002, revealing the downside of top-heavy hierarchy, leading to the forced departure of Cardinal Law, the pope's point man in America, and a public revelation of the outmoded and dangerous methods of the hierarchical approach to running the church.

It is sadly ironic that the pope who has championed an uncompromising observance of Catholic sexual teaching presided over its worst internal sexual scandal, eventually recalling and rehabilitating the loyalist Law to a safe position in Rome and continuing membership on a half-dozen major church congregations.

It is ironic that the philosopher John Paul II who so defended the unity of the human person in his early writings should have chosen a divided model (body against soul, flesh against spirit) in his later writing on human sexuality. Irony is too mild a word for his decision to make saints of a husband and wife who had renounced sexual relations while they were still young and vigorous.

John Paul II is being credited with changing the papacy, internationalizing the office and attracting the world's attention. He was, however, only following through on the truly breakthrough initiative of Pope John XXIII who called Vatican Council II to renew the church's dialogue with the world, thereby opening a new phase in the history of both the church and the world.

Pope John Paul II is, indeed, in heaven from which he can get a better view of the church that he tried to hand back to control by clerics. That church, inspired by Vatican II, is thriving in the United States, criticized by him as possessing a culture of death. It is led largely by the laypeople he wanted to keep out of the sanctuary. In Europe whose old-fashioned faith he praised so highly, secularism has reached high tide, washing away his pleas to include references to Christianity in the document of its unity.

These ironies are no bar to his being John Paul the Great but they remind us of the abiding mystery in the man the world felt that it knew so well.

DH/JL END RNS

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin's Stations of the Cross,'' published by St. Martin's Press.)