c. 1998 Religion News Service
VATICAN CITY _ John Paul II, increasingly frail in body but unbending on dogma and determined to live to the year 2000, is scheduled to set another record Sunday (May 24), becoming the longest-serving pontiff of the 20th century.
The pope, who helped the West win the Cold War, will have reigned 19 years, seven months and eight days _ one day longer than Pius XII, the pope who led the Roman Catholic Church through World War II.
It has been a remarkably full papacy whose impact will be felt well into the next millennium.
Among the 264 successors to St. Peter on the papal throne, John Paul will rank 13th.
But as far as Vatican historians can determine, no other pope has equaled the number of saints (279) and blesseds (792) John Paul II has created or the sum of discourses he has delivered and documents he has issued.
Paul VI, his predecessor but one, pioneered papal air travel but made only a modest nine trips outside Italy over seven years before age and infirmity grounded him in 1971. John Paul II already has made 82 trips and plans three more in the next eight months.
Numbers aside, Pius XII probably has retained one unwelcome distinction over John Paul. His papacy remains the most deeply controversial of the century, tarnished by allegations the church has denied but never fully disproved that he chose not to intervene strongly enough on behalf of the Jews during the Holocaust.
This is one area where John Paul II leaves little room for criticism.
Growing up in Poland during the war, Karol Wojtyla was part of the anti-Nazi resistance and had close Jewish friends. One of them lives in Rome and regularly eats Sunday lunch with the pope at the Vatican.
And despite basic differences with Israeli leaders over the status of Jerusalem, it was John Paul II who took the historic step of establishing full diplomatic relations with the Jewish state in 1994.
John Paul also has carried forward ecumenical dialogue with the Anglican and Orthodox churches and Protestant bodies such as the Lutherans.
The pope is an impassioned defender of human rights in general and religious freedom in particular and an implacable foe of almost, but not all, that Marxism represents. He conceded during a visit to Latvia in 1993 that its criticism of the exploitation of the proletariat was”Marxism’s kernel of truth.” His periodic visits to Poland, armed with all his pontifical authority, and his support, both public and private, for the Solidarity labor movement helped destabilize the communist governments of Eastern Europe. Within the church, he dealt swiftly and sternly with priests advocating liberation theology.
But his opposition to communism has not made him a great fan of capitalism. He continues to express sharp criticism of what he sees as today’s excesses of free-market liberalism, and he has written in two encyclicals of the right of workers to secure employment with adequate pay. He abhors the widening abyss between rich and poor in the West and the rush to materialism in formerly communist countries.
These views are remarkably similar to Fidel Castro’s and _ along with his desire to win more space for the church and his distaste for economic embargos _ may help to explain why the pope visited Cuba last January.
John Paul feels just as strongly about consumerism, which he considers a manifestation of the same selfishness leading to sexual license, the use of artificial methods of birth control, abortion and divorce _ all part of what he has labeled the”culture of death.” The pope is well aware that his inflexible assertion of church teachings concerning sexual matters and the family, along with his determination to uphold doctrine forbidding the ordination of women and refusing to permit priests to marry, has alienated many Catholics in the West.
But he has no intention of tempering his stand.”The pope,”he has said,”must be a moral force.” But how long he can retain the strength to exert his moral force is in question.
On his election Oct. 16, 1978, he was a vigorous 58 years old, the youngest pope in 132 years. He found time to ski and hike, and he displayed remarkable stamina on his travels.
John Paul marked his 78th birthday on May 18, just six days before he is set to establish the record for the length of his pontificate, and he looks and moves like an old man.
He was shot and seriously wounded in an attempt on his life in 1981, and in recent years he has broken his thigh, dislocated his shoulder and undergone surgery to remove a precancerous tumor from his intestines. He shows the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.
But John Paul has said repeatedly he intends, God willing, to live long enough at least to lead the world’s 1 billion Roman Catholics into the new millennium of Christianity in the year 2000. If faith alone can do that, there is no doubt he will succeed.”Goodbye until the third millennium,”he said last weekend as he ended a pastoral visit to a Rome parish.
DEA END POLK
