Religion News Service
(John L. Allen Jr. covers the Vatican for National Catholic Reporter)
VATICAN CITY _ He was a magnificent pope who presided over a contentious pontificate, at turns both daring and defensive, inspiring and insular. John Paul II, 263rd successor to St. Peter, leaves behind the great irony of a world more united because of his life and legacy, and a church more divided.
This is perhaps the best first draft of history one can offer about a man who towered over his times in a way few other leaders did.
Even if he was not the “Man of the Century,” biographer Jonathan Kwitny once claimed, John Paul II was a stunningly successful historical actor. In an age in which institutional religion was supposed to be sliding toward extinction, he applied the force of his enormous personality to revitalizing it.
John Paul was among the key forces in the collapse of European communism. He did it not by fueling an arms race or by threatening Armageddon, but through moral leadership and the social idea of Solidarity.
Through his constant travels, John Paul carried a media spotlight to corners of the globe that would otherwise never have commanded public attention. He urged people to think of the world as one planet, to recognize a common humanity beneath and beyond differences of language and race and class.
John Paul was the first pope in the age of CNN, and he was born for the part. He wrote books, recorded compact discs, staged massive youth rallies that at times felt like Rolling Stones concerts, and used all the other tools of pop superstardom to promote the message of Christ. He did not shrink from modernity, but challenged secular culture on its own turf. Often enough, he prevailed.
He was a master of grand historical gestures. The image of the pope, this child of Poland who grew up just miles from Auschwitz, placing a handwritten note of remorse for Christian hostility to Jews in Jerusalem’s Western Wall was among the 20th century’s most splendid icons. In 1986 he became the first pope to visit a Jewish synagogue since the age of St. Peter, and in 2001 the first pope to enter a mosque.
Where he felt passionately, John Paul was not a man to be shackled by the poor lists of his predecessors’ fashions. He made his own manners, whether it was assembling leaders of world religions to pray for peace, or apologizing almost 100 times for various historic offenses of the Catholic Church. He scandalized traditionalists who felt being pope means never having to say you’re sorry.
Towards the end of John Paul’s long reign, his physical ailments unfolded on the public stage. The pope struggled to walk, slurred his speech and drooled badly. His hearing failed, and his facial expression became increasingly frozen. Yet he soldiered on, bearing his thorns in the flesh with grit and good humor. For a world that has made a fetish out of youth and beauty, this pope was a strong counter-witness. Jean Vanier, the founder of the L’Arche community that makes its life among disabled persons, said of the bowed but not beaten pope: “He was never more beautiful.”
John Paul II was a man of spiritual depth, of integrity, and of imagination. He understood intuitively the famous advice of Chicago architect Daniel Burnham: “Make no small plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood.”
Yet precisely because he was so missionary in his instincts, so focused on the global culture he aspired to shape, the pope devoted comparatively little energy to the internal life of the church, whose care is actually the Roman pontiff’s primary mandate.
John Paul’s top internal agenda for the Catholic Church was to stop what his top lieutenant, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, describing the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), called an “avalanche of ecclesial decadence.”
The pope considered himself a man of the council, but felt its teaching had been badly misapplied through an uncritical embrace of modernity and a too-hasty abandonment of elements of church practice and doctrine. In that sense, John Paul’s was a “restorationist” pontificate.
Above all, John Paul believed in order.
Whether cracking down on religious orders perceived as disobedient (as he did in 1981 by foisting new leadership upon the Jesuits) or insisting on a sharp distinction between clergy and laity (as the Vatican did in a 1997 document on lay ministry), this was an unapologetically hierarchical and clerical papacy.
In pursuit of his great historical ambitions, John Paul left day-to-day management to his aides. (A veteran official of the Secretariat of State, whose office lies down the hallway from the papal apartments, saw John Paul exactly twice in 26 years). Since nature abhors a vacuum, this lassiez-fare approach encouraged a stranglehold over the internal life of the church in the curia, the Vatican bureaucracy.
Across a range of issues _ from liturgy to clerical life, from Catholic education to the role of laity _ power accumulated in the center, in contrast with Vatican II’s vision of a church whose future is worked out more in parishes and missions, in dioceses and base communities, than in Rome.
The pope’s lack of attention to internal concerns was nowhere more evident than in the appointment of bishops. Despite a few counterexamples _ such as Carlo Maria Martini in Milan, Jean Lustiger in Paris, and Godfried Danneels in Brussels _ the shepherds named on John Paul’s watch tended to be gray men, noted more for doctrinal reliability than vision or pastoral competence. John Paul reaped the bitter harvest of his disengagement in 2002, when a sexual abuse crisis involving priests exploded in the United States and other countries. As the story unfolded, it became clear that the real scandal was not the personal failures of a small number of clerics, but malfeasance by speak-no-evil, see-no-evil bishops.
On the world stage, John Paul was an apostle of human rights. Inside the church, he tolerated a form of absolutism that critics, such as fiery Swiss theologian Hans Kung, could not help comparing with the Soviet system the pope helped bring down.
As members of the College of Cardinals assemble in the Sistine Chapel to elect his successor, they face a central question: Whether to elect someone who will continue to embody the contrast John Paul II brought to the papacy _ between the apostle of unity ad extra and the bruiser ad intra _ or to choose someone who will take the papacy in a different direction.
In the meantime, what epitaph can one compose about John Paul II?
First, he mattered. He changed the face of Europe, stopped a handful of wars and inveighed against others, traveled nearly 800,000 miles and has been seen in person by more human beings than anyone else in history. He has to be numbered among the titans of his time.
This pope was a magnet for humanity, including the estimated 5 million people in Manila in 1995 for World Youth Day, and the 10 million in Mexico City in 1979.
Precisely because John Paul mattered, he also divided. He lived the title of the retreats he preached as archbishop of Krakow for Pope Paul VI: a “sign of contradiction.” Everyone had an opinion on John Paul II, which is perhaps the most convincing sign of his impact.
His years were a whirlwind of activity: 104 trips outside Italy, 483 saints, 1,345 beatifications, 14 encyclicals, and on and on. While this activity made the pope famous, it also made him controversial. It was a bruising, painful, polarizing pontificate, one of the reasons that some cardinals say his successor should perhaps be a quieter, less dominating figure, who doesn’t tower over the scene in quite the same way.
In the end, Karol Wojtyla, deeper than his politics and beyond his early 20th century Polish Catholic cultural formation, was a mensch. He was a strong, intelligent, caring human being, someone whose integrity and dedication represent a standard by which other leaders can be measured.
John Paul was a selfless figure in a me-first world. Cardinal Roberto Tucci, who planned John Paul’s voyages before retiring in 2001, once said he had briefed John Paul hundreds of times on the details for his various trips. Not once, Tucci said, did the Pope ever ask where he was going to sleep, what he would eat or wear, or what his creature comforts would be. The same indifference to himself could be seen every time the pope stepped _ or, toward the end, was rolled _ upon the public stage.
This is the key that unlocks why John Paul drew enormous crowds, even where his specific political or doctrinal stands may be unpopular. Deeper than politics, either secular or ecclesiastical, lies the realm of personal integrity _ goodness and holiness, the qualities we prize most in others. A person may be liberal or conservative, avante garde or traditional, but let him or her be decent, and most of the time that’s enough.
This realm of menschlichkeit _ authentic humanity _ is where John Paul’s appeal came from. For a pope of a hundred trips and a million words, perhaps the most important lesson he offered was the coherence of his own life. When he urged Christians to “Duc in Altum,” to set off into the deep, it resonated even with those who sought very different shores.
As Hamlet said of his father, perhaps John Paul’s admirers and critics together might be able to say of him: “He was a man. Take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.”
KRE/JM END ALLEN
