Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (64 page)

John Paul actively endorsed this trend, most notably in the Apostolic Letter
Ordinatio Sacerdotalis
in 1995, declaring that the debate about the ordination of women (hardly begun in the Catholic Church outside North America, and hardly an issue in most of the developing world, where the majority of Catholics live) was now closed. Christ had chosen only men as apostles, and so only men may be priests. In order that ‘all doubt may be removed,’ therefore, ‘in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren,’ he declared that ‘the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination to women and that this judgement is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.’ The form in which this statement appeared – an ‘apostolic letter’— was several notches down in the hierarchy of authoritative papal utterances, below that of an encyclical, for example. Its phrasing however, hinted at something weightier – just what might be meant by ‘definitively held’ for example? A subsequent gloss by Cardinal Ratzinger, apparently attributing infallibility to the pope’s statement, evoked protests as a blatant attempt to stifle discussion of an issue which many considered not yet ripe for resolution.

Pope John Paul’s suspicion of Western liberalism was in part an aspect of his Slav inheritance. From the start of his pontificate he looked East more consistently than any pope of modern times. His strong sense of Slav identity expressed itself in the conviction that the religious schism between East and West had left the Church breathing ‘through only one lung’, desperately in need of the spiritual depth and the wisdom born of suffering which the churches of the East could bring. The 1995 encyclical
Ut Unum Sint
on Christian Unity contained an extended and hopeful discussion of the fundamental unity of the ‘sister churches’ of East and West (unlike Paul VI, John Paul was careful never to apply this phrase to any church of the Reformation). The encyclical left no doubt about the pope’s ardent commitment to reconciliation with the Orthodox churches. Paradoxically however, his own exalted understanding of papal authority and changes after the fall of Communism (which brought pastoral pressures for the reintroduction or strengthening of Catholic hierarchies of both the Latin and Byzantine rites to minister to Catholics in the countries of the former Soviet Union) did a good deal to set back relationships with the Orthodox world.
Ut Unum Sint
recognized the barrier presented by the Petrine ministry, but asserted its permanent and God-given role as a special ‘service of unity.’ The pope, in a remarkable gesture, invited the leaders and theologians of other churches to enter into a ‘patient and fraternal dialogue’ with him to discover how the Petrine ministry might be exercised in a way which ‘may accomplish a service of love recognized by all concerned.’ Rueful Catholic hierarchies and theologians wondered if he wanted a similar dialogue with them.
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For Wojtyla, it was clear from the start, believed passionately in a hands-on papacy. As soon as he was elected, the flood of permissions for priests to leave the priesthood and marry dried up. Priests might leave the ministry, but with difficulty, and initially the pope would not release them from their vows of celibacy: there was no mistaking in this change of policy Wojtyla’s own stern convictions. John Paul II saw himself as the universal bishop, and within months of his appointment he launched on an extraordinary series of pastoral visits to every corner of the world, carrying his message of old-fashioned moral values and fidelity to the teaching authority of the hierarchical Church, yet with a personal energy and charisma which brought the faithful out in their millions like football fans or zealots at a rally. This tireless journeying was to become the defining mark of his papacy, and transformed the papal office. The ‘prisoner of the Vatican’, the administrative and symbolic centre of the Church rooted in Rome, had become the world’s most spectacular roving evangelist. Asked by a reporter why he intended to visit Britain in 1982 he explained, ‘I
must
go: it is my Church.’ Critics deplored these paternalist visitations as disabling and absolutist, upstaging the local bishops and placing the isolated figure of the pope in the limelight. Wojtyla saw them as a distinctive and necessary feature of the modern Petrine ministry, while the actor and populist in him unfolded in the sun of popular
enthusiasm. He appeared on balconies and platforms wearing Mexican sombreros, or Native American headdress. As infirmity descended on him he harnessed that too, twirling his walking cane like Charlie Chaplin’s tramp, while the crowd roared its approval. For the crowds adored him, especially the young, who rallied in their millions, responding to his demanding exhortations to generosity for Christ and chastity in an age of licence, with the chant ‘John Paul Two, we love you.’ There were an estimated five million at the World Youth Day held in Manila in 1995. By the end of his pontificate he had conducted more than a hundred such international trips, and had addressed, and been seen by, more people than anyone else in history.

His interventions extended to every aspect of the Church’s life, not least that of the religious orders, whom he was anxious to recall to their traditional observance. Early in his pontificate he became alarmed by the spread of radical theological opinions among the Jesuits under Paul VI’s friend, the saintly and charismatic General Pedro Aruppe. In 1981, Aruppe had a stroke, and Pope John Paul suspended the constitution of the Society of Jesus, thereby preventing the election by the Jesuits of a successor. Instead, the pope, in an unprecedented intervention, imposed his own candidate, the 79 year-old Fr Paolo Dezza, a Vatican ‘trusty’, theologically conservative and almost blind. The move was seen as an attempt to impose a papal puppet on the Society, and strained Jesuit loyalty to the limit, evoking a letter of protest from the venerable Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner. The pope subsequently allowed the order to proceed to a free election, and publicly expressed his confidence in their work, but the intervention was recognized as a shot across the bows of an order which he felt was in danger of politicizing the Gospel by over-commitment to the Theology of Liberation.

In his later years, John Paul II seemed at times at least as much the successor of Pius IX, Pius X or Pius XII as of John XXIII or Paul VI. An Ultramontane, filled with a profound sense of the immensity of his own office and of his centrality in the providence of God, he was convinced, for example, that the shot with which the deranged Turkish Communist Mehmet Ali Agca almost killed him in St Peter’s Square in 1981 was miraculously deflected by Our Lady of Fatima. There were resonances behind this conviction that went beyond mere piety. Fatima is a Portuguese shrine where the Virgin was believed to have appeared in 1917. The apparitions and the Fatima cult rapidly became drawn into the apocalyptic hopes and fears aroused by the Bolshevik Revolution and the
Communist attack on Christianity. During the Cold War years Fatima become a devotional focus for anti-Communist feeling, and the aging Pius XII was rumoured to have received visions of the Virgin of Fatima. Agca’s bullet was later presented to the shrine at Fatima, where it was set in the Virgin’s jewelled crown. The assassination attempt was not the only event interpreted by John Paul as a manifestation of his mystical vocation. In 1994, when, like many another old man, he fell in the shower and broke his thigh, he saw the accident as a deeper entry into his prophetic calling: the pope, he declared, must suffer.

Suffering, indeed, offers an important key to his character: the death of his mother when he was nine, of his beloved elder brother when he was thirteen, the harshness of his wartime experience as a labourer in a quarry and a chemical factory, the years of concealment, resistance and confrontation as seminarian, priest and bishop under Nazi and then Communist rule. All these combined to shape an outlook half grieved by and half contemptuous of the self-indulgence of the West, dismissive of the moral and social values of the Enlightenment which, he believed, had led humanity into a spiritual cul-de-sac and had more than half seduced the churches.

Yet he was a hard man to measure. Sternly authoritarian he nevertheless abandoned the use of the Royal plural in his encyclicals and allocutions: he was the first pope to write not as ‘we’, but in his own persona, as Karol Wojtyla. He was also a passionate believer in religious liberty, and at Vatican II played a key role in the transformation of Catholic teaching in that area. Often seen as dismissive of other faiths, he had an intense interest in Judaism, born out of a lifelong friendship with a Jewish boy from Krakow: he was the first pope to visit the Roman Synagogue, and in 1993 he established formal diplomatic relations with the State of Israel. His openness to other religions extended to the non-Abrahamic traditions. In October 1986 at Assisi he initiated acts of worship involving not only Muslims, but Hindus, the Dali Lama and assorted Shamans. When praying by the Ganges at the scene of Gandhi’s cremation he became so absorbed that his entourage lost patience and literally shook him back into his schedule. The uncompromising defender of profoundly unpopular teaching on matters such as birth-control, he was nevertheless the most populist pope in history, an unstoppable tarmac-kisser, hand-shaker, granny-blesser, baby-embracer. Convinced of his own immediate authority over and responsibility for every Catholic in the world, he went to the people, showing himself, asserting his authority, coaxing, scolding,
joking, weeping, and trailing exhausted local hierarchies in his wake.

Wojtyla had a special preoccupation with the making of saints. Believing that the creation of indigenous models of holiness was a fundamental part of embedding the Gospel in the world’s cultures, he beatified and canonized local saints wherever he went, creating in all nearly five hundred saints and fourteen hundred
beati
or ‘blesseds’, more than had been made by all previous popes put together. This prodigal multiplication of saints alarmed many even in the Vatican, and in 1989 even Joseph Ratzinger wondered whether too many saints were being declared ‘who don’t really have much to say to the great multitude of believers’.
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As Cardinal Ratzinger pointed out, every canonization represented a choice of priorities. The priorities in practice were often those of others, since pressure for the choice of saints often originated in the local churches rather than at Rome. Nevertheless, the lists of new saints were eagerly scrutinized for whatever signals the pope might be thought to be sending. On 3 September 2000 Wojtyla beatified Pope John XXIII, the much-loved pope of the Council. This was an immensely popular move. John’s tomb in the Vatican crypt had been constantly surrounded by kneeling pilgrims since the day of his burial, and his raising to the altars of the Church was seen by many as an overdue endorsement of Papa Roncalli’s Council and the changes it had brought. But in the same ceremony Wojtyla also beatified Pio Nono, the pope of the
Syllabus of Errors
and the First Vatican Council, and the symbol of an infallible papacy intransigently at odds with modernity and with secular Italy. It had originally been planned to beatify Roncalli alongside his very different predecessor, Eugenio Pacelli, Pius XII. Controversy over Papa Pacelli’s alleged silence about the treatment of the Jews during the Nazi era made this pairing impossible. Pio Nono’s cause had in fact been in process long before Roncalli’s, but canonizations are public statements, and inevitably there were many who saw the linking of these incongruously contrasting popes as an attempt to offset any advantage pro-Conciliar forces in the Church of the Third Millennium might have derived from the raising of Pope John to the altars. In all likelihood there was more than a whiff of paranoia in such fears; that they were aired at all is a sign of the tensions of the last years of the Polish pope.

For the titanic energy of Wojtyla’s pontificate had momentous consequences for the Church, not all of them good. The endless journeys, designed to unite the Church around the pope, sometimes seemed in fact to highlight divisions. The rhetoric of shared responsibility with other
bishops was often belied by increasing Vatican intervention in the local churches, not least in some disastrous, and disastrously unpopular, episcopal appointments, like that of Mgr. Wolfgang Haas to the Swiss diocese of Chur. Haas, deeply conservative and very confrontational, was widely believed to have been introduced by the Vatican to promote reactionary theological views and pastoral policies. He rapidly alienated clergy and laity alike, priests applied in large numbers for transfers to other dioceses, and there were public demonstrations against him. The Canton of Zurich voted to cut off all payments to the diocese. Haas attributed all this to the fact that he was a defender of orthodoxy: ‘If one fully accepts the magisterium of the Church, an essential condition for Catholics, then one comes under fire.’ In 1990 the other Swiss bishops went to see the pope to secure Haas’ removal. He was not removed. Instead, in 1997 the Vatican adopted the extraordinary face-saving device of creating a new Archdiocese for the tiny principality of Lichtenstein (formerly part of the diocese of Chur), and transferred Haas into it.

Under John Paul, the autonomy of local hierarchies was systematically eroded. Vatican departments tightened their grip on matters formerly in the remit of regional hierarchies, including even the details of the translation of the liturgy into local vernaculars. Vatican scholars challenged the theological and canonical status of the National Conferences of Bishops, arguing that episcopal ‘collegiality’ is only exercised by the bishops gathered round the pope, never acting independently. Joint decisions of Conferences of Bishops – like those of Latin America, or the North American bishops, represent merely ‘collective’ decisions, introducing inappropriate ‘democratic’ structures into the hierarchy of the Church which have no theological standing. In all this, many saw the reversal of the devolution of authority to local churches in the wake of Vatican II.

Despite his patent commitment to the implementation of the Second Vatican Council, John Paul II threw his weight behind movements and energies which seemed to some to sit uneasily with the spirit of the Council. He gave strong personal endorsement to lay movements like
Communione e Liberazione
, a renewal of
Catholic Action
in the style of Pius XI. In particular, he gave his protection and the unique canonical status of a ‘personal prelature’, and hence exemption from local episcopal authority, to the semi-secret organization
Opus Dei
, founded in pre-Franco Spain by Josemaría Escrivá. Wojtyla went to pray at Escrivá’s tomb in Rome just before the Conclave which elected him pope in 1978.
Escrivá’s rapid beatification (1992) and canonization (2002), against strong and vocal opposition, was a political act which made clear the pope’s identification with the spirit and objectives of the
Opus Dei
Movement, whose conservative theological and pastoral influence and growing backroom control over many official Church events and institutions, including even episcopal meetings and synods, caused considerable unease to some local hierarchies. More disturbing was the slowness of the Vatican under Wojtyla to grasp the scale and devastating implications of the multiple cases of sexual abuse within the Church which emerged in America, Australasia and Europe in the last ten years of the pontificate, triggering a massive withdrawal of trust and a tidal wave of legal actions.