The Life and Legacy of Pope John Paul II (6 page)

If John Paul chose
not
to implement every change some women would have wanted, it wasn’t because he didn’t understand modern women and their aspirations. In many respects, he did understand modern women—the modern women of his youth in Poland. What he couldn’t understand was why the Catholic feminists contemporary with his pontificate didn’t agree with him.

John Paul was not a latecomer to the idea of women’s advancement and representation. While still a professor at the Catholic University, he had attempted to have a nun, Sister Zofia Zdybicka, appointed to the faculty. As it happened, Sister Zofia’s Ursuline superior denied her the opportunity, but permission was later granted by a different superior. He was also one of the few speakers to take notice of the female religious who were present at the Second Vatican Council, addressing them in his opening remarks.

John Paul was in many ways deeply sympathetic to the circumstances of women. He wrote movingly about women who struggled to earn a living, mothers whose adult children neglected them, and widows who lived with loneliness (“Apostolic Letter
Mulieris Dignitatem
of the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II on the Dignity and Vocation of Women on the Occasion of the Marian Year,” August 15, 1988).

His teachings on women accorded with his overarching commitment to the principle of human dignity. As pope, John Paul outspokenly defended women’s basic humanity, a humanity he viewed as being complementary to the male but no less worthy. Complementarity was central to his view of the respective roles of men and women. Nevertheless, since man and woman were created equally human in the image of God, as taught in the Book of Genesis, both were entitled to fundamental dignity. (This had also been expressed in
Gaudium et Spes.
) Women’s value is intrinsic, irrespective of her cultural setting, job, education, marital status, or personal attributes.

John Paul readily acknowledged the historic subjugation of women and affirmed the need to overturn it. Accordingly, his interpretation of Ephesians 5:22, “Wives, be subject to your husbands as to the Lord,” involved husbands and wives being mutually subjugated to each other in a relationship of reciprocal self-giving (
General Audience
, August 11, 1982).

He was unequivocal about the importance of women in the modern workforce, and he truly believed that allowing women to reach their potential would lead to the betterment of humanity. He even apologized for the role any members of the Church had played in the suppression of women and pointed to the need to follow Jesus’ example in according women respect.

Within the Church, he tried to allow women a larger voice. During his pontificate, women participated as experts in synods and conferences. More women received placements in the departments of the Roman Curia, the administrative structure of the Holy See. In Latin America, where a shortage of priests was a chronic problem, he allowed an increase in the number of women serving as parish administrators. Women religious were permitted to conduct baptisms, burials, and prayer services, and to distribute previously consecrated hosts. And in 2004, for the first time, two women theologians were appointed to the International Theological Commission, and a woman was named to be president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.

All this accords well with the first stages of modern feminism. But there was a point beyond which John Paul was not prepared to go. He viewed certain contemporary behaviors as being culturally conditioned and running counter to the eternal teachings of the Church and the divine plan. He simply could not see alternative theological explanations or approaches to his positions on male priesthood, birth control, abortion, or gender identity. Toward the end of his life, he could be quite harsh in his opposition. He extolled women who were prepared to die in childbirth rather than undergo lifesaving abortions, or who suffered in abusive situations to preserve the sacrament of marriage. In one particularly insensitive moment, he went as far as to blame women for the bad behavior of men. He naively thought that reliance on moral education would cure all ills. And thus, he alienated large segments of Church membership with his views.

As far as the priesthood is concerned, John Paul held fast to the gender diversity of certain religious roles and the need for an exclusively male, celibate priesthood. He viewed the male priesthood as based in Christ’s selection of male Apostles, a definitive tradition faithfully confirmed without deviation by both Catholic and Eastern Churches: a priest, as bridegroom of the Church, is a vital icon of Christ, the way God chose to become manifest on earth. This is not a matter of culturally conditioned discrimination against women but of preserving sacramental symbolism and efficacy.

As such, there was no room for change or debate, in John Paul’s view. Instead, John Paul looked always to Mary, the first disciple, as the epitome of womanhood. Accordingly, he believed that virginity, not priesthood, was a proper course for women who sought to make gifts of themselves for God. He did not mean this in any way to diminish women’s role and observed that the Church hierarchy only exists for the holiness of the faithful. Saints, not priests, he declared, are the most exalted among the faithful (
Ordinatio Sacerdotalis
, 1994). And he did his part to advance the causes of many women for exaltation within the Church.

Even so, his intransigence on divisive gender issues irked and frustrated many Catholics in the West, who bemoaned the pope’s unyielding traditionalism. Whose position, they asked, is really the product of cultural conditioning?

A Dark Time

It must be said, first of all, that John Paul’s strange reluctance to deal head-on with the crisis of sex abuse among the clergy continues to be mystifying, especially in light of his overall human rights record. In fact, the Vatican as a whole seems to have awakened to the fray only when forced to do so. There was extreme reluctance to confront the fact that a large number of supposedly righteous individuals were something other than what they professed. There may have been a tendency to view the accusations as overblown attempts to discredit the Church. Complicating matters further, some of the accused possessed a good deal—in some cases a great deal—of power and influence within the Church. Moreover, the hierarchical structures within the Curia that have sometimes supported misdeeds are even now still being investigated, as Pope Francis recently indicated. Here, then, is a very general summary of the situation under Pope John Paul II.

As an administrator, John Paul had always been known as a leader uninterested in details. He preferred to lay the course and then let the bureaucracy tend to itself. This allowed him to focus on his own programs and agenda.

As archbishop, he had made friends out of potential opponents and avoided schism by retaining in their posts clerics who did not see things or do things as he did. To avoid embarrassing specific individuals, even ineffectual people were retained in their positions until they could eventually be replaced, sometimes only upon death or retirement.

This is not to say that John Paul didn’t listen to his “underlings.” Certainly he took the bold step of giving the College of Cardinals a voice and role beyond that of electing popes every so often. Nevertheless, this management style may have contributed to the debacle in confronting the Church’s child sex abuse scandals.

Alarms were already being raised in the United States during the 1950s, long before the pontificate of John Paul. Father Gerald Fitzgerald, founder of the Servants of the Paraclete, had tried to treat molesting priests and was convinced they could not be helped. He felt there needed to be a “uniform code of discipline and of penalties” for dealing with the priest. He communicated this position repeatedly to several U.S. bishops and to Vatican officials. In one 1952 letter to the Bishop of Reno, he stated that such priests should be laicized because the damage to Church should take precedence over concern for the individual priest. Real conversion on the part of offending priests was rare, he advised, and they posed a real danger if moved from diocese to diocese. In 1957 he received a letter from a New Hampshire bishop telling him about a repentant priest who needed a “fresh start.” Fitzgerald responded that such priests only pretended to repent so that they could again be in a position to abuse. In many of the letters, Fitzgerald poured out his own disgust towards these priests, calling them “devils,” “damned,” and a “class of rattlesnake.” He wanted—literally—to isolate them on an island, away from society. The letters were unsealed by a court in 2007 and made public by the
National Catholic Reporter
in a series of articles in 2009.

In another major instance, credible allegations about the sexual abuse of children by a particular priest were made during the pontificate of Paul VI and thereafter. Two Mexican priests working in the United States accused the influential founder of the Legion of Christ, Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, of abusing them repeatedly while they were children. Over time, there were reports of dozens who had been abused by just that one priest. Although the local U.S. bishop made a full report to the Vatican representative in Washington, D.C., the report seems to have been shelved at the curial level. A letter addressed to Pope John Paul by one of the victim priests also contained some of the information about that particular case, but it is not known whether John Paul ever saw the letter personally. Other letters from other victims followed and were ignored.

It is not clear at precisely what point John Paul became aware, or was made aware, of increasing numbers of allegations about criminal priestly behavior. Certainly, the crisis extended far beyond being a mere “detail,” and warranted his full attention. There is every indication that through the 1980s John Paul knew or should have known—the U.S. Bishops were virtually pleading for help—but failed to act. Some officials within the Vatican itself complained that their leaders failed to grasp the gravity of the problem, whereas others couldn’t understand why the U.S. bishops were speaking so openly about it all. The March 2000 Day of Penance Mass mentioned “minors who are victims of abuse,” among others mistreated but was not terribly specific.

John Paul finally took decisive action in April 2002 by calling in his American bishops to discuss the matter. Consistent with his managerial style, he left it to them to resolve the problem, but he also made it clear that they needed to address it. It’s possible that in taking this course of action, he meant to bypass any obstructions in the Curia, but it was also evident that systemic changes in the Church in the United States needed to be made. This is not to say that the problem of abuse existed only in the United States; however, the major effort was made not within the Church as a whole, but rather where the wheel was squeakiest.

 (Other parts of the world are more reticent about holding public debate on such issues. Along with the United States, the English-speaking countries of Australia, Canada, and Great Britain were also more vocal than other parts of the world about the problem.)

In his address to the U.S. cardinals, John Paul stated that he was “deeply grieved” that people who were supposed to be living holy lives had caused such suffering to young people. He continued by stating that abuse by clerics was “by every standard wrong and rightly considered a crime by society; it is also an appalling sin in the eyes of God.” He included this message to those most directly affected: “To the victims and their families, wherever they may be, I express my profound sense of solidarity and concern.” He stated in no uncertain terms that there was “no place in the priesthood and religious life for those who would harm the young,” and he reaffirmed the Church’s commitment to sexual morality and the good of married and family life. Nevertheless, he also expressed a view that may historically have been behind some of the hierarchical foot-dragging; namely, that even the perpetrators could be changed by Christian conversion (Address to the Cardinals of the United States and Conference Officers, April 23, 2002). When similar scandals broke in the Philippines in 2003-04, the pope spoke about the need for Christian mercy in dealing with the priests involved, although he did also talk about transparency and “strict discipline” for the common good.

Following the meetings between the pope and the U.S. bishops, spokespersons for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops expressed disappointment that the media was focusing its attention exclusively on old cases of abuse and had not taken notice of any new measures that had been put in place over the prior ten to fifteen years to prevent such abuses from occurring. Discussing instances when pedophile priests had been reassigned to similar duties in other parishes where they were free to abuse again, they pointed out that those priests had been treated with psychotherapy, and it was thought at the time that this was sufficient. Now, the reality of recidivism was better understood, and bishops were not likely to make the same mistake. Bishop Wilton Gregory, then-president of the Conference, stated that any pedophile priests in the future would have to be turned over to civil authorities and should always have been. He further stated that the pope had a “high level of understanding” of the situation and had personally expressed to him his concern for the spirit of the people, the priests, and the bishops of the United States.

The U.S. Conference of Bishops met in June 2002 and in response to the crisis adopted a comprehensive set of national standards and procedures, the
Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People
. The
Charter’s
adoption followed meetings with victims and their families and with experts on sexual abuse and its impact on survivors, and it took into account the opinions of the Catholic laity.
It was approved with revisions at the June 2011 General Meeting of the U.S. Catholic Bishops. In addition,
Essential Norms for Diocesan/Eparchial Policies Dealing with Allegations of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Priests or Deacons
was recognized by the Vatican and promulgated in 2006.