Paul Wilkes
JOHN PAUL II, who survived an assassination attempt 13 years ago, the removal of a tumour the size of an orange two years ago and who suffered two bad falls within a year, still has his faith intact. But no longer can his iron will command a weakening body to do its bidding.
To talk of John Paul’s last days is to begin to consider the next pontiff — who, one day, will succeed the most travelled and most widely known pope in history. When the next conclave is called and the cardinals are summoned to Vatican City, there to meet each day in the Sistine Chapel until a decision is reached, who will have their vote? One who will continue the legacy of John Paul? Or will they turn away from his often sternly didactic view of humankind’s halting efforts and enlist a less rigid pastor to guide them?
It will not be an easy choice. Never, in recent history, has the Catholic Church been so strong and so divided. Among the papabili, the cardinals who will choose the 265th pope, as among Catholics throughout the world, there are essentially two passions at work.
One is still confident of its power under an enormously popular pope, who has transformed the Vatican into a doctrinal clearing house, rewarding the faithful while meting out punishment to the wayward. The other sees a pope who has listened to the roar of the crowds but not to the cries and whispers of individuals who do not share his vision. It is these two visions that will one day clash in the
In the year 607, the Church issued a proclamation forbidding papal electors, under pain of excommunication, any discussion of a successor during a reigning pope’s lifetime. But such an edict never did, and never will, stop like-minded cardinals from seeing one another to talk about the current state of the church and, by clerical osmosis, to form the alliances they will take into the conclave.
John Paul seems hardly troubled by such manoeuvring. A pronouncement last year — banning divorced Catholics, who have remarried without obtaining an annulment, from receiving holy communion — proves the Vatican’s moral sonar is still functioning. And the wide-ranging proclamation that looked ahead to the third millennium illustrated the pope’s steely determination that he and his invincible reign will go on for years.
“He’s amazing. The strength …” says Pio Cardinal Laghi, prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education, one of the offices of the Roman Curia, the body that helps the pope govern the church.
This congregation has performed masterfully for John Paul, conducting periodic “apostolic visitations” to seminaries worldwide to assure purity of doctrine and depth of allegiance. They have set limits on theological dissent that some church members have found chillingly repressive. Many Catholics working in the Vatican and in the church’s administrative diaspora throughout Rome feel that the Second Vatican Council produced an atmosphere more sympathetic to the difficulties of living out an imitation of Christ in the modern world.
Under John Paul, they say, they have seen dedicated people demoralised, careers ruined and lives shattered. While loyal to their pope, they are extraordinarily resentful. A generation of moral moles seems to be in every office, classroom and espresso bar in Rome, listening for lapses from the one, true faith. John Paul will leave a powerful religious empire, but one riddled with distrust.
“Is this a way to run a Church, to live a moral life, when you have to be careful of everything you say, every friend you have, everyone you are seen with?” one senior member of his religious order asked. “We should be in this together; instead we look at each other as the enemy.”
A long-term curia priest noted that under Pope Paul VI he actually had fun on the job. Now, he said: “It’s an attitude of servile obsequiousness. Daily, I feel nibbled to death.”
Interpretations of how John Paul came to forge his distinct and controversial papacy abound in Rome. One of the most compelling is from a priest who is in the top administration of his monastic order and has worked closely with the pope.
“Know the man and his background and these 16 years are perfectly in line,” he began. “In Poland, you were for communism or against it. In Poland, to turn out a crowd was to show you had power. So, there you are: his theology — black and white, absolute — and his fixation with the crowds.
“I would add one other quality of his make-up — his penchant for suffering. Poland in the 19th and 20th centuries suffered as no country suffered. He sees his life as a continuation of that suffering. He does not avoid it; he takes it on. Heroic? Yes. But is this what the church needs, all this suffering? John Paul is a man of his time, but the next pope must be a man of our time. The Cold War is over.”
The next conclave will be entirely different to the one that elected John Paul in 1978. Of the 166 cardinals, 120 are now under the age of 80 and therefore eligible to vote. The number of Italian electors has declined, while the number of Eastern Europeans, Asians, Africans, South Americans and North Americans has
Nowhere in the world is Catholicism flourishing as it is in Africa, where tens of thousands have been converted during John Paul’s reign. The surge of religious vocations often outstrips the capacity to house and train those who seek to be priests, brothers and nuns. After Eastern Europe’s quick transformation from legions of righteous freedom fighters to packs of pleasure-seeking hedonists, it is to Africa and the rest of the Third World that the pope increasingly looks for the future growth of Catholicism and an antidote to the Western world’s moral degradation.
So it is that the name of an otherwise obscure 62-year-old Nigerian, Francis Cardinal Arinze, has been frequently mentioned as a possible successor. After warning that he did not want to touch on anything “political” — his euphemism for talk of papal succession — Cardinal Arinze talked of the reasons for Catholicism’s stunning evangelisation in post-colonial Africa.
“Much of African belief is animism, and animism is very, very close to Catholicism, so there is natural attraction, an affinity,” he told me. “In animism, there is one God, spirits good and evil, worship of ancestors, rituals. I was born an animist.
“But we must be very careful indeed in this work. My job is to make sure that other religious groups know our plans, our techniques for evangelisation” — he was referring obliquely here to Islam, with which Catholicism is competing in Africa — “and that we are aware of theirs so that we — how do you say? — are not stepping on their toes. Yes, we feel the Catholic message is for the whole world, but we must propose, not impose. The church in each land must be seen as a tree growing out of its own soil.”
Cardinal Arinze looked out the window as if for guidance and added: “We have been fortunate to have a holy father who has helped the world to have a clear picture of what Catholicism is. People may not do what he says, but at least they have heard the word.
“We do not need uniformity, but unity.” Cardinal Arinze is given to outbursts of head-thrown-back laughter. These came forth with his next thought: “And the pope is not a man to make a discount, so that people will buy!”