John Paul II’s papacy has been one of the longest and most energetic of any in 2 000-odd years of the history of the Catholic Church. On that at least Catholics agree, but there is much less agreement on the nature of this remarkable man’s achievements.
Without doubt, he has been one of the few figures of the 20th century who affected millions of lives. Outside the Catholic Church, he has attracted admiration, incomprehension and loathing in almost equal measures. His impact will outlast his life, shaping the future direction of the church; he ensured no less by appointing so many of the cardinals who will be charged with electing his successor.
He inherited a church still struggling to find its way in a rapidly changing world. Industrialisation, urbanisation and totalitarianism had all challenged the traditional authority structures of a church which, for centuries, had relied on a faithful rural peasantry and a biddable hierarchy.
The Polish pontiff’s response was to revolutionise the papacy while imposing a disciplinary iron grip on the institution and its teachings. He boasted of his ”rigidity”. By the end, the doctrinaire, authoritarian pontiff was the predominant perception in Western Europe, and it crowded out quite how radical this papacy has also been.
This was the first non-Italian pope in 450 years. John Paul II took a dusty, remote office shrouded in secrecy and modernised it; in the age of celebrity, he made himself one, using travel and mass communications to project a new meaning of the title of Holy Father. Images of him kissing children, surrounded by people, flags and well-wishers, became commonplace.
He made the central Catholic ritual, the mass, into a mass event, playing on his past as an actor in his youth to stage vast open-air spectacles involving millions of believers. At the same time, he allowed a more personal image than any previous pope; the Vatican released photographs of him skiing, walking in the mountains.
One of John Paul II’s greatest achievements was his role in ending the Cold War and bringing down the iron curtain. But having battled against two forms of totalitarianism during much of his life — Nazism and then communism — he hoped a revival of faith would succeed them and was horrified by the emergence of a triumphalist consumer capitalism. One of his greatest failings was his incomprehension of the quest for freedom of Western liberal democracies.
His response was to clamp down all the more tightly on the theologians, bishops and priests who deviated in the smallest detail from the official line, presiding over one of the most punitive, centralising Vatican regimes in recent history. On a wide range of subjects from women priests and papal authority to homosexuality, contraception and liberation theology, he ruthlessly stamped out any possibility of debate. A similar lack of compromise was evident in his stance towards other Christian churches; while he went some way towards building better relations with other faiths, he made little progress on ecumenism.
At the same time, he developed in a series of encyclicals a critique of contemporary global capitalism. In his unyielding interpretation of the dignity of each individual, John Paul II was at his very best as he condemned a global economy in which both inequality and the arms industry were spiralling out of control. He opposed the use of force — most notably in the second Gulf war — except as a very last resort and he upheld international law.
More divisive was his concept of a ”culture of death” as he lambasted the death penalty and abortion. Equally divisive was his conservatism on the position of women, which was closely allied to his intense personal devotion to the Virgin Mary. But the two most serious charges against his papacy are the lamentable failure to deal honestly with allegations of child abuse and the Vatican’s pernicious opposition to the use of condoms to combat Aids.
Alongside the social teaching, he sought to invigorate the spiritual traditions of the church. From his desk flowed a remarkable range of writing — poetry, meditations and encyclicals expressing his vision of the gospel. The sincerity and power of his own belief was evident, and sustained him through evident physical suffering.
He refused to succumb to his frailty and his very public death was part of the message he sought to convey to the world: the inescapability of suffering and its acceptance in human existence as part of God’s greater purpose for redemption. It was a stark message, which perhaps perplexed as many as it inspired.
Such mixed interpretations of John Paul II make him one of the most complex and paradoxical figures of his era: he humanised and modernised his office, but not his church. His uncompromising teaching contributed to the decimation of the church in its European heartland, but also to its extraordinary continuing vitality in the developing world. — Â