John Paul II became Pope in 1978, just as the emancipatory 1960s were declining into the long political night of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. As the economic downturn of the early 1970s began to bite, the Western world made a decisive shift to the right, and the transformation of an obscure Polish bishop from Karol Wojtyla to John Paul II was part of this transition. The Catholic Church had lived through its own brand of flower power, known as the Second Vatican Council; and the time was ripe to rein in leftist monks, clap-happy nuns and Latin American Catholic Marxists.
What was needed for this task was someone well trained in the techniques of the Cold War. As a prelate from Poland, Wojtyla hailed from
a reactionary outpost of the Catholic Church. Years of dealing with the Polish communists had turned him and his fellow Polish bishops into consummate political operators. In fact, it turned the Polish church into a set-up that was, at times, not easy to distinguish from the Stalinist bureaucracy.
Once in power, John Paul II set about rolling back the liberal achievements of Vatican II. Prominent liberal theologians were summoned to his throne for a dressing-down. One of his prime aims was to restore to papal hands the power that had been decentralised to the local churches.
The result of centring all power in Rome was an infantilisation of the local churches. Clergy found themselves incapable of taking initiatives without nervous glances over their shoulders at the Holy Office. It was at just this point that the child sex abuse scandal broke. John Paul’s response was to reward an American cardinal who had assiduously covered up the outrage with a plush posting in Rome.
The greatest crime of his papacy, however, was the grotesque irony by which the Vatican condemned condoms, which might have saved countless Catholics from an agonising Aids death. The Pope goes to his eternal reward with those deaths on his hands. He was one of the greatest disasters for the church since Charles Darwin. —