For the African continent, Karol Wojtyla, otherwise known as Pope John Paul II, is credited with overseeing the implementation of the recommendations of the second council of the all-bishops meeting of the Catholic Church, otherwise known as Vatican II.
The council resolved that to ensure that African Catholics identify fully with the church it would be advisable to allow them to integrate some of their rituals and practices, play African musical instruments and incorporate African musical conventions in broad terms, and introduce African forms of expression into the still dominant Latin rites of the Mass.
For this, Pope John Paul II has no competitor in the history of the papacy. But was Wojtyla the idol he is made out to be?
One of the major accomplishments the late pope is credited with is the collapse of communism. The one example often cited is his active support for Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement in his native Poland.
Those who credit him with this fail to distinguish between communism, the last stage of socialism, that classless society that Karl Marx predicted, and Stalinism, a vulgarisation of the post-Lenin establishment in Eastern Europe, characterised by brutality and corrupt bureaucracies.
Yet the pope failed to take a similar stand against the excesses and brutality of imperialism (such as United States aggression) in Latin American countries such as Nicaragua and Grenada where the majority of citizens are Catholic, or in Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Some of us will also not forget how, in the 1980s, at the height of the campaign for the international isolation of apartheid South Africa, the pope gave an audience to the then minister of foreign affairs, Pik Botha, against the advice of black priests opposed to the visit to the Vatican City.
Although the pope is called radical, he in fact led a conservative papacy.
Contrary to what many now want us to believe, the pope’s political interventions were mostly conservative. It was not long before this trail of conservatism took a firm grip on the Vatican.
The liberation theology movement in Latin America had managed to make the church relevant to most poor people. In fact, through this movement, religion ceased to be ”an opiate of the masses”, as Marx had correctly pointed out. Instead, the church became part of the struggle for freedom in most Latin American countries.
The experiences of the liberation theology movement inspired many of us in South Africa, leading some to embrace black theology (those of us from a black consciousness background) and contextual theology (those from a Freedom Charter background).
But the intolerance of the Vatican City (under the late pope) to liberation theology led to its suppression and eventually to the resignation from priesthood in 1992 of one of the brightest liberation theologians, Leonardo Boff, after being silenced in 1984 for writing critically against church hierarchy, oppression and being in favour of the ordination of women.
Did Boff commit the cardinal sin of employing Marxist analysis, which the late pope was known to hate with passion? What about the position of women in the church? In a document titled Familiaris Consortio (The Christian Family in the Modern World) the late pope wrote the following: ”A woman must give priority to her role as mother before any other public or professional activity. Her original mission, for which she cannot be replaced, is to stay at home to raise children.” These views put to rest any hopes that the Catholic Church would change its stance on the ordination of women. And by its stance against contraception, the church played the ostrich, fiddling while Rome burnt. As the world continues to mourn the passing of an undeniably influential pope, all eyes are now on who will succeed him.
Whoever ascends the throne, one thing is sure, we can forget about any progressive changes within the Catholic Church. The late pope chose the majority of cardinals, from whom the next pope will be chosen.
Implication? The trail of conservatism will continue.
Console Tleane is a former youth leader within the Catholic Church and is still a practicing Catholic. He writes in his personal capacity