While he was alive and ailing it was easy to overlook how great was this Polish Pope. Especially for those of us who tend to view the Roman Catholic Church as essentially illiberal and who disapprove of their attitude toward the marriage of priests, the ordination of women and birth control. And yet he was a giant of a man. In retrospect is hard to think of any figure who was better able to embody and transcend the terrible aspects of the 20th Century and point the way to the new and very different challenges of the 21st Century.
As a young man growing up in Poland Karol Wojtyla had direct experience of the two great totalitarian systems, Nazism and Communism, that so bedevilled the 20th Century and responsible for the enslavement and deaths of so many millions of men and women. He spent the greater part of his life fighting such evils.
Looking back at the liberation of Eastern Europe and the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 it is hard to remember what a momentous event it was and how it came about. At the time few imagined such a thing. It would take generations or a war to accomplish it, it was supposed. In 1980 the neighbouring Warsaw Pact countries were poised to invade Poland, to re-impose Soviet authority just as they had in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. In the event, Soviet dominion over half of Europe just melted away. It is impossible to imagine such a thing happening without the size and pivotal nature of Poland. Its geography, history and the religiosity of its predominantly Catholic population. That and the fact that Karol Wojtyla had by 1978 become Pope John Paul II, crystallising the spirit of Polish resistance, swinging the whole moral weight of the Roman Catholic church behind the freeing of Poland. Not since Ghandi’s movement to free India of the British has such a momentous feat been accomplished peaceably.
There are three great qualities I see in this Pope. The first was that more than anything else John Paul II epitomised the belief in the dignity and sanctity of life. In the age of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot and all the crazy, debased and murderous notions supposedly designed to bring about the perfect society, whatever their faith people felt that here was a man who with every fibre of his being believed that each human being mattered.
The second great quality arose out of the first. This was the way John Paul II brought the Roman Catholic church to relate to and recognise the validity and worth of other religions. That a belief in the divine was more important than to come to Christ through the sole agency of the Roman Catholic church. Doctrinally this might remain the case, but in human terms people instinctively knew that this Pope included all human beings, whatever their faith. This not only greatly invigorated the Catholic church and its relevance, but allowed people of all persuasions to revere and admire the Pope. He was the first Pope to apologise and publicly atone for the crimes committed by Christians against the Jews and, the first Pope to enter a mosque, he reached out to Islam in ways that were historically calculated to transcend notions of inevitable cultural and religious clash. This was a Pope who in 26 years travelled the world and met and was seen by more people than any other leader, religious or otherwise, in world history. Here, possibly for the first time ever, was a potent world figure speaking out for every man and woman and who was heard worldwide. A man who did not represent any powerful government and even rebuked them. People everywhere of any persuasion could genuinely believe this Pope had their essential interests and humanity at heart.
The third and possibly the greatest attribute of Pope John Paul is the most complex. This was his call to spirituality, without which sense he believed the world was gravely threatened. He saw all around him what he termed a “culture of death” and a world increasingly engulfed in soulless materialism. While a firm believer in liberal democracy he warned against the evils of untrammeled and uncaring capitalism, which he saw as being as great a threat to humanity as communism had been in the past. He was “ pro-life” and remained firmly against abortion and any form of birth control. He believed in a strong centralised control of the Catholic church and was very active in disciplining churchmen who strayed too far from the official doctrine. He was ruthless in the extirpation of “Liberation Theology” in Latin America with its active participation in politics and class war. He gave short shrift to priests who wanted to marry and those who opposed the church on abortion and contraception or who advocated the ordination of women. Accordingly he pleased and displeased social conservatives and progressives alike.
He was a bridge to the post-human world we are now in the process of entering. A world where communications, artificial intelligence, and genetic cloning offer us huge benefits but present even greater opportunities for the de humanisation of mankind than anything we’ve seen yet, if we are not very careful.
If Francis Fukuyama’s concept of a Hegelian “End of History” has any validity at all, it is in the political sense only. Liberal democracy may indeed, with a few blips to come, have shown itself to be the best and final form of government, but in the sense that it is the full sum of human aspiration, it is a pitiful and most unsatisfying prospect. Nor could it work. The world would combust out of sheer frustration and boredom. In any event, millions of people in the world, who are neither free nor wealthy, reject such an idea out of hand. In the West we are increasingly divided between a secular world as in Europe and a Christian fundamentalist vision of things that is gathering strength in America and elsewhere. The Roman Catholic church may be the world’s largest religion and it’s numbers may be growing in Africa, Asia and Latin America but it is in competition with Islam and Pentacostalism and in heartland Europe as well as in North America, the numbers are dwindling.
It seems to me that the greatness and appeal of Pope John Paul II was that he not only saw the need for people to be free of oppression and want but beyond that, the necessity for them to seek and find spiritual fulfillment. Despite being a Catholic, he nevertheless veered toward “relativism”, the theory that no religion is intrinsically truer than another. That may have worried many in the Church but most people see it as no more than common sense. As a result Pope John Paul was able to speak not only for Catholics but for many other Christians as well, and increasingly for many who were not.
What he also saw and did not shirk from pointing out was that the spiritual path is not an easy one. It is more than good works, there is a mystical dimension and hard choices are required. That is why, however unpopularly, he was so adamantly against birth control in any form save abstinence. It was for him a sin against life, which is sacred. In practical terms, as well as moral, he may be right. The most effective contraceptive device of all is the eradication of poverty and hunger. Wherever that has happened the birth rate has always fallen.
He may not have been right about certain things, a total ban on birth control for example. And quite why it must be an article of faith that no priest may marry (St Peter, the first Pope did. And so did the apostles) or that no woman can be ordained, are good questions. His essential message was that man does not live by bread alone. Most valuably, he clearly outlined for us the daunting nature of the spiritual challenge that lies ahead. How much the old truths can help us and how much new solutions will have to be found, are questions for the future. Suffice it to say that we were blessed that in this day and age Karol Wojtyla became Pope and pointed us the way, counseling us to, “Be not afraid!”.
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