As the world waits
Apr. 2nd, 2005 07:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbThere can be no doubt that he has been a great Pope. It is clear why the second Conclave of 1978 chose him. They wanted a youngish, fit man, to follow three papacies by elderly men in ill health; a man who could project his own strong faith in an unambiguous, uncompromising manner, to be a vigorous image of Christian faith across the world stage - something desperately needed after the agonized pontificate of Paul VI, who had spent his last days watching one of his closest friends (Aldo Moro) being murdered by terrorists, and who had not only been under virtual siege for ten years by so-called "liberals," but left, in his long silences, in his tormented features, in many statements, the impression of being himself half attracted to their destructive views. They wanted someone far from the rot and chaos that Italy was at the time, and felt, at last, that the political reasons to keep electing Italians no longer mattered. They wanted someone uncompromised in any way. Finally, they wanted - many of them having personally encountered Communist hatred or even personally suffered at Communist hands - someone who would stand up to what was then the great worlwide totalitarian threat. Anyone who was born in the eighties or after cannot imagine what a direct, immeditate presence the Soviet Union was, not only in world politics, but in the daily considerations of hundreds of millions of people.
Well, they got what they wanted. And they had one supplementary bit of luck. This new Polish Pope was destined to live in an age of diminishing and dreary public figures. In the thirties, the forties, the fifties, Popes had competition on the world stage. The leaders of the great world powers, good and bad, were themselves impressive figures: Mussolini, Hitler, Churchill, FD Roosevelt, Chang Kai-Shek, Charles de Gaulle, MK Gandhi, Alcide de Gasperi, Konrad Adenauer, Stalin, Mao, Truman, Eisenhower, Macmillan, Tito, Vervoerd, Ho Chi-Minh - heroes and villains on the grand scale, with real lives and interesting personalities, capable of inspiring electors and followers. Culture, too, had its share of heroes and towering figures: Freud, Einstein, Popper, Wittgenstein, Ernst Gombrich, Dumezil, Chesterton, Yeats, Picasso, Schoenberg, Webern, Sartre, Camus, Hesse, Hemingway, Faulkner, Thomas Mann - again, good or bad (and I regard some of them as very bad indeed), these were men of stature, capable of inspiring a following and of altering people's view of reality. Even popular culture produced its Frank Capras and its Walt Disneys, its John Waynes and its Edith Piafs. Where are their successors now? In retrospect, the Sixties represent not a beginning but an end: the last time when politics, the arts, and popular culture, were capable of producing figures who could stir the masses and really change the landscape they stood up in. Now, we live in an age of dwarves. There is no comparison between the Beatles and Britney Spears, between Charles de Gaulle and Jacques Chirac, between John Wayne and Tom Cruise - not even, as villains go, between Richard Nixon and Tony Blair. The Conclave elected a man of immediate appeal and powerful presence, just as such men were becoming rare to the point of invisibility. The only person I can think of who deserves the same rank is Nelson Mandela - and he, too, is on the edge of his grave. No wonder that one of the mourners in St.Peter's Square was heard to say that he was "the only great man in the world".
Having said that, he reigned long enough. No man is perfect in this life; and this Pope's own weaker points have done plenty of damage - the more so because his reign was so long. I have written a criticism of some of his less brilliant decisions (http://www.livejournal.com/users/fpb/63552.html), linking it to his obsession with ecumenicism. This is a constant, leading to all sorts of problems: as the Egyptian Coptic Church pointed out, how could the Catholic Church both be negotiating with Copts and Armenians (who regard the fifth-century Patriarch Nestorius as a heresiarch - as does the Catholic Church) and with the Chaldean Church of Iraq, who regard Nestorius as a persecuted saint and their founder, without dealing with that tiny little issue? This sort of fudge is unfortunately all too typical of the current obsession with unity at all costs.
But this is not the only negative legacy of this papacy. In his drive to create more Saints - he is famous for having canonized as many as all his predecessors put together - he has more than bent the rules of procedure, coming to the point of actually abolishing the celebrated office of "Devil's advocate," the person who argues against the sanctity of the proposed candidate. This violation of the rules of procedure and prudence is obviously no problem in such cases as Mother Teresa of Calcutta, regarded as a living saint not only by all the Catholic world but also by much of the rest, or of indubitable martyrs such as St.Edith Stein, but it becomes a very serious matter indeed when dealing with controversial figures such as Escriva de Balaguer, founder of Opus Dei, or Padre Pio, the supposed mystic from Puglia whom many contemporaries regarded as an outright fraud. And his disregard for rules and regulations is also seen in a shocking and in my view incomprehensible innovation, the invention of the "personal prelature" in the case of Opus Dei. Until this invention, the ultimate authority in any territorial diocese was the bishop, and no religious order, however powerful, could disregard his authority. When even the Jesuits tried to assert themselves against the Archbishop of Westminster, for all their importance, they were smartly slapped down by the great Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical Romanos Pontifices. However, John Paul II has invented, for the benefit of Opus Dei alone, this wholly new legal status, which means that wherever it is, Opus Dei must be regarded as belonging to an extra-territorial diocese whose bishop is their own leader. This is horrendous. Opus Dei is a much-maligned and intensely hated organization, but this sort of innovation, and the attitude it shows to the rest of the Church, makes it easy to understand why.
This careless attitude to rules and regulations went with a tendency to ignore properly administrative needs. This does not mean that they were not discharged; they were carried out by people lower down the hierarchy, according to their views, and without reference to the ultimate authority. The unfortunate results of this are to be seen especially in the Church marriage courts, where annulment was pushed to the point where it became, especially in America, as common and easy as divorce. This undermined the Church's stance on one of its own sacraments. The Pope became aware of this drift and condemned it loudly, but that is hardly enough; what was needed was constant and pernickety administrative work, which John Paul II had neither the temperament nor the time to carry out.
John Paul II's genius was for inspiring and involving people. His presence reached out to individuals personally: they felt called, addressed, spoken to on a personal level. He personally caused a number of conversions. But the Church needs now - not what the BBC, in its seraphic imbecility, suggested: someone who would be "more flexible" on such "controversial" issues as divorce, abortion, homosexuality, contraception and so on; to the contrary, it needs someone of greater discipline and administrative skill, someone with a policeman's mind, who can investigate and clear out such nests of corruption as the American church. John Paul II's disregard for administration and organization was seen at its worst there, and the result has been catastrophic, not only for the Church's public standing, but for its pastoral action. To pay the enormous fines levied for the crimes of hundreds of priests, and for the cover-ups they received from on high, it has been forced to close hundreds of parishes and schools, sell property, and, in the case of at least a couple of dioceses, go bankrput altogether. There were plenty of opportunities, if not to nip the evil in the bud, at least to deal with it before the secular authorities did; they were all ignored. As a result, the richest of all the national churches is haemorraging money like a harpooned whale - a disaster that involves the whole worldwide Church.
Nor is this the only major scandal linked to his administration - or disregard of it. In the seventies and eighties, he entered into a silent, bitter struggle with the Communist authorities of his country, in the course of which he diverted large amounts of secret funds to the opposition group Solidarnosc. His struggle was a success, breaking Communist tyranny in Poland, and eventually all across Easten Europe; but the diversion of secret funds to Poland involved the Vatican bank IOR neck-deep in the frightful Banco Ambrosiano scandal, with such unacceptable bedmates as the Mafia and the less attractive reaches of Freemasonry (a group which Catholics are forbidden to join). As a result, the Catholic banker Roberto Calvi was murdered in London by a Mafia enforcer for having mislaid Mafia funds, and a couple of bank managers spent years hiding from Italian authorities within the walls of the Vatican. One cannot doubt that the Pope's struggle with Communist tyranny was both just and successful, but this sort of methods are rather too reminiscent of Machiavelli ("the end justifies the means") for the Vicar of Christ. I am convinced, however, that the Pope had nothing to do with the dirtier reaches of the affair; it would be just like him to welcome money that could be spent in a good cause and not wonder where it had come from. After all, his own oppressed Polish Church had continued to live thanks to such underground subventions for decades.
Nonetheless, and with all these imperfections on his head, he has been a great man, and exactly what the Church needed: a tonic to stop it feeling irrelevant and excluded, a bright and confident reassertion of its place in the world. And his last days - placed almost by design against the horror and corruption of the Schiavo case - have given a tremendous object lesson in moral coherence and dignity. During his famous visit to Britain in 1982, when he was the strong, athletic figure we rememeber, he said this: Do not neglect your sick and elderly. Do not turn away from the handicapped and the dying. Do not push them to the limits of society. For if you do, you will fail to understand that they represent an important truth. The sick, the elderly, the handicapped and the dying teahc us that weakness is a creative part of human living, and that suffering can be mbraced with no loss of dignity. Without the presence of those people in your midst, you might be tempted to think of health, strength, and power, as the only important values to be pursued in life. But the wisdom of Christ and the power of Christ are to be seen in the weakness of those who share His sufferings... Let us keep the sick and the handicapped at the centre of our lives. Let us treasure them and recognize with gratitude the debt we owe them. We begin by imagining that we are giving to them; we end by realizing that they have enriched us.
Yes, this is what he said when he was fit and strong. Of how many other people can you say, he acted according to his teachings; and he is dying according to his teachings?
Well, they got what they wanted. And they had one supplementary bit of luck. This new Polish Pope was destined to live in an age of diminishing and dreary public figures. In the thirties, the forties, the fifties, Popes had competition on the world stage. The leaders of the great world powers, good and bad, were themselves impressive figures: Mussolini, Hitler, Churchill, FD Roosevelt, Chang Kai-Shek, Charles de Gaulle, MK Gandhi, Alcide de Gasperi, Konrad Adenauer, Stalin, Mao, Truman, Eisenhower, Macmillan, Tito, Vervoerd, Ho Chi-Minh - heroes and villains on the grand scale, with real lives and interesting personalities, capable of inspiring electors and followers. Culture, too, had its share of heroes and towering figures: Freud, Einstein, Popper, Wittgenstein, Ernst Gombrich, Dumezil, Chesterton, Yeats, Picasso, Schoenberg, Webern, Sartre, Camus, Hesse, Hemingway, Faulkner, Thomas Mann - again, good or bad (and I regard some of them as very bad indeed), these were men of stature, capable of inspiring a following and of altering people's view of reality. Even popular culture produced its Frank Capras and its Walt Disneys, its John Waynes and its Edith Piafs. Where are their successors now? In retrospect, the Sixties represent not a beginning but an end: the last time when politics, the arts, and popular culture, were capable of producing figures who could stir the masses and really change the landscape they stood up in. Now, we live in an age of dwarves. There is no comparison between the Beatles and Britney Spears, between Charles de Gaulle and Jacques Chirac, between John Wayne and Tom Cruise - not even, as villains go, between Richard Nixon and Tony Blair. The Conclave elected a man of immediate appeal and powerful presence, just as such men were becoming rare to the point of invisibility. The only person I can think of who deserves the same rank is Nelson Mandela - and he, too, is on the edge of his grave. No wonder that one of the mourners in St.Peter's Square was heard to say that he was "the only great man in the world".
Having said that, he reigned long enough. No man is perfect in this life; and this Pope's own weaker points have done plenty of damage - the more so because his reign was so long. I have written a criticism of some of his less brilliant decisions (http://www.livejournal.com/users/fpb/63552.html), linking it to his obsession with ecumenicism. This is a constant, leading to all sorts of problems: as the Egyptian Coptic Church pointed out, how could the Catholic Church both be negotiating with Copts and Armenians (who regard the fifth-century Patriarch Nestorius as a heresiarch - as does the Catholic Church) and with the Chaldean Church of Iraq, who regard Nestorius as a persecuted saint and their founder, without dealing with that tiny little issue? This sort of fudge is unfortunately all too typical of the current obsession with unity at all costs.
But this is not the only negative legacy of this papacy. In his drive to create more Saints - he is famous for having canonized as many as all his predecessors put together - he has more than bent the rules of procedure, coming to the point of actually abolishing the celebrated office of "Devil's advocate," the person who argues against the sanctity of the proposed candidate. This violation of the rules of procedure and prudence is obviously no problem in such cases as Mother Teresa of Calcutta, regarded as a living saint not only by all the Catholic world but also by much of the rest, or of indubitable martyrs such as St.Edith Stein, but it becomes a very serious matter indeed when dealing with controversial figures such as Escriva de Balaguer, founder of Opus Dei, or Padre Pio, the supposed mystic from Puglia whom many contemporaries regarded as an outright fraud. And his disregard for rules and regulations is also seen in a shocking and in my view incomprehensible innovation, the invention of the "personal prelature" in the case of Opus Dei. Until this invention, the ultimate authority in any territorial diocese was the bishop, and no religious order, however powerful, could disregard his authority. When even the Jesuits tried to assert themselves against the Archbishop of Westminster, for all their importance, they were smartly slapped down by the great Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical Romanos Pontifices. However, John Paul II has invented, for the benefit of Opus Dei alone, this wholly new legal status, which means that wherever it is, Opus Dei must be regarded as belonging to an extra-territorial diocese whose bishop is their own leader. This is horrendous. Opus Dei is a much-maligned and intensely hated organization, but this sort of innovation, and the attitude it shows to the rest of the Church, makes it easy to understand why.
This careless attitude to rules and regulations went with a tendency to ignore properly administrative needs. This does not mean that they were not discharged; they were carried out by people lower down the hierarchy, according to their views, and without reference to the ultimate authority. The unfortunate results of this are to be seen especially in the Church marriage courts, where annulment was pushed to the point where it became, especially in America, as common and easy as divorce. This undermined the Church's stance on one of its own sacraments. The Pope became aware of this drift and condemned it loudly, but that is hardly enough; what was needed was constant and pernickety administrative work, which John Paul II had neither the temperament nor the time to carry out.
John Paul II's genius was for inspiring and involving people. His presence reached out to individuals personally: they felt called, addressed, spoken to on a personal level. He personally caused a number of conversions. But the Church needs now - not what the BBC, in its seraphic imbecility, suggested: someone who would be "more flexible" on such "controversial" issues as divorce, abortion, homosexuality, contraception and so on; to the contrary, it needs someone of greater discipline and administrative skill, someone with a policeman's mind, who can investigate and clear out such nests of corruption as the American church. John Paul II's disregard for administration and organization was seen at its worst there, and the result has been catastrophic, not only for the Church's public standing, but for its pastoral action. To pay the enormous fines levied for the crimes of hundreds of priests, and for the cover-ups they received from on high, it has been forced to close hundreds of parishes and schools, sell property, and, in the case of at least a couple of dioceses, go bankrput altogether. There were plenty of opportunities, if not to nip the evil in the bud, at least to deal with it before the secular authorities did; they were all ignored. As a result, the richest of all the national churches is haemorraging money like a harpooned whale - a disaster that involves the whole worldwide Church.
Nor is this the only major scandal linked to his administration - or disregard of it. In the seventies and eighties, he entered into a silent, bitter struggle with the Communist authorities of his country, in the course of which he diverted large amounts of secret funds to the opposition group Solidarnosc. His struggle was a success, breaking Communist tyranny in Poland, and eventually all across Easten Europe; but the diversion of secret funds to Poland involved the Vatican bank IOR neck-deep in the frightful Banco Ambrosiano scandal, with such unacceptable bedmates as the Mafia and the less attractive reaches of Freemasonry (a group which Catholics are forbidden to join). As a result, the Catholic banker Roberto Calvi was murdered in London by a Mafia enforcer for having mislaid Mafia funds, and a couple of bank managers spent years hiding from Italian authorities within the walls of the Vatican. One cannot doubt that the Pope's struggle with Communist tyranny was both just and successful, but this sort of methods are rather too reminiscent of Machiavelli ("the end justifies the means") for the Vicar of Christ. I am convinced, however, that the Pope had nothing to do with the dirtier reaches of the affair; it would be just like him to welcome money that could be spent in a good cause and not wonder where it had come from. After all, his own oppressed Polish Church had continued to live thanks to such underground subventions for decades.
Nonetheless, and with all these imperfections on his head, he has been a great man, and exactly what the Church needed: a tonic to stop it feeling irrelevant and excluded, a bright and confident reassertion of its place in the world. And his last days - placed almost by design against the horror and corruption of the Schiavo case - have given a tremendous object lesson in moral coherence and dignity. During his famous visit to Britain in 1982, when he was the strong, athletic figure we rememeber, he said this: Do not neglect your sick and elderly. Do not turn away from the handicapped and the dying. Do not push them to the limits of society. For if you do, you will fail to understand that they represent an important truth. The sick, the elderly, the handicapped and the dying teahc us that weakness is a creative part of human living, and that suffering can be mbraced with no loss of dignity. Without the presence of those people in your midst, you might be tempted to think of health, strength, and power, as the only important values to be pursued in life. But the wisdom of Christ and the power of Christ are to be seen in the weakness of those who share His sufferings... Let us keep the sick and the handicapped at the centre of our lives. Let us treasure them and recognize with gratitude the debt we owe them. We begin by imagining that we are giving to them; we end by realizing that they have enriched us.
Yes, this is what he said when he was fit and strong. Of how many other people can you say, he acted according to his teachings; and he is dying according to his teachings?
