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fpb"There has never been an event like this. Never in history..."
The public death of Pope John Paul II has been the biggest event, at least in Europe and the Americas, since the death of Princess Diana; with the difference that, while people sent flowers to her residence in the days that followed her death, in his case they came in person. Poles, of course, in their millions; it was said that in the days that preceded the funeral, the two thousand miles of motorway from Krakow to Rome were one long one-way jam. But not Poles alone, nor Italians either. The city of Rome and the Italian state, hardly unused to foreign visitors, had to make unprecedented emergency provisions, employing resources normally used for catastrophes such as earthquakes and tsunamis, simply to deal with what came. For a few days, Rome’s population more than doubled.
As far as the politicians were concerned, the comparison is not with Princess Di’s death, but with the funeral of Winston Churchill. I cannot think of any other ceremony ever to call out so many “captains and Kings”; certainly no president of the United States, no Prime Minister of Britain, had ever taken part in any previous Papal burial. There were some ugly holes in their numbers: no Russian representative, no Chinese. But public authorities were there in such massed ranks that the benches to the left of the altar made you think of a world parliament, or even a world party. And yet, in this monumental event, they were only a part, and not even the most important; a group of the flock among many, distinguished indeed from the rest of the millions of mourners, allowed a special place at the side of the altar – but a part of the public nonetheless, receiving rather than taking part, present at something that others had organized.
I, as a Catholic, was not wholly glad of this flock. To see such unmitigated scoundrels as Chirac or Berlusconi, such sworn enemies of the Church as Zapatero or Paul Martin, such howling relativists as Balkenende, to see persecutors from Iran and Sudan with hands dripping with Christian blood, around the Pope’s bier, left the impression that many of these people had come – as one Hollywood magnate said of the well-attended funeral of another – to make sure that he was really dead.
Different thoughts came from the sight of massed religious authorities: not only other Christian denominations, not only Jews, but Hindus, Buddhists, all sorts of alien faiths (including one gentleman all in green whom I could not for the life of me identify). Above all, I wondered about the phalanx of poker-faced Muslim dignitaries, a simply enormous number – the TV screen left the impression that there were as many of them as members of all other religions put together – quietly sitting through three hours of Latin and Greek, incense, and choral singing. I wondered what they were thinking; I wondered what they really felt in this monumental and alien environment, how much of it could even seem religious to them, dominated as it was by statues and paintings and interspersed with music, which their religion proscribes. I would like to think that some at least of them will have been struck, if not by the devotional feeling – which runs contrary to anything they have ever done and felt in their own forms of worship – at least by the beauty of the ceremony. If a Muslim is ever converted, it will not be by our ceremonies; but it would be nice to believe that some of them will have gone home with a sense of the dignity and loveliness of these infidel things.
The beauty itself is, of course, part of the message. It is the beauty of organized space and time, of men moving in ranks and order, of word given and answer received according to a significant pattern. The ancient Protestant polemics, resurrected, alas, by one of the most intelligent and independent denizens of my f-list – Sergeant Majorette – would imply that this sense of rank and order is part of the essentially heathen, imperial Roman heritage of the Church of Rome. People such as the normally witty and worldly-wise Sergeant would take the sight of Cardinals marching to the altar as an inheritance from the legions marching in step – such is the power of inherited prejudice. What they really represent, of course, is the belief in the ultimate regularity of the universe; in the rule of logic and order, the descent of all that exists from a Word that is both the essence itself of beauty and one with reason and right rule. Because we believe in reason and order, therefore our ceremonies reflect that order and that reason. As everyone knows who has skimmed through The Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Catholic Church is as orderly and methodical, indeed as pedantic, as a German professor (let alone that she is now led by a German professor); the difference being that, unlike most German and German-influenced professors, we do not place a complete void at the centre of our system of values.
This order radiated outwards from its centre on the steps of the great basilica, to all the members of that enormous throng of pilgrims. The Roman authorities, well used to the vagaries of tourists throngs – let alone the frequent apparition of football crowds – were justifiably concerned about the sudden inflow of million upon million of foreigners, mostly young; but administrators, police, and witnesses, foreign and Italian journalists, all agree that there never was such a well-behaved, sweet-tempered, helpful mob. They slept uncomplainingly on the stones of St.Peter (that is what Rome’s cobbles, which have a traditional shape and layout, are called: sampietrini) when they could find no room at any inn; they tried hard to get to the Square, but quietly accepted to be sent to other places in the city when they could not. Five million visitors came and left, and hardly any mark or damage on the city.
And yet this was a mob, with all the features of a mob. Chesterton once said, in the occasion of a similarly epoch-making funeral (that of Queen Victoria), that “There is something unnatural and impossible, even grotesque, in the idea of a vast crowd of human beings all assuming an air of delicacy.” But these five million did not do anything of the kind. They did as a crowd does: roared, clapped hands, shouted slogans in rhythm; but one which had come not, as mobs often do, to take control of events, but to be a part – a noisy, good-humoured, respectful part – of events already laid out. Pope John Paul, a man of great natural strength and stamina, had been a long time dying. Day after day, the news reports throughout the world had been dominated by his fate. The avalanche had had plenty of time to gather itself and roll upon Rome; just as the city of Rome had time to prepare to be filled with pilgrims, not all at once, but in swiftly gathering waves. Above all, it had allowed an astonished political and media world to get, for once, a full measure of what was taking place. With or without the presence of the mighty of the Earth, something was going to happen in Rome for which there was no precedent. As a stunned TV man was heard to say, “There has never been anything like this. Never in history.”
This is why so many of the mighty of the world were there on that memorable Friday. These men may be, as I called them, scoundrels, enemies of the Church, relativists, or persecutors; but they understand and respect power. And the way Europe was shaking from one end to the other, for the death of this one man, spoke of power; of a phenomenon they dared not ignore or by-pass. Hence we saw Zapatero, with his infantile and contemptible desire to cross the Church in all things, coming to the grave of his enemy like a long-lost black sheep son turning up at his father’s funeral and leaving the lady from the chorus at home for the day; hence we saw Chirac, more guilty than any other man of the exclusion of Christianity from the European Union (against which both Pope John Paul and the then Cardinal Ratzinger had railed), act as though he respected a man whose influence he had done his best to destroy. This was a compliment, in a way.
Among the Pope's last few dying words, it seems, were: "I have come to seek for you. Now you have come to seek me, and I thank you". Properly read, these sum up the whole of his pontificate. He had come to seek out that widely dispersed, browbeaten, silenced, ridiculed, slandered minority who believed in Christ and in His Church. He sought for them throughout the world; and wherever he went, he drew crowds – hundreds of thousands, millions, at a time – of a faith that the media insisted was dying; and most of all among the young. His successor – who was one of only a couple of Cardinals old enough to have taken part in his election – rightly remembers his first words as Pope: “Do not be afraid!” He was not afraid; and with his film-star looks, abounding vitality, twinkling smile, erect bearing, he was as far from the notion of an enervated and declining Church as anyone could imagine.
And so, when his time was over, those he had come to seek came to him, from all over Europe – that supposedly Godless continent, whose politicians imagine they can win votes and consensus by insulting the religion of their fathers – and from all over the world. The most imposing demonstration of popular love and approval in modern times was driven, not by the authorities that followed it, but by the masses. The masses, too, forced its importance upon the media. It was particularly amusing to notice the slow drift of BBC and other commentators during those endless weeks of papal agony, death, mourning, conclave, and election; first clinging to their own beliefs – I lost count of the number of commentators who said that of course not everyone in the crowd agreed with the dying Pope’s teachings, as though traveling to a foreign country and spending days in a crowded square, sleeping rough at night, were a sign of disagreement – and then slowly being not only silenced but actually drawn in by the power of mood and company. By the time of the Requiem Mass, there was no difference in tone and content between the comment of the BBC reporter and that of a Catholic newspaper. I have no doubt that the tone will drift back to the politically correct whine of Ordinary Time, as it already has in the newspapers; but the sheer power of Christian consensus, the marvel of that immense yet peaceful mob, the ongoing contact with people of faith, had an effect that I for one did not expect – in early days, I started each BBC news report with a cringe – and that can be nothing but encouraging to Catholics.
That is what these twenty-six years of reign have done: encouraged a flock still immense, still overwhelmingly the largest Church in the world and the largest religious body – but oppressed by fashion, by a low high culture that treated it with contempt, by the grim and constant pressure of the Cold War, by lasting economic insecurity and unsettlement, by increasing exclusion from media and academic elites, by the penetration of the Church itself by heretics and atheists – encouraged it, encouraged us, not to be afraid, not to be ashamed of God, not to be browbeaten into silence by the vulgar pretence at intellect that dominated the media and what passed for culture; not to give up our ancient culture, the immense heritage built by twenty centuries of faith and civilization, just because of loud, dominant, but dim fads.
These fads Pope John Paul had the ability, not even so much to squish – as their supporters complained – but simply to ignore. A man who spent four hours a day in prayer, a man who faced down Communist authorities with a habit of sending religious people to Gulags (I do not mean his work in Poland in the eighties, when the Communist leadership had already to a large extent compromised, but his time as a young priest and a fresh-nominated bishop in the fifties, when priests and bishops regularly vanished), is not going to be hugely shaken by the arguments of some theologian in a German or Brazilian university. There is too much in this world and the next for a Catholic to follow, for him to be concerned about the latest nostrum pushed by TV or whatever.
Of course, Pope John Paul was himself an absolute master of the use of mass media. An acidic enemy, the great cartoonist Rob Walton, brutally caricatured him as the power-mad “Pope John Paul George and Ringo”, which one must admit is an inspired insult. But there is nothing illegitimate about this: the Church has always sought to communicate, at all times, with all possible individuals. Whatever the mass medium of communication may have been at any given time, from poetry chanted at the courts of Celtic kings to the public theatre of pre-reformation England, the Church made use of it to broadcast her message to the world. Some people may object to the mass media of today simply because they are mass media – of the mass, hoi polloi; Catholics object not because of their nature but because of their occupation by a caste of professional agnostics who cultivate a constant professional jealousy towards the Church because it interferes with their self-claimed duty to illuminate their public. Any Catholic who is not a hopeless snob (alas, there are a few) will be glad of Pope John Paul’s success in using the media to spread the message, like Bishop Fulton Sheen and G.K.Chesterton before him, and under even more difficult circumstances.
Pope Woytila was, quite simply, the greatest missionary the world has ever seen. He went everywhere, and everywhere he gathered crowds. He invited the Catholics to be seen and to be heard, not to hide away in the spaces of private life kindly left by their enemies for such devotions as would not trouble the counsels of political authority and mass media consensus. His strength was in reaching out, with an extraordinary and quite inimitable mixture of avuncular simplicity and intellectual precision - one never quite forgot that he got his degree in Philosophy, in a country and time where PhDs did not come cheap. And he knew where his strength lay. That is why he spent so much of his reign in journeys, public appearances, speeches, and encyclicals. As I already said elsewhere, the difference between him and his predecessor Paul VI (disregarding the unfortunate John Paul I, who lasted too little to know what manner of Pope he might have made) was that between a man who did his duty at all times, and a man who followed his inclinations. Karol Woytila was one of those rare lucky men who are at ease with life, who know what they are good for and do it without stint and apparently without effort.
It goes without saying that this devotion to the parts of his job that he could do best had its bad sides. A child could pick them out: a man who focuses on some features of his work will tend to disregard the rest, with unfortunate results. And I will add that this reliance on one's own natural gifts and inclinations tends to breed a slightly happy-go-lucky and somewhat irrational reliance on one's point of view, which can, at times, result in taking absurd and damaging positions.
I am not, of course, speaking of the commonplace objects of anti-Catholic criticism – divorce, contraception, abortion, homosexuality, all that guff. In all of these things, the Pope could not but speak as a Pope, as the servant, rather than the leader, of an institution that pre-existed him by a good nineteen centuries and had never in all that time taught anything but that. Anyone who wants the Church to change its position on these things might as well ask for water to stop being wet.
Some of what I have in mind I have already discussed: his rough and ready attitude to canonizations, for instance. (There is some irony in the fact that he may well turn out to be the first man in centuries to be canonized by popular acclamation.) If the Pope felt happy about the personality and influence of some ecclesiastical figure, no matter whether others regarded them as controversial, that was good enough: canonized they must be, without all the fuss and debate of
a long trial.
However, I would say that the episode that shows John Paul at his very worst – and I speak with the great scandals of Banco Ambrosiano and paedophilia in the US very much in mind - is the disgrace of Medjugorje. The Pope, everyone knows, was intensely devoted to the Blessed Virgin, to the point of taking his heraldic arms from her cult. In the case of Medjugorje, this means that no matter how much evidence anyone might bring him of fraud, heresy, hypocrisy, schism, profiteering, folly, he would not condemn the cult. He never exactly endorsed it, but one cannot help but feel that his attitude was to wish that it were true, even against all evidence.
This enduring Papal silence, which effectively endorsed the continuing Medjugorje ramp, is in my view much the blackest of spots on his pontificate. It is the one scandal in which he was directly and personally at fault, not just drawn into a false position by the need to support the Polish opposition (as in the Banco Ambrosiano scandal) nor essentially having to pick up after the malfeasance of others (as in the US paedophilia one), but actually going against the stream of advice and urgent recommendation from collaborators and subordinates. Beginning with the local Bishop, who declared the visions a fraud as soon as he had an opportunity to examine them and suffered a schism in his own diocese as a result, no responsible voice in the Catholic Church has ever spoken in favour of Medjugorje. And yet the semi-official Catholic shop opposite my own parish offers monthly trips there.
I speak, of course, as a Catholic. But even non-Catholics ought to agree with the following views: in refusing to condemn Medjugorje, the Pope failed in the most important of his duties, which is to be the court of last appeal for all controversies within the Church. He refused to judge where he should have. He betrayed his own colleague, the local Bishop, whose position has been made impossible by the schismatics of Medjugorje. He has allowed a cult to continue to exist which is not only in revolt against the local ecclesiastical authorities but also at odds with the teachings of his own Church; and, last but not least, he has allowed the very Virgin whom he so much reveres to be abused by a heretical fraud.
Does this disqualify him as a prospective Saint? By no means. Saints make mistakes. Saints even make enormous, shameful, avoidable mistakes. St.Francis of Assisi, loved by both Catholics and non-Catholics, sent many of his early followers to certain and horrible death in a crazy attempt to convert North African Muslims. And outside the Church, Confucius, one of my favourite non-Christian teachers, once led his followers almost to starvation because of mistaken belief in the word of a king. Yet the judgement of history on these men is that they were good through and through, models of the religious man and of the moral sage. Saints may be heroic, but they are, by definition, not perfect – only Jesus was, and it was in His Name that they were saved.
Need we hesitate to place the late Pope in such company? I do not think so. It is not so much that he is indubitably a major historical figure – not a sound criterion to judge a saint – nor even that he was hugely successful as a missionary; but that his witness to the Faith was never in doubt, that from beginning to end all the good he did was done to the glory of God, that he trusted in God and loved Him. Of course, to those who are not members of the Church, such judgements are pointless in the first place.
To them I would say: as the proverb says, you cannot judge the size of a tree until it has been cut down. The impact of John Paul II on history has been enormous, and, whether you like what he has done or not (and, if you are not Catholic, you are not likely to like it), irreversible. He has awakened the Catholic mass; he has put an end to the culture of passivity and shame, of subservience to non-Catholic and anti-Catholic ideals, that dominated the mood of too many Catholics for far too long. He has roused the Catholic minority throughout the world, so that it can now no longer be ignored. Like the Ents of J.R.R.Tolkien (a Catholic himself), the Catholic Church has awakened, and realized that it is strong.
The public death of Pope John Paul II has been the biggest event, at least in Europe and the Americas, since the death of Princess Diana; with the difference that, while people sent flowers to her residence in the days that followed her death, in his case they came in person. Poles, of course, in their millions; it was said that in the days that preceded the funeral, the two thousand miles of motorway from Krakow to Rome were one long one-way jam. But not Poles alone, nor Italians either. The city of Rome and the Italian state, hardly unused to foreign visitors, had to make unprecedented emergency provisions, employing resources normally used for catastrophes such as earthquakes and tsunamis, simply to deal with what came. For a few days, Rome’s population more than doubled.
As far as the politicians were concerned, the comparison is not with Princess Di’s death, but with the funeral of Winston Churchill. I cannot think of any other ceremony ever to call out so many “captains and Kings”; certainly no president of the United States, no Prime Minister of Britain, had ever taken part in any previous Papal burial. There were some ugly holes in their numbers: no Russian representative, no Chinese. But public authorities were there in such massed ranks that the benches to the left of the altar made you think of a world parliament, or even a world party. And yet, in this monumental event, they were only a part, and not even the most important; a group of the flock among many, distinguished indeed from the rest of the millions of mourners, allowed a special place at the side of the altar – but a part of the public nonetheless, receiving rather than taking part, present at something that others had organized.
I, as a Catholic, was not wholly glad of this flock. To see such unmitigated scoundrels as Chirac or Berlusconi, such sworn enemies of the Church as Zapatero or Paul Martin, such howling relativists as Balkenende, to see persecutors from Iran and Sudan with hands dripping with Christian blood, around the Pope’s bier, left the impression that many of these people had come – as one Hollywood magnate said of the well-attended funeral of another – to make sure that he was really dead.
Different thoughts came from the sight of massed religious authorities: not only other Christian denominations, not only Jews, but Hindus, Buddhists, all sorts of alien faiths (including one gentleman all in green whom I could not for the life of me identify). Above all, I wondered about the phalanx of poker-faced Muslim dignitaries, a simply enormous number – the TV screen left the impression that there were as many of them as members of all other religions put together – quietly sitting through three hours of Latin and Greek, incense, and choral singing. I wondered what they were thinking; I wondered what they really felt in this monumental and alien environment, how much of it could even seem religious to them, dominated as it was by statues and paintings and interspersed with music, which their religion proscribes. I would like to think that some at least of them will have been struck, if not by the devotional feeling – which runs contrary to anything they have ever done and felt in their own forms of worship – at least by the beauty of the ceremony. If a Muslim is ever converted, it will not be by our ceremonies; but it would be nice to believe that some of them will have gone home with a sense of the dignity and loveliness of these infidel things.
The beauty itself is, of course, part of the message. It is the beauty of organized space and time, of men moving in ranks and order, of word given and answer received according to a significant pattern. The ancient Protestant polemics, resurrected, alas, by one of the most intelligent and independent denizens of my f-list – Sergeant Majorette – would imply that this sense of rank and order is part of the essentially heathen, imperial Roman heritage of the Church of Rome. People such as the normally witty and worldly-wise Sergeant would take the sight of Cardinals marching to the altar as an inheritance from the legions marching in step – such is the power of inherited prejudice. What they really represent, of course, is the belief in the ultimate regularity of the universe; in the rule of logic and order, the descent of all that exists from a Word that is both the essence itself of beauty and one with reason and right rule. Because we believe in reason and order, therefore our ceremonies reflect that order and that reason. As everyone knows who has skimmed through The Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Catholic Church is as orderly and methodical, indeed as pedantic, as a German professor (let alone that she is now led by a German professor); the difference being that, unlike most German and German-influenced professors, we do not place a complete void at the centre of our system of values.
This order radiated outwards from its centre on the steps of the great basilica, to all the members of that enormous throng of pilgrims. The Roman authorities, well used to the vagaries of tourists throngs – let alone the frequent apparition of football crowds – were justifiably concerned about the sudden inflow of million upon million of foreigners, mostly young; but administrators, police, and witnesses, foreign and Italian journalists, all agree that there never was such a well-behaved, sweet-tempered, helpful mob. They slept uncomplainingly on the stones of St.Peter (that is what Rome’s cobbles, which have a traditional shape and layout, are called: sampietrini) when they could find no room at any inn; they tried hard to get to the Square, but quietly accepted to be sent to other places in the city when they could not. Five million visitors came and left, and hardly any mark or damage on the city.
And yet this was a mob, with all the features of a mob. Chesterton once said, in the occasion of a similarly epoch-making funeral (that of Queen Victoria), that “There is something unnatural and impossible, even grotesque, in the idea of a vast crowd of human beings all assuming an air of delicacy.” But these five million did not do anything of the kind. They did as a crowd does: roared, clapped hands, shouted slogans in rhythm; but one which had come not, as mobs often do, to take control of events, but to be a part – a noisy, good-humoured, respectful part – of events already laid out. Pope John Paul, a man of great natural strength and stamina, had been a long time dying. Day after day, the news reports throughout the world had been dominated by his fate. The avalanche had had plenty of time to gather itself and roll upon Rome; just as the city of Rome had time to prepare to be filled with pilgrims, not all at once, but in swiftly gathering waves. Above all, it had allowed an astonished political and media world to get, for once, a full measure of what was taking place. With or without the presence of the mighty of the Earth, something was going to happen in Rome for which there was no precedent. As a stunned TV man was heard to say, “There has never been anything like this. Never in history.”
This is why so many of the mighty of the world were there on that memorable Friday. These men may be, as I called them, scoundrels, enemies of the Church, relativists, or persecutors; but they understand and respect power. And the way Europe was shaking from one end to the other, for the death of this one man, spoke of power; of a phenomenon they dared not ignore or by-pass. Hence we saw Zapatero, with his infantile and contemptible desire to cross the Church in all things, coming to the grave of his enemy like a long-lost black sheep son turning up at his father’s funeral and leaving the lady from the chorus at home for the day; hence we saw Chirac, more guilty than any other man of the exclusion of Christianity from the European Union (against which both Pope John Paul and the then Cardinal Ratzinger had railed), act as though he respected a man whose influence he had done his best to destroy. This was a compliment, in a way.
Among the Pope's last few dying words, it seems, were: "I have come to seek for you. Now you have come to seek me, and I thank you". Properly read, these sum up the whole of his pontificate. He had come to seek out that widely dispersed, browbeaten, silenced, ridiculed, slandered minority who believed in Christ and in His Church. He sought for them throughout the world; and wherever he went, he drew crowds – hundreds of thousands, millions, at a time – of a faith that the media insisted was dying; and most of all among the young. His successor – who was one of only a couple of Cardinals old enough to have taken part in his election – rightly remembers his first words as Pope: “Do not be afraid!” He was not afraid; and with his film-star looks, abounding vitality, twinkling smile, erect bearing, he was as far from the notion of an enervated and declining Church as anyone could imagine.
And so, when his time was over, those he had come to seek came to him, from all over Europe – that supposedly Godless continent, whose politicians imagine they can win votes and consensus by insulting the religion of their fathers – and from all over the world. The most imposing demonstration of popular love and approval in modern times was driven, not by the authorities that followed it, but by the masses. The masses, too, forced its importance upon the media. It was particularly amusing to notice the slow drift of BBC and other commentators during those endless weeks of papal agony, death, mourning, conclave, and election; first clinging to their own beliefs – I lost count of the number of commentators who said that of course not everyone in the crowd agreed with the dying Pope’s teachings, as though traveling to a foreign country and spending days in a crowded square, sleeping rough at night, were a sign of disagreement – and then slowly being not only silenced but actually drawn in by the power of mood and company. By the time of the Requiem Mass, there was no difference in tone and content between the comment of the BBC reporter and that of a Catholic newspaper. I have no doubt that the tone will drift back to the politically correct whine of Ordinary Time, as it already has in the newspapers; but the sheer power of Christian consensus, the marvel of that immense yet peaceful mob, the ongoing contact with people of faith, had an effect that I for one did not expect – in early days, I started each BBC news report with a cringe – and that can be nothing but encouraging to Catholics.
That is what these twenty-six years of reign have done: encouraged a flock still immense, still overwhelmingly the largest Church in the world and the largest religious body – but oppressed by fashion, by a low high culture that treated it with contempt, by the grim and constant pressure of the Cold War, by lasting economic insecurity and unsettlement, by increasing exclusion from media and academic elites, by the penetration of the Church itself by heretics and atheists – encouraged it, encouraged us, not to be afraid, not to be ashamed of God, not to be browbeaten into silence by the vulgar pretence at intellect that dominated the media and what passed for culture; not to give up our ancient culture, the immense heritage built by twenty centuries of faith and civilization, just because of loud, dominant, but dim fads.
These fads Pope John Paul had the ability, not even so much to squish – as their supporters complained – but simply to ignore. A man who spent four hours a day in prayer, a man who faced down Communist authorities with a habit of sending religious people to Gulags (I do not mean his work in Poland in the eighties, when the Communist leadership had already to a large extent compromised, but his time as a young priest and a fresh-nominated bishop in the fifties, when priests and bishops regularly vanished), is not going to be hugely shaken by the arguments of some theologian in a German or Brazilian university. There is too much in this world and the next for a Catholic to follow, for him to be concerned about the latest nostrum pushed by TV or whatever.
Of course, Pope John Paul was himself an absolute master of the use of mass media. An acidic enemy, the great cartoonist Rob Walton, brutally caricatured him as the power-mad “Pope John Paul George and Ringo”, which one must admit is an inspired insult. But there is nothing illegitimate about this: the Church has always sought to communicate, at all times, with all possible individuals. Whatever the mass medium of communication may have been at any given time, from poetry chanted at the courts of Celtic kings to the public theatre of pre-reformation England, the Church made use of it to broadcast her message to the world. Some people may object to the mass media of today simply because they are mass media – of the mass, hoi polloi; Catholics object not because of their nature but because of their occupation by a caste of professional agnostics who cultivate a constant professional jealousy towards the Church because it interferes with their self-claimed duty to illuminate their public. Any Catholic who is not a hopeless snob (alas, there are a few) will be glad of Pope John Paul’s success in using the media to spread the message, like Bishop Fulton Sheen and G.K.Chesterton before him, and under even more difficult circumstances.
Pope Woytila was, quite simply, the greatest missionary the world has ever seen. He went everywhere, and everywhere he gathered crowds. He invited the Catholics to be seen and to be heard, not to hide away in the spaces of private life kindly left by their enemies for such devotions as would not trouble the counsels of political authority and mass media consensus. His strength was in reaching out, with an extraordinary and quite inimitable mixture of avuncular simplicity and intellectual precision - one never quite forgot that he got his degree in Philosophy, in a country and time where PhDs did not come cheap. And he knew where his strength lay. That is why he spent so much of his reign in journeys, public appearances, speeches, and encyclicals. As I already said elsewhere, the difference between him and his predecessor Paul VI (disregarding the unfortunate John Paul I, who lasted too little to know what manner of Pope he might have made) was that between a man who did his duty at all times, and a man who followed his inclinations. Karol Woytila was one of those rare lucky men who are at ease with life, who know what they are good for and do it without stint and apparently without effort.
It goes without saying that this devotion to the parts of his job that he could do best had its bad sides. A child could pick them out: a man who focuses on some features of his work will tend to disregard the rest, with unfortunate results. And I will add that this reliance on one's own natural gifts and inclinations tends to breed a slightly happy-go-lucky and somewhat irrational reliance on one's point of view, which can, at times, result in taking absurd and damaging positions.
I am not, of course, speaking of the commonplace objects of anti-Catholic criticism – divorce, contraception, abortion, homosexuality, all that guff. In all of these things, the Pope could not but speak as a Pope, as the servant, rather than the leader, of an institution that pre-existed him by a good nineteen centuries and had never in all that time taught anything but that. Anyone who wants the Church to change its position on these things might as well ask for water to stop being wet.
Some of what I have in mind I have already discussed: his rough and ready attitude to canonizations, for instance. (There is some irony in the fact that he may well turn out to be the first man in centuries to be canonized by popular acclamation.) If the Pope felt happy about the personality and influence of some ecclesiastical figure, no matter whether others regarded them as controversial, that was good enough: canonized they must be, without all the fuss and debate of
a long trial.
However, I would say that the episode that shows John Paul at his very worst – and I speak with the great scandals of Banco Ambrosiano and paedophilia in the US very much in mind - is the disgrace of Medjugorje. The Pope, everyone knows, was intensely devoted to the Blessed Virgin, to the point of taking his heraldic arms from her cult. In the case of Medjugorje, this means that no matter how much evidence anyone might bring him of fraud, heresy, hypocrisy, schism, profiteering, folly, he would not condemn the cult. He never exactly endorsed it, but one cannot help but feel that his attitude was to wish that it were true, even against all evidence.
This enduring Papal silence, which effectively endorsed the continuing Medjugorje ramp, is in my view much the blackest of spots on his pontificate. It is the one scandal in which he was directly and personally at fault, not just drawn into a false position by the need to support the Polish opposition (as in the Banco Ambrosiano scandal) nor essentially having to pick up after the malfeasance of others (as in the US paedophilia one), but actually going against the stream of advice and urgent recommendation from collaborators and subordinates. Beginning with the local Bishop, who declared the visions a fraud as soon as he had an opportunity to examine them and suffered a schism in his own diocese as a result, no responsible voice in the Catholic Church has ever spoken in favour of Medjugorje. And yet the semi-official Catholic shop opposite my own parish offers monthly trips there.
I speak, of course, as a Catholic. But even non-Catholics ought to agree with the following views: in refusing to condemn Medjugorje, the Pope failed in the most important of his duties, which is to be the court of last appeal for all controversies within the Church. He refused to judge where he should have. He betrayed his own colleague, the local Bishop, whose position has been made impossible by the schismatics of Medjugorje. He has allowed a cult to continue to exist which is not only in revolt against the local ecclesiastical authorities but also at odds with the teachings of his own Church; and, last but not least, he has allowed the very Virgin whom he so much reveres to be abused by a heretical fraud.
Does this disqualify him as a prospective Saint? By no means. Saints make mistakes. Saints even make enormous, shameful, avoidable mistakes. St.Francis of Assisi, loved by both Catholics and non-Catholics, sent many of his early followers to certain and horrible death in a crazy attempt to convert North African Muslims. And outside the Church, Confucius, one of my favourite non-Christian teachers, once led his followers almost to starvation because of mistaken belief in the word of a king. Yet the judgement of history on these men is that they were good through and through, models of the religious man and of the moral sage. Saints may be heroic, but they are, by definition, not perfect – only Jesus was, and it was in His Name that they were saved.
Need we hesitate to place the late Pope in such company? I do not think so. It is not so much that he is indubitably a major historical figure – not a sound criterion to judge a saint – nor even that he was hugely successful as a missionary; but that his witness to the Faith was never in doubt, that from beginning to end all the good he did was done to the glory of God, that he trusted in God and loved Him. Of course, to those who are not members of the Church, such judgements are pointless in the first place.
To them I would say: as the proverb says, you cannot judge the size of a tree until it has been cut down. The impact of John Paul II on history has been enormous, and, whether you like what he has done or not (and, if you are not Catholic, you are not likely to like it), irreversible. He has awakened the Catholic mass; he has put an end to the culture of passivity and shame, of subservience to non-Catholic and anti-Catholic ideals, that dominated the mood of too many Catholics for far too long. He has roused the Catholic minority throughout the world, so that it can now no longer be ignored. Like the Ents of J.R.R.Tolkien (a Catholic himself), the Catholic Church has awakened, and realized that it is strong.
