Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition

by Eamon Duffy

  In the face of growing unhappiness with the Church’s total ban on all forms of artificial birth-control, even within marriage, Paul had taken the radical step of removing the question of contraception from the jurisdiction of the Council and remitting it to an advisory commission of theologians, scientists, doctors, and married couples. The commission prepared a report recommending modification of the traditional teaching to allow birth control in certain circumstances, and it was widely expected that the pope would accept this recommendation. In the event, he could not bring himself to do so, and the encyclical reaffirmed the traditional teaching, while setting it within a positive understanding of married sexuality. To his horror, instead of closing the question, Humanae Vitae provoked a storm of protest, and many priests resigned or were forced out of their posts for their opposition to the pope’s teaching.

  Paul never doubted that he had done what had to be done, but his confidence was shattered. He never wrote another encyclical, and the last ten years of his pontificate were marked by deepening gloom, as he agonized over the divisions within the Church and his own unpopularity, the mass exodus of priests and religious, and the growing violence of the secular world, signalled for him in 1978, the last year of his life, by the kidnap and murder of his close friend, the Christian Democratic politician Aldo Moro.

  Paul was a complex man, affectionate, capable of deep and enduring friendship, yet reserved, prone to fits of depression, easily hurt. He was passionately committed to the Council and its pastoral renewal of the Church, yet he passionately believed also in the papal primacy, and was fearful of compromising it. Hugely intelligent and deeply intuitive, he saw and was daunted by difficulties which others could brush aside, a fact which sometimes made him appear indecisive, where another would have acted first and reflected later. He felt criticism deeply, and was acutely conscious of the loneliness and isolation of his position. His last years as pope were a sort of slow crucifixion for him, and he was often to identify himself with the suffering servant of the prophet Isaiah, unloved, bearing the world’s woes. He did not despair. In 1975, a weary seventy-eight year old, he jotted down a series of notes on his isolation:

  What is my state of mind? Am I Hamlet or Don Quixote? On the left? On the right? I don’t feel I have been properly understood. My feelings are Superabundo Gaudio, I am full of consolation, overcome with joy, throughout every tribulation.36

  Tribulation had indeed become the element he moved in, yet he held the Church together during a period of unprecedented change, and there was no doubting his deeply-felt Christian discipleship or his total dedication to the Petrine ministry as he understood it. More than any one else, he was responsible for the consolidation of the achievements of the Second Vatican Council, and the renewal they brought to the Church. His funeral was conducted in the open air of St Peter’s Square, his simple wooden coffin bare of all regalia except the open pages of the gospel book, blown about by the wind. It was a fitting symbol of the most momentous but most troubled pontificate of modern times.

  He was succeeded by another peasant pope, Albino Luciani, son of a migrant worker who had risen to become Patriarch of Venice. Luciani was a pope in the mould of Roncalli rather than Montini, a simple, good-humoured pastoral bishop chosen to lift the gloom that had descended during Paul’s last years. He signalled his commitment to the Council by taking the composite name John Paul, and established himself at once as a pastoral figure, opposed to all pomp, refusing for example, to be crowned. There was universal enthusiasm for his appointment, despite his lack of experience, and the English Cardinal Hume was unwise enough in the euphoric aftermath of the conclave to call him ‘God’s candidate’. There are in fact signs that the responsibilities of the Papacy might have overwhelmed him, but there was no time to discover whether he had the stamina to cope with them or not, for just a month after his election he was found dead of a coronary embolism in the papal apartments. Sensational rumours, later shown to be groundless, suggested that he had been murdered to prevent him exposing and cleaning up financial corruption in the Vatican Bank.

  V PAPA WOJTYLA

  Once more the shocked cardinals assembled. They had elected a simple good man to be a pastoral pope, and the Lord had whisked him away. Was there a message in all this? General opinion called for another pastoral pope: but who? The choice of the cardinals, an overwhelming 103 votes out of 109, staggered every commentator. For the first time since 1522 they elected a non-Italian. He was a Pole, Karol Wojtyla, Archbishop of Krakow and at 58 the youngest pope since Pius IX. He took the name John Paul II. Though not widely known to the general public, his intellectual and physical energy, his record as an effective bishop under a hostile atheistic regime, and his remarkable linguistic gifts had impressed many fellow-bishops. He established himself during the Vatican Council as a coming man, and had even attracted some votes at the Conclave which had elected John Paul I. In the second conclave of 1978 he seemed to promise hope and growth after the confusion and demoralization of Paul VI’s last years.

  A former university professor of philosophy and a published poet and playwright, a practiced mountaineer and skier, a skilled linguist in French, German, English, Italian and Russian, Wojtyla was by any standards a star, with a remarkable career behind him. Born in 1920, he was the son of a retired army officer widowed while Karol was still a child. A student at the outset of the Nazi occupation of Poland, Wojtyla served as a labourer in a quarry and a chemical factory. He was the first pope for two centuries to have had anything approaching an ordinary upbringing – if such an upbringing counts as ordinary – and even a girlfriend. When he decided to become a priest he had to commence his studies in secret. His priestly and episcopal career had been conducted entirely under Communist rule. He understood and was able to confront and handle the Communist system. His philosophical interests were in the field of ethics and human responsibility, and he was deeply read in existentialist thinkers like the Jewish philosopher and theologian Martin Buber. Trained in theology at the Angelicum University in Rome under the decidedly old-fashioned neo-Scholastic Dominican, Reginald Garrigou-Legrange, he was to complete a second doctoral dissertation in Poland on the personalist ethics of the philosopher Max Scheler, a Jewish convert to Catholicism. Even as bishop, he continued to teach at the Jagiellonian University. Paul VI greatly admired Wojtyla’s sanctified intellectualism, and had drawn on his book Love and Responsibility in drafting Humanae Vitae.

  In line with all these hopes and expectations, from the outset John Paul II pledged himself to continue the work of the Council and his immediate predecessors, whose names he took. But it was equally clear from the outset that his agenda was quite distinctive, profoundly marked both by his philosophical concerns, and by his Slav identity. Much preoccupied with the so-called ‘Church of silence’ suffering under Communism, he set himself to strengthen it in its struggle with materialist regimes. He returned to Poland as pope in June 1979. The nervous Communist regime, against the strongest possible advice from the Kremlin, did not dare to refuse him entry. It was a catastrophic miscalculation on their part. A rapturous one third of the entire population turned out to listen to Wojtyla at meetings up and down the country. The visit focused national confidence in the face of a shaky Communist regime, and was a major factor in the emergence of the independent union Solidarity, the following year. Papal support, both moral and financial, played a crucial role in the success of the Solidarity movement, and Poland’s eventual peaceful transition to self-government and the end of Communism there. Lech Walesa, the Solidarity leader who was to become President of the liberated republic, would pointedly sign the agreement with the Communist government legalizing Solidarity with a plastic souvenir pen of the 1979 papal visit, sporting a portrait of Wojtyla.

  But he was to be much more than a national redeemer for the Poles. Like Pius XII, who had made him a bishop, Papa Wojtyla saw the pope as first and foremost the supreme teacher, an oracle. In 1979 there appeared the first of an eventual fourteen t
eaching encyclicals. Entitled Redemptor Hominis, it set out a Christian doctrine of human nature, in which Christ is seen not merely as revealing the nature of God, but revealing also what it is to be truly human. From this first encyclical, which picked up themes from the Conciliar Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, in the drafting of which Wojtyla had played a part, the distinctive character of the new pope’s Christian humanism was in evidence. He based his teaching about human dignity and responsibility not on natural law, but on the mystery of love revealed in Christ – as he wrote ‘the name for [our] deep amazement at man’s worth and dignity is the Gospel’.37 The spiritual profundity of John Paul’s thought was quickly recognized, but so also was its markedly conservative character, and Redemptor Hominis contained a stern call to theologians to ‘close collaboration with the Magisterium’ which foreshadowed tighter central control over theological freedom within the Church.

  This concern with orthodoxy showed itself especially in the field of sexual ethics. From the start of his pontificate, Wojtyla campaigned tirelessly against birth control and abortion, which he invariably linked, and there were recurrent rumours of a solemn statement which would endorse infallibly the teaching of Humanae Vitae. No such statement was forthcoming, but his most formidable encyclical, Veritatis Splendor, published in October 1993, insisted on the objective reality of fundamental moral values, and asserted the existence of ‘intrinsically evil’ acts, which purity of intention could never make licit. Contraception was explicitly cited as one such act. Like Pius XII’s Humani Generis, the encyclical was designed to reject, without naming names, a range of current theological approaches to morality. His concern with the evil of abortion expressed itself in 1995 the encyclical Evangelium Vitae, in which he called for ‘a new culture’ of love and reverence for life, and attacked the ‘culture of death’ which he saw as characteristic of materialist societies, and of which abortion and euthanasia were the principal expression. The uncompromising consistency of his opposition to every aspect of this ‘culture of death’, however, was to involve him and his Church in appalling moral dilemmas. The epidemic spread of HIV-Aids in Africa seemed to demand the use of condoms to prevent the transmission of the disease. But for Papa Wojtyla, the use of condoms was never justifiable, even in pursuit of an undoubted good like the halting of disease. The Church recommended chastity as the best and only protection against the disease, while highly placed Vatican spokesmen even harnessed dubious science to query the effectiveness of condoms as protection against the Aids virus. The world beyond the Church, and many within, found such intransigent teaching hard to comprehend – or to forgive.

  Yet sex was by no means his main target. If Marxism dehumanized by collectivism, liberal capitalism, he believed, dehumanized by ruthless commodification, oppressing the world’s poor with un-payable debt, and turning moral agents into mere consumers. His visit to Poland in 1991 was embittered by agitation there for permissive abortion legislation, but also by the hectic growth of the trashier aspects of consumerism. Christian civilization, refined in the fire of suffering and fresh from its victory over Communism, seemed about to be sold for a mess of McDonald’s. Taking the Ten Commandments as the text for all his speeches, Papa Wojtyla shook his fist and wept at Polish crowds whom he feared were in danger of selling themselves into a new and worse kind of slavery.

  John Paul’s attitude to Liberation Theology was to become one of the most controversial aspects of his theological stance. During the 1960s and 1970s theologians in Europe and the Americas increasingly gravitated towards an account of Christian salvation which emphasized the liberating effect of the Gospel not merely in the hereafter, but wherever human beings are enslaved by economic, social or political oppression: they were able to appeal for justification both to Gaudium et Spes and to Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio. The Exodus account of the deliverance of Israel from slavery, and the celebration in biblical texts like the Magnificat of a God who ‘puts down the mighty from their thrones’ and ‘lifts up the humble and meek’, were developed into a theological critique of the political and economic order which had particularly direct application in polarized societies like those of Latin America. Theologians like the Peruvian priest Gustavo Guttierez pressed into service Marxist notions such as ‘alienation’, and emphasized the evils of sinful economic and social structures as a form of institutionalized violence against the oppressed. In Nicaragua, Liberation Theology played a part in the Sandanista revolution, and five catholic priests took their place in the Sandanista cabinet, including the poet, Fr Ernesto Cardenal.

  These emphases were taken up by many bishops and priests in Latin America during the pontificate of Paul VI, and became central to much rethinking of the nature of the Church’s mission, not least in the Society of Jesus. They alarmed Pope John Paul, however. Profoundly hostile to Communism, he was deeply suspicious of the emphases of Liberation Theology, which he believed subordinated Christian concerns to a Marxist agenda. He was deeply opposed, also, to the direct participation of priests and bishops in politics, and he viewed the activities of bishops like Oscar Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador, or Evaristo Arns, Archbishop of São Paulo, who had thrown themselves into the defence of the poor against their governments, with a marked and somewhat surprising lack of warmth. When Romero was murdered by government assassins while saying Mass in 1980, he was acclaimed throughout Latin America as a martyr. The pope however, who had cautioned him not long before on the need for prudence, spoke of him only as ‘zealous’. Though he prayed at Romero’s tomb during a visit to San Salvador in 1983, he would, when addressing the Conference of Latin American Bishops in 1992, remove from the agreed text of the speech a reference to Romero’s martyrdom. Arns was undermined by having his huge diocese subdivided without his agreement, and the five new suffragan sees created filled with conservative bishops hostile to his social commitment.

  Yet this reserve about Liberation Theology went alongside a profound suspicion of Western Capitalism, signalled in a series of powerful and distinctive social encyclicals, like the denunciation in Dives in Misericordia (1980) of the ‘fundamental defect, or rather a series of defects, indeed a defective machinery … at the root of contemporary economics and material civilization’, defects which trap the ‘human family’ in ‘radically unjust situations’ in which children starve in a world of plenty.38 Even more explicitly, in his remarkable Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, published in 1988 to commemorate Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio, John Paul II excoriated both ‘liberal capitalism’ and ‘Marxist collectivism’ as systems embodying defective concepts of individual and social development both of them in need of radical correction, and both contributing to the widening gap between North and South, rich and poor. He saw Catholic social teaching as something quite distinct from either, offering a critique of both, and even found space to praise the use of the concept of Liberation in Latin American theology. The encyclical, which echoed the call for a ‘preferential love for the poor’ caused consternation among conservative American theologians and social theorists, used to seeing papal utterances as valuable underpinning for Western economic and social theory.39

  Nevertheless, for all these signs of ambivalence, under his pontificate conservative theological forces steadily reasserted themselves in the Church, producing a series of confrontations between theologians and the authorities, especially the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the old Holy Office or Inquisition renamed) headed by the Bavarian Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Ratzinger had a distinguished record as an academic theologian, and in an earlier incarnation was one of the theological architects of the reforms of Vatican II. He had been profoundly shocked by student radicalism and the sexual revolution in Germany in the sixties however, as well as by what he regarded as the hijacking of genuine reform by essentially irreligious Enlightenment values. The flexibility and openness of his earlier writings gave way to a more pessimistic call for ‘restoration’ which suggested strong reservations about so
me elements of the legacy of the Council. Poacher turned game-keeper, he now presided over the silencing or disowning of a string of theologians, beginning with Hans Kung in 1979, (who had appointed him to his first academic post) and the reconstruction of a tight and increasingly assertive orthodoxy which became the hall-mark of the pontificate. The contrast with the pontificate of Paul VI, when even the traumatic aftermath of Humanae Vitae produced no papal denunciations or excommunications of theologians, was striking.

  John Paul actively endorsed this trend, most notably in the Apostolic Letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis in 1995, declaring that the debate about the ordination of women (hardly begun in the Catholic Church outside North America, and hardly an issue in most of the developing world, where the majority of Catholics live) was now closed. Christ had chosen only men as apostles, and so only men may be priests. In order that ‘all doubt may be removed,’ therefore, ‘in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren,’ he declared that ‘the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination to women and that this judgement is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.’ The form in which this statement appeared – an ‘apostolic letter’— was several notches down in the hierarchy of authoritative papal utterances, below that of an encyclical, for example. Its phrasing however, hinted at something weightier – just what might be meant by ‘definitively held’ for example? A subsequent gloss by Cardinal Ratzinger, apparently attributing infallibility to the pope’s statement, evoked protests as a blatant attempt to stifle discussion of an issue which many considered not yet ripe for resolution.

  Pope John Paul’s suspicion of Western liberalism was in part an aspect of his Slav inheritance. From the start of his pontificate he looked East more consistently than any pope of modern times. His strong sense of Slav identity expressed itself in the conviction that the religious schism between East and West had left the Church breathing ‘through only one lung’, desperately in need of the spiritual depth and the wisdom born of suffering which the churches of the East could bring. The 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint on Christian Unity contained an extended and hopeful discussion of the fundamental unity of the ‘sister churches’ of East and West (unlike Paul VI, John Paul was careful never to apply this phrase to any church of the Reformation). The encyclical left no doubt about the pope’s ardent commitment to reconciliation with the Orthodox churches. Paradoxically however, his own exalted understanding of papal authority and changes after the fall of Communism (which brought pastoral pressures for the reintroduction or strengthening of Catholic hierarchies of both the Latin and Byzantine rites to minister to Catholics in the countries of the former Soviet Union) did a good deal to set back relationships with the Orthodox world. Ut Unum Sint recognized the barrier presented by the Petrine ministry, but asserted its permanent and God-given role as a special ‘service of unity.’ The pope, in a remarkable gesture, invited the leaders and theologians of other churches to enter into a ‘patient and fraternal dialogue’ with him to discover how the Petrine ministry might be exercised in a way which ‘may accomplish a service of love recognized by all concerned.’ Rueful Catholic hierarchies and theologians wondered if he wanted a similar dialogue with them.40