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

by Eamon Duffy

  For Wojtyla, it was clear from the start, believed passionately in a hands-on papacy. As soon as he was elected, the flood of permissions for priests to leave the priesthood and marry dried up. Priests might leave the ministry, but with difficulty, and initially the pope would not release them from their vows of celibacy: there was no mistaking in this change of policy Wojtyla’s own stern convictions. John Paul II saw himself as the universal bishop, and within months of his appointment he launched on an extraordinary series of pastoral visits to every corner of the world, carrying his message of old-fashioned moral values and fidelity to the teaching authority of the hierarchical Church, yet with a personal energy and charisma which brought the faithful out in their millions like football fans or zealots at a rally. This tireless journeying was to become the defining mark of his papacy, and transformed the papal office. The ‘prisoner of the Vatican’, the administrative and symbolic centre of the Church rooted in Rome, had become the world’s most spectacular roving evangelist. Asked by a reporter why he intended to visit Britain in 1982 he explained, ‘I must go: it is my Church.’ Critics deplored these paternalist visitations as disabling and absolutist, upstaging the local bishops and placing the isolated figure of the pope in the limelight. Wojtyla saw them as a distinctive and necessary feature of the modern Petrine ministry, while the actor and populist in him unfolded in the sun of popular enthusiasm. He appeared on balconies and platforms wearing Mexican sombreros, or Native American headdress. As infirmity descended on him he harnessed that too, twirling his walking cane like Charlie Chaplin’s tramp, while the crowd roared its approval. For the crowds adored him, especially the young, who rallied in their millions, responding to his demanding exhortations to generosity for Christ and chastity in an age of licence, with the chant ‘John Paul Two, we love you.’ There were an estimated five million at the World Youth Day held in Manila in 1995. By the end of his pontificate he had conducted more than a hundred such international trips, and had addressed, and been seen by, more people than anyone else in history.

  His interventions extended to every aspect of the Church’s life, not least that of the religious orders, whom he was anxious to recall to their traditional observance. Early in his pontificate he became alarmed by the spread of radical theological opinions among the Jesuits under Paul VI’s friend, the saintly and charismatic General Pedro Aruppe. In 1981, Aruppe had a stroke, and Pope John Paul suspended the constitution of the Society of Jesus, thereby preventing the election by the Jesuits of a successor. Instead, the pope, in an unprecedented intervention, imposed his own candidate, the 79 year-old Fr Paolo Dezza, a Vatican ‘trusty’, theologically conservative and almost blind. The move was seen as an attempt to impose a papal puppet on the Society, and strained Jesuit loyalty to the limit, evoking a letter of protest from the venerable Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner. The pope subsequently allowed the order to proceed to a free election, and publicly expressed his confidence in their work, but the intervention was recognized as a shot across the bows of an order which he felt was in danger of politicizing the Gospel by over-commitment to the Theology of Liberation.

  In his later years, John Paul II seemed at times at least as much the successor of Pius IX, Pius X or Pius XII as of John XXIII or Paul VI. An Ultramontane, filled with a profound sense of the immensity of his own office and of his centrality in the providence of God, he was convinced, for example, that the shot with which the deranged Turkish Communist Mehmet Ali Agca almost killed him in St Peter’s Square in 1981 was miraculously deflected by Our Lady of Fatima. There were resonances behind this conviction that went beyond mere piety. Fatima is a Portuguese shrine where the Virgin was believed to have appeared in 1917. The apparitions and the Fatima cult rapidly became drawn into the apocalyptic hopes and fears aroused by the Bolshevik Revolution and the Communist attack on Christianity. During the Cold War years Fatima become a devotional focus for anti-Communist feeling, and the aging Pius XII was rumoured to have received visions of the Virgin of Fatima. Agca’s bullet was later presented to the shrine at Fatima, where it was set in the Virgin’s jewelled crown. The assassination attempt was not the only event interpreted by John Paul as a manifestation of his mystical vocation. In 1994, when, like many another old man, he fell in the shower and broke his thigh, he saw the accident as a deeper entry into his prophetic calling: the pope, he declared, must suffer.

  Suffering, indeed, offers an important key to his character: the death of his mother when he was nine, of his beloved elder brother when he was thirteen, the harshness of his wartime experience as a labourer in a quarry and a chemical factory, the years of concealment, resistance and confrontation as seminarian, priest and bishop under Nazi and then Communist rule. All these combined to shape an outlook half grieved by and half contemptuous of the self-indulgence of the West, dismissive of the moral and social values of the Enlightenment which, he believed, had led humanity into a spiritual cul-de-sac and had more than half seduced the churches.

  Yet he was a hard man to measure. Sternly authoritarian he nevertheless abandoned the use of the Royal plural in his encyclicals and allocutions: he was the first pope to write not as ‘we’, but in his own persona, as Karol Wojtyla. He was also a passionate believer in religious liberty, and at Vatican II played a key role in the transformation of Catholic teaching in that area. Often seen as dismissive of other faiths, he had an intense interest in Judaism, born out of a lifelong friendship with a Jewish boy from Krakow: he was the first pope to visit the Roman Synagogue, and in 1993 he established formal diplomatic relations with the State of Israel. His openness to other religions extended to the non-Abrahamic traditions. In October 1986 at Assisi he initiated acts of worship involving not only Muslims, but Hindus, the Dali Lama and assorted Shamans. When praying by the Ganges at the scene of Gandhi’s cremation he became so absorbed that his entourage lost patience and literally shook him back into his schedule. The uncompromising defender of profoundly unpopular teaching on matters such as birth-control, he was nevertheless the most populist pope in history, an unstoppable tarmac-kisser, hand-shaker, granny-blesser, baby-embracer. Convinced of his own immediate authority over and responsibility for every Catholic in the world, he went to the people, showing himself, asserting his authority, coaxing, scolding, joking, weeping, and trailing exhausted local hierarchies in his wake.

  Wojtyla had a special preoccupation with the making of saints. Believing that the creation of indigenous models of holiness was a fundamental part of embedding the Gospel in the world’s cultures, he beatified and canonized local saints wherever he went, creating in all nearly five hundred saints and fourteen hundred beati or ‘blesseds’, more than had been made by all previous popes put together. This prodigal multiplication of saints alarmed many even in the Vatican, and in 1989 even Joseph Ratzinger wondered whether too many saints were being declared ‘who don’t really have much to say to the great multitude of believers’.41 As Cardinal Ratzinger pointed out, every canonization represented a choice of priorities. The priorities in practice were often those of others, since pressure for the choice of saints often originated in the local churches rather than at Rome. Nevertheless, the lists of new saints were eagerly scrutinized for whatever signals the pope might be thought to be sending. On 3 September 2000 Wojtyla beatified Pope John XXIII, the much-loved pope of the Council. This was an immensely popular move. John’s tomb in the Vatican crypt had been constantly surrounded by kneeling pilgrims since the day of his burial, and his raising to the altars of the Church was seen by many as an overdue endorsement of Papa Roncalli’s Council and the changes it had brought. But in the same ceremony Wojtyla also beatified Pio Nono, the pope of the Syllabus of Errors and the First Vatican Council, and the symbol of an infallible papacy intransigently at odds with modernity and with secular Italy. It had originally been planned to beatify Roncalli alongside his very different predecessor, Eugenio Pacelli, Pius XII. Controversy over Papa Pacelli’s alleged silence about the treatment of the Jews during the Nazi era mad
e this pairing impossible. Pio Nono’s cause had in fact been in process long before Roncalli’s, but canonizations are public statements, and inevitably there were many who saw the linking of these incongruously contrasting popes as an attempt to offset any advantage pro-Conciliar forces in the Church of the Third Millennium might have derived from the raising of Pope John to the altars. In all likelihood there was more than a whiff of paranoia in such fears; that they were aired at all is a sign of the tensions of the last years of the Polish pope.

  For the titanic energy of Wojtyla’s pontificate had momentous consequences for the Church, not all of them good. The endless journeys, designed to unite the Church around the pope, sometimes seemed in fact to highlight divisions. The rhetoric of shared responsibility with other bishops was often belied by increasing Vatican intervention in the local churches, not least in some disastrous, and disastrously unpopular, episcopal appointments, like that of Mgr. Wolfgang Haas to the Swiss diocese of Chur. Haas, deeply conservative and very confrontational, was widely believed to have been introduced by the Vatican to promote reactionary theological views and pastoral policies. He rapidly alienated clergy and laity alike, priests applied in large numbers for transfers to other dioceses, and there were public demonstrations against him. The Canton of Zurich voted to cut off all payments to the diocese. Haas attributed all this to the fact that he was a defender of orthodoxy: ‘If one fully accepts the magisterium of the Church, an essential condition for Catholics, then one comes under fire.’ In 1990 the other Swiss bishops went to see the pope to secure Haas’ removal. He was not removed. Instead, in 1997 the Vatican adopted the extraordinary face-saving device of creating a new Archdiocese for the tiny principality of Lichtenstein (formerly part of the diocese of Chur), and transferred Haas into it.

  Under John Paul, the autonomy of local hierarchies was systematically eroded. Vatican departments tightened their grip on matters formerly in the remit of regional hierarchies, including even the details of the translation of the liturgy into local vernaculars. Vatican scholars challenged the theological and canonical status of the National Conferences of Bishops, arguing that episcopal ‘collegiality’ is only exercised by the bishops gathered round the pope, never acting independently. Joint decisions of Conferences of Bishops – like those of Latin America, or the North American bishops, represent merely ‘collective’ decisions, introducing inappropriate ‘democratic’ structures into the hierarchy of the Church which have no theological standing. In all this, many saw the reversal of the devolution of authority to local churches in the wake of Vatican II.

  Despite his patent commitment to the implementation of the Second Vatican Council, John Paul II threw his weight behind movements and energies which seemed to some to sit uneasily with the spirit of the Council. He gave strong personal endorsement to lay movements like Communione e Liberazione, a renewal of Catholic Action in the style of Pius XI. In particular, he gave his protection and the unique canonical status of a ‘personal prelature’, and hence exemption from local episcopal authority, to the semi-secret organization Opus Dei, founded in pre-Franco Spain by Josemaría Escrivá. Wojtyla went to pray at Escrivá’s tomb in Rome just before the Conclave which elected him pope in 1978. Escrivá’s rapid beatification (1992) and canonization (2002), against strong and vocal opposition, was a political act which made clear the pope’s identification with the spirit and objectives of the Opus Dei Movement, whose conservative theological and pastoral influence and growing backroom control over many official Church events and institutions, including even episcopal meetings and synods, caused considerable unease to some local hierarchies. More disturbing was the slowness of the Vatican under Wojtyla to grasp the scale and devastating implications of the multiple cases of sexual abuse within the Church which emerged in America, Australasia and Europe in the last ten years of the pontificate, triggering a massive withdrawal of trust and a tidal wave of legal actions.

  John Paul’s last years were dogged by inexorably advancing illness which reduced the former athlete to a painfully stooped and frail figure. Parkinson’s disease froze his charismatic face into an immobile mask incapable of smiling: his left hand trembled uncontrollably. He refused to be defeated. Despite increasingly explicit speculation in the media about the possibility of a papal resignation, he soldiered on, permitting no letup in the gruelling regime of roving evangelist he had evolved for himself. The international trips went on, 104 by the time of his death, to 130 countries, covering more than a million miles, every trip a punishing round of receptions, mass-meetings and liturgies. Some, like that to Castro’s Cuba in January 1998, were of major international significance: a deal which helped Cuba in its efforts to lift the American-led blockade against it, and which, from the pope’s point of view, gave him an opportunity to secure new freedoms for the Cuban church and to carry his unswerving campaign for religious and human liberties into the last outpost of Soviet-style Communism in the West (Wojtyla secured from Castro the release of 200 political prisoners). Kept on his feet by injections administered in the sacristy before long ceremonies, the ageing pope was often visibly exhausted, stunned or dozing as his illness overcame him, yet capable of summoning his strength in astonishing returns of the old magic. The Bimillennial Holy-Year 2000 was a series of such surprises: Wojtyla drew a flood of pilgrims to Rome, and packed the year with farreaching initiatives, like the Day of Pardon he presided over, brushing aside more cautious counsels in the Vatican, at the start of Lent in March 2000. In the course of this ceremony in St Peter’s, designed to initiate a ‘Purification of Memory’ for the Church in the Third Millennium, he solemnly acknowledged and apologized for the Catholic Church’s past sins against human and religious freedoms, against the dignity of women, against the Jews. He reiterated this public act of repentance during an historic visit to the Holy Land later the same month, in an eloquent address at the Yad Vashem memorial for the dead of the Shoah, and, even more touchingly, when the stooped and trembling old man inserted into a crevice in the Wailing Wail a prayer of penitence for Christian sins against the Jews. The Holy Year had begun too, with spectacular gestures, notably the ceremony for the opening of the Holy Doors at St Paul’s outside the walls in January when Wojtyla was assisted in swinging back the door by the Protestant evangelical Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, an ecumenical gesture unimaginable in any previous pontificate, and a testimony to Wojtyla’s continuing ability to draw imaginative and generous responses from other Christian leaders.

  He was to continue such gestures after the Holy Year had ended, for example in his remarkable visit to Greece in May 2001, which initially evoked a storm of protest from Orthodox ecclesiastics, but in the course of which the pope simply and humbly apologized before the Archbishop of Athens for Roman Catholic sins against the Orthodox churches, especially the Sack of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, an episode which for many Orthodox epitomized the evils of Latin Christendom. Wojtyla’s trip in June that year to the Ukraine, where historic tensions between the Orthodox Church and the five million Byzantinerite Catholics had worsened since the collapse of Communism, heartened the Catholic faithful there, but was less successful ecumenically.

  In these last journeyings the pope’s frailty itself became an instrument of his mission, almost a weapon, a reproach to his opponents and an eloquent sign of the total dedication and abandonment to the will of God which he saw as the core of the Christian and above all the priestly life. But it was also a source of anxiety to many in the Church, who admired Wojtyla’s courage and fidelity, but who feared that his growing weakness left control of the central administration of the Church in the hands of the Vatican bureaucracy. Always on the move, he had never given much attention to administrative detail or Church structures, leaving such things largely to his staff. The lack of concern for detail was evident in the new procedures he authorized in 1996 for future papal conclaves, which made provision for the abandonment of the traditional two-thirds majority in the event of deadlock, and permi
tted election by a simple majority. Many viewed such a change as placing a weapon in the hands of any well-organized faction determined to impose a particular candidate rather than work for consensus, and thus a recipe for disaster. A more experienced papal administrator would never have agreed to it. In his old age, the authority of the Vatican Congregations grew, above all that of Cardinal Ratzinger’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, always the single most influential Vatican department and now, rightly or wrongly, widely perceived as empire-building. A case in point was the publication by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in September 2000 of a declaration on the unity and universality of Christianity, Dominus Iesus. Markedly different in tone and rhetorical impact from Ut Unum Sint, the pope’s own encyclical on this subject, Dominus Iesus was an emphatic assertion not merely of the centrality of Christ for salvation, but of the imperfection and incompleteness of all other religions. Within Christianity, it insisted on the centrality of the Roman Catholic Church. A ‘note’ on the usage ‘sister churches’ seemed to many to be designed to reverse a trend inaugurated by Paul VI, by forbidding the application of the phrase to the Church of England and other churches of the Reformation.