It was all very well for John Paul to stride forward as a pope whose mind was filled with a new and wider and hitherto unimagined role for a successor to Peter, the Great Fisherman. It was all very well for him to attend, as some said even then, to a strange and alien light that only he could see, but that certainly seemed to illumine his actions as he touched the rarely reached acme of worldly exposure and recognition. But what about touching power within the Church itself? There seemed to be plenty of worldly leaders, the complaint went. But what about John Paul’s irreplaceable role as Peter?
For those who treasured the amber-encased papacy that John Paul had already put behind him forever, it was too much by far to see a pope who allowed himself to be touched and greeted and addressed and, yes, even rebutted by millions of ordinary men and women. That he had already been appropriated in some sense by millions of very different people, baptized and unbaptized, and that he obviously intended to travel the world in order to continue that overdemocratic process, shattered the fragile mold within which large numbers were convinced the papacy—the real and Catholic papacy—must ever remain.
That wasn’t to say, however, that there weren’t plenty of Roman Catholics and others besides on the other side of the fence; people to whom the shambles of John Paul’s Church were a welcome sight; people who would have been more than content to see the papacy remain sealed away from the rough-and-tumble of the world’s scramble toward its future. In such quarters as these, the strong desire to see the Pope mind his Churchly business was not sparked by deep faith. Rather, the hope was simply that the papacy would truly wither to nothing; that it would no longer be a central unifying factor of universal Catholic life.
For these people, who not only nourished that hope but had, many of them, labored daily for the death of the papacy as the unifying force of Catholicism, John Paul threatened a dream. They found his behavior and his appeal so distressful, in fact, and so maddening, that some in this group could not keep from an early and open display of their dislike for the Pontiff, and of their contempt for his highly publicized actions.
Milwaukee’s Archbishop Rembert Weakland, arguably no stranger to notorious behavior, stepped far beyond the normal bounds of public comment for high Churchmen when he characterized John Paul II as “a ham actor whose speeches don’t make sense unless you dramatize them.”
In a tone of loftier disdain, the English Cardinal, Basil Hume, Archbishop of Westminster and onetime willing papal candidate, held John Paul up to that discreetly disguised contempt once favored by the English upper classes for the ill-bred and lowborn. After listening to the newly elected Pontiff address all his cardinals in the Consistory Hall of the Apostolic Palace, Hume complained, “I became increasingly flabbergasted and amazed at the pace it [the Pope’s address] went on, especially since the weather was quite warm.” The barb that no true gentleman would subject another needlessly to suffer through such a meeting when the weather was disagreeable made Hume’s deeper implication clear to all who heard him: John Paul could not possibly have anything of importance to say.
Such a lack of discretion and extreme feelings aside, it was not long before just about everyone within the Roman Catholic Church had some complaint to make. And though the complaints were varied and covered a wide spectrum, all of them focused in some way on one remarkable trait of this new Pope. Wherever they might stand on the ever-widening range of action, of faith and of loyalty to the papacy; and whatever rung they might occupy in the Church’s structure, from lay person to activist to priest to cardinal, the seeming tranquillity of Pope John Paul in the face of the decay that was eating at the vitals of his Church was cause for uncertainty and for downright bafflement.
From the very beginning of his pontificate, it was clear that John Paul was acutely aware of his Church’s disarray. And it was equally clear that his conscious decision was to refuse to halt the process of decay.
So consistent was this mystifying attitude on John Paul’s part that a somewhat later incident came to symbolize the apparent fruitlessness of any attempt to change the papal mind on that score. Early in his pontificate, one of John Paul’s most invaluable allies and servitors, the powerful Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who heads the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, underlined for the Pope just one festering source of Church decadence. The Cardinal implied that the Holy Father might profitably address himself to the problem in question.
To the surprise of all within earshot—for the exchange took place before the two had reached an entirely private area—and as if to underline his papal refusal to bring order out of chaos, the Pope turned on Ratzinger with a sharp and open rebuke of a kind rarely seen in the Apostolic Palace.
It was not merely that the tone and the quasi-public nature of this encounter were so unusual, but that the unpapal attitude it displayed was so alarmingly consistent toward Church decay still advancing on every side.
Nevertheless, as Ratzinger and everyone present at that unpleasant moment realized, no one who knew this Pope, or who knew more about him than the trivia afloat in the press, had ever thought for a moment that the explanation of such unprecedented behavior might reasonably lie in any flaw in John Paul’s own Catholicism. Even so formidable a figure as the late and supremely canny Carlo Cardinal Confalonieri—regarded by friend and foe during his long Vatican career as the very embodiment of what is genuinely Catholic and of Romanism—gave the stamp of approval to John Paul on this score. “We have a Catholic Pope!” the Cardinal exulted to newsmen on the October day of Wojtyla’s papal election.
In that Cardinal’s mouth, the word “Catholic” was not some merely partisan label. It was his summary of what he knew firsthand to be this Pope’s profound grasp of what it means to be Catholic today. In his shorthand way, Confalonieri was saying that no one could seriously fault John Paul’s credentials as theologian, philosopher or scholar, as student of history and religion, or as experienced Roman Catholic Churchman.
Nevertheless, and even though he was bombarded from East and West with detailed reports and firsthand evidence of rampant decadence and unfaith among Churchmen who were everywhere entrusted with the pastoral care of nearly a billion Catholics, John Paul refused to take any significant action.
Complaints and questions mounted. How could this Pope refuse to do anything even to slow what he acknowledged openly to some to be the steady deterioration of the institutions of his Church? How could he refuse to defend his own Petrine authority by strong exercise of it and, at the same time, keep railing at the world to pay attention to him and his “new mission”?
It did not take long for what could only be taken as John Paul’s hands-off policy within his own Church to encourage some of his most significant adversaries in the struggle that did seem to interest him, the one struggle to which he was committed as Pope from the first instant of his election.
As his intimate associates knew, John Paul was aware, name by name and to his own pain, of Churchmen with front-rank power over the sinews of Church strength who were committed to his failure as defender of the Church and its traditional moral and religious teachings, and as defender of Petrine authority itself.
Yet the Pontiff’s refusal, early or late, to rebut such in-Church adversaries—even to the degree that he rebutted Cardinal Ratzinger, among others of his supporters—led quickly and directly to the spread of a truly eerie state of affairs among Catholics and non-Catholics alike, the world over.
It seemed to take no time at all, for example, for an increasing and remarkably vocal array of cardinals, bishops, prominent theologians and lay people everywhere to join forces openly, as a phalanx of in-Church adversaries to John Paul and his authority. Aptly dubbed the anti-Church, this widely dispersed group was recognized by John Paul—as well as by his advisers and his adversaries—as conscious and willing collaborators of all who saw the Church, its papacy and its independent centralized governing structure as an unsuitable and ill-fitting element of modern life.
Then as
now, John Paul understood that these anti-Church elements within his Church were reckoned publicly as Catholics. Then as now, however, and as John Paul understood equally well, these same anti-Church Churchmen saw every new announcement of the fledgling Pope—his every break with tradition; his every innovation; above all, his encyclical letter The Redeemer of Men—as an unacceptable obstacle to the personal leadership roles they fancied for themselves on the highroad of humanity toward its near-future destiny as a world society.
Not only was John Paul aware, even as the balloting went forward in the Conclave that elected him, that highly placed Churchmen in and out of the Vatican were fostering the inner decadence of Catholic faith and practice. In his inner councils soon after his election, it was clear that he took it as a sign of that decadence that, even as the worldwide Church was being split into segments, those segments themselves were dubbed and defined in political rather than religious terms. As with everything else in the world, Catholics were seen—and more important, from John Paul’s point of view, they saw themselves—as standing on the Right, on the Left or in the Center in matters of supremely, but by no means exclusively, Catholic importance.
This switch in descriptive terminology was symptomatic of the inner rot. An Augustine, an Aquinas or a Pius XII would never have resorted to political categories in describing the faith of the Church. They judged matters from a supernatural and theological viewpoint. But now the norm for judging the behavior of Catholics in regard to their faith was. their position vis-à-vis worldly interests in the political and social marketplace.
Both the Left and the Right bristled with leaders and with constantly networking activists about whom the Pope received reports so stunning that many an earlier pope would have taken immediate and summary measures against them. The Center, meanwhile, was leaderless and had no activist network worthy of the name.
One major element of this breakup of the Church’s worldwide institutions into Left, Right and Center was as clear to John Paul as to the cleverest of his advisers. The issues splitting the Church into these politically labeled factions were many, and some of them were complex. But all of them centered ultimately about John Paul himself, just as surely as everything in the Church had always centered around the Pope. Everything, in other words, rotated around the teaching and legislative authority of the Pope as the sole successor to Peter and Vicar of Christ.
The Catholic Left wanted John Paul’s authority to dwindle as quickly as possible to that of any nonpartisan chairman of the board, whose mandate, pure and simple, would be to respect and accept all opinions and ideas. Especially the idea of human rights in and of themselves as the ultimate value. Human rights, that is to say, defined humanistically and without reference to inconvenient moralities based on “outmoded” religious underpinnings.
John Paul as Bishop of Rome, said those on the Left, should wield the same authority as any other bishop. True, he might cast a vote now and then to break a tie. But he should lay claim to no outmoded special dignity, respect, honor or power just because he happened to be bishop of a venerable diocese called Rome. Indeed, the very fact that Rome was seen as the center of Catholicism was taken by the Left as no more than the happenstance of geography.
John Paul was not surprised, then, at the official reports and other intelligence that showed in graphic and sometimes scandalous detail the impatience of those on the Left within his Church for the complete disintegration of his institutional organization in its present form; and for the disintegration above all of the papal monarchy he now embodied.
Scholar that he is, in fact, John Paul might well have summed up the policy of the Catholic Left with Friedrich Nietzsche’s neat and nihilistic principle: “In the world, if you see something slipping, push it.”
At the other extreme, the Catholic Right, then as now, defended papal authority as such—entrusted for the moment to John Paul—exactly as it had always been defined and understood in Roman Catholic tradition. In religious matters, said those on the Right, the Pope has the authority of an absolute monarch. He has not merely the power but the obligation to teach and to legislate for Catholics everywhere. In fact, his teaching in certain circumstances enjoys an infallibility that endows his papal persona with privilege. For the Right, therefore, this or any pope’s power and obligation, privilege and infallibility, were issues to be reckoned with at the profoundest level.
As to Rome, its importance for the Right had and has nothing to do with happenstance. It is sacred. It is the Holy See of Rome. And the Bishop of Rome will, by that fact—the Roman Fact—be the head of Christ’s Church Universal until time is no more.
No wonder, then, that the clamor on the Right would come soon enough to excoriate John Paul II for the shambles he would allow to continue in the papacy, in Rome and in the Church Universal.
At the Center, occupied by the greatest mass of Catholic men and women, then as now the most dizzying confusion and pain stretched across the entire landscape of Catholic life. No certainties buoyed the Center as they did the Right. Nor did any dreams of bold revolution energize the Center as they did the Left. Here reigned fear and doubt, discouragement, vain hope and real disappointments, moral seediness and religious inertia. Here, horror at peculiar novelties in Church ceremonial and revulsion at un-Catholic teaching by priests and bishops drove thousands upon thousands out of the Church and onto the wide plains of aimless consternation.
In the Center was none of the certainty of the Right or the Left. All questions were open again. What did it really mean to be Catholic? To be Pope? To go to Hell for all eternity? To commit a sin? To eat and drink the body and the blood of Christ? What did it mean for the Pope to be infallible? What did it mean to be celibate and, at the same time, a balanced human being? What did it mean for sexual union to be blessed by a covenant with God, and for life itself to be sacred? The doubts were legion and growing. The questions were endless and mounting. The pain extended to the deepest areas of personal and social life.
And so, even as John Paul II was striding forward as an international figure of the first order on the world scene, inside his own institutional Church no one on any side of any fence could doubt that the decay in that worldwide institution was as critical as it was obvious.
At a certain level of Vatican life and service, however, there was worry over a still more significant weakness. There were those at this level who pointed to a far greater danger to John Paul’s pontificate and to his Church.
This is the level within Vatican operations at which one finds, for example, the men John Paul brought with him to the papacy, as every pope does. Here, too, one would find the “caretaker” group—the core found within any center of power—ensuring its continuity, maintaining the memories, discarding the pointless practices of a former pontificate once a new one has begun.
Neither dispersed at a papal death nor taken over by a new pope, these caretakers are servants of each of those truly isolated men who, having accepted the Ring of the Great Fisherman, comes to occupy alone the throne of Peter and to wield the Keys of that ancient Apostle’s unique power.
At this level are the men who have come to know at close quarters that it is never an easy thing to be called to the public work of the Church at large. These are the men who knew the mountain to which John Paul put his shoulders when he made the decision, as he gave such clear notice at the outset of his reign, to become an active competitor on the international scene.
Like the Pontiff they served, these intimate collaborators kept their eyes, then as now, on the goal this Pope had chosen. For that very reason, among themselves, and sometimes with the Pope, they outlined the most significant weakness—the greatest danger—to John Paul’s overall policy, and to the strategies by which he pursued it from the start.
These caretakers at the core of John Paul’s administration found that even before he came to Rome, this Pope had been made aware of this greatest in-Church threat to his pontificate. He already knew that the danger was so well
installed that it had earned its own shorthand name within some quarters of the Vatican. The superforce, it was called.
Though John Paul knew of the organized existence of this superforce before his papal election, it was only as Pope that he was quickly forced to appreciate every menacing detail of its membership, its organization, its influence throughout the institutions of the Vatican and the worldwide Church, its single-minded intention, and the agenda by which it pursued its deadly purpose.
The superforce had taken its members from what some with a fanciful turn of mind called the specters loose in the Pope’s house—that growing number of John Paul’s intra-Church adversaries. But these were not just any specters. These were Churchmen of such rank and power within the Vatican and at key points of the hierarchic structure that they controlled the most vital organs and sinews of that structure, worldwide.
In two thousand years of the Roman Church’s existence, there had never been anything like the superforce. Schisms, heresies, inner-Church struggles, prolonged alienation of parts of the Church from the main body, decadence of belief and morals among prelates, priests and laity, wholesale abandonment of the Roman faith by entire stretches of territory—the Catholic Church had seen and survived them all. Popes have been kidnapped, imprisoned, injured, forced into exile, murdered. For a time in the early Church, a goodly majority of bishops were heretics. At other times, in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was fashionable in Rome to be a nonbelieving cleric. But the aims and the activity of the superforce had already produced for John Paul a situation that was qualitatively different from any and all of them.
Since the day Peter came to Rome in chains as Caesar’s prisoner and became the first in the long, unbroken line of men claiming to be the personal representative of Jesus, John Paul, as the 264th in that line, was the first to come to power with the knowledge that he would have to face something so calculated, so simple and so sinister as the bated intention of this superforce.
Keys of This Blood Page 9
