John Paul II: beyond his time

HE WAS A GREAT MAN in a Cold War fought by hard-nosed men. At a critical time in human history, when physical, psychological, and ideological conflict were rending human society, John Paul II stepped forward to put his credibility--and ultimately his leadership role in the Catholic Church--on the line. In his native Poland, after becoming Pope, he continued a significant effort to rally Polish Catholics against communism. The Soviet empire was in the midst of collapsing of its own totalitarian and inefficient weight but Pope John Paul II made a significant contribution to moving that collapse along. This especially was true in Poland, but his image and his broad visibility wrought an impact throughout Roman Catholic Eastern Europe and in sympathetic socialist-leaning states elsewhere.

John Paul II will be respected by historians for his clarity of purpose and for the basic honesty that reflected the man beneath the Pope's garb. These are images that parents should want to hold before their children. In the aftermath of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, John Paul II took to the streets--so to speak--to solidify and unify the message of the Roman Catholic Church, expand its reach, and deEuropeanize it. For the Church, these were important bridges into the 20th (yes, 20th) century. The Pope's Church remains mired in the past, stuck on a time in history when church and state converged, when the "civilized" (i.e., Christian) world was all there was and life was organized around unity of enterprise and the family was the source of all social security. Half a millennium ago, Europe's Christian Church separated it from the anarchic Middle Ages and gave it a predictable ethics system and order.

The rise of the European nation-state system coincided with successful challenges to the monolithic control of the roles for human behavior of the Roman Catholic Church. Rules and laws to regulate a growing human diversity slowly were transferred to nonreligious bodies. The American, French, and Russian revolutions catapulted the secular nation-state into the forefront of governance. The separation of church and state was born of the coexistence of multiple cultures and globalization.

By stepping into the realm of politics, John Paul II put the Vatican in the role of nation-state. It no longer was a religious sect in action, rather a challenge to political empire. Just one of the players. The problem with this Pope was this institution, his institution. The Roman Catholic Church is a patriarchy, a form of governance that was maybe appropriate for an earlier century, but certainly not the 21st. We cannot put multiculturalism or the problems of overpopulation or the AIDS pandemic back in the boule again. John Paul II tried, though.

When he led his parishioners against the Soviet system in the 1980s, the Roman Catholic Church even then was an authoritarian--although sometimes altruistic--institution. However, it was posed against a totalitarian and ruthless empire. After the Cold War, it confronted the very sense of freedom and diversity that it helped let loose. Other religions--Islam, Evangelicalism, and raw capitalism--came to the fore and Pope John Paul II did not have a new formula for dealing with them, or with the forces of globalist democracy that these empowered actors have unleashed. Supporters have argued that John Paul II held the fort against the forces of "secularism and moral relativism." These same words ring positively for the vast majority of the world's population, including many Catholics. They reflect diversity and a mosaic of ethical views, not evil.

Some of the Pope's advocates see the problems of dealing with globalization and the condition of broader human society as secondary to the resoluteness of character and clarity of religious vision that John Paul II presented. Those standing at some distance from his view of faith-based governance see it differently. While sacrifice and self-denial can be admirable traits that instill important discipline in the human psyche, celibacy for priests and nuns has had debilatory effects as well. As we have seen over the last several decades, many priests--whether heterosexual or homosexual--have been unable to tolerate the condition of sexual isolation. Both the evident hypocrisy of the Church and the rapidly declining numbers in a stable priesthood are indicators of a conservative institutional character that will be the undoing of the greater good that the Church can provide.

Difficult to ignore in the evaluation of unattended problems are population growth and the rapidly spreading disease AIDS. Condoms have been around for thousands of years and today they are better than ever; clearly, they can make inroads on both the population and AIDS fronts. To deny them is not to defend the sanctity of life. There is more human life today than there has been in all of human history put together. Yet, because we are so many, it often is a miserable life. Born into abject poverty is not born into a life. Dying the slow AIDS death does not give value to the lives of those being tortured to extinction. The next Pope will need to face these questions or face a continuing diminution of a religious society that once gave great value to human life.