Man From A Far Country who became a superman Pope

WHEN Cardinal Karol Wojtyla was made Pope, the Catholic world collectively gasped in astonishment.

But, as author John Cornwell points out in the following extracts from his recent book, The Pope In Winter, the young cardinal was not chosen for his shock value.

TWO weeks after being raised to the priesthood [he was ordained on November 1, 1946], young Fr Wojtyla was making his way by train across Europe, via Paris, to Rome. It was not given to every young priest to be funded for a postgraduate Roman education, especially in destitute countries like Poland, where every priest was needed.

Cardinal Sapieha [Bishop of Krakow] evidently judged Wojtyla a potential ecclesiastical high-flyer, and in the traditional manner was boosting his future clerical career by acquainting him with Romanita - the ‘Roman thing’.

“For the young priest who had never left Poland the Roman experience was an opportunity to broaden his horizons.

When he became Pope - he would be hailed as ‘The Man From A Far Country’ - few suspected how completely at home he was in Rome, the centre of Church governance.

A month after Wojtyla had been made bishop, Pope Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli, the wartime Pope, died after a pontificate of almost 20 years. His successor was John XXIII.

Just three months after his election on 25 January 1959, the new Pope called a general council with a view to pastoral renewal and the promotion of Christian unity. Preparations for the Second Vatican Council began at once.

Arriving in Rome with his fellow Polish bishops, who were accustomed to the disciplined discretion essential to dealing with the Communist regime, Wojtyla was stunned by the apparent anarchy and disarray which marked the early sessions of the council.

What was this? Bishops quarrelling, lobbying, criticising and even attacking each other verbally! This was not how the Church had survived in Poland as it grappled with its totalitarian enemy.

A Church that was to survive stood like a porcupine against all comers. And where was the sense of reverence for the magisterium, the Church’s dogmatic teaching? The Church’s inerrancy down the ages?

As Pope, many years later, he would move to prevent free discussion among the bishops at the regular synods which were intended to give the local Church a greater say in Curial governance. And he would forbid executive officers in the Curia to speak to the press without express permission.

John Paul was, in 1979, at a unique historic and personal juncture. In Poland he appeared as both local pastor and universal pastor.

In time he came to believe that he could and should be both local and universal pastor in every circumstance throughout the Church.

As he got into his stride within the Holy See in Rome, and as he travelled ever wider abroad, he appeared ever more popular with the crowds, ever more authoritarian in the presence of his bishops.

As John Paul’s papacy entered the decade of the 1990s and the world witnessed the break-up of the Soviet Union and the retreat of Soviet Communism, it was not to be expected that he would embrace Western capitalism uncritically. On his fourth visit to Poland in 1991 he observed and deplored the effects of American-style capitalism.

Democracy was employed in John Paul’s liberated Poland to legalise abortion. It had become fashionable to be anti-clerical.

But all might not be lost. John Paul’s message to the Polish faithful now began to concentrate on the coming third millennium of Christianity.

As the 1990s progressed, John Paul appeared less happy with pluralism than with fundamentalism.

John Paul had vigorously defended freedom of belief and religious practice in Poland, but final acceptance of the pluralist society as the best of all possible worlds was another matter.

How should Catholics engage in the public arena of a pluralist society? How do Catholics in public life urge moral principles, vote, govern even, on issues such as exploitation of human embryos for research, questions of war, deployment of nuclear weapons, abortion?

Progressive Catholics, following the recommendations of Vatican II, favoured dialogue.

John Paul, however, tended through the 1990s to exert a denunciatory approach on key issues, especially sexual morals, with a readiness to employ harsh ‘culture of death’ language.

John Paul was Pope during an extraordinary era of disruption and fragmentation in the world and within the Church. He responded to the manifold problems and crises by becoming a superman pope: he took charge.

He saw the Church as a pyramid rather than a group of communities. He saw his papal role as that of a chief executive running the branch offices from the apex. In this he had exemplars in plenty through the 20th century: Pius X, Pius XI and Pius XII.

There might have been another pope who took worse decisions, and perpetrated more calamitous failures.

But with the end of John Paul’s reign and the Church preparing for a new pontificate in the 21st century, we must ask whether the Church is best served by a superman.

John Paul never ceased to be a human being, and a remarkable one at that. But his autocratic solutions tempted him to act in ways that eclipsed those human qualities, demoralising and discouraging large segments of the faithful.

John Henry Newman, the 19th century Anglican convert, theologian and cardinal, gave warning of the dangers of an autocratic long-lived papacy.

“It is an anomaly,” he wrote, “and bears no good fruit; he becomes a god, has no one to contradict him, does not know facts, and does cruel things without meaning it.”

* The edited extracts from John Cornwell’s The Pope In Winter have been re-produced with the permission of the author.