The Enigma of John Paul II

The weeping crowds say it more than words can: in death as in life, this Pope moves the hearts of millions.

There is always a deep, solemn resonance that echoes in our hearts when a man of such great stature passes away. Karol Wojtila is undoubtedly a large man. On his watch, the lofty but paling shadow of Rome over its more than a billion faithful has sharpened once again into a stark chiaroscuro of light and dark. Weighted by centuries of tradition and gilded ritual, with checkered moments of mysticism and spiritual fervor along with cruel fanaticism and corrupt decadence, the Roman Catholic Church stands today as a bastion of moral certitude, pulled out of the shadows by a Pope whose sunny warmth and force of conviction has given it a dry and hard clarity in a time when much of the modern world prefers to live in the murky, misty shades of relativism.

One can not help but be drawn to the immense magnetism of this smiling, charming man waving to large crowds wherever he went, treating the world as his parish. One felt inexplicably moved, awed and touched by something authentically human yet altogether joyful and good. Here was genuine star power, but with a depth of intellect and a luminous charisma rarely seen together. An actor before he became priest, John Paul II knew how to communicate by word and symbol. His visits were virtual theatre, his motorcades a stunning show of populist power that unnerved totalitarian regimes and pressured dictatorships into loosening up.

Yet there was, in this Pope, a rocklike intransigence, a hard edge that baffles those who are warmed by his passion for social reform but turn cold stiff at the hardline conservatism of his theology.
Invested with the pomp and circumstance of his office, John Paul II used the magisterial power of the papacy along with his own considerable personal influence to lend authority and force to things he obviously believed in as of first importance. With shrewdness and passion, he applied it in equal measure to the support of dissidents and human rights movements under repressive regimes, the critique of consumerism, the Gulf War and global arms trade as well as to the buttressing of ancient dogma and church tradition against what he saw as the corrosions brought about by modern secularism, be it in liberal or marxist form.

Hailed as an apostle of ecumenism in his historic rapprochements with Jews and Muslims, he was nevertheless undauntingly forthright, as in the remark that Buddhism was essentíally “an atheistic system.” From all accounts capable of tender relationships with women, his uncompromising views on female ordination, contraception, abortion and other gender-related issues have sent many feminists up the wall in anguish and rage. A staunch defender of individual rights and a ringing advocate for the cause of the poor, he was high-handedly autocratic in disciplining those in his ranks he deemed to be wayward, particularly those known to be involved in socially-progressive projects.

What lies behind the seeming contradictions, the supposed paradoxes in the life and legacy of this extraordinary pope ?

The answer perhaps can be found in the very nature of his faith. The millenium Pope, while at home in the tools and the mental stock-in-trade of modern society, is a thoroughly unmodern believer rooted in the ancient certainties of his faith. He lived in a generation that saw the horrors of war and the constant specter of guilt and betrayal raised by the Holocaust among those who survived. It was a time when it was possible to live, only by a horrific descent to the animal instinct for survival, or by a depth of spirituality that enables human beings to miraculously rise from the ash heap and find an adequate reason for which to live and die.

According to accounts, the young Karol’s spirituality was forged out of the sufferings endured by the people of Poland under nazism and totalitarianism. The Germans began the bombing of Krakow on September 1, 1939 as the young priest served his first mass. He saw his Jewish friends and neighbors taken away, his university shut down and his professors disappear. Already distraught by the early loss of his entire family, the trampling of Poland under the bootheels of Hitler’s troops and then its subsequent subjection to Stalinist terror seems to have driven this intense, thoughtful man deeper into the search for meaning and transcendence in the face of such horrors.

Out of this crucible of suffering seems to have emerged a faith that was centered on the vast confidence that God is there; in our loneliness, desolation and despair there is someone home in the universe. It is not empty. At the same time, it must have impressed on the future pope the reality of evil, and the philosophical moorings that give rise to it.

Both nazism and totalitarianism were, in a way, modern social experiments that merely pushed to a logical, though extreme, conclusion the so-called ‘death of God’ as announced by Nietzche. As another Slavic, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, once put it, “with the downfall of the altar of God, all we are left with is the anthill or the superman.” Having lost an absolute reference for proportioning the exact value of human beings, we either pulverize people into little ants that have significance only in so far as they are part of a larger grouping that can move history, or deify them into heroic figures that are beyond mere conventions of good and evil, like Raskolnikov who in the novel Crime and Punishment fancied himself as a superman to whom ‘everything is permitted.’
We either apotheosize the collective and come up with the myth of the classless society, or raise certain nations and ethnicities to the status of demigods like the German folk belief in the supremacy of the Aryan race.

These practical consequences of secularism and the moral relativism that came trailing it may have shaped the Pope’s own dogged fight against what he saw as threats to the sanctity of the individual’s right to life. His own intimate experience of the social devastations of apostate relativism, or the loss of belief in absolute truth and absolute values rooted in the very nature of God, may have framed his attitudes towards those who assert complete autonomy in their ‘right to choose.’

As he says himself in his book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, “We can not afford forms of permissiveness that would lead directly to the trampling of human rights, and also to the complete destruction of values which are fundamental not only for the lives of individuals and families, but for society itself. ”

However this may be construed by pro-life and pro-choice protagonists, it is clear that the Pope’s views on abortion and other sex issues stems from his fear of the dam breaking, as it were. The West has unleashed its highly developed language for ‘rights’ from its original Christian moorings. This has released a floodtide of permissiveness that has broken down traditional boundaries between right and wrong, maleness and femaleness and even what constitutes a family. This reaction to the excesses of western secular liberalism is echoed here by a rather caustic remark of our own Cardinal Sin: “Two men live together with a dog and you call that a family ?”

Undeniably, there is an element of fundamentalist militance here. The Pope’s stringent boundary-keeping is seen as of a piece with the way he is associated with the Opus Dei and the Legionaries of Christ, conservative groups that are seen to be Catholicism’s equivalent of Protestant fundamentalists. Someone had observed that this Pope had a ‘siege mentality,’ the feeling of being surrounded by forces hostile to the fundamental truths of his faith. This has been accounted to the fact that he grew up in an environment where belief in his faith and even the very survival of Polish identity was a matter of life and death and tied up to the ever-present possibility of martyreia.

This sense of ‘siege,’ this fundamentalist streak of being keeper of the faith in an age of doubt and disorder, also seems to be behind the silencing of theologians like Hans Kung and Leonardo Boff. This seemed like a throwback to those medieval days when the Church punished its best and brightest by subjecting them to the deadly inquisitions of those anxious to preserve dead orthodoxies. The Pope showed in no uncertain terms that he was prepared to excommunicate and bludgeon into submission those who stray from what he considered to be the straight and narrow path.

The public censure of activist priests Ernesto Cardenal and Miguel D’Escoto in the Sandinista government also appears to be seamlessly connected to the Pope’s direct experience of the evils of East European socialism. Asked about his views on liberation theology, the Pope was straightforward and spoke plainly: “It depends on whose liberation theology. If we’re talking about the liberation theology of Christ, not Marx, I am very much for it.” The Pope would have none of the unholy synthesis of Christianity and Marxism that had been the hallmark of much liberation theology and praxis then in vogue in Latin America.

Queried once about the iron-handedness of this doctrinal cleansing of the ranks, he replied, “It’s a mistake to apply American democratic procedures to faith and truth.” As a Pole who lived through a war and a totalitarian system, the Pope had little appreciation for the tolerant niceties of pluralism, nor was he a Protestant, raised within a church tradition that allowed believers great space and latitude for the free exercise of individual conscience. “You can not take a vote on truth.”

Theologians from both the Catholic and Protestant traditions may take issue with many of the things he unconditionally pronounced to be ‘the truth.’ John Paul II may indeed, through time, fade into the mists of history as some think because he was, merely, “a great man, but not a great Pope” as an English Catholic editor, John Wilkins, has remarked.

Still, the blunt and brave simplicity with which he took on many of the raging issues of our day had an appealing clarity to the masses of people who looked up to him for guidance and direction in a time of confusion and moral collapse.

The millions who now file past the dead Pope witness to something quite obvious yet has largely gone unremarked. This Pope is grieved over, not so much because of his lofty office, but because of the warmth and authenticity of his faith. This successor to Peter proved to be solid rock, not perhaps because he was, at first instance, tough, but because he had a depth of inner life born out of a genuine walk with God. He lived as if there is, really, another world, an alternative social reality and a moral order that saw good and evil as real and distinct, not woolly abstractions that cloud and sicken the mind. With the clarity of daylight, he led with courage and insight those who needed to be shown the way.

According to Robert Moynihan, editor of the magazine Inside the Vatican, the Pope believed that if we keep following the road, we are likely to find that “some kind of eternal, holy being wants human beings to be holy and happy.”

Quite fittingly, his visits to the many countries he covered had the feel of virtual epiphanies. In a world bereft of a sense of transcendence, he gave us what the sociologist Emile Durkheim calls ‘times of effervescence,’ that unbearable lightness of feeling that bubbles over with a luminous joy when face to face with something authentically touched with the holy.


Melba Padilla Maggay, Ph.D.
for PATMOS FEATURES
of Institute for Studies in Asian Church and Culture
April 7, 2005