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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
April 3, 2005
John Paul II
Tobituary essay was written some years ago when I was an Anglican. Though I'm a Catholic now I haven't changed my mind about anything you will read in it. It was written in a dreadful hurry during a previous "death watch" then sat in the Ottawa Citizen's electronic "morgue" all this time then suddenly appeared in several CanWest newspapers today. There was a sense of divine intervention at the election of Karol Jozef Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II. The first John Paul lasted only a few weeks before dropping dead. Albino Luciani was another in the long line of Italian-only Popes stretching through five centuries a vicar from the industrial shoreline behind Venice a compromise candidate from the College of Cardinals unsure of himself in his first official acts; a good man by the account of those who knew him but promising to be ineffectual. When he died it was as if God called the cardinals back from the airport. "Try again." They now went to the opposite extreme and chose an "outsider a Pole, a man of large human experience not only as priest, but before he ever became a priest. The very greatest leaders in history are often, perhaps usually, outsiders - unlikely choices for the destiny that befalls them, at least in prospect. In retrospect, they seem as inevitable as John Paul II, or as Winston Churchill, or (on a lesser scale) as that other playwright-turned-saviour, Vaclav Havel. To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, after eliminating the impossible, whatever candidate remains, however improbable, must be the one we need. There is no doubt Pope John Paul II - I shall call him Wojtyla" through what follows to emphasize the fact he was a man - was a man of destiny. When he ascended the throne the Roman Catholic Church was losing members rapidly its teachings on subjects such as contraception were ridiculed not only by intellectuals but by common people throughout the post-Christian West. The Church was "out of touch with the times lacked confidence in its own nervously expressed authority; and through Europe and the Americas priests were openly questioning the Vatican's least ambiguous and most predictable rulings. This has changed. Many, including professing Catholics, continue to oppose the Church's enunciation of traditional Christian faith. But few now hold the Church in contempt. Fewer still expect the Church to change its outlook, or abandon its traditional positions. In 1978, it was taken for granted the Church would eventually cave in to modernity; today it is taken for granted that it won't. Karol Wojtyla arrived, it seems, looking back, in the way Churchill arrived in wartime Britain - not a moment too soon. I have spoken, for instance, with conservative Jews, who deeply appreciate Wojtyla's achievement. Though themselves much more liberal on social questions, they say the Pope held the line sometimes singlehandedly; that by making emphatic statements about right and wrong, he provided a rearguard against the collapse of Western society into complete narcissism and relativism. Only because the Pope would not compromise on human life issues such as contraception and abortion was it possible to maintain there was anything such as sexual morality. Only because he understood Communism was it possible to make a stand for Western values. He was, in the words of one such person, our backstop in the culture wars." In his famous encyclical of 1968 Humanae Vitae Pope Paul VI had the courage to lay down the law on human contraception and made a thoughtful reasonable explanation of the Church's views. Tempted as only God can know to make a concession to modernity that would have led to retreat on all fronts Pope Paul also held the line. But he was content to have written his encyclical. He never mentioned the subject again avoiding it privately as much as publicly. He had only enough courage left to "play out the clock." Wojtyla was not that kind of Pope. He repeated the Church's position at every opportunity told it with especial relish to the young and to those least likely to agree. He didn't merely lay down the law but argued for it on many intersecting levels remorselessly. No Pope ever thought more about sex or I think more deeply. He even wrote a book about it: Love and Responsibility translated in 1981. It is worth looking back to Wojtyla's earlier career as priest and confessor to see the breadth of his outlook on the problems of the family. His pastoral writings from the 1950s and early 1960s are elegantly reasoned yet almost as accessible as Ann Landers. His book on sex purity and marriage shows him to have studied the lives of his parishioners with diligence and imaginative sensitivity. He was not one to tell people that sex is only meant for procreation. He was not a prude nor unaware of any aspect of the temptations that lead red-blooded persons astray. Playwright that he was he had a gift for insinuating himself into other minds and situations and could be both celibate priest and worldly wise. In Christian teaching the body is not some unfortunate encumbrance as it is in Platonism and among Eastern mystics. The human is a unity of body and soul on the analogy of Christ - "very man and very God." We learn and love also through the body; human nature is irreducibly carnal. Having been created in the image of God - with all that that implies - even our desires must be in some sense holy. Wojtyla taught the regulation of desire not the suppression of instinct. As Pope he would be attacked as an old Puritan as backward-looking and a know-nothing. But the stereotype is applied exclusively by people who have never read Wojtyla nor listened and indeed know nothing about what he says. The mission of the Church in the world is to be strong and bold when the people are weak and lackadaisical yet soft and forgiving at just those moments when we would be intolerant and heartless. For that reason the Church must more often resist than encourage human appetites. It is not a democracy not an expression of popular will. Its principles are unchanging. It has nothing to do with fashion nor with what we want; only with what we need. It answers to inscrutable God. This was obvious enough in other centuries and through most of this one but Wojtyla came at an unprecedented time when Christians everywhere were fleeing from the Church and from the moral restraints with which the Church was associated. Not even in the Reformation had so large a number felt themselves judges of God and man. The world has never seen anything like the fatuous arrogance of post-modernity. Wojtyla came at a time in which the work of 20 centuries had seemed largely undone in a single generation. He inherited a spiritual catastrophe - one which had been building for a long time but the dam burst all at once. The churches suddenly emptied out and people went their own ways like floodwater. And it is not too much to say that Wojtyla understood this catastrophe. He experienced Nazism and communism in his native Poland; but beyond these obvious evils he had a preternatural sense for the void the emptiness in the modem outlook for the inflation the devaluation of the very words we use in all our Western languages. It is everywhere in the pastoral tracts he wrote as a young priest and then as metropolitan of Cracow this struggle against the devaluation or "taking the value out" of words; the demoralization or "taking the moral content out" of everyday life. We are making ourselves naked he said poignantly observing that when the Nazis tried to take all personhood away from Jews they stripped away their clothes. They made them stand naked above the gravepits they had dug sent them naked down the slides into the furnaces. I doubt that any non-Jew has ever spoken so eloquently at Auschwitz as Wojtyla spoke - calling it "Oswiecim" repeatedly and thus reminding his Polish audience that it had a Polish name. Nor for that matter did any Pope in the long history of Rome so reach out to the Jews and to the Muslims and to persons of other faiths or show such respect invoking the common God. "Catholic" is from the Greek meaning "universal and while Wojtyla was the conscientious custodian of a single religious institution, he often framed his statements in universal terms, speaking beyond Catholics to all men and women. Which is why, more I think than any Pope before him, he had so great an influence beyond his communion. In his Wednesday audiences in St. Peter's Square, through the memorable season of 1979-1980, it was shocking to hear the Pope. He was the first to make constructive use of modern Biblical scholarship. He was the first to speak to the people at large on a high theological plane, to speak directly from his own thinking on the origin of man, on personhood, on the theology of the body and sexuality, on the nature of original sin. He never spoke down to people. And suddenly, here was a Pope who freely quoted the greatest Protestant divines and scholars, brothers in one faith. Whatever is true whatever is honest whatever is just whatever is pure whatever is lovely or of good report" - Wojtyla had a mind that did not stop at boundaries. It was breathtaking. Here was not merely the chief administrator of an all-too-human institution but one of the finest minds of his age raised onto the highest podium of the Catholic Church; a man who had read very widely in a dozen languages wrestled with the fate of modern man lived very fully - he even played tennis went trekking in mountain ranges. A man who had he never become Pope would still have left his mark on the Catholic thinking of the 20th century. Every serious Catholic intellectual knew of his reputation as an original writer a figure associated with the creative cutting edge. It is owing to the accident he became Pope that his poetry and plays are fully translated into English and it is in reading these one approaches closest to a man who I think unquestionably was a literary genius. In his hometown of Wadowice a cultural centre despite its small size Wojtyla began running errands for a theatre company at the age of eight. As a boy he performed playlets for the patients in a hospital where his older brother was a doctor. This brother fascinating in his own right soon after died of scarlet fever. In his high school Wojtyla acted and directed a fanatical number of plays and began to write meditative essays on the nature and possibilities of a "theatre of words." Before he ever became a priest he was a moving force in an underground company called the Rhapsodic Theatre that staged plays in private homes in wartime behind the backs of patrolling Nazis. His acting experience of course served him well - for from the beginning of his papacy he showed an extraordinary poise and mastery of public gesture. At age 19 he had written a play on the theme of Job showing depth and maturity. To read it now is to realize how fully he was formed even as a teenager; there is nothing juvenile in that play. His theatrical creed - that "theatre of words" - is also fully formed. Job is a meditative play in which the protagonist is presented from inside and the audience is progressively drawn into the character - the very opposite to that cliche of "Brechtian distance" that has long governed theatrical conventions. The ironical cuteness is entirely missing; instead there is a passionate warmth including occasional warm humour but never jokes or situational asides. By necessity the play was staged without props or much costume yet it paints word-pictures that gradually fill one's whole attention. The rhythmic structure of the play is uncanny austere without any modernist stripping down. It is a verse play mysteriously urgent; though little happens on stage the reported action is dramatically intense. Job is presented as the type of modern man tested by his doubts almost to breaking and the chorus that interrogates him embodies the terror in his aloneness. One feels the wind howling at his naked flesh. And the play leads inexorably to the characteristic Wojtyla denouement the divine whisper Be not afraid. Later as Pope it would be his most-repeated message whether in private audiences or to the individuals within very large crowds: be not afraid of anybody whether Nazis or Communists or other bogeymen but also not afraid of your own soul and of the emptiness you encounter. Take courage and make a stand. Refuse to lie to anyone and especially to yourself. "Stand in Christ love and be damned!" In the whole superstar world of the media what other public figure has uttered this message? It was Mother Teresa. And was it any surprise the message eluded every attempt at destructive paraphrase and analysis breaking through the gauntlet of cynicism and resounding with that vibrant daring masculinity with which Wojtyla hooked every phrase. Again one thinks of Churchill - another man who was unafraid. As a poet Wojtyla was likewise a dramatic writer his poems long and often breaking into voices as dialogue or remixing into spoken choral effects. The dominant rhythm is of the Psalter pausing but never stopping riding on - half-sung half-spoken. He was in the business of raising words from the dead and blowing the straw away from them. His major poetical works the Meditation on Death The Quarry and Profiles of a Cyrenean have a narrative power that is missing from almost all contemporary verse; they are epic and flowing not chattering and lyrical. Few modern writers in any genre are so at home in verse so unproselike in their movements. As philosopher and theologian Wojtyla is thrilling. There is a poetical thrust there is no dawdling and self-consciousness. Real issues are always kept in view not white stags; and the chase is from many angles. Like a sturdy mountaineer he sets a pace that is hard to keep up with though he shouts encouragement from the next ridge. His turns are never what you quite expect it is vista after unimagined vista. In his book Sources of Renewal written out of his experience as delegate to the Second Vatican Council and forming an exhilarating commentary on it one sees him pushing ahead - half-plan and half-inspiration looking forward to a Church that will be unafraid of modernity that will be comfortable in its vocation to a much-altered world. It is impossible to pin him down whether latter-day traditionalist or old-fashioned Church liberal; he is consistently both. His later implacable hostility towards the various kinds of "liberation theology" was not based on fear of novelty or experiment - he could be playful himself. He opposed the radical priests because they had ceased to be fully Christian because they were creating obstacles to Christian faith by elevating material aspirations above spiritual ones and economic class above the individual soul; and finally because they tortured the language and used words with less than their full meanings. He was against them he repeatedly asserted not because they were modern but because they were wrong about Christ. His immediate predecessors had avoided conflict by giving heterodox preachers a wider and wider berth; Wojtyla was unafraid of confrontation. He not only fired them but explained why he was doing so with a sureness that in retrospect seems more and more astounding. In cases such as those of the Swiss "freethinker" Hans Kung or the Dutchman E. Schillebeeckx he was at pains to relocate their thinking outside the official Church yet he did not excommunicate. Wojtyla had read both men with attention. And with something like mischief he liked to quote Kung in particular selectively with approval. He did not deny them the right to teach only the right to claim the authority of the Church for their teaching. On the level of pure politics at the meeting of East and West Wojtyla was a much greater warrior. He knew communism from the inside and in his dealings with the authorities he fought for his territory like a shrewish peasant - instructing his diplomats never to give an inch lest the Communists take it as a sign of weakness. Yet he opened secret channels and established a network of direct contacts with Communist leaders so effective that Western statesmen often turned to him for help. The secret history of our time cannot yet be written; most documents remain hidden and most lips are still sealed. But when the doors eventually open it is likely we will see Wojtyla played a large role perhaps the largest role of any individual in the events of 1989. No less an insider than Mikhail Gorbachev has given the Pope credit for the fall of the Berlin Wall; at the least it is clear Gorbachev was in awe of him. That the Catholic Church has spread like wildfire through what was once the monolithically Orthodox world of the Eastern Slavs is a testimony to the success of his many interventions. The Church's record with the Nazis was mixed and not entirely edifying; but under Wojtyla against communism it made a very effective stand beginning with the launch of the Solidarity union in Poland which according again to the source was as much the creation of Wojtyla as of Lech Walesa. It is Walesa who remembers the Pope taught him tactics and in our North American phrase ran interference as the Solidarity movement gathered speed. While several books have been written expressing outrage at the Pope's conspicuous success as a politician (God's Politician is a typical title) and several more have been directed at the murky world of Vatican banking and finance - desperate juggling is not always avoidable for an organization that may have huge revenues but even huger costs and which can never declare bankruptcy - the truth is unambiguous. No one ever seriously doubted the sincerity of Wojtyla's vocation or the integrity of his faith. That a man could have been at once so attuned to the eternal and to the diurnal is ground for much hope. He set an example for how to hold power. If one believes in the Incarnation one must necessarily believe that God works in time in history; that as bad as things may look His Church will always somehow survive. It may be reduced as it was several times in the distant past almost to nothing. There were times in the early centuries when members of Gnostic and other heretical sects so far outnumbered catholic orthodox believers that it seemed they must prevail. And times when the Roman Catholic Church fell into such bad hands that it seemed it ought not to prevail. Somehow it recovered. Christians and religious of all persuasions should give thanks for the blessing of this exceptional man. "Papists" and Protestants alike should be grateful the world we share has been made richer and better. More than any living teacher of doctrine and faith Wojtyla brought Christian witness before the minds of many millions of people. He expounded a contemporary faith in his words and in his person a faith equal to every challenge of our age; yet a faith profoundly rooted in the rock of St. Peter. I think that we have seen the reign of one of the greatest Popes; one who brought the second Christian millennium to an unexpectedly hopeful close; one whose work in this world is not yet fully visible. I think that in Karol Wojtyla Pope John Paul II we have seen an example of God's amazing grace. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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