In
my last posting I mentioned my reservations about the timeliness of the double
canonization of Popes John XXIII and John Paul II. I fear that the canonization is not on the
respective merits of the two popes, but is a “too little, to late” attempt to
heal the growing potential schism in the Catholic Church between the extreme
left and extreme right wings. John XXIII
and John Paul II have each been mythologized to represent one or the other
polar end of the Catholic spectrum, but whether declaring them each to be
saints is a way to bring those two ends back into harmony and mutual
respect—well, I appreciate the effort but I don’t expect it to be
successful. To illustrate my point, one
of my friends mentioned that in his Baltimore Parish yesterday, a parish that
represents a far more liberal perspective than most, there was great to do
about John XXIII and no mention of John Paul.
On the other hand, the New York Times today mentioned a Brooklyn parish
where all the attention was given to John Paul with almost no note of the Pope
who called Vatican II. I know in my
parish, there were pictures of the two popes on Sunday bulletin and holy cards
with their pictures together distributed at the doors as people left, but no
mention in the homily or prayers of the canonization. And while people took the
holy cards, they just tended to put them in their pocket or their purse without
comment. For a lot of us
middle-of-the-roaders it was a non-event.
We take Vatican II for granted and, with all due respect, John XXIII and
John Paul II are, first and foremost, dead.
While their memory may still inspire us to some extent, their influence
is over for the 80% of the Church.
I
wrote in the previous posting that the John of history differs significantly
from the John of liberal mythology.
Almost all of the changes we associate with Vatican II were actually the
work of John’s successor, Paul VI—a far less appealing figure than the jovial
John, but a man who had a very clear vision of where and how to bring the
Church into the Modern World. This is
not to denigrate John—far from it. He
called the Council and he, much like the current Pope, was an
attitude-changer. He was a good man and
a devout man. I don’t see the “heroic
sanctity” in him that sainthood supposedly requires, but then I hardly have—or
had—access into the depths of his soul. And
perhaps I set the bar of sainthood too high—it is just that when one is used to
Thérèse of Lisieux, Francis of Assisi, Ignatius Loyola, John of the Cross, Rose
Duchesne, Bernard of Clairvaux etc, your expectations get rather high. But who knows?
If
John XXIII was a complex character about whom to write, John Paul is an
extremely thorny character to assess. I
was living in Rome when he died and when asked by a BBC commentator to give my
opinion of his reign, I quoted Dickens: “It was the best of times; it was the
worst of times.”
It
was the best of times. John Paul was a
rock star whose ability to hold tens of thousands enthralled was a powerful tool
for evangelization. You had to admire
the man—especially in his prime—not for what he did or said, but for his sheer
ability to capture your attention and compel you to give him a hearing. And then there was the role he played in the
collapse of international Marxism.
Stalin once asked “how many divisions does the pope have?” and the irony
is that it was this Pope who—according to Mikhail Gorbachev—was the principle
player in the collapse of the Soviet empire.
It
was the worst of times. When it came to
the internal administration of the Church, John Paul was both as rigid as the
most authoritarian autocrat and as unable to control his own bureaucracy as the
most clownish dictator. He never got his
Curia under control and the Curia took on a life of its own with petty
monsignors in Rome dictating their
preferences in liturgy, catechetics, religious life, ecumenics, and other
aspects of Church practice and doctrine to Archbishops and Bishops throughout
the world as if it were coming directly from the Chair of Peter. It led to a lot of confusion as one monsignor
would issue a directive contradicting the edict of prelate in another Vatican
dicastry. More seriously, the economic
scandals and the gross mishandling of the sexual abuse crisis seriously damaged
the Church. John Paul’s inability to
control the Curia was a serious set back to the progress of the Second Vatican
Council as the Roman Curia had always seen the Council’s plan for the Pope to
share power more laterally with his fellow bishops was a threat to their own
power, but the break down in collegiality can not be blamed on the Curia
alone. John Paul himself was determined
to keep Church authority centralized in Rome.
Moreover his paranoia about challenges to central authority made blind
loyalty to the papacy the sine qua non
qualification for new bishops. The
Vatican II Bishops who were not afraid to question everything were replaced
throughout the Church by mitered automatons who saw themselves not as heads of
the local Churches but as sycophantic lieutenants of the Roman
bureaucracy. This was extremely
demoralizing to those in the Church who had bought into the vision of the
Council.
Finally
it must be said that while John Paul was a man of unparalleled piety, piety
must not be confused with holiness. This
does not mean he was not a good pope—he was, in many ways, a great pope. But sainthood implies holiness and holiness
to a “heroic degree.” Few people possess
such holiness: which is somewhat the point of canonizing saints. The saints show the rest of us to what we
should aspire. They are the “Christian
Disciples Hall of Fame.” Just plain
every day virtue is not enough here. And
while John Paul was perhaps the most pious of recent popes, piety is not the
same as spirituality, much less holiness.
A good man; a great man—but not an unreservedly great pope nor—in my
opinion—a particularly imitable saint. Nonetheless,
they are canonized and hopefully their words and deeds while alive will have
much to say to future generations of Christians.
