Fed Up With Francis

Well Pope Francis’s favorability ratings among Americans has taken a serious dip.  All I can say is that it is about time.  For two and a half years now everybody has been falling all over themselves over Francis and I have been asking myself: Are they listening to the man???  Really listening???

Well, ok, not everybody was falling all over him.  The Krazies spotted something wrong right from the first.  A Jesuit?!?  Not a good sign!  “Francis”—hmmm, a break with tradition, shoulda been a Pius or an Alexander.   And where is the papal folderol that we had grown used to again???  You know, the fur-trimmed cape, the floppy Santa-hat, the ruby-reds on his feet???  But the regular joes liked it: living simply, eating in the cafeteria with the staff, the used car to get back and forth to the office.  “A poor Church for the poor”—good rhetoric, clever marketing.  But there were a few more who saw the problem: without the fancy shoes and living on the palace, he becomes just another priest doing his job.  I mean he had might as well just get a bicycle to ride around like the Queen of Holland.  Michael Voris was first to sound the blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of a Jesuit claiming to be Pope when the real Pope is still alive.  Now that Mother A. is incapacitated, thank heavens we have Michael Voris to be our infallible guide when the magisterium fails.   

And then there was “who am I to judge.”  That alienated all the Pharisees.  I mean, if the Pope can’t judge then the rest of us can’t keep score.  This time it is Lions 0, Christians 1.  Game’s over.  Son of a Bitch called an “olly olly in free” for sinners.  Damn.  The I’m-holier-than-thou crowd still hasn’t forgiven him for that.  Poor Carol McKinley at Throw the Bums Out 2010, aka The Tenth Crusade, aka What the Pope Really Means, and Janet over at Restore D.C. Catholicism, and Mary Anne at Les Femmes: what will these women do if they can’t cast the first stone at anyone who doesn’t meet their criterion for worthy reception of Holy Communion.  If we don’t get back on track, next thing you know prostitutes and tax-collectors will be entering the Kingdom of Heaven before us. 

But despite all this, still Francis managed to hold on to the vast majority of Catholics.  Only the spiritually elite were seeing it.   Most of us weren’t interesting in sitting in judgment anyway, and most of us liked the Pope being a bit down at the heels after the previous Pope’s somewhat of a dowager’s penchant for damask and old lace.  And all that Swiss Guard, and Gentlemen of His Holiness, and stamping of feet and saluting of soldiers and thrones and things stand in somewhat dramatic contrast to the plain hard wood of the Cross.  The gilded crucifix thing used to work; doesn’t anymore.  So we could live with this guy: we liked it actually.  But then he began to move from the theatrical to the everyday and that increasingly made us uncomfortable. Of course before we run-of-the-mill Catholics realized we were being hoodwinked by this somewhat commonplace excuse for a pope, there was the famous Father Hunwicke, a refugee from women-priested Anglicanism who has been appalled at Francis’ disdain for the pontifical; but then the good Father is a subject of her Britannic Majesty and so can’t imagine life beyond the fantasy realm of Queens and palaces.  And our own America presbyter vagans, Father Z, another convert, has been beside himself about the Pope’s everyday style.  Why did these people become Catholics anyway: it certainly wasn’t the Gospel.  What did you go out into the desert to see?  A pope dressed in fine clothes?  Those who wear elegant clothes and live luxuriously are found in palaces.    If you don’t like a down-at-the-heels Jesuit from Buenos Aires, you certainly aren’t going to be happy with a carpenter from Nazareth. 

But then it began to get a little to hot-in-the-kitchen for the rest of us.  Frankly, when it comes to the immigrant thing, a lot of us want Donald Trump for Pope.  I mean if this Francis fellow wants to ramble on about Africans swimming ashore at Lampedusa, who cares?  Let the I-talians deal with their own problems, but when he starts talking about those Latino types climbing over our border wall with their diseases and their penchant for drugs and rape and violence, well, he should stick to things he knows about. 

And then it only got worse.  He won’t pontificate at the Traditional-Latin-Mass-of-All-Ages-and-Everywhere-Like-Jesus-did-at-the-Last-Supper (you know when he gave the Apostles Holy Communion—in one kind—on the tongue as they knelt around the table), but he’ll pontificate about Climate Change and how he thinks capitalism is ruining the earth.  He should stick to faith and morals.  In this age of abortion and rampant birth control and same-sex marriage any pope has more than enough to keep him busy without interfering with fracking and strip-mining and deforestation and human trafficking.  I don’t go to Church to hear about this world; I go to hear about the next world.  I mean, we are going to be in heaven (or hell) a long time; much longer than we will live on this earth.  So who cares about this world.  God gave it to us to dominate so strip ‘er bare and make what money you can doing so.  There’s no sin in being rich.  Jesus endorsed trickle-down economics when he told us about how that poor fellow, what was his name?  Lazarus?  How he used to eat the crumbs from the rich man’s table.  We need to hear more about that—what was it that Ronald Reagan said: when enough crumbs fall all boats rise.  No, this Francis fellow will destroy America as we know it.   He’s got to go.  Never trust a Pope who wears black shoes; he isn’t the real McCoy.  

Bazinga.  

Politics and Rite

Archbishop Romero 

receives a sack of beans

 at the presentation of the 

gifts at Mass 

Yesterday, just to have something to post, I grabbed the famous quote of Pope John Paul about the failure of “trickle-down economics” to bring about greater justice and inclusiveness to our world-wide human community.  (It hasn’t worked well here in the U.S. either.)  I entitled the post: a short musing to keep this liturgical thing in context.  Aaron replied “I see what you did there.”  Well, it wasn’t all that subtle and nor was it meant to be, but I am glad that someone picked up on it.

You see, Liturgy is a highly political thing.  A few months ago I received this comment to my posting of March 12 this year:

 I have always believed that the most subversive product of the conciliar reform was the Lectionary and Pope Francis has proved my point. While conciliar documents and papal encyclicals have their value -- though go, as you say, mostly unread, much less acted upon -- it is the broad, daily exposure to the Scriptures, and the Gospels in particular that are likely to rankle the conservative mindset even more. To wit, the daily Domus homilies by the pope. There has been nothing more offensive to the wingnuts than the almost daily harangue against them based straightforwardly and without varnish on the day's readings. I have always been amazed at how the worst of right wing Republicans and Katholic Krazies of my acquaintance can attend daily Mass and retain their political and religious views when they hear, over and over again, the diatribes against pharasaic religion, the prophetic denunciations against social injustice, the narratives of divine mercy, and the pauline invective against religion grounded in mere tradition and works righteousness. All of this has been the subject of Francis' daily preaching and it has driven them to utter distraction. This is also why, I believe, they are so enamored of the "Extraordinary Form" -- it effectively shields them from such uncomfortable exposure to the Bible behind clouds of incense, the cover of a foreign language, the distraction of rubrical obsessions and the comparative paucity of reading from Scripture.

It is an old axiom in our Catholic tradition that if you want to change what people believe change the way the pray.  (Lex orandi, lex credendi)  The Novus Ordo has been extremely effective in raising the Catholic social consciousness for several reasons.

1.   The direct participatory access to the liturgy of the current rite vs. the pre-conciliar rites changes the hierarchal self-expression of the Church

2.   as you cite—the direct exposure to the Scripture, read in one’s own language, from a more widely inclusive lectionary, and preached on a daily basis.

3.   The integration of the horizontal and vertical dimension of our faith with a shared awareness of the Presence of God and the presence of our neighbors.

4.   The move away from monarchial models of worship and environment for simpler, plainer vestments, vessels, décor.

5.   The inclusion of new music that not only expressed our relationship to God, but to each other and often emphasizes the needs of the poor or the special place in God’s care which is given to the poor. 

6.   A church architecture that often places the altar in the midst of the assembly and thus emphasizes not only our common participation but our personal responsibility to God 

I can’t help but think that much of the opposition to the current Liturgy isn’t motivated by a desire to preserve the socio-economic and political status quo. When I read blogs like Rorate Caeli or Father Z’s Blog I cannot but notice the political undertones (admittedly no stronger than the political undertones readers find in my blog).  I don’t think Pope Benedict realized the political impact the liturgy was taking in his pontificate, but I do think that Pope Francis is far more savvy about the relationship between cult and politics.  (We expect Jesuits to be savvy, even well, Jesuitical.)  And I think that much of the opposition to Francis and the protests against his style of liturgy (and his style of papacy) is in fact a protest against the shift to the left on highly politicized issues in which he has sunk the pontifical dentures.  The place of immigrants is one of these issues; the environment is another; income inequality is a third.  Certainly the projected beatification (and possible canonization) of Archbishop Romero has generated a flood of Internet complaints.  And now Dom Helder  (“When I feed the poor you call me a saint; when I ask you why they are poor you call me a communist”) Camara is being considered for posthumous promotion to the dismay of those whose model for sainthood is the late great 40^th POTUS.  And then of course there is our dear friend in Malta who from his liturgical style seems to be waging a campaign to be elected to fill the slippers of the late Queen Mother.  Unfortunately for him it is not an elected position. When you see how at home he is at the Palace in Gricigliano he would be so good at it.

What May Be Francis' Most Dramatic Break With Tradition

Rumors are flying around that when Pope Francis comes to the United States in October he will continue on to El Salvador where he will canonize Archbishop Oscar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador who was murdered by  an assassin from the American backed Salvadoran military in 1980.  The interesting aspects of this canonization is that Romero has not yet been beatified—the normal preliminary step to sainthood—and there as yet no approved miracles to testify to his sainthood. 

Romero was born on August 15, 1917 to carpenter Santos Romero and his wife, Guadalupe de Jésus Galdámez in Ciudad Barrios, El Salvador.  He was one of 8 children. The family does not seem to have particularly devout as the child was not baptized for 20 months after his birth, yet Oscar himself was drawn to the churches in town even as a very young child.   There were only three years of formal schooling available to him but he was tutored by a local teacher and at age 13 went off to a high-school seminary.  His father, a practical man, had wanted him to be a carpenter and the boy showed promise in that trade, but wanted to be a priest.  His intelligence was noticed in the seminary and he was eventually sent to Rome for theological studies and he was ordained in Rome on April 4, 1942.  World War II was raging at the time and on his way back to El Salvador, Father Romero and his companion, Father Valladares were imprisoned in Cuba as they were coming from Italy, then an Axis power.   He was soon repatriated and took up pastoral work in his native region in eastern El Salvador. 

Romero was by nature a conservative and a pious man.  He did what for the time and place were some innovative things such as establish Alcoholics Anonymous groups, but by and large he was given to supporting the traditional devotions and pieties of the Salvadoran peasants. 

El Salvador had from the time of its independence from Spain been controlled by an oligarchy sometimes called “The Fourteen Families.”  (There were, in fact, more families than fourteen, though they were all inter-related through marriages and had common interest.)  These were the great landowners of Spanish blood.  Their children were sent to Cuba or Mexico or even to Spain and other European countries for education.  They lived on large estates farmed by peasants of Native American or mixed blood.  After independence their cash crop was indigo from which an expensive blue dye is produced, but by the latter part of the nineteenth century the economy had switched to coffee production.  90% of the land was owned by this small number of wealthy families.  The Constitution was written to give these families a majority of seats in the national assembly and they—or their client families—held the officer positions in the military.  The military controlled the government by a series of dictatorships from 1931 until 1979.  A 1932 peasant rebellion led by Farabundo Martí was brutally suppressed with the murder of over 40,000 Salvadoran peasants.  In 1979 the government of General Carlos Humberto Romero Mena was overthrown by a conservative but reformist military junta that realized unless there was some economic and land reform the situation in El Salvador would be untenable and the country would be vulnerable to an extreme left-wing (read Marxist) power-grab.  The American government under President Carter, and later President Reagan, supported to the Junta, while Cuba and more left-wing governments supported the FLMN  (Farabundo Martí Liberation National Front) rebels.  This led to a violent civil war.  In an attempt to suppress the rebels the Salvadoran Army, under command of the Junta, was often responsible for indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, most notably the El Mozote Massacre in 1981. 

The teachings of the Catholic Church regarding a just social order—teachings rooted in the Encyclicals of Leo XIII, Pius XI, John XXIII, Paul VI and the decrees of the Second Vatican Council—were a powerful stimulus for the poor of El Salvador to seek social change and this left priests, nuns, and lay catechists vulnerable to attack by Junta forces who saw the work of the Church as supporting a more radical social change than they were prepared to make. 

Meanwhile in 1970 Romero had been named auxiliary to Archbishop Luis Chávez of San Salvador and four years later given his own diocese of Santiago de Mariá, a poor rural diocese.  In 1977 Paul VI named Romero to be Archbishop of San Salvador in succession to Archbishop Chávez who reached the mandatory retirement age of 75.

Romero was, as I said, a pious priest of a more conservative bent.  He was certainly no political activist.  But like many holy people, he did not limit himself to those with whom he agreed but had friends across the political and theological spectrum.  Among his closest friends was the Jesuit Rutilio Grande.  Grande worked among the peasants, catechizing them and raising their consciousness to understand that the sort of social dysfunction where wealth in concentrated in the hands of a few while others lack necessities is contrary to the Gospel and the Kingdom of God.  Rutilio Grande had huge influence among the peasantry and his message became a threat to the existing social order.  In a famous homily he declared

I am fully aware that very soon the Bible and the Gospels will not be allowed to cross the border. All that will reach us will be the covers, since all the pages are subversive—against sin, it is said. So that if Jesus crosses the border at Chalatenango, they will not allow him to enter. They would accuse him, the man-God ... of being an agitator, of being a Jewish foreigner, who confuses the people with exotic and foreign ideas, anti-democratic ideas, and i.e., against the minorities. Ideas against God, because this is a clan of Cain’s. Brothers, they would undoubtedly crucify him again. And they have said so.

On March 12, 1977, Grande and two lay associates travelling with him were ambushed and killed.  Romero heard of the murders and went at once to the church where the three bodies lay.  After celebrating Mass there, the Archbishop spent hours listening to the stories of the peasants who had gathered their to mourn.  Unable to sleep, he spent the night in prayer and underwent a deep personal conversion where he realized that the Church, if it were to be faithful, could not stand silently by while the poor were being driven ever deeper into the dirt but had to stand with them and for them.  He said that as he looked at the body of his friend,  he thought “If they have killed him for doing what he did, then I too have to walk the same path” The morning after the murders, Archbishop Romero announced that he, as Archbishop, would attend no government function until the murders had been investigated.  In a Catholic culture where the presence of the Archbishop gave a legitimacy to the government, this act of separation was seen as a repudiation of the government’s moral legitimacy and a severe blow to its credibility.  It was an invitation to reject government authority.  The following day Romero published the following statement

The true reason for [Grande's] death was his prophetic and pastoral efforts to raise the consciousness of the people throughout his parish. Father Grande, without offending and forcing himself upon his flock in the practice of their religion, was only slowly forming a genuine community of faith, hope and love among them, he was making them aware of their dignity as individuals, of their basic rights as words, his was an effort toward comprehensive human development. This post-Vatican Council ecclesiastical effort is certainly not agreeable to everyone, because it awakens the consciousness of the people. It is work that disturbs many; and to end it, it was necessary to liquidate its proponent. In our case, Father Rutilio Grande.

As if this was not sufficient aggravation to the government, Archbishop Romero next cancelled all Masses throughout his Archdiocese, instead summoning the faithful to a single outdoor Mass in San Salvador.  150 priests and over 100,000 faithful attended.  
to be continued

The John Paul Papacy, A Mixed Legacy III

I recently had a friend who reads this blog ask me about something that I had written in my first entry about the legacy of John Paul II and that is what is the connection between the more conservative bishops that were appointed to American sees during his pontificate and the establishment of diplomatic relations between Washington and the Holy See by the Reagan administration in 1984, so I want to revisit this topic in case I have not been clear.

There had been a long tradition of socially progressive bishops in the United States going back into the nineteenth century with such prelates as Cardinal James Gibbons, Archbishop John Ireland, and Bishop Dennis J. O’Connell.  They were succeeded in turn by other progressive leaders as Archbishop John T. McNicholas, O.P., Archbishop Bernard Sheil, and Bishop Francis Haas.  These were all men whose outlook had been shaped by Pope Leo XIII’s Encyclical Letter Rerum Novarum  and later by Pius XI’s Quadrigesimo Anno.   Furthermore, when Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, the head of the ‘Holy Office’—today’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—came down heavy on American Jesuit John Courtney Murray, even conservative prelates, and especially Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York, came to the defense of Murray’s harmonization of Catholic tradition with the American socio-economic-political outlook.  Spellman went so far as to defy Ottaviani and bring Murray (whom Ottaviani had formally “silenced”) to the Second Vatican Council as his personal theological advisor.  In the years before and during the second Vatican Council we saw a blooming of a theologically and socially progressive hierarchy with men like Cardinal Albert Meyer, Cardinal Joseph Ritter, Cardinal John Carberry, Cardinal Lawrence Sheehan, and Cardinal John Dearden, to name only the top ranking.  And then there was the eccentric and indomitable Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston who was willing to overthrow just about everything and break any rule to make the world spin along more happily. Blessed be his memory!   Even men who could be quite authoritarian in the governance of their dioceses—Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle of Washington or Cardinal John Cody of Chicago—championed the cause of minorities, of the poor, and of labor.  It was not entirely a happy situation as men like Cardinal James Francis McIntyre of Los Angeles and Archbishop Thomas Toolen resisted the Civil Rights Movement in particular, but the tide was against them.  In the years after Vatican II positions in the American hierarchy were increasingly filled with talented men of vision—Bishops Howard Hubbard of Albany, Matthew Clark of Rochester, John L. May of Saint Louis, Paul John Hallinan of Atlanta, William Borders of Baltimore, Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle, John R. Quinn of Oklahoma City and then San Francisco, and Roger Mahoney who would end up as Cardinal Archbishop of Los Angeles.  Many of these men—though not all—owed their advancement in part to Archbishop Jean Jadot, Apostolic Delegate to the United States from 1973-1980.   Jadot, a protégé of Cardinal Leo Suenens who had been a principal architect of the Second Vatican Council,  came from an aristocratic Belgian family and had exceptionally progressive views;  he significantly marked the American hierarchy by his choice of intelligent and articulate prelates who were committed to the social agenda laid out by Popes Leo XIII, Benedict XV, Pius XI, John XXIII, and Paul VI as well as by the Second Vatican Council.  Well, Suenens sowed the winds of change but it was Ronald Reagan who reaped the whirlwind.  In 1983 the American bishops—at that point a body heavily influenced, if not controlled, by Jadot protégés, published the Peace Pastoral: The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response.  It was a dramatic counter-voice to the ost-politik of President Reagan and virtually was a Catholic vote of no-confidence in Reagan foreign policy.  And that was only the one shoe.  The bishops were preparing a second pastoral letter that they would in fact issue in 1986: Economic Justice for All.   It would prove to be a critique of Republican economic theory that would clearly show that Reaganonmics is not compatible with Catholic magisterial teaching on distributive justice.   Meanwhile, Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle publicly declared that he would withhold half his taxes rather than allow money to go to the nuclear arms race.  This was a direct challenge to the Reagan administration. 

This split between the Catholic Church in the United States and Reagan policy—both regarding the Arms Race and Economics—threatened to undermine the joint efforts of John Paul and Ronald Reagan to destroy the hegemony of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe.  To keep abreast in the Arms Race, the Soviet Union had to pour its resources unstintingly into military expenditures with no room for developing a consumer economy.  Reagan and his advisors counted on this “breaking the bank” and on it fomenting unrest among the unhappy citizenries of Eastern Europe.  Meanwhile, for his part, the Pope was brandishing the sword of Polish nationalism and egging the population of his homeland on to demand a better life than the Polish government or its Soviet overseers could provide.  Marxisim in Eastern Europe was fighting a war on two fronts.  And it worked.  Poland fell and the dominoes followed.  But that was not until 1989.  In 1984 Ronald Reagan still had to figure out how to hold it together.  He did not want to fight a war on two fronts also—Communism in Eastern Europe and Catholics at home. 

The Holy See had long wanted full diplomatic relations with the Holy See.  When the Popes lost their temporal power in 1870, several predominately Catholic nations maintained ambassadorial ties.  The United States did not. In fact, Congress by law prohibited such diplomatic relations.  In the years between the loss of the Papal States and the restoration of Sovereignty with the Lateran Treaty, more nations gradually began to exchange ambassadors with the Holy See.  Each ambassador gave the Holy See more prestige and credibility in international affairs.  During World War II, President Roosevelt, unable to name an ambassador, sent Myron Taylor as a “personal representative” to the Vatican.  The Vatican proved to be a very important diplomatic post during World War II as representatives from various sides were posted there and it was one of the best—if not the best—channels of communication.  Nevertheless, the outcry from America Protestant groups about any sort of American governmental presences—no matter how unofficial—was so strong that it would not be possible for many years yet to have official ties at the ambassador level.  Periodically Presidents sent “personal representatives” but there was no standing mission.   By 1980 most world powers had established full diplomatic relations with the Papacy, but the Holy See always wanted the prestige of American recognition.  Ronald Reagan gave this in 1984.  As a Protestant himself, and as a not particularly religious man, he was in a good position to do so, but there was still a considerable public outcry and several legal challenges.  Nevertheless, President Reagan appointed William A. Wilson first ambassador to the Holy See.  He served until 1986 when he was succeeded by Frank Shakespeare. 

 “Nothing gets you  nothing” as Monsieur Thénardier likes to sing and while there is no public record of a deal, there is a definite change in the type of priest appointed to the episcopacy during and after the Reagan years.  The concerns moved from issues of social justice, peace, the economy, and the environment to more “in house” matters.  A nominee for the miter—or having a miter, for advancement—had to be explicitly opposed to the ordination of women.  He had to have not blotted his copybook on contraception.  He had to be clear on the Church’s teaching about abortion and same-sex relationships.  There is nothing wrong with making sure that a candidate for bishop adheres to Church teaching, but what was curious is that there were no such litmus tests when it came to the Church teaching on war, on capital punishment, on economic justice.  There was lots of wiggle room there.   The ‘80’ and ‘90’s saw the American hierarchy change drastically in its outlook.  They became far more establishment, some not bothering to conceal their open and uncritical preference for the Republican Party and its policies.  Meanwhile, priests, religious, and laity who were involved in the areas of maintaining Church teaching on social justice—labor relations, health issues, immigration and migrants, against the death-penalty, civil rights—found themselves unsupported by many of their bishops and priests.

The Pope Francis sort of bishop whose priority is the poor was becoming virtually unknown in the United States.  Prelates like Raymond Burke, Robert Morlino, Robert Finn, Edward Slattery, Michael Sheridan, Thomas Olmstead, Frank Dewane became more and more the face of the American Church.  Decked out in pre-conciliar finery and extending their beringed episcopal paw to be slobbered over by the faithful as they proceeded to the altar for a retro-Mass,  they were the epitome of the Tea Party at prayer. 

A few years ago I had a chance to sit and visit with Thomas Gumbleton, retired auxiliary of Detroit.  Bishop Gumbleton is the “last of the lefties”—named a bishop in the heady days after Vatican II and always an outspoken voice crying for Peace and for Justice, he was a thorn in the side of Presidents and Popes alike.  That is what prophets do.  I asked Bishop Gumbleton why there had been such a shift in the way the hierarchy saw things.  He didn’t follow my suspicions of a symbiotic relationship between John Paul’s papacy and Ronald Reagan’s administration.  His explanation was more simple.  He said “In my day, we bishops came from families where our fathers were bricklayers, or worked in a factory, or carried the mail.  Today, my brother bishops’ fathers were Doctors or Lawyers, or Businessmen.  They were raised to think that way.  That is the way their fathers thought.”  Ockham’s razor says that we should accept the simpler explanation and that would be Bishop Gumbleton’s.  Who am I to argue with Ockham, I am—after all—a medievalist.  But I still say, that we got the John Paul Bishops as part of an understanding between the Reagan White House and the Holy See to reach their mutual goal of bringing down the “Evil Empire.”   There are too many fingerprints to think the demise of American Catholic Progressivism was a natural death.  The Good News is, of course, that our whole Christian Faith is based on Resurrection and it does seem that we might be in store for a better cut of Episcopal Leadership.  As they like to say at those Tridentine Masses, Oremus.  

The John Paul Papacy: A Mixed Legacy

A statue in Gdansk, Poland, shows Pope John Paul
and President Ronald Reagan walking together as
joint architects of the collapse of the former Soviet
bloc.  

I mentioned in yesterday’s posting the “complex ambiguities of Pope John Paul’s papacy” and I want to clarify what I meant.  John Paul II was an extremely popular pope and in many circles his papacy is glossed over without careful examination as one of the brighter spots of the Church in the last century, but truth demands that a more critical look be taken and a more balanced appreciation be rendered. 

I was living in Rome in the final years of Pope John Paul’s papacy and was, in fact, in Saint Peter’s Square earlier in the afternoon of the day he died.  An interviewer from the BBC randomly picked me out of the crowd, knowing only that I was an English speaker, and asked to talk with me.  (When he found out that I am a professional historian and was a Romanista, I ended up being taken on by the BBC and several other networks as a commentator during the funeral of the Holy Father and the election and installation of Pope Benedict.)   The reporter asked me for my evaluation of the Holy Father’s reign and I answered by quoting Dickens: “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” 

It was the best of times in terms of John Pauls’ incredible ability to move world-wide audiences to be able to see possibilities for human betterment.   In particular it was the best of times because it marked the collapse of the Marxist ideology which had ensnared hundreds of millions of people in totalitarian regimes that could offer their citizens nothing worth having in this mundane sphere and no hope for the eternal sphere.  The remarkable events of his 1979, 1983, and 1987 visits to Poland chipped away at the first of the dominoes to fall.  John Paul’s battle cry was “Solidarity” by which he advanced the socio-economic-political idea—in contradistinction to both Marxist and capitalist ideologies—that members of society have a set of mutual responsibilities towards one another that require a collaboration in which those who have act to alleviate the distress of those who lack, not merely by relieving the needs but by creating just social structures that work to mutual benefit.  Such solidarity not only undermines the “class struggle” of Marxism but also the “income inequalities” of free market capitalism.  The Pope’s ideal of “Solidarity” was taken up by the Poles and became the battle cry to topple the Marxist regime there.  Unfortunately it has yet to be heard in the income-inequality nations of the West but Pope Francis is working to change that—much to Rush Limbaugh’s and Ken Lagone’s annoyance.  (You go, Francis.) 

It was no one less than Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Communist premier of the Soviet Union, who has said that Pope John Paul was the principal architect of the collapse of the Marxist dictatorships of the former Soviet Bloc.  But Pope John Paul is also credited with a significant role in bringing down the dictatorships in Paraguay, Haiti and Chile and there is no doubt that he was a major player in the arena of human rights in the second half of the twentieth century. 

John Paul was also remarkable in the strides the Catholic Church made in ecumenism during his pontificate.  His particular interest was with the Orthodox Churches of the East and while—and probably because of the Polish-Russian tensions arising from the stress being put on the Soviet Empire by John Paul in working for Polish autonomy—the Russian Orthodox Church was never brought into closer ties with Catholicism, John Paul made some remarkable progress with the other Churches of Orthodoxy.  More remarkable, however, was his subtle recognition of Anglicanism.  I remember seeing him come to the Holy Doors of the Pauline Basilica escorted on the one side by Metropolitan Athanasias of the Greek Orthodox Church and on the other by Archbishop George Carey of Canterbury.  Pope John Paul consistently treated the Archbishop of Canterbury on a par with the Orthodox.  While the Catholic Church still officially  has not recognized Anglican Orders, the protocols established by John Paul (and not later followed by Pope Benedict XVI) gave an implicit acceptance of Anglicanism.  A similar breakthrough came on October 5, 1991 when Pope John Paul celebrated Vespers with the Lutheran primates of Sweden and Finland and the Lutheran Bishop of Oslo.  All sat in copes and miters, the Bishop of Rome and his separated brother Bishops, in front of the papal altar in the Vatican Basilica.  Lex orandi, lex credendi:  liturgical praxis establishes the doctrine we hold in belief.  Without yet giving official recognition to the valid orders of these separated brethren, the Pope showed that we can begin to construct a path through the complex issues of restoring full unity to the Church.

In short, I think we can say that as far as “foreign policy” went, John Paul’s papacy was hugely successful.  As far as “domestic policy”: well, that is a different story. 

The internal governance of the Church in the papacy of John Paul II was a disaster.  While he was extremely popular personally, his teaching went unheeded by most Catholics.  During his funeral, while I was doing consulting for the BBC and other news outlets, I had the opportunity to speak with hundreds who had come to Rome (among the four million pilgrims who came to Rome for the funeral).  It was an overwhelmingly young audience—mostly in their twenties and thirties.  “Yes,” they assured me they “love this Pope.”  “He was a great Pope.”  “It is like losing a grandfather.”  “Do you agree with this Pope,” I asked “on homosexuality?”  “Do you follow his teaching on pre-marital sex?,” “On contraception?,” On marriage in the Church?”  The answer was overwhelmingly, “No—but we loved him.  We don’t agree with him, but we love him.” 

John Paul was without impact on the consciences of the vast majority of his followers—not only on contraception or same-sex relationships, but on the very issues where he found success in his program of smashing Marxism.   Westerners in general and Americans in particular cheered on his attacks on Marxism, but did they embrace his theory of “Solidarity?”  Nothing could be further from “Solidarity” than the Trickle Down Economics of the Reagan Presidency or the Thatcher Ministry.  To push his campaign against Communism to victory in the Soviet Bloc, John Paul formed a political alliance with the Reagan White House that compromised the papal integrity when it came to economic morality.  The symbiotic relationship of the Reagan administration and the John Paul Papacy resulted in the fact that the Catholic Church could hardly be believed in its call for economic justice.  The heritage of John XXIII and Mater et Magistra and Paul VI and Popolorum Progressio  was squandered and Catholicism became identified with the radical selfishness of Reaganomics. 

Furthermore, after the American Bishops’ pastoral letters on the nuclear arms race (The Challenge of Peace, 1983) and economic justice (Economic Justice for All, 1986) there was a very sharp change in the sort of men who were appointed to be bishops in the United States.  In 1984 the Reagan administration established formal diplomatic relations with the Holy See—something the Vatican had long sought but which had always met with much opposition in the United States from those non-Catholics who saw such relations as giving formal recognition to one religious body over others in violation of the American Constitution.  Such favors came at a price and that price was bishops who would not ruffle the political right.  The Social Justice wing of the Catholic Church in the United States was pushed more and more to the margins and the Jadot Bishops (those bishops appointed during the time Archbishop Jean Jadot was Apostolic Delegate, 1973-1980) who were the voice of “Vatican II” Catholicism melted into obscurity as the new breed of John Paul bishops replaced them.  The Church’s social activism –that is the Social Gospel—was more and more in the hands of brave and committed laity who felt cut-off from their own bishops who ignored the grave structural injustices in our society and “obsessed” (to use a current word) on select issues that reinforced the right-wing agenda and distracted the faithful from an integral approach to Christian moral life. 

John Paul paid a heavy price for selling out to the political right.  When he cried out against the Gulf Wars—I and II (1990-91 and 2003-2011), the American bishops did not echo the cry.  Far from it.  Editorials appeared in many Catholic diocesan newspapers on how these wars met the criterion for “just war.”  No, the focus remained on abortion and the rising “threat” of gay rights.  The fear was universal health care and the implications that would have for Catholic institutions.  Catholics were admonished for not falling in line behind their “shepherds” and a political agenda that was morally a very mixed bag.   “Cafeteria Catholics” were denounced for their selective agreement with Church policy, while those who accused them themselves were picky eaters at the magisterial table. 

In the end, John Paul left—as far as the American Church goes—a dispirited faithful who felt alienated from their bishops and caught in the crossfire of the culture wars that have been undermining the larger American society.  Is he John Paul the Great?  Only time will tell—this title has only been awarded to three popes so far, and it takes centuries before history grants it.  Will it do so for John Paul?  Hmm.   John Paul was an enigmatic Pope.  It was an ambiguous papacy.  It was the best of times and it was the worst of times.