Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (65 page)

John Paul’s last years were dogged by inexorably advancing illness which reduced the former athlete to a painfully stooped and frail figure. Parkinson’s disease froze his charismatic face into an immobile mask incapable of smiling: his left hand trembled uncontrollably. He refused to be defeated. Despite increasingly explicit speculation in the media about the possibility of a papal resignation, he soldiered on, permitting no letup in the gruelling regime of roving evangelist he had evolved for himself. The international trips went on, 104 by the time of his death, to 130 countries, covering more than a million miles, every trip a punishing round of receptions, mass-meetings and liturgies. Some, like that to Castro’s Cuba in January 1998, were of major international significance: a deal which helped Cuba in its efforts to lift the American-led blockade against it, and which, from the pope’s point of view, gave him an opportunity to secure new freedoms for the Cuban church and to carry his unswerving campaign for religious and human liberties into the last outpost of Soviet-style Communism in the West (Wojtyla secured from Castro the release of 200 political prisoners). Kept on his feet by injections administered in the sacristy before long ceremonies, the ageing pope was often visibly exhausted, stunned or dozing as his illness overcame him, yet capable of summoning his strength in astonishing returns of the old magic. The Bimillennial Holy-Year 2000 was a series of such surprises: Wojtyla drew a flood of pilgrims to Rome, and packed the year with farreaching initiatives, like the Day of Pardon he presided over, brushing aside more cautious counsels in the Vatican, at the start of Lent in March 2000. In the course of this ceremony in St Peter’s, designed to initiate a ‘Purification of Memory’ for the Church in the Third Millennium, he solemnly acknowledged and apologized for the Catholic Church’s past sins against human and religious freedoms, against the dignity of women,
against the Jews. He reiterated this public act of repentance during an historic visit to the Holy Land later the same month, in an eloquent address at the Yad Vashem memorial for the dead of the Shoah, and, even more touchingly, when the stooped and trembling old man inserted into a crevice in the Wailing Wail a prayer of penitence for Christian sins against the Jews. The Holy Year had begun too, with spectacular gestures, notably the ceremony for the opening of the Holy Doors at St Paul’s outside the walls in January when Wojtyla was assisted in swinging back the door by the Protestant evangelical Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, an ecumenical gesture unimaginable in any previous pontificate, and a testimony to Wojtyla’s continuing ability to draw imaginative and generous responses from other Christian leaders.

He was to continue such gestures after the Holy Year had ended, for example in his remarkable visit to Greece in May 2001, which initially evoked a storm of protest from Orthodox ecclesiastics, but in the course of which the pope simply and humbly apologized before the Archbishop of Athens for Roman Catholic sins against the Orthodox churches, especially the Sack of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, an episode which for many Orthodox epitomized the evils of Latin Christendom. Wojtyla’s trip in June that year to the Ukraine, where historic tensions between the Orthodox Church and the five million Byzantinerite Catholics had worsened since the collapse of Communism, heartened the Catholic faithful there, but was less successful ecumenically.

In these last journeyings the pope’s frailty itself became an instrument of his mission, almost a weapon, a reproach to his opponents and an eloquent sign of the total dedication and abandonment to the will of God which he saw as the core of the Christian and above all the priestly life. But it was also a source of anxiety to many in the Church, who admired Wojtyla’s courage and fidelity, but who feared that his growing weakness left control of the central administration of the Church in the hands of the Vatican bureaucracy. Always on the move, he had never given much attention to administrative detail or Church structures, leaving such things largely to his staff. The lack of concern for detail was evident in the new procedures he authorized in 1996 for future papal conclaves, which made provision for the abandonment of the traditional two-thirds majority in the event of deadlock, and permitted election by a simple majority. Many viewed such a change as placing a weapon in the hands of any well-organized faction determined to impose a particular candidate rather than work for consensus, and thus a recipe for disaster. A more experienced
papal administrator would never have agreed to it. In his old age, the authority of the Vatican Congregations grew, above all that of Cardinal Ratzinger’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, always the single most influential Vatican department and now, rightly or wrongly, widely perceived as empire-building. A case in point was the publication by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in September 2000 of a declaration on the unity and universality of Christianity,
Dominus Iesus.
Markedly different in tone and rhetorical impact from
Ut Unum Sint
, the pope’s own encyclical on this subject,
Dominus Iesus
was an emphatic assertion not merely of the centrality of Christ for salvation, but of the imperfection and incompleteness of all other religions. Within Christianity, it insisted on the centrality of the Roman Catholic Church. A ‘note’ on the usage ‘sister churches’ seemed to many to be designed to reverse a trend inaugurated by Paul VI, by forbidding the application of the phrase to the Church of England and other churches of the Reformation.

This document was widely understood as a restorationist attempt to halt creeping relativism in the Catholic Church’s relations with other churches and other faiths. It was issued, however, without prior consultation with the two Vatican bodies charged with direct responsibility for Ecumenism and inter-faith dialogue, and was accordingly resented. Cardinal Walter Kasper, head of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity considered the document ecumenically disastrous, and issued a statement explaining and correcting its emphases: he described it as ‘perhaps too densely written’, a phrase which in Vatican-speak was as near to a howl of protest as protocol allowed. Kasper later let it be known that when he went to the pope with a file full of protests about
Dominus Jesus
from spokesmen and leaders of the other Christian churches, Papa Wojtyla seemed uncertain of the exact content of the document. The implication was clear: the pope was no longer in charge of major statements and policy decisions issued under his authority.

John Paul II’s pontificate, the longest since Pius IX and the second longest in history, will also be judged one of the most momentous, in which a pope not only once more reasserted papal control of the Church, and thereby sought to call a halt to the decentralizing initiated as a result of the Second Vatican Council, but in which the pope, long since a marginal figure in the world of
realpolitik
, once more played a major role in world history, and the downfall of Soviet Communism. John Paul’s own contradictions defied easy categorizations. Passionately committed to the freedom and integrity of the human person, he was the twentieth century’s
most effective ambassador for such freedoms, setting his own country on a path to liberation and thereby helping trigger the collapse of the Soviet empire. Two of his major encyclicals,
Veritatis Splendor
and
Fides et Ratio
, celebrate the ability of the free human mind to grasp fundamental truth and to discern the will of God which is also the fulfilment of human nature. Yet under his rule, the last quarter of the twentieth century saw a revived authoritarianism in the Catholic Church, in which, in the judgement of many, theological exploration was needlessly outlawed or prematurely constrained. Passionately committed to reconciliation with the Orthodox, his pontificate saw an expansion of Catholi cism within the former Soviet Union which outraged Orthodox leaders and hardened the ancient suspicions he so painfully and sincerely laboured to dispel. This Polish pope did more than any single individual in the whole history of Christianity to reconcile Jews and Christians and to remove the ancient stain of anti-Semitism from the Christian imagination: his visits to the Roman synagogue and above all to the Holy Land in 2000, and his repeated expressions of penitence for Christian anti-Semitism, were imaginative gestures whose full implications and consequences have yet to appear. Yet he canonized Maximillian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan who voluntarily took the place of a married man in a Nazi concentration camp death cell, but who had edited an anti-Semitic paper between the Wars. Wojtyla also canonized Edith Stein, the Jewish convert to Catholicism who became a Carmelite nun and died because she was a Jew in Auschwitz in 1942. The pope saw Stein as a reconciling figure. Jews saw her as an emblem of proselytization and, as in the case of Kolbe, an attempt to annex the Shoah for Catholicism. Wojtyla was not deflected from his purpose, and despite protests both canonizations went ahead.

Wojtyla’s dying was as magnificent as anything in his life. In the summer of 2004 he visited the international shrine of Lourdes. Visits to the national shrines of the Virgin were a routine feature of his apostolic journeys, but now he came to the greatest of all the shrines of Catholicism, as he himself declared, less as pope than as a sick and ailing pilgrim. His increasing immobility was both moving, and painful to watch: praying at the grotto of the apparition, he slumped forward and could not raise himself, manifestly a dying man. Over the next six months speculation about resignation or what emergency measures might be put in place if the pope were to become mentally incapable, were rampant. In February 2005 he was rushed to the Gemelli hospital in Rome with a respiratory infection which made a tracheotomy necessary: the world’s most
impassioned talker was now struck dumb. Still the crowds gathered, and still he struggled to greet them. Back in the Vatican, he was unable to carry out the demanding ceremonies of Holy Week: for the first time in the twenty-seven year whirlwind of his pontificate, someone else (Cardinal Ratzinger) led the meditations on the stations of the Cross in the Coliseum on Good Friday. On Easter Sunday, the pope appeared at his Vatican window to bless the crowds and lead the midday prayer of the Angelus. A microphone was placed before him, but he struggled in vain to speak: the colossus was in chains. In the following week his condition suddenly worsened. Papa Wojtyla, the second longest-serving pope in history, died at 9.37 pm on Saturday 2 April.

His last spectacular crowd-pulling appearance now began. In the twelve hours after his death, 500,000 people flocked to St Peter’s square, and over the next week four million pilgrims, a million and a half of them from Poland, flooded into the city, queuing for up to sixteen hours at a time to file past his body. On the day of his funeral, more than a million mourners assembled in St Peter’s square and the other great squares of the city, where enormous TV screens had been placed. The funeral mass, presided over by Cardinal Ratzinger and attended by representatives of most of the world’s churches and by 140 leaders of non-Christian religions, as well as by 200 heads of state and diplomatic representatives including three Presidents of the USA, was relayed to an estimated two billion viewers round the world, making it the most watched event in history. The Prince of Wales postponed his wedding to Camilla Parker Bowles, scheduled for the same day, and attended the funeral. There was non-stop media coverage: the death of the pope, even more than his life, had become the greatest show on earth. Banners round the crowded Piazza San Pietro demanded peremptorily ‘Santo subito’ – ‘Canonize him at once.’ (It was said that the banners had been organized by the
Focolare
Movement.)

Wojtyla preached a craggy and at times uncomfortable Christianity, but he was neither a prude nor a pessimist. He was the first pope in history to write extensively about sex as a mirror of the life of the Godhead, even advocating that married lovers should seek orgasm together. His inaugural sermon had been a resounding affirmation of a Christian humanism, calling for a renewed world order in the light of the gospel: ‘open wide the doors for Christ. To his saving power open the boundaries of states, economic and political systems, the vast fields of culture,
civilisation and development. Do not be afraid. Christ knows what is in man. He alone knows it.’ There was nothing escapistly otherworldly about his message. Believing that the Christian Gospel illuminates politics and economics as well as individual morality, he translated theory into practice by his role in the liberation of Poland. He rejected Marxism not only for its practical consequences, but for its collectivist metaphysic, which he believed ‘degraded and pulverized the fundamental uniqueness of each human person.’ His own philosophy emphasized the supreme value of free and loving moral action, in which each person realizes their own individuality. But for him such action was never the freedom to invent oneself from scratch. True liberty and happiness came from grasping the divine reality which underlies the world – ‘the splendor of truth’ – and acting in harmony with it. Truth is the hard thing, a terrible joy, obedience to which runs counter to our own desire for security. But it joins us to Christ on the Cross, that figure in which true humanity, suffering humanity, is raised for all to see, a source of resurrection, but also of more authentic existence now.

He will be remembered for many things, not least for the way in which his charismatic and authoritarian personality halted and reversed the relativization of papal power, which had been one of the most marked and most apparently irreversible transformations effected by the Second Vatican Council. Virtually single-handedly, he placed the Papacy back at the centre of Catholicism. His long pontificate meant that he left behind him a hierarchy most of whose members he had appointed: he had elevated to the Cardinalate, for example, all but two of the 115 electors who were to choose his successor.

But his uncomfortable vision of the costly freedom of the Gospel is perhaps his most distinctive legacy. For all his openness to people of other faiths, he had utter confidence in the ancient teachings of Catholicism, certain that lives lived in accordance with them are the most richly human. His own excruciating perseverance in the face of crippling illness was a deliberate clinging to the cross, a witness to the nobility of suffering and the value of the weak whom society prefers to sideline. In his last years he endured publicly all the indignities and diminishments of the sick and aged, which he had once ministered to in others in a thousand encounters with the oppressed, the poor and the sick on those endless journeyings. Someone in his entourage, daunted by the sight of such sufferings, had once asked him if it made him weep. ‘Not on the
outside,’ said Wojtyla.