4/4/2005

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

The Legacy of Pope John Paul II

A central figure of the second half of the 20^th century has died. Regardless of Pope John Paul’s substantive role in the history of the last century, the tortured path he had to tread among the destructive forces of that century dramatized the dangers and difficulties of that period of world history.

The political and economic chaos that followed the First World War and the collapse into worldwide economic depression seemed to suggest that to escape depression and decline, nations had to choose one or another totalitarian path, both perversely labeled “socialist”: A nationalist version pretending to be conservative that came to be symbolized by Hitler’s Nazis and a revolutionary version claiming to be populist that came to be called communism, symbolized by Stalin’s monstrous regime.

Growing up in Poland, Pope John Paul got a bitter taste of both. Ironically, the Roman Catholic Church that had long based much of its power on an intertwining of church and state ultimately was driven to oppose totalitarian regimes for the right reason, they squeeze the autonomous civic sector to near nothing, not only leaving little room for democracy, a political tradition with almost no roots in Catholicism, but also leaving no room for autonomous religious organizations. The latter Rome could not tolerate, leading it into a defiant, subversive role across Eastern Europe. Pope John Paul and other indigenous Catholic leaders helped carve out space for autonomous organizations within the suffocating totalitarian bureaucracy of Soviet dominated Eastern Europe. They are rightly seen as crafty heroes keeping nationalist and religious traditions alive that ultimately supported repeated popular anti-Soviet rebellions. Although initially brutally crushed by Soviet troops, as the decades passed, that Soviet response became less and less viable, leading, in the end to the collapse of the Soviet empire and the disintegration of the dysfunctional bureaucratic state capitalist system that we had named “communism.”

But John Paul was no revolutionary. What he and the Vatican wanted back was the autonomy to continue with its own medieval, hierarchical, male-dominated institutions. For both good and bad, his was basically an anti-modern campaign. That allowed him to criticize the excesses of capitalism and consumerism while also helping to bring down communism. It also meant that he held fast to a tradition that excludes women from any significant role in the Catholic Church and promotes the primitive view that sexual activity’s sole function is the procreation of children.

So the Catholic Church has remained the domain of unmarried men who are supposed to forsake all sexual thoughts and activity. Since human beings rarely find that possible, the results have been perverse in one way or another: secret mistresses, a safe refuge for homosexuals within an institution that nominally condemns homosexuality, and the scandal of the sexual abuse of children.

In the Western world the consequence of that anti-sexual, anti-woman tradition has been a systematic decline in the number of men who are willing to become priests, increasingly leaving Catholic parishes without religious leaders. In addition, most Catholics in the Western world have come to reject the Church’s teachings on the role of women, sexuality, birth control, divorce, and homosexuality. That, by itself, weakens the commitment of believers to the institutional church.

The result has been a dramatic, unplanned demographic change in the Catholic Church as its growth has come almost entirely in developing countries far removed from Europe and Rome. The high birth rates in South America, Africa, and South Eastern Asia now provide the bulk of the Church’s members. The next Pope may come from one of these nations. Although the Vatican bureaucracy and Catholic tradition continue to dominate the Church, it unavoidably is becoming less and less “Roman” and more and more cosmopolitan, at least in ethnic makeup.

This source of growth, however, has also allowed the Church to remain conservative and anti-modern since it is largely drawing on the traditional values of indigenous people. The Catholic Church, like its evangelical protestant and Islamist fundamentalist rivals, is providing Third-World people with a refuge as they try to make sense out of the collapse of traditional cultures, communities, and ways of life brought on by global capitalism’s continued expansion of its domain.

Whether this will be a stable base for the Roman Catholic Church is unclear. That will depend on whether the Church can serve its members’ spiritual needs in everyday life beyond the current crisis of their transition modernity. Given the Church’s ongoing failure on its own home turf in Europe and, now, North America, the long- term prospects do not look good. But our spiritual impulses are strong and permanent and this is an institution that has lasted two thousand years by periodically renewing itself. The spiritual impulses of its members may yet find a way around the Vatican’s top-down hierarchical structure and flow up from the grassroots to redirect the Church’s focus.

The Church in its origin was subversive, speaking to the needs of ordinary people with a message of love, forgiveness, and personal redemption. Maybe one day it will return to that tradition.