Standing in St. Peter’s Square in the early evening of Oct. 16, 1978, I listened intently to the rolling Latin phrases booming out over loudspeakers, pronounced by the dean of the College of Cardinals: ” … great joy … we have a pope!”
Cheers, a pause, and then the name: “Carolus Wojtyla.” Wojtyla? People looked at one another in surprise, and a question flashed idiotically through my mind: Have they elected a Chinese pope?
Much has changed in the quarter-century since then. Now everybody knows who Cardinal Karol Wojtyla — Pope John Paul II — is.
Or do they? Even after 25 years, in fact, it appears that many people do not understand John Paul nearly as well as some may think.
The progressives’ line on him is that he is an authoritarian reactionary. Writer Garry Wills, viewing the pontificate from the perspective of his brand of weary liberalism, speaks of the “rigidity” of Church leadership under John Paul. Here is the myopia of the Catholic left.
But the view isn’t always a whole lot clearer over on the right. Here people commonly hail the orthodoxy — by which many seem to mean doctrinal predictability — of John Paul.
In doing so, they tend to ignore his boldest innovations in substance and style, treating elements of his moral radicalism with which they disagree with embarrassed silence or a patronizing shrug. A good recent example was the dismissal by Catholic neoconservatives of John Paul’s opposition to the Iraq war.
Summing him up in a few words — or even many — is admittedly risky. For this is indeed a highly complex man whom simple tags like “liberal” and “conservative” just don’t fit.
For instance: Is the pope who, to advance the cause of Christian unity, invited non-Catholic churchmen to enter into a dialogue about new ways of exercising papal primacy a conservative? (John Paul did this in 1995.) It’s impossible to imagine any pope before him doing that — or any pope from now on doing less.
Yet who would care to argue that the pope who insists on the truth of the Church’s teaching against contraception and rejects the idea of ordaining women as priests or recognizing homosexual unions as marriages is a liberal?
At times, John Paul seems almost to go out of his way to leave the instant labelers talking to themselves. Take his pro-life encyclical Evangelium Vitae, which condemns not only abortion but, in virtually every circumstance imaginable, capital punishment. (Some people on the Catholic right are still choking on that.)
In this quarter-century John Paul has put his stamp on the papacy to a remarkable extent. To take one example: his journeys as pope (more than 100 outside Italy so far) have fashioned a model for projecting the Bishop of Rome as pastor of the universal Church that his successors are virtually certain to imitate to one degree or another.
It is not the highest praise of this pontificate at the quarter-century mark, but it is real praise nevertheless, to say that John Paul II has been and remains consistently interesting. The key to understanding him does not lie in ideology but something else.
In Novo Millennio Ineunte, his January, 2001, document for the start of the third millennium, he insists that the Church does not need a “new program.” Rather: “The program already exists. It is the plan found in the gospel and in the living tradition. … Ultimately, it has its center in Christ.” John Paul began telling us that in St. Peter’s square that evening 25 years ago. He’s still telling us today.
Russell Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington, D.C. You can email him at RShaw10290@aol.com.
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