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A Global Champion Of All of Humanity - Seth Armus

In the quarter century of Pope John Paul II's papacy, three moments stand out for me.

First, his 1983 visit to Nicaragua, where Daniel Ortega's Sandinistas, having won over an element of the Catholic clergy, hoped John Paul could be manipulated into defending the government and their "popular" church.

Mistaking the pope's humanism for socialism, and accustomed to weak and corruptible Catholic leaders, Ortega attempted to turn a religious service into a Communist pep rally. The pope told him, in effect, to shut up and stop desecrating the mass. Guest of the Marxist Sandinistas, he was nonetheless the eternal messenger of Jesus.

The second occurred 10 years later, at World Youth Day in Colorado. Addressing a half-million young followers in what the press quickly dubbed a "Catholic Woodstock," the pope, after wallowing in mutual good-feeling, told the audience that America is too materialistic and selfish and, more pointedly, that all of our nation's great accomplishments will be meaningless if we continue permitting abortion.

And the final example is his personal outreach to Jews. He stopped those within his own Polish church who wished to "Christianize" the Holocaust, and he also prayed for forgiveness at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Memorial. He then angered many Jews by pushing for the canonization of Edith Stein, a woman murdered at Auschwitz for being a Jew, but whom some Catholics want to transform into a "Christian martyr."

These three instances contain the fundamental contradictions of John Paul's papacy: An instinctively political man, he resists political classification. A leader with a great instinct for freedom, he mistrusts any movement based on man. And, finally, though a deeply cultured European intellectual, he has consistently moved the Roman Catholic Church toward its ecstatic and medieval roots.

Tomorrow marks the 25th anniversary of the papacy of John Paul II, but even without this occasion, he has been on our minds. First, the announcement, from the highest Vatican sources, that the long-ailing pope is "in a bad way" permits us to assume that his appointment of conservative cardinals is in preparation for his succession.

Then, the Nobel Peace Prize, for which experts had favored him, again went elsewhere - meaning that the man who is inarguably one of the most important religious leaders of modern times was passed over, on what was likely his last chance. Missing the prize for which he is, if anything, overqualified, shows the gap between the most worldly pope since the Renaissance and European opinion.

But, without being a liberal, John Paul has fought for human dignity, standing down Communist suppression in Eastern Europe, Nicaragua and Cuba without ever once letting himself be turned into an apologist for capitalism.

He may have publicly scolded "liberation" theologians, but he just as publicly reproached American Catholics, who want to love this pope without accepting his uncompromising opposition to the three issues that separate him from them: birth control, male celibate priesthood and homosexuality. If a schism occurs, it will be over these issues.

John Paul II inherited a worldwide but European-dominated bureaucracy, and he has made a conscious effort to globalize it. Culturally he is a product of the West, but theologically he is aligned with the enthusiastic Mary-oriented worship of the Third World.

This pope sees that the future of Catholicism is in Latin America, Asia and Africa and recognizes that European and American Catholics, with their ever-declining church attendance and demands for liberal reforms, can undermine the church's global strategy.

In the pastoral world of John Paul, the most important challenge comes not from Italian atheists or American Unitarians, but from evangelical Protestantism and Islam and gestures of social reform that must be tempered by dedication to the unchanging principles of the church.

It's my sense that the pope's greatest fans, like his critics, choose to see only part of his papacy. David Brooks, the sober conservative columnist, wrote last Saturday in The New York Times that the pope was a champion of "democracy," a statement that, despite his anti-communism, is utterly indefensible.

In other articles, liberals credited the pope with being the man who "really ended the Cold War." Some of the same people who chortled at the notion of Ronald Reagan bringing down the Soviet empire seem to believe that John Paul did.

As a historian, I am wary of proclaiming about the legacy of a still-ruling pope. One need only remember Pius XII, a hero at the time of his death in 1958 who today is held in rather lower esteem. One wonders, in particular, about how history will regard preaching against condoms in AIDS-ravaged Africa.

But this much must be said: John Paul II's complex and gifted leadership has firmly redirected Catholicism and, for better or worse, it is his vision that will now guide it. He has championed the dignity of every human life and resisted the superficial with an honesty, fearlessness and finesse that we will not likely see again.

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A wonderful article worthy of a full posting!! - ConservativeStLouisGuy

In other articles, liberals credited the pope with being the man who "really ended the Cold War." Some of the same people who chortled at the notion of Ronald Reagan bringing down the Soviet empire seem to believe that John Paul did.

presidio9, I agree that this is a generally good article--but I my point in reply#4 to

From today's vantage point, the liberation of Eastern Europe and the discrediting of communism looks foreordained. But it certainly didn't look that way on October 16, 1978. Scarcely three years earlier Saigon had fallen to the North; a year later the Soviets would invade Afghanistan; Communist movements menaced Central America; and as [the anticommunist union] Solidarity grew in the Pope's native Poland so did the prospect of a Soviet invasion.

Roman Holiday
Wall Street Journal ^ | Thursday, October 16, 2003 | REVIEW & OUTLOOK

is not affected by it. The NY Newsday article doesn't begin to give the perspective that the WSJ piece does. A college student never exposed to the Cold War would get nothing of the serious nature of the threat of Communism in the years preceding his/her birth from the Newsday piece.