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The dark face of the papacy
The Pope in Winter: The Dark Face of John Paul II’s Papacy
John Cornwell
Published by Penguin Viking, 2004
Hardback £20
Pope John Paul II enjoyed the spotlight on the
world stage. Mass media, modern travel and PR techniques were used to
promote his brand of Catholicism. Shown kissing the ground at airports
or wracked in pain in his final years were political acts. He also
polarised the Catholic church. At the time of his death, mainstream
media celebrated his role in directing mass revolt against Stalinism
down pro-capitalist channels. MANNY THAIN reviews a recent, critical
biography.
AMAZING SCENES ACCOMPANIED the long drawn out and
public death agony of Pope John Paul II, pronounced dead on 2 April
2005. He had reigned for 27 years, the second-longest serving pope in
history. In his last days, tens of thousands of people from all over the
world flocked to Saint Peter’s Square, Rome, the threshold of Vatican
City, the papal ‘state’. It was a testament to the enduring influence of
the Catholic church, established nearly 2,000 years ago. Several hundred
thousand turned up for the funeral. Two hundred world leaders attended,
including, for the first time, a US president.
To many, this live-and-direct celebrity death-watch
was inspirational. To others, it was macabre voyeurism. What is clear is
that it was a meticulously stage-managed final act in John Paul II’s
career as figurehead of the Catholic church, with which over a billion
people, one in six of the world’s population, identify themselves.
Shortly before his death, the latest in a long line
of biographies was published. As with much commentary on the papacy, The
Pope in Winter is written by a Catholic author. John Cornwell wishes to
see a modernised papacy capable of adapting to the fast pace of change
in the 21st century. His account is well researched and informative.
In the introduction, Cornwell raises his key
criticisms: "We have had a papacy in which a pope utters virtual heresy,
bishops and faithful are told they may not discuss women priesthood, a
curial cardinal teaches that condoms kill, prelates guilty of having
shielded paedophiles are honoured, and a US president exploits the
papacy as an election campaign stop". (page xiii) It is a critique of a
bureaucratic regime from someone who seeks its reform.
For Cornwell, the main theme was that John Paul II
was an authoritarian figure who concentrated power in a close-knit
clique around him, including Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope
Benedict XVI), Stanislaw Dziwicz (John Paul II’s secretary), Cardinal
Angelo Sodano (Vatican secretary of state), and Joaquin Navarro-Valls
(chief Vatican spin-doctor). They created a cult of personality, the
pope central and untouchable. Cornwell quotes the Polish correspondent
of the Catholic weekly, The Tablet: "To my knowledge no other public
figure has had so many statues erected in his lifetime, except Joseph
Stalin". (xvi)
John Paul II was born Karol Wojtyla in 1920 in
Wadowice, Poland. He was put to work in a quarry serving the German
military machine following the Nazi invasion in September 1939, became a
priest in 1946 and studied in Rome before teaching philosophy at Krakow
and Lublin universities.
Wojtyla was made a bishop in 1958, the same year
that Pope Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) died. Pius had ruled over a
centralised church and stood by in silence as Adolf Hitler’s fascist
regime killed six million Jews and ripped the heart out of Europe.
Fiercely anti-socialist, he backed the dictatorships in Portugal under
Oliveira Salazar and Spain under General Francisco Franco.
He was succeeded by John XXIII (Angelo Roncalli) who
attempted to modernise the church, organising a council of bishops – the
‘second Vatican council’ – which met October-December, 1962-65. The
council shook the Catholic edifice with calls for decentralisation and
more open discussion of church dogma. Wojtyla’s meteoric rise continued
when he became an archbishop in 1964, a cardinal in 1967.
To avoid potentially damaging splits, John XXIII
appointed a commission to assess the ban on contraception, first put in
place by Pius XI (Achille Ratti) in the 1930s. It found that the
church’s position "could not be sustained by reasoned argument". John
XXIII died in 1963, to be replaced by Paul VI (Giovanni Montini), who
re-enforced the ban in 1968 – a victory for the Vatican’s bureaucracy,
the curia.
Nonetheless, the council had a profound affect. The
liturgy was changed from Latin to the vernacular, the altar was turned
around so that priests faced the congregation at Mass for the first time
in centuries, and laypeople took on leadership roles. Priests and nuns
joined the anti-Vietnam war and civil rights struggles, and other social
movements.
Paul VI died in 1978, John Paul I (Albino Luciani)
replaced him but died 33 days later. The church was divided and in
crisis. Wojtyla was elected on 16 October, the first non-Italian pope
since 1522. According to Cornwell, his aim from the outset was "to take
the church by the scruff of the neck and restore order". (p62)
He was soon on the first of many international
trips, to Mexico City in January 1979. The visits were designed to
strengthen the influence of the Vatican – within the institution and in
the wider world. John Paul II visited around 120 countries, clocking up
over 500 million miles.
Cornwell sets the scene in Latin America: "There
were oppressive, reactionary regimes on the one hand and what John Paul
saw as clerical political activists inspired by Marxism-Leninism –
liberation theology – on the other". (p66) John Paul II had the latter
in his sights.
The proponents of liberation theology were, in the
main, poor priests and other religious people who witnessed the
destitution and deep inequalities in society and the brutality of the
military regimes. They were influenced by the continental tide of
revolutionary struggle, denouncing inequality and corruption from the
pulpits. Many paid with their lives.
When Archbishop Oscar Romero was gunned down in El
Salvador on 24 March 1980, John Paul II remained silent. Romero had
spoken out against oppression. The murder was organised from within the
ruling right-wing party. A bomb at Romero’s funeral killed a further 30
people.
The pope’s enforcer, Ratzinger – in 1981, appointed
head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly known
as the Inquisition) – silenced liberation theologians such as Leonardo
Boff from Brazil. John Paul II said he would not tolerate "priest
revolutionaries". Before becoming Vatican secretary of state, Sodano had
been papal nuncio (ambassador) in Chile where he ignored human rights
abuses under General Augusto Pinochet. The Vatican kept silent about
repression in Argentina. Four Catholic priests who joined the left-wing
Sandinista government – which came to power in Nicaragua in 1979 after
ousting Anastasio Somoza’s dictatorship – were excommunicated.
Poland
THIS ANTI-MARXIST campaign tied in with another
focus of the pope’s attention: the Stalinist states, above all, Poland.
In contrast to his trenchant criticisms of authoritarianism, Cornwell
falls into line with the triumphalist capitalist view prevalent after
the collapse of Stalinism, casting Wojtyla/John Paul II as the liberator
of the Eastern bloc.
All the Stalinist regimes were in various stages of
economic stagnation and social upheaval. Their ossified bureaucracies –
based on a top-down, centralised economic plan – had proved incapable of
developing dynamic modern economies. What was necessary was a political
revolution – replacing the corrupt bureaucracy with socialist democracy
and democratic workers’ control and management of the economy. In the
absence of revolutionary parties with sufficient support in the
developing workers’ movements, however, the states imploded, moving to
the restoration of gangster capitalism after 1989.
From the late 1960s, Poland was convulsed by
demonstrations, strikes and clashes with security forces. The epicentre
was the massive shipyard strikes in Gdansk out of which emerged an
independent union movement, NSZZ Solidarnosc (Independent Self-Governing
Union Solidarity), set up in September 1980. By the end of the year, it
organised ten million workers out of a workforce of 12.5 million.
Despite the lack of a clear socialist direction, far-reaching attempts
were made towards workers’ control. The rotten bureaucratic rule was
under threat. Czech and East German troops, under orders from their
Russian masters, deployed near the border.
John Paul II did, indeed, play a role, although this
was grossly exaggerated by capitalist commentators at the time of his
death. Nonetheless, the Vatican helped steer Solidarity in the direction
of supporting the restoration of capitalism. It consistently called for
calm at times of heightened social unrest, to restrain the workers. It
channelled up to $50 million to Solidarity, helping to reinforce
conservative elements in the movement – including Lech Walesa and the
intelligentsia around figures like Jacek Kuron (who started out on the
left) – against sections moving towards political revolution.
In October 1980, a conference of bishops declared
against action, to avoid ‘antagonising’ Moscow. Cardinal Stefan
Wyszynski warned of ‘serious consequences’ if a threatened general
strike went ahead on 31 March 1981. John Paul II sent the same message
from Rome. General Wojciech Jaruzelski’s military coup in December 1981
was backed by Archbishop Jozef Glemp. In short, instead of liberating
the Polish working class, the Vatican worked to ensure that it would
remain enslaved – under a restored capitalist system.
The church was in a particularly favourable position
to influence developments, as it is bound up with Polish national
identity. It had been a rallying point for centuries. In 1656, for
example, the icon of the Black Madonna at the Jasna Gora monastery had
even been proclaimed queen of Poland after a Swedish invasion had been
repulsed. The national network of churches meant that it became a means
of national expression against tsarist Russian rule, Nazi occupation and
Stalinist dictatorship.
This was seen in the reactions of Polish people when
John Paul II died. The Washington Post quoted Wojtek Wisniewski, aged 40
and unemployed: "I don’t go to church, I don’t believe in priests or in
God the way he is presented. But I believe in the pope. I love him. He
is a saint. He understands people like me and speaks to us". (1 April)
It was a common response. When Liverpool Football Club won the European
Championship last season, its Polish goalkeeper, Jerzy Dudek, dedicated
the victory to the memory of John Paul II.
In control
JOHN PAUL II clamped down on ‘dissident’ Catholics
in Europe. Local initiatives were stifled in the Netherlands,
Switzerland, Italy, Hungary and Ukraine. In 1989, the Cologne
Declaration criticising authoritarianism was signed by 163 German and
130 French theologians. The pope imposed an oath of obedience. In 1995,
the bishop of Evreux, Jacques Gaillot, who supported contraception, was
sent to Partenia in the Sahara Desert, which has not had a Catholic
community since the 5th century! A book about women priests by the
British nun, Sister Lavinia Byrne, was incinerated on the Vatican’s
orders.
The Vatican’s institutional longevity is used to
legitimise its theological teachings and authority, and boost its
prestige in the world. In reality, they have developed piecemeal over
centuries. For example, in the early years of Christianity, communities
elected their own priests. Only with the consolidation of centralised
power did the Vatican control the supply of priests. Celibacy was
introduced in 1139 to stop married priests handing down property donated
by the crown to their heirs. Papal infallibility was introduced at the
first Vatican council in 1870 under Pius IX.
Control freakery saturated every aspect of John Paul
II’s reign. It even extended beyond the grave. By the time he died, he
had hand-picked all but two of the cardinals eligible to elect his
successor. He also appointed bishops, leading to the charge that only
sycophantic clones were rewarded.
John Paul II’s reign was nearly one of the shortest
when, in Saint Peter’s Square on 13 May 1981, he was shot twice by
Mehmet Ali Agca, who many believe was backed by Bulgaria’s Stalinist
regime. One of the bullets went through his abdomen causing serious
injury. John Paul II linked his survival to the figure of the Virgin
Mary, as the date commemorates the time that Mary is said to have
appeared to three poor shepherd children in Fatima, Portugal, in 1917.
John Paul II claimed that the third ‘secret’ Mary is
said to have told the children was about the attempt on his life. One of
the bullets was placed in Mary’s crown at the shrine at Fatima when he
went there in 2000. The event was another exercise in religious power,
the message being that the pope had been saved by divine intervention to
carry out his mission.
Saint-making, canonisation, was central to John Paul
II. A Catholic saint is someone declared to be in heaven and worthy of
universal worship. A blessed is someone worthy of a local cult.
Declaring someone blessed, beatification, is a prerequisite for
canonisation. John Paul II canonised 482 and beatified 1,338 people,
more than all previous 260 popes combined.
One of many controversial canonisations was that of
Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer (1902-75), founder of the right-wing Opus
Dei in 1941. Opus Dei had nine members in General Franco’s cabinet.
Today, it has an estimated 80,000 members worldwide – including
influential politicians and business people – and 1,800 priests. John
Paul II and Opus Dei were allies against liberation theology and liberal
Catholicism, and he granted it the status of ‘personal prelature’,
allowing it to operate under the direction of the Vatican, free from
local, diocesan, control.
In 2000, John Paul II started the beatification of
Pius IX, architect of the first Vatican council. He had been brought in
as a substitute for Pius XII, ‘Hitler’s pope’, supposedly to placate
Jewish anger. In reality, Pius IX was the right-wing antidote to the
beatification of John XXIII, the ‘reformer’ of the second Vatican
council.
Sexual abuse
AT THE START of the new millennium, the papacy was
embroiled in a paedophile priests scandal. The main crisis was in the US
but many other countries were affected: 21 convictions for abuse against
minors in Britain, 23 convicted of rape and molestation of children in
France, 150 in Ireland. Italy, Austria, Spain, Argentina, Mexico,
Australia, Canada and several African countries were involved. In
Germany, church officials admitted to 47 cases of abuse (the true figure
was reckoned to be nearer 300).
The Catholic church in the US was being sued under
the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organisations Act, originally
introduced to deal with the Mafia. New Hampshire’s attorney general’s
office released 9,000 pages of documentation on how Catholic leaders had
known for years about sexual abuse but did nothing. By February 2004,
4,400 US Catholic priests had been "credibly accused" of attacking
11,000 minors over a 50-year period. Half of all bishops had
"systematically" covered up abuse.
In March 2002, the Vatican blamed the crisis on
"pan-sexuality and sexual licentiousness" in society. It also made clear
that the church would maintain "secret canonical norms" to avoid a
"culture of suspicion" (p226). In other words, it would continue to keep
the issue out of the public gaze. The curia blamed gay priests, thus
equating homosexuality with paedophilia, reinforcing that centuries’ old
prejudice.
In Boston, the role of Cardinal Bernard Law, the
leading Catholic in the US, caused uproar. He had moved priests who had
sexually abused minors from parish to parish without notifying the
police. In June 2004, after first resisting widespread calls for his
resignation, John Paul II appointed Law an archpriest in Rome, a
powerful and prestigious position. Cornwell quotes Eileen McNamarra in
the Boston Globe to illustrate the outrage this caused: "Set aside the
fundamental depravity of rewarding a co-conspirator in serial child rape
with a plush posting to the Eternal City. How much clearer a signal
could the Roman Catholic Church send to the faithful that it administers
justice in two tiers, one for the laity and another for its clerics?"
(p229)
In 1994, Sister Maura O’Donohue reported on the
sexual abuse of women in religious communities in 29 neo-colonial
countries. O’Donohue had worked for six years as the Aids coordinator of
the London-based Catholic Fund for Overseas Development (Cafod). She
said that Catholic clergy had been sexually abusing nuns because they
feared contamination with HIV through sexual contact with prostitutes
and other women. Another report, The Problem of the Sexual Abuse of
African Religious in Africa and Rome, was sent to the Vatican in 1998.
No action has been taken.
It is an age-old institutional problem. Cornwell
refers to a letter written in 1050 by Peter Damian to Leo IX on clerical
paedophilia, which attacks the "do nothing superiors" who were "partners
in the guilt of others" (p220). Abuse is about unequal power
relationships. The potential for abuse in any religious institution is
immense because authority seems to be transmitted directly from an
omnipotent God.
Culture of death
IN 1980, THE ban on contraception was reaffirmed by
John Paul II: "He saw the issues – contraception, divorce, illicit
unions, homosexuality – as a dimension of the ‘culture of death’,
against which he taught and preached with increasing vehemence". (p133)
This is against the background of the HIV/Aids pandemic. The UN Aids
organisation estimated that nearly 40 million people had the disease in
2003, and 3.1 million died. The world’s poorest areas are worst hit.
The pandemic can only be controlled by linking the
availability of treatment and prevention with tackling the basic social
and economic ills of capitalist society. Health-care infrastructure,
education, jobs and raising the status of women are essential.
Nonetheless, in the immediate battle against this terrible disease,
condoms can play a significant role in halting its spread.
In El Salvador, Catholic leaders in 1998 helped ban
abortions, even when necessary to save the life of a woman, and to pass
a law requiring condoms to carry warnings that they do not protect
against HIV, the virus which causes Aids. In Nicaragua, the cardinal
pressured the government into destroying sex education pamphlets because
they mentioned abortion. In Philippines, all contraceptives were banned
from Manila’s health clinics. In Kenya, a church pamphlet stated that
HIV can pass through condoms. In October 2003, the Vatican claimed that
"serious scientific studies" backed this view. No scientists supported
the claim. It was a deadly lie, the real culture of death.
These positions are linked to the Vatican’s
reactionary attitudes to women, applied within the church as well as to
society. In May 1994, the pope declared that the church could not ordain
women. Ratzinger played the infallibility card to stifle debate.
The paedophile crisis and the gulf between the
Vatican’s right-wing fundamentalism and the realities of the modern
world have hit the Catholic church hard in the northern hemisphere. From
the mid-1960s into the 1990s, 100,000 priests (20,000 in the US) and
200,000 nuns left. The number of priests in England and Wales fell from
7,000 in 1980 to 5,500 in 2000. In 1965, 96% of the French population
were Catholic, 45% attending Mass regularly. Today those percentages are
62% and 12%.
The church’s grip on peoples’ lives has been
weakened. In Italy, about 85% identify themselves as Catholic. A study
by the University of Turin showed that 70% approve of premarital sex,
birth control and divorce, and the country has one of the world’s lowest
fertility rates. Ireland, Italy, Spain and the US all have majorities in
favour of the ordination of women. In Spain, reforms introduced by the
government of José Zapatero – such as cutting the church’s role in
education and introducing same-sex civil partnerships – have further
undermined its influence.
Even Poland is not immune. Hanna Rosin wrote about
the pope’s visit in 1995: "This time he was in a new landscape of
fast-food restaurants and red-light districts. The audience at Victory
Square was distracted, and some reporters swore they heard boos. At one
point the pope had to shake his fist like a grade-school teacher to get
the crowd to listen. ‘When people were free, it turned out they didn’t
go to church,’ said [Monsignor Lorenzo] Albacete the New York
theologian. ‘They went to McDonald’s’." (Washington Post, 4 April)
The percentage of Catholics in worldwide
Christianity has fallen, from over 50% in 1970 to 42% in 2000. The main
loss has been to evangelical Protestantism in Latin America and Africa.
Latin America has 4-500 million Catholics, Protestants have increased
from two million in 1960 to over 60 million today.
Even so, in 1988, there were 401,930 Catholic
priests in the world (404,626 in 1998), with numbers rising in
neo-colonial countries. A seismic shift from the ‘first’ to the ‘third’
world is taking place. And it is reflected in the US. With 300,000
Catholics arriving each year, Latinos now make up 40% of US Catholics,
challenging Irish domination. In 1965, the US Catholic population was
45.6 million, around 64 million today. The number of priests, however,
has fallen from 58,632 to 43,634.
Backing Bush
CORNWELL CITES THE fact that John Paul II opposed
capital punishment, denounced the excesses of economic globalisation as
"savage capitalism", and both Iraq wars, to argue that he had a ‘left’
as well as ‘right’ side. He called for a non-violent response to the
terrorist attacks of 9/11, before the US and Britain attacked
Afghanistan. Vatican spin-doctor, Navarro-Valls, on the other hand, said
that force would be understandable, CNN carrying the statement as papal
blessing for the bombardment.
On Iraq, John Paul II said that war should be a
"very last option" under "very strict conditions" (p255). He opposed the
invasion, though he might have backed a UN-led war. He publicly
criticised the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses. The Catholic hierarchy in the
US, however, fully supported military intervention and, once the
conflict commenced, John Paul II fell silent.
The Vatican can find itself at odds with world
powers at times, while remaining part of the established order. It
defends hierarchical relations – in its own organisation and in the
world – the capitalist system and class division. But it also has its
own specific interests, accumulated over two millennia, which it
jealously defends. John Paul II’s relationship with George W Bush is
instructive.
Bush visited the pope in June 2004, the third time
in three years. It provided a golden photo-opportunity in presidential
election year – presenting John Paul II with the Medal of Freedom, the
highest US civilian award. Time magazine quoted a Vatican official:
"People in Rome are becoming more and more aware that there’s a problem
with [Democratic candidate] John Kerry and a potential scandal with his
apparent profession of his Catholic faith and some of his stances,
particularly on abortion". (p278) The pope praised Republican
former-president, Ronald Reagan, who had recently died.
Catholics make up a quarter of the US electorate. In
2000, Bush won around half that vote. In 2004, he set up a task force to
address Catholics in 14 states, emphasising agreement on sex, TV
violence, same-sex marriage and, of course, abortion. The Catholic
church is allied with Bush’s right-wing Protestant evangelists on this
‘moral’ agenda.
Cornwell is saddened by the effects of John Paul
II’s reign. His conclusion is that Catholics have never been so divided.
He looks back longingly to a mythical better time, denouncing "a
tumescent [inflated] papal authority" as "a modern anomaly" (p298).
The Catholic church certainly struggled to adapt to
capitalism. Its culture and organisation belong in feudal, medieval
times, when it directly exploited ‘its own’ peasants, conquered
territories with its own army, and when it was at its most powerful. It
is an anachronism. It survived the transition into capitalism, coming to
terms – often with great difficulty – with the emergence of nation
states out of bloody wars and revolutions, scientific advances, and the
separation of church and state.
Above all, the explosive growth of the working class
with the industrial revolution of the 19th century, the workers’
collective toil, organisation and consciousness, severely tested the
Vatican, more used to lording it over an uneducated and heterogeneous
peasantry. The development of socialist ideas and Marxist ideology were
direct challenges to its strict hierarchical rule: "In the 1880s
Catholic labour groups were descending on Rome in ever-greater numbers.
Appeals for guidance on issues such as unions, strikes, capitalism and
socialism prompted Leo to write his great encyclical in response to the
forces released by the industrial revolution. It was the papacy’s
response, moreover, half a century on, to the Communist Manifesto and
Marx’s Das Kapital". (p117)
John Paul II continued that crusade. And on 19 April
his natural successor, Ratzinger, was elected pope, the first German
pontiff for 482 years. Bush praised the cardinals’ choice. John Paul II
has his place in the Catholic church’s incredible history. Not only
because of his length of tenure but, mainly, because of the convulsive
period of history that coincided with his reign. Moves towards his
canonisation are already in place.
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