The Pope's record is dreadful but his conviction is heroic
Secular government could do with some of his unflinching steadfastness
Hugo Young
Tuesday April 17, 2001
The Guardian
En route to the election, I took the path to Rome. For a cradle Catholic, Easter in Rome is the apex of ceremonial experience. The majesty of the religious services at the seat of western Christianity gets close to numinous as well as logistical perfection.
Easter close to Pope John Paul II, on the other hand, made a jarring start to a springtime which will be spent in the company of relativist politicians. Being in the presence of absolute conviction is something one has seldom experienced in the past 20 years. In the end, I decided that what ought to jar a modern voter was less the sight of this conviction than its well-spun, infinitely pliable opposite, which is to be found in every secular politician of the day.
The Pope has been in many ways disastrous. Yet in one way he is heroic. Viewed from close quarters he exudes, even for a liberal sceptic, the aura of a unique being. No one immersed in politics can escape the shock of witnessing the most unfashionable political figure in the world. Those of us destined to spend the next seven weeks in thrall to Tony Blair can see here someone who embodies the one quality every other leader, including not least Mr Blair, conspicuously lacks.
The disasters John Paul II has inflicted on the Catholic church over 20 years in the Vatican would be hard to exaggerate. His record is such an offence against elementary tenets of liberal decency that even a Catholic who has not entirely lost his ability to submit to the church's teaching finds certain particulars intolerable. This papacy has devoted itself to undoing much of the work of the Second Vatican Council, held in the 1960s, and reclaiming for the iron authority of Rome what the council, initiated by a much wiser pope, had begun to yield to wider discourse and less centralised decision.
The repudiations have been numerous. High on my list of them is the church's treatment of women. In his compelling new book, Hans Kung summarises the story: "This pope has waged an almost spooky battle against modern women who seek a contemporary form of life, prohibiting birth control and abortion (even in the case of incest or rape), divorce, the ordination of women and the modernisation of women's religious orders." As a result, writes Kung, countless women have tacitly turned their backs on a church that no longer understands them.
This has happened simultaneously with a fearsome crusade against free speech. Vatican II opened up the possibility of discussion, which the Roman curia, encouraged by the Pope, now ruthlessly suppresses. Liberal theologians, Kung among them, have had their teaching faculties withdrawn.
North America and Europe, Latin America and Asia, are littered with priests and thinkers terrorised by secret process into remaining silent under pain of excommunication. Such is the secrecy that nobody is permitted to know who exactly these are or what is their offence.
In Rome the perpetrators of the modern Inquisition, the curial cardinals led by Joseph Ratzinger, paraded at the ceremonies. From my favourable seat, I found it hard not to gaze on the red-mitred collective with fascinated horror. The imperium now displays itself with practised insouciance, as if nothing could challenge it. Ratzinger, once a liberal colleague of Kung's in a German university, presides over a doctrinal regime that in some ways pre-dates Vatican II, deeming other religions to be beyond possibility of truth, issuing multiple documents that reaffirm the church as patriarchal, intolerant and triumphantly backward-looking.
This performance is as unsuccessful as it has been, in the wider liberal world, aberrant. It has not done the church much good. Not merely is church attendance falling and the priesthood shrinking in Europe and North America, but Rome's former authority is being quietly rejected.
Even 23 years of John Paul II have not been enough to install in every diocese in every country bishops who are prepared to be Rome's mouthpiece. The doctrine of papal infallibility, as propounded by Ratzinger, is widely rejected. In some places, including Britain and the US, only the political cunning of key bishops has preserved the local church from Rome's imperious edicts and thereby retained a core of the faithful.
So the balance-sheet on John Paul's era will, I think, be as red as a cardinal's hat. It looks, functionally and philosophically, doomed. It proposes a degree of absolutism that even Catholics of impeccable loyalty and goodwill cannot reconcile with the modern world.
Hans Kung is very likely right when he ends his book by calling for Vatican III, a new council, to lead the church back towards a simpler, more generous, more authentic Christianity, away from the deadly power-hunger of the Roman bureaucracy, whose control mechanisms put those of all other political organisations to shame.
A nd yet, that doesn't say quite all there is to be said about the Easter experience. The record is appalling, but it's not the end of the story. Looking at John Paul II, homing in on his intimate presence, you're forced to recognise a quality that's missing from political life elsewhere. It hits you with an awful power that here is a leader who brings truly undeviating commitment to principles he believes in.
His intolerance of everyone else is a shocking scar. But the fierceness of his conviction is never now seen in sec ular government, and we are surely sometimes the worse for it. Here I kneel, he seems to say, and this is the God to whom I devote my life. I'm not interested in your dissent, still less in what opinion polls have to say. I may care how many people fail to get the message, but I'm not prepared to temper it. I declare my beliefs, which will not change. Follow me, or go elsewhere.
Here, in other words, is a holy man; dedicated to his conviction; granite in its expression; a man of character, as Kung admits, an impressive champion of human rights and social justice everywhere except in the church itself; a man seen as more worthy of moral trust, despite that large exception, than almost anybody else in contemporary society.
To have witnessed such a leader close up at this season is decidedly unsettling. It makes one note the statements of belief that the coming election will not yield. Who, any longer, has convictions they won't surrender to the latest focus group? Who will talk about social justice, ready to offend every corporation that violates it? Who will make an unflinching case for asylum-seekers? Who will take on any enemy, and let the votes fall where they may?
Just as the Pope has no divisions, he may need no votes. But there's a part of him that grandly challenges those who do.
• Hans Kung, The Catholic Church, a short history (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.99) |
