[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] The Pope and Me
Apr. 8th, 2005 10:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI'm tempted to agree wholeheartedly with the reactions of Francis Strand and rdi on Livejournal. I also think that it's important to note that while Pope John Paul II certainly played a role in the downhall of Communism, particularly in his native Poland, he wasn't singlehandedly responsible. The desire for religious freedom was a factor, to be sure, but as Slate's Marc Fisher writes it was hardly the main motivating factor for the central and eastern Europeans who took to the streets back in the annus mirabilis of 1989.
I also find it hard to disagree with Ted Schmidt, writing for Toronto's weekly Now, when he says that Karol Woltyja's centralization of the Church and his rejection of liberal reforms damaged the Church in its traditional Western strongholds. Philip Jenkins' thesis in The Next Christendom that the Church, from its new strongholds in an undifferentiated global "South," will eventually reevangelize a secular North strikes me as unconvincing, not only because these sorts of predictions don't have very good track records (remember when, in the mid-20th century, Québec, Ireland, Spain, and Poland were supposed to reevangelize the West?) but because Jenkins' vision carries a strong whiff of wish-fulfillment with it. The only thing that keeps me from predicting that Catholicism will follow the same downwards trajectory in the global South as in the global North is the problematic assumption that more unites the highly diverse religious cultures of Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, South Africa, India, and the Philippines than divides them.
And yet. Even if you held the worst possible view of the Pope, you would at least have to grant him no considerable measure of intellectual solidity. I find that I can't do that; I can't agree with Christopher Hitchens's assertion that the Church--the person of the Pope in particular, the institution of religion in general--was a negative force. The official ideology of the Catholic Church is one that differs in multiple crucial details from my ersatz ideology, but there's enough points in common for me to feel critically sympathetic towards it. And, truth be told, I don't think that the Pope's more negative actions had that much of an effect: Was liberalism really so strong in the official church before his ascension? The ease with which the Church was centralized and rendered homogeneously conservative at official levels suggests otherwise, while the growing organization of the laity suggests that something is on the verge of breaking.
In the end, it comes down to whether or not I feel sympathy for a man in his eighties who fought valiantly against a series of debilitating illnesses to the end, a person who was by all accounts quite personally kind and who really did feel concern even for those people and groups and ideologies he condemned. I do. [1]
[1] Yes, I'm feeling magnaminous towards the late Pope. Whether I have the right to feel magnaminous is another question that I'm not going to get into, for so many reasons.
Why are you doing this [Fisher asked]? And the answers came in a torrent, as if decades of silence had been unplugged. Especially in East Germany, where almost everyone could watch West German TV (though they had to keep the volume way down because it was strictly verboten to watch, and if the neighbor heard, there could be trouble), people talked about their jealousy for the material goods that Westerners enjoyed—the clothes, the shoes, the cars, the food. They talked about their dreams of traveling outside the Soviet Bloc and about the hopes—mainly for a particular career or area of study—they'd had when they were young. And they talked about the freedom to say what they wanted or to teach their children about realities other than what the socialist state had ordained.
Even when I sat in churches for hours on end, talking to ministers, priests, and the generally nonreligious people who came there because of the more open atmosphere, the talk was of political freedom and consumer goods, not of faith.
I also find it hard to disagree with Ted Schmidt, writing for Toronto's weekly Now, when he says that Karol Woltyja's centralization of the Church and his rejection of liberal reforms damaged the Church in its traditional Western strongholds. Philip Jenkins' thesis in The Next Christendom that the Church, from its new strongholds in an undifferentiated global "South," will eventually reevangelize a secular North strikes me as unconvincing, not only because these sorts of predictions don't have very good track records (remember when, in the mid-20th century, Québec, Ireland, Spain, and Poland were supposed to reevangelize the West?) but because Jenkins' vision carries a strong whiff of wish-fulfillment with it. The only thing that keeps me from predicting that Catholicism will follow the same downwards trajectory in the global South as in the global North is the problematic assumption that more unites the highly diverse religious cultures of Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, South Africa, India, and the Philippines than divides them.
And yet. Even if you held the worst possible view of the Pope, you would at least have to grant him no considerable measure of intellectual solidity. I find that I can't do that; I can't agree with Christopher Hitchens's assertion that the Church--the person of the Pope in particular, the institution of religion in general--was a negative force. The official ideology of the Catholic Church is one that differs in multiple crucial details from my ersatz ideology, but there's enough points in common for me to feel critically sympathetic towards it. And, truth be told, I don't think that the Pope's more negative actions had that much of an effect: Was liberalism really so strong in the official church before his ascension? The ease with which the Church was centralized and rendered homogeneously conservative at official levels suggests otherwise, while the growing organization of the laity suggests that something is on the verge of breaking.
In the end, it comes down to whether or not I feel sympathy for a man in his eighties who fought valiantly against a series of debilitating illnesses to the end, a person who was by all accounts quite personally kind and who really did feel concern even for those people and groups and ideologies he condemned. I do. [1]
[1] Yes, I'm feeling magnaminous towards the late Pope. Whether I have the right to feel magnaminous is another question that I'm not going to get into, for so many reasons.
