Saturday, October 17, 1998

After 20 years, do we really know Pope John Paul II?

By MARCUS GEE

Toronto Globe and Mail

At 6:45 on the evening of Oct. 16, 1978, Cardinal Pericle Felici appeared on the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica and spoke the words that the crowd in the square below had been waiting for hours to hear: "Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum habemus papam (I announce to you with great joy, we have a pope)."

Then, as the crowd held its collective breath, he pronounced the name "Karol Wojtyla."

There was a stunned silence, with only a smattering of polite applause. Karol who?

When Wojtyla was elected pope at 58, becoming the 263rd successor to St. Peter as Bishop of Rome, he was unknown to most Roman Catholics outside his native Poland, where he was then Archbishop of Krakow.

The faithful were just getting used to his predecessor, John Paul I, when he died after only 33 days in the Vatican. Now there was this new pope -- the first Pole, the first non-Italian in nearly 500 years and, to most people, a complete stranger.

Twenty years later, John Paul II is perhaps the most recognized person on the planet. A tireless traveler, he has crisscrossed the globe on 84 foreign trips that have taken him to more than half of the world's countries. In between, he has penned a dozen weighty encyclicals and a blizzard of apostolic letters and other pronouncements.

But do we really know him?

John Paul is best known -- and most attacked -- for his stern views on sexual morality. This is the pope who called homosexuality an "intrinsic moral evil," denounced abortion as part of a "culture of death" and forbade Roman Catholics to use any form of artificial birth control. He is the pope who refused point-blank to ordain women as priests and who insisted on priestly celibacy, ending the practice of giving some priests special papal permission to marry.

But a closer examination of his record shows that he is much more than simply a reactionary with sex on his mind.

John Paul is also the pope who condemned the "scandalous arms trade," who stood against the war in the Persian Gulf, who opposed capital punishment and the "Star Wars" missile-defense system, who questioned global capitalism and its "idolatry of the market" and who criticized the International Monetary Fund for making poor countries focus on repaying their debts.

He is the first pope to visit an Islamic country, the first to enter a synagogue and the first to admit in detail the role of Christians in the persecution of Jews. He invited Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat into the Vatican at a time (1982) when that was still an unusual step. He helped bring down right-wing dictators in Chile, Haiti, South Korea and the Philippines.

John Paul is also the repenting pope. He has apologized on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church for, among other things, aiding the slave trade, killing Czech Protestants in the 15th century and persecuting Galileo in the 17th century for saying the Earth revolved around the sun.

Biographer Jonathan Kwitny says that to concentrate on the pope's stand on sexual morality is to overlook his complexity. "Contrary to popular belief," he writes in "Man of the Century," "his clearest changes in Catholic doctrine as pope have been toward pacifism, respect for other religions and willingness to admit error."

Whether those views have had any impact is another question. The paradox of John Paul is that, while he is the most listened-to pope in history, he may be the least heeded. His sermons are broadcast to hundreds of millions and his encyclicals carried on the Internet (www.vatican.va), but many of his exhortations fall on deaf ears.

His stand against the Gulf War did not prevent an international coalition from going to fight Saddam Hussein, killing tens of thousands of front-line Iraqi recruits and bombing densely populated Baghdad. His pleas for the world's poor have not stopped rich countries from slashing their foreign-aid budgets to the bone. His harsh critique of unfettered capitalism has not halted the Thatcherite formula of privatization, deregulation and trade liberalization from sweeping the world.

His moral teachings are even less influential. Polls show that, despite his denunciation of divorce and birth control, 90 percent of U.S. Catholics believe they can remain good Catholics even if they divorce and remarry or use contraception. And despite his strict stand against the ordination of women, 59 percent believe that women should be allowed to serve as priests.

If all this has discouraged John Paul, he doesn't show it.

Physically, he is far less vigorous than he was on the day of his inauguration. At 78, he is believed to suffer from Parkinson's disease, the debilitating neurological condition that explains his trembling left hand, his halting walk, his stooped posture and his often immobile face.

A series of operations over the years -- one for the removal of an assassin's bullet, another to remove an inflamed appendix, another to excise an orange-sized bowel tumor, another for a broken leg -- have left him increasingly frail. When he goes on papal visits, he no longer kneels to kiss the ground. Attendants lift a bowl of earth to his lips instead.

But his determination to spread the word seems as strong as ever. He is about to release a new encyclical, "Reason and Faith," on the role of religion in the modern world. He has just returned from a three-day visit to Croatia and is preparing for a trip to Mexico and the United States in January, followed in June by a return visit to Poland.

His dance card is already full for 2000, when he is to make almost daily appearances during the church's millennium celebrations. One date that is already marked on the Holy Year calendar: May 18, 2000, his 80th birthday. By that time he will have served for 22 years. Only six of the 263 popes since St. Peter have reigned that long.

Beneath all this furious activity is an unmistakable will to make a difference. An intellectual whose early life was marked by tragedy -- his mother died when he was nine, his brother when he was 12 and his father when he was 20 -- John Paul made it plain as soon as he became pontiff that he would be much more than a benign father figure for an irrelevant institution. "I think that God raised me to be pope to do something for the world," he said. "I have to do something for the good of the world, and for Poland."

Poland came first. By traveling to his homeland and supporting the Solidarity union movement, he helped bring down communism not just in his country but throughout Europe.

But John Paul's fight did not end with the triumph over communism. From the beginning of his papacy, he has been waging an equally fierce battle against secularism, materialism and liberalism.

Instead of trying to adapt the church to these modern forces, he has confronted them head on. Instead of trying to remake the church to fit the modern world, he has sought to remake the modern world to fit the church.

His goal is nothing less than a worldwide spiritual restoration, with the Roman Catholic Church at its head.

The most controversial part of the pope's spiritual crusade is his stand on sexual morality. The fundamentals of that stand are not new. In his 1968 encyclical "Humanae Vitae," Pope Paul VI denounced all forms of birth control except the rhythm method as "a serious sin that offends God."

But John Paul restated those fundamentals with new force. He condemned contraception as "denying the sovereignty of God over life and death." In his 1995 encyclical "Evangelium Vitae," he linked abortion to euthanasia as "threats to life." The world faced "a new massacre, a true slaughter of the innocents, a new holocaust."

In a letter to families around the world that same year, he said the church was struggling against a destructive anti-civilization marked by abortion on demand, homosexual unions, open sex education and broken marriages, which left orphans whose parents are still alive.

Those statements caused millions of liberal-minded Catholics to drift away from the church and led many churchmen to speak up in protest. The pope has no time for such objections. In 1987, he said that the church's line on contraception "is not a matter that can be discussed freely by theologians." In 1994, he declared that the church's view on female priests -- that there shouldn't be any -- "is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful."

The Vatican has closed seminaries that drifted from Church teachings, censored the results of a bishops' conference that questioned the line on contraception and removed the teaching privileges of dissidents such as Swiss theologian Hans Kung.

But it would be a mistake to pigeonhole John Paul as a prudish throwback. He is, after all, the only pope to comment on the female orgasm (he says it's OK, within marriage).

John Paul has done more than any other pope to reach out to other faiths, often praying with leaders of those religions. In recent years, he has mused about a great summit of the leaders of Islam, Christianity and Judaism on Mount Sinai.

In a symbol of his sincerity, he has asked all of the faithful to beg forgiveness for the crimes committed by Catholics over the centuries. "How can we keep silent about all the forms of violence that have been perpetrated in the name of the faith?" he asked in 1994.

He has tried especially hard to mend relations with Jews (though not as hard as many would like. Critics found his statement on the Holocaust lukewarm). Last weekend he canonized Edith Stein, a Jew who became a Roman Catholic and was sent to Auschwitz by the Nazis.

But he also puts enormous energy into evangelism -- the conversion of others to Christianity -- something other religions often resent.

The same sort of contradictions have hurt his attempts to bring the Christian churches closer together. He has tried to mend bridges between Catholics and Anglicans and (less successfully) Catholics and the Orthodox. But his hard-line on issues such as women priests and contraception have hobbled the attempt.

Here's the paradox about John Paul II. His forceful views have invigorated the church but alienated many of its adherents. His attempts to unify the church by imposing doctrinal discipline have instead often divided it. He has touched the hearts of millions, but changed the minds of few.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)