If the pope was willing to promote clandestine activities when
necessary, his greatest contribution to the downfall of communism
wasn't covert at all. In public pronouncements on his visits to
Poland and at every possible opportunity, he bore a simple message:
faith matters, the truth matters, freedom matters, injustice must
be condemned. His audiences knew what truths and what injustices
without his having to spell them out, without his taking any overtly
political stands. He encouraged such dissidents as Poland's Walesa
and Czechoslovakia's Vaclav Havel to live "as if" they were free,
undermining the elaborate system of lies that the communist system
depended upon to survive. Once the pretenses were stripped away,
more and more people realized they weren't alone with their dissident
thoughts and began to act upon them. In talking about Europe's
common spiritual genealogy, the pope was, in his own way, signaling
that the Iron Curtain had to come down.
Those convictions flowed directly from his Polish upbringing
and his encounters with both of the 20th century's brutal totalitarian
systems -- Hitler's and Stalin's. His rejection of any system
that crushed the individual, that degraded people into objects,
was instinctive. So was his rejection of anti-Semitism, which
he occasionally witnessed growing up in Poland. His effort to
reach out to Jews and others of different faiths can be traced
to the same roots.
While the most dramatic public manifestations could be seen when
he visited Jerusalem's Wailing Wall, I was struck by a smaller,
private gesture. A few years ago, I spent a long afternoon interviewing
a Polish priest who had discovered, only at age 35 when his "mother"
told him the truth, that he was a Jew by birth. His natural parents
had pleaded with a Polish Catholic couple to save the baby by
adopting him as their own during the Nazi occupation. Until he
learned more about his origins, he decided to tell only one person:
the then newly elected pope. He wrote to John Paul II that his
Jewish origins made him feel a special bond to the successor of
Peter, a Jewish apostle. The pope's warm reply began with the
words "Beloved Brother."
The pope's rejection of totalitarian ideologies and anything
that smacks of racism or persecution doesn't mean he uncritically
embraces liberal democracy and capitalism. At the same Mass in
Krakow that attracted nearly 3 million of the faithful, he reiterated
his frequent message about the dangers of the "noisy propaganda
of liberalism" and "freedom without responsibility," and denounced
man's attempts, whether by genetic engineering or euthanasia,
to interfere "in the mystery of human life." He can sound like
a scold when he also talks about the dangers of hedonism and consumerism,
of a system that too often treats materialism as an end in itself
and forgets spiritual values.
Zieba, the Polish priest who wrote The Popes and Capitalism,
points out that the pontiff's view of capitalism is quite different
than of totalitarian systems. "Capitalism can produce a very creative
culture or a very merciless one," Zieba notes. "It depends on
us. It can be exploitative and lose touch with God." The pope
believes that what determines the type of capitalism that emerges
isn't structural, it's the human component -- how people are educated.
If the "human ecology" of capitalism is polluted then you get
a corrupted system, Zieba adds; the way to clean up the pollution
is to impart the right values. The pope has praised the freedoms
capitalism can provide -- the encouragement of entrepreneurs,
allowing people to develop their talents to the fullest. But he
opposes any "ideology" of capitalism that excuses its worst excesses.
In light of the recent wave of corporate scandals, it's too bad
this part of his message often failed to register.
As inspiring and visionary as this pope has often been, there
has always been an undercurrent of discontent with some aspects
of his reign. When I covered the Vatican in the early 1980s, some
of the curia -- the cabinet that assists the pope in governing
the church -- complained about his preoccupation with Poland and
the number of Poles in his entourage. Those complaints faded later,
especially once the results in his homeland won universal applause.
But a more persistent and significant criticism is that John Paul
II hasn't done more to curb the power of the curia. "We are suffering
from overcentralization," a senior member of the curia admitted
to me in 1982. "This clerical life of Rome remains a bit of a
royal court, with some of the mentality of Louis XIV." At the
time, this could be ascribed to a holdover culture from previous
popes, but today internal critics claim that centralization has
increased rather than decreased under John Paul II's rule.
When I recently asked a Polish cleric who has worked in the Vatican
about the negative side of the ledger when it comes to this pope's
record, he mentioned the "fear of innovation" in much of the church,
due in part to the appointment of weak bishops. He also pointed
out that the synods of bishops, which should counterbalance the
power of the curia, "are not what they should be." They are only
consultants, and they haven't been able to develop the new ideas
that are needed in this time when the church's traditional base
-- Europe and the United States -- is suffering from a growing
shortage of priests (with Poland a very big exception). While
the pope has done a remarkable job of reaching out to the Third
World, the crisis in vocations is only one manifestation of the
broader problems facing the church in the countries where its
influence is visibly declining.
It would seem only natural, for instance, that the synod would
discuss making celibacy optional for priests, something that exists
in the Eastern or Ukrainian Rite Catholic Church. But the pope's
adamant opposition has meant that no such discussion has taken
place. Nor has the synod discussed the awkward situation the church
found itself in with married men who were secretly ordained as
priests in Czechoslovakia during the communist era. While they
were formally ordained as Eastern Rite Catholic priests, those
distinctions hardly seemed important at a time when the church
was persecuted by the communist authorities. The practice in the
underground, anti-communist church was to allow married priests
to help keep the faith alive, and they regularly said Roman Catholic
Masses and administered the sacraments. The fact that they were
married helped disguise their clerical status.
In 1999, I went to the Czech Republic to see what had happened
to those married priests after the downfall of communism. Initially,
they were told that they no longer could say Mass. They felt bitter
that the Vatican seemed to have turned on them. "It was a time
when priests who had collaborated with the secret police were
given the green light, and we were given the red light," Vaclav
Ventura, a married priest, told me. Eventually, church leaders
came up with a compromise and established an Eastern Rite diocese
in the Czech Republic, which admitted several of the married priests.
But most of their parishioners are Roman Catholics, who had become
used to them saying Mass. The married priests now can only say
Roman Catholic Mass in the company of a celibate Roman Catholic
priest. This is despite the fact most of the new "Eastern Rite"
priests were brought up as Roman Catholics, and that they could
help plug the holes created by the shortage of priests in the
Czech Republic.
While these contortions may be understandable, they reflect an
unwillingness of the church to confront the issue of celibacy
directly. Similarly, the pope has ruled out any discussion of
the ordination of women. According to clerics who know the pope
well, he believes that Christ's decision to be surrounded by male
apostles needs to be respected. As for celibacy, he is strongly
convinced that this allows priests to devote themselves fully
to the church and to experience a deeper kind of love than erotic
love. He is also against anything that smacks of loosening the
requirements for the priesthood, arguing that this would be both
wrong and ineffective. His supporters note that Protestant churches
which now ordain women have hardly enjoyed a surge in vocations.
Regardless of the merits of the idea of changing any rules, the
church should be capable of airing the issues that are already
being discussed informally -- and are very much on the minds of
many of the faithful. A recent survey of American priests, taken
for the National Federation of Priests' Council, revealed that
56 percent believe celibacy should be a matter of personal choice.
One cleric who knows the pope well says the pontiff is "physically
pained" by the crisis in the American church triggered by the
wave of revelations about sexual abuse. But that hasn't softened
his opposition to discussing either celibacy or the ordination
of women.
An even more telling omission may be the lack of serious discussion
of the church's position on birth control, especially in the era
of the AIDS epidemic. It's virtually impossible to imagine a change
in the church's opposition to abortion, euthanasia and genetic
engineering. But, as the Polish cleric with long Vatican experience
pointed out to me recently, the pope no longer routinely mentions
birth control as part of that litany of dangers. He used to do
so regularly. What accounts for this omission? The Polish cleric
offers what he calls merely a guess: that, while the pope almost
certainly hasn't changed his views, he may have been confronted
with arguments that have made him hesitant on the subject.
Which brings up one of the final ironies about John Paul II.
As he reaches the end of his remarkable papacy, this leader who
urged everyone to speak the truth, who spoke out again and again
on the most sensitive subjects, is now often seen as the defender
of the status quo who would prefer silence to open debate on the
issues that most often divide and trouble the faithful. As great
as his legacy will be, it's unfortunate that this, too, will be
a part of it.
* * *
Andrew Nagorski is a senior editor at Newsweek International.
His latest book is Last Stop Vienna, a novel about the
early days of the Nazi movement, published by Simon & Schuster.
