Pope John Paul II’s reign was a mixture of triumphs and failures.
With 84-year-old Pope John Paul II, born Karol Jozef Wojtyla, having finally left this vale of tears at 9:37 p.m. Saturday, Vatican time (is “Vatican time” a contradiction in terms?), one must begin assessing his 26-year reign as head of the Mother Church. And no, I don’t mean in terms of the sort of sappy cliches that infected even cable news coverage of the death watch and passing of the Pontiff.
Three issues concern me particularly.
The Juggernaut
Most important was the inability of a stalwart defender of the faith, who was no friend to post-Vatican II liberalization, to halt the homosexual juggernaut whose openly sexually promiscuous activists took over so many American seminaries, sowed the seeds of the pedophilia scandal, and who when the scandal broke, publicly vilified the very Church whose tolerance, for better or worse, had permitted them to get their feet in the door. Note that while forcing their own favored form of “reform,” homosexual activists also relied on time-honored forms of Church corruption which protected wicked priests, two factors which together allowed the sexual abuse of boys to spread widely, before it was publicized.
The Bureaucracy
The Pope’s failure to stop the heterophobic (or as John Derbyshire would say, “homosexualist”) onslaught, surely had much to do with the Byzantine Church bureaucracy. Already during the Pontiff’s death watch, reporters spoke about who would be in charge of the Church upon John Paul II’s death, perpetuating the fiction that the Pope was only now relinquishing Papal authority. But no honest observer can believe that the John Paul II, who in recent years continued to dutifully read aloud Vatican edicts, had in his increasingly frail state written them, or that he was in any substantive sense in control of the Church. The Vatican bureaucracy had taken over, and had likely long been in control, when the pedophilia scandal exploded in January, 2002. It remains for those better informed than I to ferret out more precisely when the Pope effectively ceded authority over the Church.
The Media
The third matter was initially not for me a Church issue, but rather a media issue. However, the mainstream media (MSM) have a nasty habit of projecting their preoccupations onto reality, and then creating political and even theological agendas, ex nihilo. A talking head at Fox News, the supposedly conservative cable news network of the Republican MSM, kept speaking Saturday about the “multicultural” aspect of John Paul II’s reign, emphasizing the Pontiff’s trips to Africa, the latter’s wish that he had spent more time there, and spouting nonsense about the Pope being the first Pope to travel all the world. Every Pontiff is Pope to all the world’s Catholics. But none of the above nonsense was problematic. What was deeply dishonest and thus problematic, was the talking head’s claim that the Pope’s embrace of Africa included the “animistic” traditions that many Catholics on that continent practice. That was, simply, a lie.
Why not note, as well, that many African priests have, in violation of Church law, reportedly taken wives? After all, John Paul II did not speak up against that practice either, during his visits to Africa. If silence implies affirmation in the one case, why not in the other? Either the talking head was ignorant of the second practice, or he knew that using it as well for propaganda purposes would cause viewers to see through his multicultural mishigaas, and not believe anything he was saying.
That the Pontiff did not order African Catholics to cease and desist from animistic practices — or order African priests to honor their vow of celibacy, and annul any marriages they had entered into — was an instance of diplomacy, within the parameters of goodwill tours in an area where the Church has enough problems, in the face of militant Islam. The claim that John Paul II accepted animism suggests that the talking head sought to use the Pope’s death as an opportunity to make mischief, spreading falsehoods which might have consequences long after the Pope is laid to rest.
A Fox News talking head (whether the aforementioned one or another, I cannot recall) spoke of the Pope as a “progressive.” Such a surreal misrepresentation will have sprung from socialist and secularist notions suffusing the MSM, Left and Right, according to which to be virtuous is to somehow be “progressive.” In fact, John Paul II was a reactionary, bless his heart!
At least one foreign outlet correctly depicted the Pope’s policies, but as per media catechisms, domestic and foreign alike, condemned him for them. That outlet, the Financial Times, cleaved to secular dogma, in claiming that Karol Wojtyla’s conservatism had alienated Catholics, when in fact he invigorated a Church which, after Vatican II, had been hemorrhaging parishioners. The Financial Times writers, Robert Graham and Tony Barber, put Catholicism on a par with communism, in attacking the Pontiff for not initiating “glasnost,” as deposed dictator Mikhail Gorbachev did, even though the Pope had demanded more religious liberty in the East Bloc. Graham and Barber found it a “paradox” that the Pope did not conduct himself the same way as the communist dictator.
Graham and Barber failed to recognize that Gorbachev was engaged in a cynical attempt to salvage his own power, whereas John Paul II was defending what he saw as eternal verities. For the FT duo, apparently the Church is just another tottering, totalitarian dictatorship. Even if one were anti-Catholic and agreed with them, one would still have to point out that glasnost destroyed the Soviet empire. Are they saying, by the way, that they wish the Church to collapse? Are they saying that liberalization will destroy any institution that tries it? If so, why do they implicitly demand it? I guess their journalism teachers never addressed such questions in theology class.
And secularists notwithstanding, sticking to principles can even be practical. Liberalization did not draw young people to the faith, but John Paul II’s no-nonsense defense of the faith did.
Mssrs. Graham and Barber are, however, welcome to call for glasnost in the media world!
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