ReligionIn 1945, Karol Wojtyla, a Polish seminarian, came across a young Jewish girl who had just been liberated from a Nazi labour camp. Since she was too frail to walk, he offered her bread and tea and then carried her on his back for three kilometres to a railway station. More than 50 years later, in Jerusalem, Edith Tzirer thanked Pope John Paul II for saving her life.
This story would be astounding at any time. But in a country which for five years had experienced apocalyptic savagery, where anti-Semitism was rife and whose church still described the Jews as "perfidious" during its Easter liturgy, Karol Wojtyla's action had that prophetic quality that would characterise much of his life.
Today, confined to a wheelchair, physically and mentally enfeebled, John Paul continues to reach out to others, whether in Rome or during heroically endured foreign travels. Many find him even more inspiring in his humbling debility than when in his health he transfixed millions across the globe.
And yet, whatever the rare gifts of mind and heart enjoyed by this Pope, a critical evaluation of his record and personality does him more honour than do swooning affirmations that he has always spoken and acted with superhuman wisdom. In this respect John Cornwell's enthralling book provides an extremely lucid and provocative short introduction to the Pope's 25-year reign.
As a liberal and sceptical Roman Catholic commentator, Cornwell's standpoint and his highlighting of grievous scandals in the Catholic church will not endear him to those who believe that each new pope is the human embodiment of all spiritual truth, even if he has partially or totally altered the teaching of his predecessors. But Cornwell generally presents the facts fairly so that readers can draw their own conclusions on each of the many controversial aspects of this papacy.
For John Paul has been supremely controversial from early in his reign. He is the Pope of paradoxes and these paradoxes considerably exceed the ordinary inconsistency between human aspiration and achievement. Here is a Pope who extols Vatican II and yet is widely seen as having subverted much of its spirit. Here is a leader who preaches subsidiarity but himself increases centralisation. He gave decisive support to the Polish church's very political fight against communism, yet he has excoriated the political involvement of clergy fighting for justice in Latin America.
He is an advocate of religious freedom and the rights of conscience, yet he has instructed Roman Catholics to close their mouths and minds for all time on the subject of female ordination. He has been a passionate and imaginative ecumenist - fancy a Roman pontiff requesting that a penitential fast coincide with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan! - yet he is profoundly distrusted by Orthodox churches and has given grave offence to Anglicans.
In person the Pope has shown himself to be warm, compassionate and ready for impromptu conversations with journalists. And yet he hugely favours Roman Catholic organisations that are reactionary, elitist and chronically secretive.
No doubt, apologists for every aspect of this papacy will deny that any inherent contradictions exist. They will rightly point to the enormous difficulty of holding together a universal church that is at very different stages of development. They will remind us of how impressively John Paul has transcended the limitations of an adult life in Poland spent under the brutalities of Nazi and communist regimes, prompting thereby a defensive and nationalistic church which valued discipline and unity above everything.
The Pope's personal life, too, was extremely tragic, losing his mother when he was eight, a beloved older brother and only sibling when aged 12, and his very pious father when aged 20. And yet in him we find no distant or desiccated celibate but rather an enthusiastic lover of poetry and music and sport and young people. No puritan, he welcomed bare-breasted women to Mass in Papua New Guinea.
It is customary to describe John Paul as right-wing. But what is right-wing about a Pope who loathes capitalism and consumerism almost as much as communism? Is it right-wing to have opposed strongly not only the recent Iraq war but also its widely acclaimed predecessor in 1991?
Consider the following electrifying rejection of violence made at the end of 2001 by a Pope allegedly in his dotage. Recommending pardon in the context of the September 2001 attack on the USA, John Paul said that forgiveness "always involves an apparent short-term loss for a real long-term gain. But violence is the exact opposite. Opting as it does for an apparent short-term gain, it involves a real and permanent loss". Would not such subversive Christ-like sentiments bring joy to any hippie commune in California?
Neither right-wing nor left-wing categories properly describe the Pope. But he is a radical with a radicalism that is often unpopular and unpredictable. Like many Poles, he is also exceptionally obstinate and single-minded. Qualities that normally strengthen his mission can, however, do immense damage when his leadership fails. And such a massive failure occurred in the area of clerical sex abuse as its dreadful dimensions were revealed. Cornwell may well be correct when he states: "This past quarter century will be remembered above all for the priestly sexual abuse scandal and its far-reaching consequences."
John Paul has always taken a profound interest in the dignity and dangers of human sexuality. It was the theme of his first book. For him, contemporary western sexuality is intimately linked to what he calls "the culture of death": contraception, divorce, abortion, promiscuity, and so on. Evidence for his polemics is not in short supply in a society with vanishing births, massive marriage breakdown, industrial-scale abortion and rampant sexual disease.
The Roman Catholic church has long prided itself on its sexual idealism and wisdom. Obeying the relevant laws was seen as the very touchstone of virtue. Then from within the heart of the clerical church erupted another manifestation of the culture of death: the death of childhood innocence. The failure to recognise the extreme horror of child abuse and to punish fittingly those responsible for it revealed just how ignorant and careless about sexuality were the self- professed paragons of excellence in this matter.
As well as giving a detailed account of shameful denials, prevarications and double standards in the matter of clerical sex abuse, Cornwell provides shocking information about the sexual exploitation of African nuns by priests intent on avoiding AIDS. A question that deserves an answer is this: if priests and bishops were the victims of sexual abuse rather than women and children, how long would it have taken for the Vatican to admit to the full extent of the evil and to act appropriately?
In a brilliant earlier book, A Thief in the Night, John Cornwell suggested that the pope of 33 days, John Paul I, simply lost the will to live, such was his revulsion in the face of the task before him. In contrast, his successor has never flinched before the most daunting challenges. But has he identified rightly what most threatens his church? Perhaps it is not materialism or doctrinal dissent or sexual licence. Perhaps it is rather the church's perennial passion for power in all its forms - the very essence of the temptation Christ is described as resisting in the desert.
Catholics still live in the shadow of the church's imperial past, a baleful inheritance that it is only slowly being shed, with much reluctance and backsliding.
Cornwell's final judgment on Pope John Paul II and his centralising policies is, however, much too harsh: "His major and abiding legacy is to be seen and felt in various forms of oppression and exclusion, trust in papal absolutism and antagonistic divisions. Never have Catholics been so divided. Never has the local church suffered so much at the hands of the Vatican and the papal centre."
On the contrary, I would argue that John Paul's life-enhancing legacy markedly outweighs his repressive or divisive measures. And, as to divisions, consider the colossal splits in the early church regarding the truth of Christ's divinity or the cesspit of papal corruption that led to the Reformation. Whatever history may record about John Paul's failures, I believe that in the mysterious economy of divine grace his titanic faith and dedication will not have been in vain. But his many virtues may be invested in and inherited by a church very different in style and structure from the one he loved so well.
John Feighery is a Divine Word missionary priest who has worked in Brazil
The Pope in Winter: The Dark Face of John Paul II's Papacy By John Cornwell Penguin Viking, 329pp. £20