He’s got an international best seller and a platinum CD. Time magazine made him its “man of the year” for 1994. He took on the United States and won in battle over abortion at the U.N. Conference on Population in Cairo. He drew a record crowd of 4 million when he visited the Philippines in January, and he plans trips to three more continents before the end of the year.
Not bad for a man who was widely believed to be approaching death’s door only a few months ago. What’s more, he has an important agenda for the future.
Pope John Paul II is giving every indication that he intends to remain on the throne of St. Peter until the year 2000–at least.
Despite signs of increasing frailty and the crippling and still painful after-effects of his broken thighbone, the 75-year-old pope is determined to be around five years from now to lead the world’s 980 million Roman Catholics into “the third millennium of Christ.”
Cameras tend to focus on the pope these days in the moments when he is feeling his age and infirmities. It has been reported–and promptly denied by the Vatican–that he suffers bone cancer, that a visible tremor in his left hand is a symptom of Parkinson’s disease and that his recent falls were the result of blackouts caused by a series of small strokes.
But people who watch him close up and on a daily basis believe that John Paul has as good a chance as any other man of his age of seeing the year 2000.
“There is no indication at this stage that the pope is in danger of death,” says one longtime member of the curia, the administrative body of the Roman Catholic Church. “Certainly, he has a medical history: He was shot in 1981; he had a benign tumor removed; he fell twice; he’s getting older. But that isn’t saying in any way he’s on his way out.”
John Paul, who at his election at the age of 58 in October 1978 was the youngest pope in 132 years and the first non-Italian in 456 years, has served notice that he has no intention of breaking another precedent by becoming the first pope to retire since Celestine V in 1294.
On May 17, the eve of his 75th birthday–the age at which canon law requires all other bishops to submit their resignations–the pope told pilgrims attending a general audience that he will leave it to Christ “to decide when and how he wants to relieve me of this service.”
Ill health is not a consideration.
“Both you and I have only one choice,” he told Dr. Gianfranco Fineschi, the surgeon who operated on his broken femor. “You have to cure me and I have to heal because there is no place in the church for an emeritus pope.”
Getting a point across
The remark is typical of John Paul’s style of humor–dry, ironic, deprecating of himself but never of his office and aimed at making a not-so-humorous point.
Referring to the gathering of cardinals that will one day elect his successor, he told the 114 cardinals he called to the Vatican last June to plan for the year 2000: “It is beautiful to have so many cardinals in the Vatican without having a conclave.”
It appears that the pope has, however reluctantly, taken the advice of his doctors and slowed down since his second fall last April and the operation he underwent to repair his broken femor.
He postponed a trip to New York, New Jersey and Maryland scheduled for last October and seems to be playing a less public role when at home in the Vatican. He usually walks with a cane, and he takes an afternoon nap.
The newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, which records all the pope’s public utterances and is known to the irreverent as “the Pravda of the Vatican,” has carried noticeably fewer papal pronouncements in its pages recently.
But, according to Monsignor Diarmuid Martin of the Pontifical Council on Justice and Peace, John Paul “is by no means semi-retired. He still keeps up a very demanding schedule.”
He not only survived an arduous 10-day trip that took him around the globe to the Philippines and record crowds, Papua New Guinea, Australia and Sri Lanka in January with a minimum of wear and tear, but he appeared full of renewed energy on his return to Rome.
If the trip, his 63rd outside Italy and one of his longest since he was elected pope 16 years ago, was a test of John Paul’s stamina, he passed with flying colors.
Five days after he returned to the Vatican, Joaquin Navarro Valls, a Catalan psychiatrist and former journalist who has served for the last decade as the pope’s spokesman, confirmed that this will be “the year of five continents.”
“We have to make up for lost time–and add something more as well,” Navarro Valls said.
Having touched down on two continents on the January trip, he visited the Czech Republic and his native Poland May 20-22 and also made an overnight trip to Belgium. He goes to the Slovak Republic June 30-July 3, to South Africa later this summer and to the United States in November to speak at 50th anniversary celebrations at the United Nations and to visit New Jersey and Baltimore.
A full schedule
At home in the Vatican, John Paul meets daily with a constant stream of visiting bishops and political figures, speaking in any of the eight languages in which he is fluent and half a dozen more in which he can converse. He addresses thousands of pilgrims every week at his Wednesday general audiences. And he has been overseeing preparations of two encyclicals, the highest form of papal document on doctrinal and social issues.
Even his private time is often devoted to visitors, whom he invites to the early morning mass he celebrates in the small chapel in his Vatican apartments, where he has hung a reproduction of Poland’s beloved Black Virgin of Czestochowa, and to working lunches and dinners, prepared by Polish nuns.
“He is a very disciplined person,” Martin says. “He reads and writes every day, even on his trips, and there are long periods where he prays.”
According to Navarro Valls, his reading is not only religious.
The pope began writing poetry in his youth, and he continues to read it. When he travels, his luggage includes a battered briefcase containing not only his breviary (a book of Psalms, readings and prayers) but also books of poetry.
An Italian publishing house has just brought out a complete collection of the poems John Paul wrote over the 35 years between 1939 and 1978 when he was elected pope.
Judging by the success of two other recent papal ventures, the publishers should have no problem selling the first edition of 65,000 copies.
A collection of the pope’s meditations, “Crossing the Threshold of Hope,” was translated into 21 languages and has become an international best seller. A compact disc of the pope reciting the Rosary and the Salve Regina prayer in Latin sold more than 154,000 copies in Spain to become a “platinum disc” and is now being issued in Italy. When a commercially produced videotape, “A Celebration of the Mass,” showing the pope at work at the Vatican and on his travels, was released in England at Easter it immediately became a top seller.
Despite all this activity–or perhaps because of it–there is a general feeling outside the Vatican that this is “the twilight of a papacy” and that the time has come to sum up John Paul’s pontificate and speculate on his possible successor.
A new English-language biography of John Paul came out late last year and at least three more are already in the works.
But the feeling inside the Vatican is that if the biographers think they have the pope down pat, they will be sorely disappointed.
“Those who think they can have a final say at this point are going to be surprised,” Martin says.
Dramatic gestures
The Rev. Gerald O’Collins, a Jesuit theologian who teaches at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, agrees.
The pope, Vatican observers say, is a man who makes up his own mind in his own way and understands the importance of dramatic gestures, especially in inter-faith relations. They point to:
– The pope’s address to thousands of young Moslems gathered in sports stadium in Casablanca in 1985.
– His day of prayer in 1986 at Assisi, the Umbrian hilltown where St. Francis was born, to which he invited representatives of all the world’s great religions.
– His visit the same year to the Rome synagogue to pray with members of the West’s oldest Jewish community, whom he called “our elder brothers in Abraham.”
– His meeting in a prison cell with Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish gunman who shot and wounded him in St. Peter’s Square May 13, 1981.
“These are the new things,” O’Collins says. “Previous popes did maybe one innovative thing, but this pope has done far more than he is given credit for. In other ways, this papacy is more traditional in style than many people realize. Pope Pius XI also beatified large numbers of people, and Pius XII attracted huge crowds to the Vatican. John Paul XXIII made the first trip outside Rome when he went to Loreto to pray for the opening of the Second Vatican Council, and Paul VI traveled widely outside Italy as long as his health permitted. He went to India, the Philippines, Uganda. He visited Jerusalem and New York.”
Looking to the year 2000, John Paul is talking of still grander gestures–meeting on Mount Sinai with leaders of all the world’s monotheistic religions and co-celebrating a mass with Orthodox Patriarch Aleksey II of Moscow.
He disconcerted many in the hierarchy last year by proposing that the Roman Catholic Church seize the “particularly propitious” occasion of the new millenium to recognize “the dark side of its history.”
In a letter to cardinals he asked, “How can one remain silent about the many forms of violence perpetrated in the name of the faith–wars of religion, tribunals of the Inquisition and other forms of violations of the rights of persons?”
The cardinals helping to plan the celebrations were less than enthusiastic about engaging in an exercise in “mea culpa.”
But past mistakes are clearly on the pope’s mind. Speaking about St. Catherine of Siena to pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’s Square for the Sunday Angelus on Feb. 15, he said she was wrong in calling for a crusade to defend the holy places.
He excused her as “a daughter of her time” who “adopted the prevailing mentality” of the 14th Century and said that the world now understands that dialogue is preferable to force.
Looking east
Of greater moment to the church is the pope’s effort to seek reconciliation between the Roman and Eastern churches, divided since what is known as the Great Schism of 1054.
He has invited Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, spiritual leader of the world’s 250 million Orthodox Christians, to the Vatican in June for only the seventh meeting between the spiritual heads of the Roman and Orthodox churches since the schism.
In preparation for that meeting, John Paul on May 2 issued an apostolic letter entitled “Orientale Lumen” (The Light from the East), containing what is probably Rome’s strongest appeal ever for an end to almost 1,000 years of separation. He called the division a “sin” and a “cause of scandal to the world” and urged dialogue at all levels. Traveling even further on the road to reconciliation, he said that instead of serving as grounds for emnity, differences in forms of worship should be accepted and honored on both sides.
The pope reinforced his call for Christian unity with Western as well as Eastern churches in an important encyclical letter–the highest form of papal teaching–that followed the apolistic letter by only four weeks. In a gesture that could have historic consequences, he said that although he cannot renounce his supreme authority, he is prepared to examine new ways of exercising that authority.
But new strains have arisen between the churches with the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union. Orthodox leaders have accused Roman Catholics of making use of the religious freedom to try to win converts from the Orthodox.
Ecumenical dialogue with Anglicans and Lutherans continues as well, but it has been overshadowed by the pope’s political rapprochement with Israel, bolstered by his vigorous condemnation of anti-Semitism and another gesture–a concert in the Vatican a year ago in memory of the 6 million Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust.
There was just one fly in that ointment. Last July, only three weeks after the Holy See and the Jewish state established full diplomatic relations, a papal knighthood was conferred on Kurt Waldheim, the former UN Secretary General and Austrian president who has been accused of collaborating with the Nazis during World War II.
The Vatican has not explained the pope’s action, but it presumably was meant to recognize Waldheim’s UN tenure.
For all his exceptional charisma among the multitudes, John Paul is not afraid to be unpopular, especially when it comes to defending moral values and upholding Roman Catholic doctrine.
He sees legalized abortion, all forms of artificial birth control–even the use of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDs–and much of biotechnology as threats to the sanctity of the human person.
He has denounced rampant consumerism for undermining society, and divorce, sex outside marriage and homosexuality for attacking the family, which he has described as “the first and the most important” institution of society.
