His Holiness:
John Paul II and the Hidden History of Our Time
By Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi
Doubleday, 582 pages, $27.50
There are three distinct images of Pope John Paul II. The first is that of the greatest religious leader of the century, the man who brought down communism in Eastern Europe, the pope who restored order to the Catholic Church. The second is that of an authoritarian and oppressive man, isolated from the lives of ordinary people, whose arbitrary decisions have polarized the church and enormously weakened the credibility of the papal office. The third is that of a man for whom Catholics cheer enthusiastically when he visits their country but to whom they pay little attention when he attempts to impose church control on their sexual lives.
The first image is the one propounded by many journalists who are not Catholic. The second is the image held by many priests and laity around the world. The third is the image of most of the rest of the Catholic laity.
While American investigative reporter Carl Bernstein and Italian journalist and Vatican correspondent Marco Politi incline to the first image, they provide evidence that John Paul II fits all three images in their fascinating story of the present papal administration. In the end, they present a sick and elderly pope, saddened by his inability to constrain Catholics to obey him on matters of sexual morality, disillusioned by the return of Communist Parties to power in Eastern Europe, and above all broken-hearted by the turn of his beloved Polish people to Western consumerism.
Still, he urges the church to ask forgiveness for its past mistakes and offenses (including the Galileo affair, the Crusades and its anti-Semitism), and even suggests that the office of the papacy might need radical reconfiguration. But it is too late; the structure and the culture of his long administration preclude the possibility of such developments.
That’s because the pope made two tragic mistakes.
The first was to assume that the style of ecclesiastical leadership with which he was familiar in Poland would work in the rest of the Catholic world or even in post-socialist Poland (where attitudes toward sexual morality do not differ from those of America). It is not enough to give orders and expect them to be obeyed. One must listen and then try to persuade, a style of which the pope might well be incapable. For all practical purposes, Catholics in Europe (east and west) and North America have rejected, rightly or wrongly, the church’s right to impose sexual morality on them.
The second mistake was to think that he could support human rights in Eastern Europe and ignore them in Central and South America and inside the church, especially when the rights at issue were being claimed by women.
The most interesting aspect of “His Holiness” is the story of the cooperation between the Reagan administration (particularly in the person of then-CIA Director William Casey) and the pope, not only in Poland but also in Central America. The authors allege, without persuasive proof, that the CIA spied on progressive priests and bishops in Central America and relayed the information to the Vatican.
Two especially chilling incidents are related in the book. During a papal appearance on a visit to Chile when Gen. Augusto Pinochet was still in power, the pope was introduced to a 19-year-old girl whose face was badly disfigured because she had been doused with gasoline and set on fire by Pinochet’s soldiers during a demonstration. The pope sped by her with the comment, “I know all about it, I know all about it.”
In the second incident, the pope is engaged in an argument with a Pakistani woman who was undersecretary general of the United Nations. She protests violence against women by men. The pope replies (according to a memo she dictated immediately afterward), “Don’t you think that the irresponsible behavior of men is caused by women?” This is an old component of Catholic clericalist spirituality: Women’s bodies are swamps designed to trap men. We heard it in the seminary not so many years ago, though most of us dismissed it as nonsense. Apparently John Paul II did not.
So I’ll stand by the judgment that Pope John XXIII, now written off in Rome as a foolish old man who put the church at great risk by permitting enormous change, is the most important religious leader of the century.
