He came from one of the most devoutly Catholic nations on Earth, but he made it his special mission to seek reconciliation with Jews, our persecuted “older brothers in faith.”
He was a genuine intellectual, but he deeply respected and honored the simple faith and humble piety of ordinary people.
He was the most-traveled pope in history, but his abiding concern was with the small interior spaces of the human heart and mind.
He grew up largely innocent about politics, but he became as shrewd a wielder of ecclesiastical power as has ever occupied the papacy, and in geopolitical circumstances as difficult as any that have ever existed.
In an institution founded on the paradox of salvation through crucifixion, Karol Wojtyla–Pope John Paul II–was a supremely paradoxical pontiff.
He never hesitated to be what he wanted his church to be: a “sign of contradiction” to what he considered a materialist, consumer-oriented, pleasure-seeking world, a man radically and intentionally out of step with the fashionable trends and ideas of the age. Never was he more out of step with common expectations than when he visited in prison and forgave the man who very nearly ended his papacy–and his life–in an assassination attempt on May 13, 1981.
Priest, poet, philosopher, bishop, Wojtyla became during his quarter-century papacy one of the towering personalities in the 2,000-year history of the Roman Catholic Church. And he used his unique stature to help catalyze some of the most important events of the late 20th Century, including probably the single most important: the fall of international communism.
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It would be foolhardy to say that we will never see his like again. Never is a long time.
But it would be equally foolhardy to suppose that Karol Wojtylas are routinely minted in seminaries or rectories. The shadow of Pope John Paul II will stretch for decades down the long corridors of history, both ecclesiastical and secular.
At the moment of his stunning election on Oct. 16, 1978, the focus of news media commentary and popular interest was his nationality. He was the first Pole ever elected bishop of Rome, the first from his nation ever to occupy the chair of St. Peter.
That turned out to be of far more than incidental importance. Largely because of the powerful spiritual influence of the Catholic Church in the lives of the Polish people, the church enjoyed unusual institutional influence in Polish society–enough, in fact, that it could serve as a true counterweight to Poland’s communist government. Largely because of the Catholic Church, totalitarian communism never was able to make good on its claim to total control of the Polish people.
Ordained a priest in 1946 at age 26 and consecrated a bishop in 1958 at age 38, Wojtyla spent virtually his entire adult life learning to joust with the communist authorities–ignoring them when it was possible; outwitting them when he could; defying them when he had to.
In “Witness to Hope,” his authorized biography of John Paul II, George Weigel recounts the machinations of the Polish communist authorities in 1962 as they sought to dictate the selection of a replacement for the recently deceased archbishop of Krakow.
Convinced that his youth, his intellectualism and his apparent lack of interest in politics would make Wojtyla a man they could control, they forced the rejection of one candidate after another until the Polish primate and the Holy See named Wojtyla the new archbishop.
Within months, they realized their mistake. Weigel quotes one apparatchik as screeching, “Wojtyla has swindled us!”
He hadn’t seen the half of it. Like many other members of the Polish clergy, Wojtyla had refined to an art the practice of cultural resistance–opposing the clumsy bureaucratic structures of the communist government with the cultural institutions and affiliations of the Polish people, led by the church. From his influential perch as archbishop of Krakow, Wojtyla practiced this art relentlessly.
Perhaps the greatest symbol of his success was the so-called Ark Church at Nowa Huta, a “model” workers’ town constructed by the communists. The town was built without a church and along architectural lines that militated against community. The dedication of the Ark Church, on May 15, 1977, represented a triumph of community and culture over the social isolation and atomization fostered by the communists.
Wojtyla carried this same approach into the papacy, using the power of the church and of the pope as its leader to challenge the communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. For Pope John Paul II, there would be no realist accommodation to these totalitarians. He had dealt with these fellows before, had looked them in the eye, and knew what they–and he–were made of.
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In June 1979, less than a year after his election as pope, he made his first visit home to Poland. It was no sentimental journey. It was a mission to, in the words of St. Luke’s Gospel, “strengthen the brethren.” For eight days he crisscrossed his country, preaching, teaching and blessing the multitudes, and giving what must have seemed like terminal heartburn to the communist government.
Weigel described the aftermath:
Four hundred forty-eight days after John Paul II flew out of Balice airfield on the outskirts of Krakow, a formerly unemployed electrician named Lech Walesa, using a huge souvenir pen topped by the picture of a smiling Pope, a relic of the June 1979 papal pilgrimage, signed an agreement at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk.
Can one draw a straight line between John Paul II and the Gdansk shipyard strike? Can one extend that line to Berlin and the toppling of that obscene wall in … 1989?
No, one cannot. But only because the spirit, whether holy or merely human, doesn’t travel in straight, easily traceable lines. No one who was alive at the time can doubt that Pope John Paul II was indispensable to the defeat of totalitarian communism and its elimination as a geopolitical force.
Ironically, the moment of communism’s fall may have been the moment when the going got really tough for John Paul. With the demon of godless communism exorcised, nations and peoples and spiritual leaders were left to contend with challenges and temptations that may be more insidious because they are less dramatic.
John Paul identified what he considered one of the most insidious when, in 1991, during his first visit to Poland after the fall of communism, he decried his countrymen’s pursuit of a “civilization of desire and pleasure.”
“Is this,” he asked, “civilization or anti-civilization?”
It was a question he asked often during his visits to the United States, which seemed at once a source of wonder and of bafflement to him. Americans were wonderfully inventive and able and wealthy, he would say, but also so deeply in thrall to a notion of freedom that allowed the killing of children through abortion and the relentless pursuit of happiness through the possession of consumer goods.
The pope’s inability to grasp America may have been manifested most vividly during the clergy sex abuse scandal that broke into the open in early 2002. The American bishops readily perceived the destructive potential of the scandal for the American church, but John Paul and his Vatican lieutenants never seemed to understand the anger, the antipathy, that the institutional church’s chronic protection of child molesters within the clergy provoked among the faithful.
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If John Paul came to office with a major project in mind, it was to cement in place what he considered a proper understanding of the reforms of Vatican Council II, in which he was an active participant.
He certainly attempted to do so, placing the very conservative Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in charge of the Vatican bureaucracy that makes official interpretations of church doctrine and placing off-limits for debate such issues as the ordination of women to the priesthood.
He attempted to bring what his supporters considered a badly needed discipline back to the church–discipline in doctrine, ritual and various church practices. But what he considered discipline, his church critics considered a reactionary attempt to squelch creativity and the engagement with the world.
On a personal level, John Paul could hardly have been more engaged with the world. He was the bishop of Rome, but he did not allow Rome to confine him.
He was the first globetrotter pope, traveling to virtually every humanly inhabited corner of the planet–Chicago, memorably, included in October 1979.
As the years wore on, age, the corrosive effects of Parkinson’s disease and the lingering damage from his assassin’s bullet took their toll. Walking and speaking became difficult for him to do and, it must be said in candor, difficult for many onlookers to watch.
But John Paul turned even his own infirmity into an occasion for teaching, offering his suffering and his persistence in the service of his God as an example to all and an invitation to solidarity in compassion.
Now he is silent. He has joined “the communion of saints.” But we shall be living with his legacy for many, many years to come.
