Requiem
Karol Wojtyła was a holy man, but John Paul II was, while still a holy man, a terrible pope. If your idea of the pope is an ambassador to the world at large, you've got a strange idea about the papacy. If you look at the properly papal things that the pope did, you'll see a record that's quite remarkably Stalinist. Wonder where he got his ideas about running things?
The trouble with the Roman Catholic Church as an institution is that it has no place for a Karol Wojtyła except the papacy. The popes have been arrogating the Church's authority unto themselves ever since Pio Nono, and now they suck up all the oxygen in the organization. The pope is no longer primo inter pares. He's solus.
An authoritarian papacy will work in the growing Asian and African dioceses only if its positions are as conservative as the local bishops themselves. Rome ought to look to Canterbury if it seeks to hold onto Western European and North American believers. It has done itself great harm in South America by suppressing liberation theology.
Memo to cardinals: "one size fits all" won't work in a truly global church. It's time for popes to stick to the small core of Catholic dogma and leave interpretation to others.
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What sorrow. For me, not for him. Saul Bellow is dead at 89. Time to read Herzog again. Has anybody ever pointed out that herzog means duke? If so, I missed it; sorry. How did Bellow pronounce the title? I've no idea. "Her-zog"? Air-tz-ohg?" I sit here fiddling with transliterations, wishing really that I were on the verge of an English garden.
Comments
Sadly, from what I've read in the newspapers regarding the front-runners to succeed Pope John Paul II, it sounds as if we will see the at least the same degree of conservativism. I happened to catch part of a Sunday morning news show during which the moderator asked the Bishop (or perhaps Archbishop or Cardinal) from Philadelphia whether he thought the late Pope was aware that his conservative views might have been responsible for the decrease in church attendance by Catholics in the US as well as the decrease in candidates for the priesthood and, if so, whether the Pope cared. The respondent declined to answer the question, choosing instead to ramble on about what a good man the Pope was and how interested he was in world peace. As one who has abandoned the Catholic Church as a result of the attitudes of the late Pope, I was greatly disappointed by the Bishop's (or whatever he was) refusal to address the issue.
Posted by: jkm | April 6, 2005 09:17 PM
Nice post, RJ, which dovetails with Thomas Cahill's Op-Ed piece in the Times.
JKM, yes, I was alarmed by the number of potential Popes with strong Opus Dei ties. Opus Dei creeps me out, without ever having read The Da Vinci Code.
Posted by: Max | April 7, 2005 09:09 AM
Karol Wojtyla was a complex man whose complete impact on the world and the Catholic Church can only be glimpsed at the moment. As RJ so correctly points out there was perhaps no place for him in the church but the papacy and there he has transformed the office into the most extreme expression yet of centralized power in its history. Some of the centralization in recent years is more the result of the Pope's declining health and the expanding administrative functions of his aides, but John Paul II set the stage for this early in his reign. An interesting view of John Paul II's reign appeared online recently by Hans Küng, The Pope's Contradictions
Posted by: George | April 9, 2005 04:21 PM