AT THE END of January 2005 the Pope contracted a fever; his public audiences were suspended for a day or two because of flu-like symptoms. The day or two were destined to grow, for on the night of Tuesday, 1 February, Karol Wojtyla was rushed to the Gemelli Hospital in Rome. So rapid was his departure that the Prefect of the Pontifical Household was not informed of the decision to call an ambulance until the Pope was already absent. Predictably, Vatican spokesman Navarro-Valls declared on Wednesday morning that there was ‘no cause for alarm’.
Influenza is often referred to as ‘the friend of the elderly’ for its ability to bring life to its final conclusion. For a man approaching his eighty-fifth birthday who, for at least fifteen years, had suffered from Parkinson’s disease, the odds against surviving such a plebeian illness were alarmingly high. Over that passage of time, his breathing had grown more laboured, his throat and chest had become increasingly constricted, his stooped posture inevitably constricted his diaphragm, preventing the muscles from functioning normally. Any respiratory infection that attacked such a frail body could prove fatal.
The world’s news media rushed to Rome. Arrangements long-made at hotels and vantage points throughout the city were activated. Simultaneously, the media speculation began. Was this the final chapter? If he did survive, should he resign? If he died who would follow? Who were the leading papabile? The various symptoms of Parkinson’s were, with one exception, publicly discussed at great length. The exception was the levels of dementia that occur because of the ever higher dosages of specific drugs that are needed for more advanced symptoms.
After nine days in the Gemelli Hospital the Pope’s condition had improved dramatically and he returned to the Vatican. The media focus then shifted to a debate on whether or not Wojtyla should resign and vacate the papal throne. The debate quickened when Secretary of State Cardinal Sodano responded to questions about papal resignation with, ‘That is a matter that we should leave to the Pope’s conscience.’ Apart from Karol Wojtyla’s own moral sense, to assist him he had around him the men who for some time had been in control of the Roman Catholic Church, an inner circle which had undergone some changes and shifts of power since 2003: Cardinals Ratzinger, Re, Ruini, and Sodano. There was also the man who was the greatest power behind the throne: Papal Secretary and gatekeeper of all access to the Pope, Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz who for some time had been leading the fight against the pressure for the Pope to resign.
During the ensuing days various Vatican statements assured the public that the Pope had fully recovered. The reality, as was usually the case with Vatican statements, was somewhat different. The infection was still active and the Pope’s breathing very laboured. The Vatican press spokesman’s confident image of a rapidly recovering Wojtyla was demolished when on 2 February he was again rapidly returned to the Gemelli Hospital and within the hour a tracheotomy was performed. A tube was inserted into his throat to assist his breathing. A few days later on Sunday the Pope, now mute and wan, was wheeled to a window of the hospital shortly after the Angelus blessing which for the first time in over twenty-six years had been conducted without the Pope. Giant screens in the Square showed a younger, vigorous Karol Wojtyla.
On 8 March it was announced that the Pope would not preside over any of the major liturgical celebrations of Holy Week and Easter. As the month progressed and Karol Wojtyla, a man clearly near death, returned again to his Vatican home, I was frequently reminded of a particular conversation with a Vatican resident. It was shortly after Karol Wojtyla’s visit to Slovakia in September 2003. I had found the spectacle of the suffering Pope deeply disturbing and expressed the view that the trip should never have been made and should certainly have been abandoned.
‘The show has continued,’ my informant told me, ‘and will do so because the Holy Father wishes it to continue. The actor within the Holy Father is dying hard. He refuses to walk off stage. He is a man terminally drugged on the adulation of the audience.’
Now throughout the month of March much of the world was watching what more than one commentator called ‘his greatest performance’. It is not true that everyone fights for life, that none seek death. Some do indeed go gently, but Pope John Paul II raged against the final darkness in a manner reminiscent of the two wartime uprisings in Warsaw when men, women and children resisted the occupying enemy for week after week.
Karol Wojtyla’s personal struggle reached its apogee on Easter Sunday when he struggled in great distress and anguish to utter a blessing to the crowd gathered below his window in St Peter’s Square. He slapped his forehead in vexation but could not utter a single syllable. The ‘great communicator’ had been permanently silenced.
A few days later during the afternoon of Saturday 2 April Karol Wojtyla murmured, ‘Let me go to the house of the Father.’ He lapsed into coma and died six hours later at 9.37 p.m.
The very public manner of his approach to that death inspired some and appalled others. Many Catholics previously opposed to euthanasia began to reconsider their position. Commentators informed their readers that the Pope had wanted the ‘faithful to draw lessons from his agony’. One thing is certain: it was markedly different from the grim, solitary death of his abandoned predecessor, Albino Luciani.
The hyperbole that followed Pope John Paul II’s death was boundless. ‘The greatest Pole of all time.’ ‘A colossus.’ ‘A solitary Atlas, holding up the Church and the world.’ ‘A golden beacon for gilded youth.’ With the pilgrims in St Peter’s Square chanting, ‘Make him a saint! Make him a saint now!’ came news of yet more miracles attributed to the power of Karol Wojtyla: the chapel at Kalwaria ‘saved from a fire by an icon blessed by the Holy Father’; a defunct television set in the Ukraine suddenly ‘whirring into life just as the Pope arrived in the country. It continued for his entire stay then died again.’ As for his legacy, in death much was claimed for him just as it had been in life. Many of those claims fly in the face of the factual evidence contained within this book.
The end of his papacy on 2 April has been seen as the end of an era. In fact, the papacy of John Paul II had already ended for many well before that date. Exactly when depends on where one looks and what part of the Wojtyla legacy one considers.
In Austria, not only the papacy but their formal links with the Catholic Church ended for hundreds of thousands during the abuse scandal involving Cardinal Groer in 1995. For a further 50,000 Austrians, it ended when they left the Church in 2004 after the paedophile scandals in the St Pölten diocese that forced the resignation of Bishop Krenn. For many other Austrians the Wojtyla papacy had ended even earlier, with the initial appointment by the Pope of Groer in 1986 and Krenn in 1987, and George Eder as Archbishop of Salzburg in 1989. All three appointments were instances of Wojtyla’s ignoring strong local resistance and insisting on appointing archconservatives. Eder, for example, blamed sex education for promoting ‘a Communist take-over of our society’, and considered AIDS ‘a form of divine punishment’. Austria was by no means unique in having hard-line conservatives forced upon her. It was the order of the day for papal envoys who were, in the words of one Vatican source, ‘basically under concealed orders to nominate conservatives. They were pushing them into Brazil, France, Germany, the US, even in the small appointments.’
The papacy of Pope John Paul II ended for many in Latin America during the early 1980s when it became obvious that Karol Wojtyla approved of the counter-insurgency tactics of the Reagan administration. Over one quarter of a million people died in just two of the countries – Guatemala and El Salvador – where the US-backed death squads operated. The ‘El Salvador Option’ was reactivated in 2005 and by early February was being seriously considered by the Pentagon for Iraq. The proposed target this time were the Sunni population, or that part of it that allegedly supported the insurgents.
In Chile, the papacy of Wojtyla ended for a significant section of the population in 1987 when he became only the second head of state, the other being the president of Uruguay, to set foot in the country since General Pinochet had murdered his way to the presidency. Wojtyla’s presence ensured very favourable media coverage of the Pinochet regime, not least because the Pope studiously avoided any public criticism of the military junta, and made only a passing reference to those subjected to torture and to those who had disappeared. An open-air mass was violently disrupted by security forces when, complete with tanks and armoured cars and water cannon, they attacked a minority of some 500 students demonstrating against Pinochet, causing the Pope, the Vatican retinue and the Chilean hierarchy to choke with the tear gas. Cardinal Fresno, Wojtyla’s appointee in Santiago, declared that he considered the police the principal victims. He condemned ‘this incredible assault on the police, Papal guards, journalists, priests and the faithful’. It would be subsequently established that during the Pinochet era over 35,000 citizens were tortured, the overwhelming majority of the 3,400 women detained had been victims of sexual violence, and between 5,000 and 10,000 Chileans had been murdered.
On this 1987 Latin American trip, Karol Wojtyla had astonished the press on the plane flying to Chile when he compared the situation in Chile favourably with the Communism of his motherland. ‘In Chile, there is a system that at the present time is dictatorial but the system is by its very definition transitory.’ When it was suggested that transition was already under way in Poland, the Pope disagreed. ‘There are no grounds for hope on that score. In Poland, the struggle is much more difficult, much more demanding.’ For a man that many claim created Solidarity, and then virtually single-handedly destroyed European Communism, his observations show a depressing lack of both faith and vision. In Poland, change was most certainly occurring: in just two more years, there would be free elections and a few months later, the Berlin Wall would come down.
In Argentina, the reign of Wojtyla ended for many of the faithful well before his April 1987 visit. Many by then were disenchanted with a man who had remained silent for nearly a decade on the tortures and murders perpetrated by the generals. The widespread complicity of the Catholic hierarchy with the military junta, without a word of criticism from the Holy Father, further alienated Argentinians. Then in 1987 with the country finally returned to democracy, the Pope chose that moment to lecture the newly elected Raul Alfonsin and the population at large on the importance of human rights.
Wojtyla compounded what many had seen as an ill-defined and offensive speech by subsequently refusing to meet the mothers of May Square, women whose relatives had vanished without trace, courtesy of the junta. He then attacked, in typical Wojtyla style, a proposed law on divorce. Throughout his entire reign he never discovered an acceptable response to democracy when the democracy in question had proposed or had enacted legislation of which he disapproved.
For Mexico, the end of the Wojtyla reign was already under way at the time of the Pope’s second trip to the country in 1990. The ‘radical and anti-religious movement’ that Secretary of State Casaroli had predicted in secret talks with the Reagan delegation in 1987 was evident. There was within the country a growing awareness of the role of the Catholic Church in the demise of the Mexican Indian. Before the visit, 300 bishops in Mexico City had signed an open letter calling on the Church to beg for pardon for its ‘complicity in the colonisation and enslavement of the native peoples’. Secular groups were now heard in the land voicing similar sentiments.
Karol Wojtyla, a man seen by many of his admirers as an individual possessing a towering intellect, demonstrated on occasion extraordinary ignorance. Preparing for a mid-1985 trip to Africa, which included a visit to Cameroon, he asked a member of the Curia to write a speech. During the Papal briefing, the Monsignor objected, ‘Your Holiness, you idealise too much. The slave trade began from there.’ The Pope was stunned. Having subsequently studied the factual history, Wojtyla then wrote and delivered a powerful plea, asking the people of Cameroon for forgiveness.
For many, not only in Cameroon but throughout Africa, the late Pope’s vehement opposition to the use of condoms in the fight against the spread of the HIV/AIDS virus not only ensured in the hearts and minds of many a premature end of the Wojtyla papacy, it also ensured the premature death for an unquantifiable number of Africans. In Kenya, Cardinal Maurice Otunga staged public condom-burning ceremonies. In Nairobi Archbishop Raphael Ndingi Mwana a’Nzeki warned the population that condoms actually gave those who used them AIDS, a view also held by leading Vatican spokesmen.
The Vatican’s failure, from Pope John Paul II down, to acknowledge the role of the Rwandan Roman Catholic hierarchy in the country’s genocide is yet another part of the Wojtyla legacy: nearly one million slaughtered and not a single proponent of liberation theology in sight.
The Pope’s hostility towards liberation theology did not merely spring from his fear of Communism. It also emanated from his ignorance of the history of the American Indians. When during the 1980s, he read for the first time the writings of Bartolome de las Casas, the sixteenth-century Spanish missionary and historian, he admitted to being shaken. But in 1990 he still clung to a defence of the Church’s historical role. During his speeches in Mexico, he admitted past errors, but always countered these with specific examples of the good performed by religious figures. In Vera Cruz, speaking of Mexico’s history, he declared that ‘. . . . conquest and evangelisation occupy a decisive place, brilliant when taken together, yet not without shades of grey’.
To describe the enslavement of an entire nation in such a manner caused a deep and lasting anger within Mexico. By the time of his next trip to the country in 1993, there were frequent media attacks on the Catholic Church’s historical role in Mexico. It was widely believed that the Pope had come on a pilgrimage of expiation towards the Indians. He did not fulfil that expectation; he again only admitted mistakes in the past. But even when confronted with overwhelming evidence, he continually attempted to distance the Church from the actions of the colonising Spanish. His defence of the Church was at all times loud and clamorous. There was no mention of the forced conversions, the torture of the Indians, the destruction of ancient books of Mayan history, the seizure of land by the Church, the brutal crushing of every Indian uprising under the blessing of the cross. By 1993 the papacy of Pope John Paul II was, for the majority of Mexicans, a thing of the past.
Just how profoundly Latin America has rejected the Wojtyla message can be gauged by the ballot box. The late Pope regularly condemned liberation theology and left-wing politics. He aligned the Church alongside President Reagan’s foreign policies for the region. As of mid-2006 the White House found itself with six left-wing anti-US leaders in its own backyard.
In the Netherlands, it was the Wojtyla suppression of the liberal majority of bishops that was for many of the faithful the defining moment. Their treatment by the Pope and senior members of the Curia during a two-week period in 1980, details of which are recorded in an earlier chapter, was akin to something out of the sixteenth century. When details eventually leaked out, there was outrage among the Catholic faithful in Holland. It was anger that five years later, when the Pope visited, was still very much on display. For the Dutch, the Wojtyla papacy finished very early. Holland’s experience was not unique. A great many episcopates that had embraced the spirit of Vatican Council II’s reforms felt the papal lash. Throughout much of Europe, the United States and Latin America, papal discussion was replaced with papal directive.
In Spain, three million have left the Catholic Church in the past four years. After the election of the Socialist government in March 2004, the exodus has been accelerating. A government elected by the majority on a mandate that included relaxation of the abortion and divorce laws produced a furious response from Wojtyla and those around him within the Vatican. Spanish government plans which included altering the status of Catholic education from compulsory to optional and a draft bill to allow homosexual marriages put both the Vatican and the Spanish Church on a war footing. Cardinal Antonio Maria Rouco proclaimed from the pulpit that there is ‘sinning on a large scale taking place in Madrid’. He had no doubt whom to blame for what he clearly saw as a recent phenomenon: ‘Major powerful currents of thinking and influential institutions of economic and cultural and political power’ – Church-speak for ‘the Spanish government’.
Four hundred and seventy-one victims of the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939 have been beatified as martyrs; not one of them came from the thousands upon thousands of Republicans slaughtered by Franco’s fascists and the Third Reich. Only supporters of the late General Franco have been put forward by the Spanish Church for beatification. In this, as in much else in his life, Karol Wojtyla showed consistency. As a young man in Cracow he was an enthusiastic supporter of Spanish fascism.
For many years the recurring mantra of the Church with regard to its own growth had been to refer to South America and Africa as the future of the Church – these regions where they could confidently predict huge growth in the numbers of the faithful. In 1985 the Church claimed Latin America contained 338 million Roman Catholics. By late 2004 the mantra was being uttered more in hope than certainty. In Brazil, the census for 2000 had revealed a twenty per cent fall in the number of Catholics during the preceding forty years. The Vatican blamed the dramatic decrease on the aggressive advance of evangelical sects, religious indifference, and the lack of effective and firm pastoral outreach. Only twenty-five per cent regularly attend mass and fifty per cent attend only on special occasions. It is a similar story throughout the continent. The Pope blamed ‘the nefarious action of sects’. During his meeting with the bishops, he listed the social problems that the Church must face in the Western hemisphere. These included drug abuse, family breakdown, guerrilla warfare, international terrorism, migration and the gap between rich and poor. The current condition of the Church itself was not on the list.
Again, in late 2004, Cardinal Ratzinger, during a sweeping critique of European secularism, said: ‘A society in which God is completely absent self-destructs.’ Neither the Pope nor Ratzinger appeared able to comprehend the Catholic Church’s role in the creation of the current secular society. The Pontifical Council for the Family lays the blame at the doorstep of the European lawmakers, who have ‘been guilty of undermining the family’. They blame Catholic theologians who have given intellectual support to this sort of legislation. No one acknowledges clerical sexual abuse as a key factor. No one admits that continuous financial corruption during much of Wojtyla’s papacy has played its part in the mass exodus from the Church. In May 2000, Cardinal Biffi, considered by some at the time as a leading contender to succeed Pope John Paul II, declared that all Catholics should follow Christ’s example of poverty by donating all of their wealth to the Church, which would in turn be exceedingly rich. ‘Christ may have been a carpenter with a frugal lifestyle, who attacked moneychangers in the temple, but that was no reason for the Church to renounce wealth,’ said the Cardinal.
It is precisely this mentality that has driven Vatican Incorporated for decades. The pursuit of wealth by the Church brought about its involvement with Sindona and Calvi. Just as a decade later it was responsible for the Vatican Bank’s involvement in ‘the mother of all bribes’. It has also brought about the one-billion-dollar claim against the Vatican by US insurance commissioners that is currently working its way through US courts. It has also brought about the multi-million-dollar claim against the Vatican on behalf of former Yugoslavian citizens that is also being processed through US courts.
A year after Cardinal Biffi’s plea for an even wealthier Church, the Vatican announced its first budget deficit for eight years. Cardinal Sergio Sebastini, President of the Vatican’s Prefecture of Economic Affairs, blamed lower revenues from securities and, above all, fluctuations in the exchange-rate. No mention was made of the devastating effect that the continuing clerical sexual abuse scandals was having on the finances of many individual dioceses around the world. But then neither was any mention made of billions of dollars that poured into the Catholic Church’s coffers, courtesy of the taxpayers in Italy, Germany, Spain and other countries.
One of the continuing features of the Church during the reign of John Paul II was an ability to apologise for its errors, providing that the error in question had been perpetrated hundreds of years ago, and a complete failure to acknowledge more recent sins. Wojtyla’s predecessor, John Paul I, observed during his tragically brief reign, ‘I have noticed two things that appear to be in very short supply in the Vatican; honesty and a good cup of coffee.’ Nothing has changed in those areas over the ensuing years.
The obituaries for Pope John Paul II abound with myths, fantasies and disinformation. Just as Wojtyla’s early years do not, in fact, contain a slave labour camp, heroic acts in the Cracow ghetto and a brave stand against the Third Reich, the postwar years do not, in fact, reveal a man who continually confronted the Communists but a man who was thought of so highly by the regime that they were instrumental in setting him on the path to St Peter’s throne.
The files that the Polish secret police kept on Wojtyla confirm that this was a man constantly seeking quietude. The legacy that had already been claimed for this Pope – even before his burial – that of ‘John Paul the Great’, flies in the face of the realities. The Wojtyla Papacy has been crammed with further myths, which tell us far more about those guilty of such extravagant claims than they do of the man himself. He never claimed to have sustained Solidarity during its early months, nor did he ever claim to have single-handedly brought about the collapse of European Communism. On the contrary, he is on record on a number of occasions as believing that it was indestructible.
What is true is that Mikhail Gorbachev, the man who did play the defining role, is on record as saying,
‘Everything that happened in Eastern Europe in these last few years would have been impossible without the presence of this Pope, and without the important role, including the political role, he played on the world stage.’
Certainly, the Pope’s contribution was important, as was Ronald Reagan’s and to a lesser extent, Margaret Thatcher’s, but the crucial role was played by Gorbachev as an earlier chapter demonstrates. Commenting on the claims of many writers including his chosen biographer, George Weigel, that the Pope was largely responsible for the fall of Communism, Karol Wojtyla described such assertions as ‘ridiculous’. Karol Wojtyla had quite different aspirations.
The actual agenda of this Pope had been a grand design, not merely for Europe, but the entire world. A pilgrim determined to bring a great spiritual reawakening, Wojtyla believed that he could turn back the idea of materialism that he saw engulfing country after country. He aspired to become a global evangelist, taking the gospel to the ends of the earth, turning the cultural clock back to an earlier time by demonstrating the supremacy of Roman Catholicism not only over Communism, but also capitalism. If he had succeeded, he would indeed have deserved the appellation ‘John Paul the Great’. His personal legacy contains, at least in part, the reasons for his failure.
Wojtyla, a man who prided himself on speaking many languages, listened in none of them. But then no Pope in 2,000 years has been listened to by more and heeded by fewer. As the late Vaticanologist, Peter Hebblethwaite, remarked during the early years of this reign, ‘They like the singer, not the song.’ The line of theologians, priests and nuns that dared to hold views and opinions contrary to Wojtyla, only to find that they had been silenced, is a long one. The kind of theologians that Pope John Paul II admired were men such as the Jesuit theologian, Avery Dulles, who became the first US theologian to be made a cardinal. A year earlier, Dulles is on record as declaring
‘the laity should not be consulted on matters of doctrine, because in the modern secular world it is hard to determine who are the truly faithful and mature Catholics deserving of consultation . . . . faith is the acceptance on the basis of authority not reason, and furthermore proposing reasons may stimulate contrary reasons leading to fruitless debate.’
Cardinal Dulles epitomises Wojtyla’s legacy of conservative Catholics, who have never accepted the central messages of Vatican Council II; men who now have their hands on the levers of power within the Church, courtesy of Wojtyla; men who wholeheartedly endorse the sentiments contained in the observation the late Pope made to Time magazine writer, Wilton Wynn: ‘It is a mistake to apply American democratic procedures to the faith and the truth. You cannot take a vote on the truth. You must not confuse the Sensus Fidei (sense of faith) with consensus.’
Wojtyla was much given to talking of truth. When another reporter, Marco Politi, asked on the flight to Cuba what he would say to Fidel Castro the Pope replied, ‘I shall ask him what his truth is.’ For Wojtyla the question was rhetorical. For the man from Poland there was only one truth, not the word of God but the words of Wojtyla. It was only with the greatest difficulty that Cardinal Ratzinger was able to persuade the Pope from declaring Humanae Vitae an infallible document. The fact that Pope Paul VI had shrunk from taking that very step when banning artificial contraception did not deter Wojtyla. He knew, just as he had always known, where ‘the truth’ lay on birth control or abortion or homosexuality, the ordination of women or one hundred other issues that have divided so many. In 1995, Ratzinger confirmed that Karol Wojtyla’s Apostolic Letter On reserving priestly ministry to men alone was an infallible papal statement, the first time in nearly forty years that infallibility had been claimed for a papal utterance.
The Swiss theologian Hans Küng, one of the first to be silenced by the Wojtyla papacy, has observed: ‘After the fall of Soviet Communism, the Roman Catholic Church represents the only dictatorial system in the western world today . . . one which confers a monopoly of power to one man.’ On another occasion Küng, having described the Wojtyla papacy as ‘a new phase of the Inquisition’, observed, ‘The present Pope suppresses problems instead of solving them.’ Even the gentle and charming world-renowned US commentator on the Vatican, Redemptorist Father Francis X. Murphy, was moved to describe Pope John Paul II as ‘very dictatorial’.
It was a trait that despite the charm and the charisma was never far from the surface when the former actor was ‘on stage’. Perhaps the majority of the vast throngs that gathered to see and hear him around the world were a great deal more ‘mature’ than the conservative theologians of this world realised. Most certainly they have been able to distinguish between the man and his message – a message that all too frequently was delivered devoid of compassion or humanity. The man they embraced: the message, they have rejected. The cult of personality that Pope John Paul II so revelled in focused very precisely on the man, at great cost to the faith. The more powerful the cult became, the more it successfully distracted from the fact that Karol Wojtyla functioned like a mid-nineteenth-century Pope. No partnership with his fellow bishops. No collegiality. No dialogue or discussion, merely an unquestioned primacy that inevitably atrophied.
The rejections took many forms. In January 1991, with Ronald Reagan two years gone from the White House, there was not even an illusion of the mythical alliance with the Vatican. For President George Bush, the papacy was over. In the build-up to the first Gulf War the President ignored both the private and public appeals from the Pope that war should be avoided, and that there should be peace talks to negotiate Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait.
When a groundbreaking peace conference in Madrid, which would see the first ever face-to-face negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, was proposed, Israel vetoed the presence of the Vatican delegation. That the Holy See has vital interests in the area counted for nothing, it seemed, to the Israeli government who gave as the reason for the veto the fact that diplomatic relations did not exist between the two countries. Israel did not have diplomatic relations with a number of the Arab nations attending but that apparently did not matter. This was a direct insult to a pope, who, notwithstanding a string of faux pas, had worked so hard for reconciliation with the Jewish faith. In October 1991 the conference duly took place without Roman Catholic representation.
The unkindest cut of all occurred in June 1991. It was the fourth trip back to his homeland and the first since the free elections. Lech Walesa had been elected President in December 1990. The country was enjoying its first taste of real democracy. The Pope not only distrusted democracy, but his words and actions over the past three decades confirmed he actively disliked democracy as a form of government. His failure to reconcile a life that was lived under and shaped by a range of totalitarian influences with democracy offers at least part of the explanation for his ultimate failure as a global evangelist. That failure was on full public display during his eight-day visit in 1991. Exactly twelve years earlier, the Pope had come to Poland, where he was acclaimed by millions throughout the journey. The people knew that with his immense moral authority, this Pope – their Pope – had given the country a precious gift, the right to hope, the right to put their collective fears to one side. In the years ahead, the fears would return, but the hope was for many inextinguishable. Wojtyla did not create Solidarity. Its roots lay in the past, in places and dates well remembered: Poznan 1956 through to Gdansk in 1980. Neither did the Pope initially offer the Solidarity movement any support until he was reassured in the autumn of 1980 that ‘yes, it will survive’.
But in 1980 from the first day in the Gdansk shipyard, Wojtyla’s moral authority was symbolically in evidence. A large photo of the Pope guarded the gates, and in the dangerous months and years that lay ahead, there was always the knowledge among the people that ‘our man in Rome’ was one of them, a Pole. Now in 1991 the struggle had come of age: the little electrician was President. Veteran Solidarity advisor, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, had been until the previous year Poland’s first non-Communist Prime Minister. An untidy, volatile democracy with many flaws had Poland in its thrall. The country was in tumult, and at the centre, most ironically, was the issue of abortion.
As previously recorded, it was the abortion issue, above all other controversies, that exercised Karol Wojtyla. The Polish Church had already discovered that it could no longer demand the unquestioning obedience in the face of ‘the common enemy of Communism’, that had been the status quo since the early postwar years. The old order had changed, and with that had gone the assumptions of religious allegiance. Cardinal Glemp and his colleagues had demanded that the abortion laws introduced by the Communist regime during the 1950s, laws that had enabled the majority of women, if they so wished, to procure a legal abortion, should be repealed and replaced with a complete ban. This had provoked widespread uproar in the country. Wojtyla, during the months prior to his fourth trip home, had been kept fully informed of the debate.
For the trip to his homeland, the Pope had chosen as the theme of his visit the Ten Commandments. In the pouring rain at the Kielce Flying Club in Poland he addressed a crowd of some 200,000. Addressed is not what he actually did. He harangued them.
‘There has to be a change in the way you treat a newly conceived child. While it may come unexpectedly, it is never an intruder, never an aggressor . . . You must not confuse freedom with immorality.’
Lashed by the wind and the rain, he looked for all the world like an Old Testament prophet.
‘I say this because this land is my mother; this land is the mother of my brother and sisters. This land is my home and for that reason, I allow myself to speak this way.’
Constantly emphasising his words with a clenched fist, he shouted against the wind,
‘All of you must understand that the way you deal with these questions is thoughtless. These things cannot but cause me pain, and they ought to pain you too. It is easier to tear down than to build up. Destruction has been going on for too long. Now, we need to rebuild. You cannot just heedlessly destroy everything.’
The spectacle of the Pope losing his temper did not impress his audience. Before his return, many within the country had been equally unimpressed with the increasing arrogance of the Polish Church towards the laity. From the hierarchy down to the local priest, many were giving the impression that they would fill the vacuum left by the Communists. The people had other ideas.
Wojtyla’s attacks on this tour were not confined to the abortion debate. He attacked their adultery, their preoccupation with materialism. He blamed the media; he blamed Western Europe. If he grew angry, so did those who heard him speak or read what he said. The women of Poland were particularly incensed; they believed that they, not the Church, should choose how many children they should have. He even managed to deeply offend the small community of Jews who had not been driven out of Poland by the unceasing anti-Semitism. He achieved this by equating the Holocaust with the ‘great cemeteries of the unborn, cemeteries of the defenceless, whose faces even their own mothers never knew’.
The laws on abortion after constant pressure by the Polish Catholic Church hierarchy were changed. Now it is very difficult to obtain a legal abortion. One of Poland’s leading gynaecologists explained to me how the stricter regulations have affected Polish women. ‘The wealthy go abroad and obtain abortions. The poor have babies.’
During 2003 and the following year, the Pope staked much on winning the argument he was having with the European Community. At every opportunity, he demanded that the constitutional treaty pay full acknowledgment to its Christian heritage. If Cardinal Casaroli had still been at the helm in the Secretariat of State, a number of Vatican insiders felt the demands would not have reached such a shrill level, that there might have been rather more ‘quiet diplomacy’. The rejection caused further damage to the image of the Catholic Church. It powerfully underlined how impotent Wojtyla’s papacy had become.
In mid-2003 when the Vatican lobbying of the European Union had grown frenetic, the Pope issued a new Apostolic Exhortation. The document summarises the work of the Synod of Bishops for Europe, which had concluded its meetings in Rome in October 1999. The Pope seized the chance yet again to condemn Europe. To attack the continent that you were simultaneously lobbying on a crucial issue demonstrates how badly the Pope lacked wise counsel. The Europe of the Wojtyla document is ‘disoriented, uncertain, without hope’. The malaise includes ‘a plummeting birth rate, the shortage of vocations to priestly and religious life, the collapse of marriages, the loss of reverence for human life, and the many signs of spiritual and psychological isolation’. Christianity ‘that has sustained Europe for centuries has been replaced by a sort of practical agnosticism and religious indifference’. Wojtyla concluded that Europe is now suffering through ‘a profound crisis of values’.
There is much truth within the document. It would perhaps have had greater resonance within Europe if the Pope had been equally perceptive about the total failure of his Church to address not only what ailed Europe, but also what ailed the Roman Catholic Church. He might then have arrived at the conclusion that the crisis within the Vatican was directly linked to the problems across the Tiber. That the Church by her inaction is directly responsible for the continuing clerical abuse and that the effect it is having on societies in many countries is directly responsible for the profound loss of faith that has resulted did not occur to Pope John Paul II.
The late Pope and his cardinals had known since at least the early 1980s that such sexual abuse was widespread: in truth, the Catholic hierarchy had always known. Instead of taking firm, early, decisive action they chose to perpetuate the secret system and such behaviour stripped the Pope and many of his princes of every single shred of moral authority. Now as we approach the second anniversary of Karol Wojtyla’s death, still nothing in real terms has been done.
Within a great many countries, particularly the United States, Karol Wojtyla’s failure to deal effectively with the continuing cancer of abuse has, from the mid-1980s onwards, caused ever-increasing numbers of Roman Catholics to conclude that the papacy of Pope John Paul II had ended long before April 2005.
As for the papal attack on Europe’s ‘profound crisis of values’, one can only hope that Pope Benedict XVI will reflect on that denunciation in the light of Europe’s response to the earthquake and tsunami that struck on 26 December 2004. The response from the British public was to donate over £372 million. There was a comparable response throughout Europe, the USA and beyond. Governments around the world pledged billions of dollars, huge amounts of material, medical and volunteer aid, a wonderful example of the true solidarity that Wojtyla so treasured. That instinctive response, ‘a commitment to the common good’, as the late Pope described the true moral value of Solidarity, in his 1987 encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis – On Social Concern – that global response was a powerful illustration that neither Christianity in general nor Catholicism in particular have a monopoly on compassion.
On 13 May 1981 the attempt on the Pope’s life came within a microscopic distance of succeeding. Karol Wojtyla and many of those close to him believed that the Virgin Mary intervened and gave the Pope ‘a second life’. From his various comments and also his writings it is obvious that self-criticism did not play a significant role in either the Pope’s ‘first’ or ‘second’ life. The perfect child became the flawless man and then the infallible Pope.
To celebrate his eighty-fourth birthday in May 2004 Wojtyla published Wstańcie, chodźmy! – ‘Get up and Let Us Go!’ – an autobiographical work on his years as a bishop in Cracow. At one point, the author considers his use of authority.
‘The faculty of admonition also certainly belongs to the role of the pastor. In these terms, I have done too little. There was always a problem of equilibrium between authority and service. Perhaps I should rebuke myself, for not having tried hard enough to command.’ The self-criticism is short-lived. A few lines later, Wojtyla wrote: ‘In spite of the interior resistance I feel for the act of rebuking, I think I have made all the necessary decisions.’
I leave the reader to judge, within the many aspects of the papacy that this book examines, whether or not Pope John Paul II ‘made all the necessary decisions’, but two in particular should cause even the most devout supporter of the late Pope to give pause. Because of his continuing failure to make ‘the necessary decisions’, a corrupt archbishop retained control of the Vatican Bank for a further decade. Because of Wojtyla’s inability to make ‘the necessary decisions’, rampant clerical sexual abuse had continued unchecked and had directly resulted in mass desertions from the faith in many countries. From his earliest days as a bishop in Cracow, Karol Wojtyla constantly avoided making the ‘necessary decisions’. His papacy is riddled with countless examples of fatal vacillation. That failure to act has left the Church in crisis, both financially and spiritually.
On 13 May 2005, Pope Benedict XVI announced the immediate opening of a cause for the beatification of Pope John Paul II. The usual five-year waiting period that is required after the death of the candidate for beatification has been waived. As befits the pop-star Pope, his elevation is being fast-tracked. The rush to sainthood has begun.
What the Church needed after the death of Pope John Paul II was a leader that would perform the Herculean task of cleaning the Augean stables he had inherited. What it got were men who allowed the disgraced Cardinal Law, the former archbishop of Boston, to preside over the Mass marking the fourth day of the novendiales, the nine-day period of formal mourning. It was an official mark of approval for a man who had lied, prevaricated and applied the secret system to cover up for numerous sexually abusing priests, thus allowing them to continue, in some cases for decades, to maim and injure the innocent.
What the Church subsequently got was Cardinal Ratzinger, the late Pope’s closest associate for more than 20 years. Pope Benedict XVI’s election demonstrated that there is indeed a life after death. The name on the headed notepaper may have changed. The management is the same. The conservative wing, to the intense delight of Opus Dei and the other reactionary elements within the Church, easily outmanoeuvred the reforming liberals and elected a 78-year-old man more than three years past his normal retirement age with a medical history that includes at least two strokes. His personal history includes volunteering – contrary to Ratzinger’s assertions, registration was not compulsory – for the Hitler youth movement. His own account of his later activities in the Wehrmacht also lacks clarity.
Cardinal Ratzinger as the then Head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith refused on several occasions to investigate repeated allegations including sworn affidavits that the founder of the Legionnaires of Christ, Marcial Maciel Degollado, had constantly sexually abused young members of his organisation. The Cardinal was very aware in what high regard Maciel was held by Pope John Paul II. With Wojtyla dead and Ratzinger duly elected as his successor, the evidence against Marcial Maciel, that for years had been disregarded, was finally acted upon. In 2007 the Vatican announced that after an intensive examination of the various accusations the Congregation of the Faith under the guidance of its new Prefect Cardinal William Levada decided ‘taking account of the advanced age of the Reverend Maciel and his delicate health to refrain from taking action against Maciel’ but instead to invite him to ‘a reserved life of prayer and penance, renouncing every public ministry’. This was not, however, the signal that the much-needed reforms regarding clerical sexual abuse were about to be implemented. Ratzinger is also on record as having issued a written warning to every Roman Catholic bishop in the world of the strict penalties facing those who referred allegations of sexual abuse to the civil authorities. He thus ensured that his predecessor’s desire that the Church should cover up such activities – a view that Karol Wojtyla had expressed to the Austrian bishops in 1998: ‘like every house that has special rooms that are not open to guests the Church also needs rooms for talks that require privacy’ – would continue to be official policy.
An indication of some of Pope Benedict XVI’s priorities can be gauged from the fact that in spring 2006 he summoned the world’s cardinals to Rome for ‘a day of prayer and reflection’, held behind closed doors. This all-day session with the cardinals was to discuss ‘the four key issues facing the Church: a bid to heal the breach with Catholic traditionalists; relations between Christianity and Islam; the status of retired bishops; and preparations and use of liturgical texts’. By the end of 2006 there were also indications that a reform of the Vatican Bank and the other financial arms of Vatican finance was moving up the Papal agenda. Much further down the list are concessions on the use of condoms to fight the modern plague of AIDS. Issues such as an honest examination of the Catholic Church’s role in the global collapse of Christianity are totally off the radar.
Speaking in a series of meditations on Good Friday 2005, the then Cardinal Ratzinger said, ‘how much filth there is in the Church, and even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to Christ!’ Quite so, Holy Father. Quite so.
As a direct result of Karol Wojtyla’s Papacy, the power of the Church had been profoundly reduced and its glory severely tarnished.
David A. Yallop
27 January 2007