ON II SEPTEMBER 2003 the Alitalia jet carrying Pope John II, his entourage, the press corps and other unidentified personnel touched down at the M. R. Stefanik airport outside Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, and the 102nd papal visit had begun. His schedule had a minimum of public appearances and photo opportunities. Gone were the images of a strong, upright, athletic figure hurrying down the plane steps to kiss the ground. It took four aides twenty minutes to manoeuvre Wojtyla into the elevator that had been especially installed to assist his descent from the plane. The Pope remained seated as his chair was rolled onto a platform in the reception hall of the airport for a brief welcoming ceremony.
He read only a few lines of his prepared speech in the Slovak language. By the end of the first paragraph he was struggling for breath and was unable to continue. His secretary, Bishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, quickly moved forward, took the speech from the Pope and handed it to a young Slovak priest, who read the remainder with the exception of the final paragraph which the Pope, struggling and in obvious difficulty, somehow got through.
It was becoming an increasingly familiar scene on these trips. Predictably, the Vatican spin doctor Joaquin Navarro-Valls sought to downplay what the watching reporters had observed, reminding the press of other occasions when the Pope had been forced to rely on others to deliver his public speeches. Navarro-Valls was obliged under further questioning to concede that this was the first time it had happened during an opening speech on an apostolic trip.
The Pope’s condition had not improved at the time of his second public appearance of the day, this time at the Marian shrine at Trnava in eastern Slovakia. Despite several hours of rest he was desperately frail. Many regulars in the press corps believed that the Pope might die at any moment during this four-day trip. Navarro-Valls demonstrated yet again that he saw a different reality to the majority. ‘I do not see any obstacle to an eventual 103rd trip. Even if there is no concrete plan, we have already received several invitations.’
As usual, the truth was somewhat different. The large quantity of medical equipment and the doctors and nurses among the papal party had become a regular feature when the Pope travelled any distance away from the Vatican. A trip to Mongolia planned for August had been cancelled because of his worsening condition.
For years Navarro-Valls had angrily denied that the Pope was suffering from Parkinson’s disease. The Pope was continually presented as the super-fit athlete of his youth long after the evidence told a different story. His health had been in serious decline well before 2003. Within the Vatican there were now open discussions of not ‘if’ but ‘when’ the Pope would hand over power. Some of those close to the Pope were terrified of that approaching moment. Unless they were able to manipulate the handover, which was a very real possibility, their own power would be in jeopardy. Meanwhile they continued to allow the 83-year-old terminally ill Pope to suffer in public. Near the end of Karol Wojtyla’s ordeal in Slovakia the consensus view of the accompanying press reporters was that he ‘was nearing the limit of what medicine and willpower can do’. Within the Vatican it was openly admitted that well before the ordeal in Slovakia this had become ‘a lame duck papacy’, and that the Pope alternated between ‘periods of lucidity and confusion’.
Apart from the human costs of shuttling a very sick man in his eighties around the world, the papal trips always raised other fundamental questions. Did the Roman Catholic Church actually gain from these journeys? What benefits were derived from this unique example of evangelism which began in January 1979 with visits to Mexico and the Dominican Republic and then continued unabated?
‘I am a pilgrim-messenger who wants to travel the world to fulfil the mandate Christ gave to the apostles when he sent them to evangelise all men and all nations.’ Since John Paul II uttered those words in Spain in November 1982 he had spent 580 days and nights on the road, up in the air, across the oceans and seas of the world. Nearly a year and a half of the entire Wojtyla Papacy were spent on arrivals and departures and in between preaching, praying and in every sense of the word, pontificating.
These activities, among a number of others, provoked extravagant praise from an unending queue of admirers. ‘Man of the Century . . . Prophet of the New Millennium . . . Conscience of the World.’ The statistics of the Wojtyla Papacy, how many trips, the number of encyclicals, the record number of beatifications, of canonisations, of the record crowds attending Papal Mass in the Philippines, in Ireland, in Poland, were constantly trotted out by the Vatican. One official statistic was never mentioned: how much did it cost? And should the Pope have followed the example of his predecessors and spent more time in Rome?
The question was raised within the Vatican very early in his papacy. A senior member of the Roman Curia told me in 1981 that the Curia were extremely concerned over ‘excessive and unnecessary use of human and financial resources’. If the Curia had known then just how frequently in the future the Papal flights would take to the skies they might have demonstrated in St Peter’s Square. As recorded earlier, the Pope raised the issue himself during his first visit to the African continent in 1980.
‘Some people think that the Pope should not travel so much. He should stay in Rome, as before. I often hear such advice, or read it in the newspapers. But the local people here say,
“Thank God you came here, for you can only learn about us by coming. How could you be our pastor without knowing us? Without knowledge of who we are, how we live, what is the historical moment we are going through?” This confirms me in the belief that it is time for the Bishops of Rome to become successors not only of Peter but also of Saint Paul, who as we know could never sit still and was constantly on the move.’
Exactly how effective was he as the messenger? Discounting Vatican spin, local exaggeration and media hyperbole the powerfully charismatic Wojtyla indisputably attracted vast crowds when making his ‘pilgrimages’. The accumulative global figure for attendances at the open masses and meetings runs into many hundreds of millions if not billions. The words he uttered amount to a similar total. The financial cost is more difficult to evaluate. During November 1980 the Pope paid a five-day visit to the then West Germany; the cost to the West German taxpayers was officially put at $10 million. In 1982 the Pope made a six-day visit to the United Kingdom; the cost was officially put at £6 million. In 1987 the Pope made a ten-day visit to the USA estimated at $26 million. The Vatican paid for the first-class air fares for the twelve members of the papal party, while American taxpayers and American Catholics paid the remainder. Long after the trip, many dioceses were struggling with huge unpaid bills. The cost of other overseas trips has also been officially estimated at $2 million per day. Taking these figures as an average, the cost of the Pope’s overseas trips since October 1978, a cost that was never paid by the Vatican, was in excess of $1.1 billion. Undoubtedly, the great majority of papal trips had an immediate effect on his audiences, with huge crowds instantly bonding to the man from the far country. However, the long-term effect was minimal. The man the audiences were prepared to love; the message they were prepared to ignore. In most countries the vast majority of Roman Catholics were to prove very resistant to the teachings of Pope John Paul II. Even in a country as historically Catholic as Ireland, where over ninety per cent of the population attended mass once a week, beliefs were changing dramatically.
Surveys, research and opinion polls carried out there in early 2001 by the American priest, author and sociologist, Father Andrew Greeley, confirmed that Ireland’s attitudes towards religion were changing. This was the country where for two and a half days in 1979 the Pope took the entire nation by storm. The first Papal Mass in Phoenix Park, Dublin was attended by an estimated 1.2 million people, more than one third of the entire population. Speaking to this vast congregation the Pope urged Ireland, a country that had for centuries sent out thousands of missionaries into the world to rediscover their faith, ‘be converted’.
At Drogheda, a compromise location chosen for security reasons some thirty miles from the border with Northern Ireland, John Paul pleaded for an end to the sectarian violence, an end to the murders, blasphemously perpetrated not only in the name of nationalism but also competing versions of Christianity. He invoked the fifth commandment, ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’. He rejected the description that a religious war was being engaged between Catholics and Protestants. ‘This is a struggle between people driven by hate and Christianity forbids hatred.’ Speaking not only to the 300,000 gathered at Drogheda but to the entire country, north and south, he made a powerful and very personal plea.
‘On my knees I beg you to turn away from the paths of violence and to return to the ways of peace . . . violence destroys the work of justice . . . further violence in Ireland will only drag down and ruin the land you claim to love and the values you claim to cherish.’
Everywhere he went he was acclaimed with thunderous applause, deafening cheers and rapturous singing. His final mass in Limerick drew more than 250,000 people. The Pope’s plea to the men of violence had not the slightest effect or influence upon events. The murders, the obscene bombings of civilians, the knee-capping, the intimidation and the hatred all continued without cease. As for Irish Catholicism, the numbers of the faithful continued to decline.
The changes in belief, behaviour and attitude that Father Greeley’s surveys recorded were certainly not the ones that the Pope had in mind when he had exhorted ‘be converted’. ‘If the proper measures of Catholicism are faith and devotion, then the Irish are still Catholic,’ Father Greeley observed. His research found that ninety-four per cent of the Irish believed in God, eighty-five per cent in heaven and miracles and seventy-eight per cent in life after death. However, ‘If on the other hand the proper measures of faith are acceptance of Church authority and adherence to the Church’s sexual ethic, then the Irish are no longer Catholic,’ said Greeley, adding ‘but then neither are any other people in Europe including the Italians and the Poles.’ His figures showed that only forty per cent believed that abortion was always wrong, only thirty per cent believed that premarital sex was always wrong and just sixty per cent believed that same-sex relations were always wrong. Most tellingly of all, only seven per cent of those born in the 1970s had a great deal of confidence in the Church but seventy per cent had high confidence in their local priest.
A subsequent poll conducted in September 2003 by RTE, Ireland’s state broadcaster, confirmed Father Greeley’s findings. It showed that only fifty per cent of Catholics in Ireland attended mass each week, seventy-five per cent believed that celibate priesthood should be abolished, sixty per cent believed that the priesthood should be open to women and thirty-eight per cent rejected the concept of papal infallibility.
A 2002 Zogby poll indicated that Father Greeley might soon need to add the United States to those who are ‘no longer Catholic’. It found fifty-four per cent in favour of married priests, while fifty-three per cent thought there should be women priests, sixty-one per cent approved of artificial birth control, a thumping eighty-three per cent thought it was morally wrong to discriminate against homosexuals and even on abortion nearly a third disagreed that it was always morally wrong. In contradiction to those figures, in the same poll no fewer than ninety per cent thought the Pope was doing a good job worldwide in his leadership of the Church.
The fact that so many of those polled disagreed with the Church’s position on such a wide range of key issues was a startling illustration of the central paradox of Karol Wojtyla’s papacy. They would buy his books, his CDs, his videos, they would flock in their millions to the parks, fields, football stadiums of this world when he was celebrating mass but in ever increasing numbers they would not follow either his teaching or Church doctrine on a growing number of issues. His form of Christianity was becoming increasingly irrelevant and evidence was not confined to polls. In Australia, they were voting with their feet. Between 1971 and 2006, Catholic weddings in a church had declined by over 50%, from 9,784 to 4,075.
In the United States the number of priests more than doubled to 58,000 between 1930 and 1965. Since then the number has fallen to 45,000 and continues to slip away. By 2020, on present trends, there will be fewer than 31,000 and more than half of those priests will be over seventy. In 1965, one per cent of US parishes were without a priest. By 2002, 15 per cent – 3,000 parishes – lacked a priest. In that same period the number of seminarians declined by ninety per cent. The same grim picture repeated itself in the figures for Catholic nuns and members of religious orders. Almost half of the Catholic high schools have closed in the past forty years. Weekly attendance at mass hovers between thirty-one and thirty-five per cent. Annulment figures have soared from 338 to 501,000. Wherever one looks the story is the same yet the US Catholic Church still proclaimed that within the same period, 1965 to 2002, the number of Catholics within the country had risen by 20 million.
The myth of a hugely increased membership is perpetuated not only within the USA but globally. The Church’s definition of a Roman Catholic – a baptised person – flies in the face of the fact that hundreds of millions of notional Catholics subsequently reject the Church’s teachings on a huge range of issues and by doing so, notwithstanding what is written on their baptismal certificates, cease to be Roman Catholics. A non-practising Roman Catholic is an ex-Roman Catholic, or in Vatican-speak – a lapsed Roman Catholic.
In Britain, plans are well advanced to abolish the current oath taken before giving evidence in court. In future there will be no reference to God. In the United States in October 2003 after a long legal battle that went all the way up to the Supreme Court, a Federal Court decision banning the display of the Ten Commandments in the Alabama state judiciary building was upheld. The decision re-affirmed the separation of church and state. While the Pope created more and more saints, fewer and fewer children are being named after them. In devoutly Roman Catholic Chile, abortion morning-after pills are distributed free of charge. Vandalism, theft, drug dealing, arson, pagan rites and ‘inappropriate behaviour on the high altar’ have become such common occurrences in British churches that many are now kept locked outside the hours of service, with closed-circuit TV cameras on. Simultaneously Catholic churches in Scotland are recording all-time low attendances, a mere twelve per cent. Bishop Joe Devine of Motherwell observed, ‘The Catholic population is diminished but not vanquished. The occult plays a part, but the main issue is that people are watching television or playing football rather than going to church.’ The Pope held a bleaker view: ‘Scotland is a pagan country.’
Cardinal Keith O’Brien, a man he recently promoted, agrees. ‘There is a danger of Scotland declining into a bacchanalian state where everyone is just concerned with their own pleasures and to sleep with whomever they want.’ In January 2003 Britain’s leading Catholic clergyman, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, dramatically spoke of a far greater crisis of faith: ‘Britain has become a very pagan country.’
If there are unwanted pregnancies in Britain there are not enough of them in Italy. In L’Osservatore Romano in October 2001 theologian Father Gino Romano sought to find the reason for the fact that Italy, closely followed by Catholic Spain, has the lowest birth rate in Europe. He blamed ‘Italian policies . . . the steady rise in divorce reflects the impact of a cyclone of secularism and consumerism.’ He also called ‘for new efforts to enable young couples to have more than one child’.
The Italian theologian, like the Catholic Women’s League in Britain, lamented the fact that the majority of teenagers, while still believing in the value of marriage, prefer to wait until their relationships and other aspirations have matured. Choice is being exercised. Traditional marriage in mid- or late teens with three or more young children by the age of twenty is a prospect with diminishing appeal in Europe.
There has been a wholesale rejection of the Church’s teaching on birth control. The majority have also rejected the Church’s teaching on divorce and abortion. While renowned Catholic philosophers argued publicly with the Pope and the Jesuits on the existence of hell, the Catholic masses are more concerned with the here and now and a lifestyle profoundly at odds with the Pope’s constant admonitions. They also disagree with the Church’s position on married priests and women priests.
Two thirds further believe that the Catholic Church should return to the practice of priests and the congregation electing bishops within their own diocese. The Italians regard the Pope’s failure to eliminate the financial corruption of the 1980s with deep cynicism. During that decade when he paid a visit to a very seriously deprived Naples, he was greeted with a huge banner that proclaimed: ‘Rich Naples Welcomes Its Poor Pope’. The Italians were equally cynical about the extraordinary number of trips abroad the Pope and his entourage had made. It confirmed in the minds of many the image of a very wealthy Church squandering the people’s money.
Some of the public criticism was unfair and uninformed. The visits within Italy frequently finished in profit. Vatican officials were not above requesting a facility fee if they had a request from a mayor or a factory owner for a visit from Pope John Paul. When Carol de Benedetti (wearing not his Banco Ambrosiano hat but his chief executive of Olivetti headgear) was preparing for a papal visit to his typewriter factory in Ivrea he was advised that a contribution would be required. The man from the Vatican suggested $100,000 and subsequently de Benedetti wrote out the cheque making it payable to the Pope personally and handed it to him privately during his visit.
I had been told this story some years ago and considered it apocryphal until seeing it quoted by Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi after they had interviewed De Benedetti. Subsequent research confirmed that many other Italian businessmen have been obliged to put something in the Vatican plate.
Nor did the Italian taxpayer or the Vatican pick up the $2 million daily expense of the overseas trips.
The Pope and his closest advisors never considered the possibility that the widespread collapse of Catholicism might at least in part have been due to the Vatican. For them, the answer was invariably found in the corruption of secular society rather than the corruption of those from whom secular society once sought moral guidance. As Wojtyla commented to the Belgian bishops, the decline of religious practice in their home country was ‘particularly troubling’ and he was in no doubt as to the reasons. It was the problem of ‘a society that loses track of its traditional points of reference, promoting relativism in the name of pluralism’.
On the occasion of a visit to Rome by a group of French bishops the Pope encouraged them to confront ‘the secularisation of French society, which often takes the form of rejection, in public life, of the anthropological, religious and moral principles which have profoundly marked the history and culture of the nation’. The Pope told his French bishops of his concern of the decline in priestly vocations. ‘For many years now, your country has seen a grave crisis of vocations: a sort of wandering in the desert that constitutes a real trial of faith for pastors and faithful alike.’ A long list of recommendations followed. The French bishops were too cowed to point out that all of them had been previously tried without success.
In December 2004 a survey of 18,000 French citizens was conducted by the Catholic daily La Croix and the CSA polling institute. It confirmed that in France the Catholic Church was approaching meltdown. While 64.3 per cent of French people describe themselves as Catholic, only 7.7 per cent of respondents said they attended church once a month. Of these, 28 per cent were aged over 75 years and the overwhelming majority were poorly educated, rural women. France today has 17,000 diocesan priests, half the number that existed in 1980. Parishes, too, show a 50 per cent decline.
The French might perhaps have been heartened to learn that they were not alone. The Pope delivered the same lecture to the majority of his bishops. He told the Dutch, ‘Your country has experienced an intense process of secularisation for thirty years, which has spread to the Catholic Church like wildfire and unfortunately continues to mark Dutch society.’ Subsequently in November 2004 Cardinal Adrianis Simonis of Utrecht offered what has become among Catholic bishops in Europe a popular explanation for the collapse of Christianity. ‘Today we have discovered that we are disarmed in the face of the Islamic danger.’ Pointing out that even some of the young who had been born and raised in the Netherlands had become militant Muslims the Cardinal linked the rise of Islam to ‘the spectacle of extreme moral decadence and spiritual decline that we offer’ to young people.
Cardinal Poupard, the president of the Pontifical Council, a Frenchman working within the Vatican, brought a broader vision to the Christian meltdown.
‘The militant and organised atheism of the Communist era has been replaced by practical indifference, the loss of interest in the question of God, and the abandonment of religious practices, especially in the Western world.’
Among the problems that the Church must confront, he continued, were ‘the globalisation of mass culture, the influence of the electronic media and the rise of new sects’. He lamented the ‘absence of efficient media through which the faith can be spread’. Poupard feared that the loss of faith could ‘lead to the collapse of culture with dangerous consequences for society. The era most menacing to man is not the one that denies the truth but the one that is not concerned about the truth.’
In fact the Catholic Church has highly efficient media to spread the faith. The Catholic media are a global giant with a galaxy of news agencies, newspapers, radio and television companies committed to the Roman Catholic Church’s official line on all issues. All of this is based in just one city, much of it replicated in many cities around the world. Opus Dei alone has more media outlets worldwide than Rupert Murdoch. The last thing lacking in the modern Catholic Church is an absence of efficient media.
‘Rome Reports’, for example, is a television news agency focusing entirely on the Pope and the Church that sells programme segments in English, Spanish and Portuguese to broadcasters in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Its director Yago de la Cierva is a member of Opus Dei. Radio Maria is both a radio and TV station, broadcasting globally. Famiglia Cristiana is a weekly periodical published by the Fathers of St Paul. The Italian Bishops’ Conference has its own newspaper Avvenire and a satellite television station that is rebroadcast by dozens of local Catholic stations. Telepace is yet another Catholic television station. The Catholic University of the Sacred Heart publishes the magazine Vita e Pensiero. Mondo e Missione is the monthly magazine of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions. Rival Catholic monthly magazines include Nigrizia, Missione Oggi, Il Timone and Inside the Vatican. There is the Zenit news agency. There is the on-line agency Asia News, publishing in Italian, Chinese and English.
Then of course there are the Vatican’s media outlets, including a press office controlled by Opus Dei numerary Joaquin Navarro-Valls; a website in six languages with daily bulletins and an extensive archive; the daily newspaper L’Osservatore Romano; the Vatican Television Centre; the Vatican Information Service; Fides, the only on-line agency of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, its seven-language service yet again including Chinese; the Liberia Editrice Vaticana which publishes all official declarations of the Holy See; and finally there are the magazines and bulletins published by the various Vatican offices.
The bishops twist and turn as they seek the enemy. Socialism has been added to Islam and Communism though in truth many from the Pope down have never been able to distinguish Socialism from Communism. His late Secretary of State Cardinal Casaroli, who really should have known better, fell into that trap when discussing the problems of Mexico. There is no doubt that when the Spanish bishops make their next ad limina visit to Rome the current Socialist government will be held to blame for all of the Spanish Church’s problems. A late 2004 opinion poll showing sixty-one per cent support for the government’s proposal to legalise homosexual marriage and a seventy-two per cent majority who thought that the state should stop the annual handout to the Spanish Church of nearly £100 million would indicate that the majority of Spaniards stand with their government and not the Catholic Church.
Further legislation being prepared in Spain is designed to give other Christian churches, Jews and Muslims some of the privileges currently exclusively enjoyed by the Roman Catholic Church. The Spanish Catholic Church has subsequently placed itself in the frontline of political opposition to the democratically elected government which cannot be held responsible for the extraordinary collapse of the Catholic faith that has occurred in Spain. In a country where ninety per cent of the population are ‘declared’ Roman Catholics two-thirds – sixty-six per cent – are non-practitioners. To take just one issue that was particularly close to Karol Wojtyla’s heart, in predominantly Catholic Spain, polls show that forty per cent of the population believes that abortion is a fundamental right and a further twenty-four per cent believe that it should be tolerated. That was from a poll carried out before the Socialists came to power when the country was ruled by a right-wing government. In present-day Spain, more than fifty per cent of pregnancies occurring in girls between the ages of fifteen and seventeen are terminated.
The Pope had recognised that the challenge faces not just Catholicism but Christianity in general. In a speech to the Pontifical Academy for Culture, in March 2002, he said: ‘Our contemporaries are immersed in cultural circles that are often strangers to every spiritual dimension of life . . . Christians must repair the damage caused by this rupture of the connection between faith and reason.’ But his solution was a two-edged sword. ‘There is a need to create an educational system dedicated to a serious anthropological study to take account of who man is and what life means.’ Such studies have existed for a very long time and additional research in this field would at the very least strengthen the position of the humanist.
One of the bishops in Nicaragua had a more radical proposal. Bishop Abelardo Guevara during a Christmas Day sermon addressed the crisis in family life. He railed about the violent gangs of teenagers who had forced the diocese to cancel the traditional late-night Christmas Eve Mass. ‘We urgently need to recover family unity and spiritual principles. Our society is falling apart because of lack of these virtues.’ Addressing all parents within his congregation the bishop continued, ‘You must be willing to do everything possible to protect values within your families. Shoot the TV set if it is necessary to keep anti-values away!’
In early December 2001 the official exorcist for the diocese of Rome, Father Gabriele Amorth, saw the threat as coming not from the small screen but the big one. His concern was the Harry Potter films and books. The priest, who is also the president of the International Association of Exorcists, believed that a great force for evil was influencing the works. ‘Behind Harry Potter hides the signature of the king of darkness, the devil.’ The exorcist explained that the books contain innumerable references to magic, ‘the satanic art’ and that they attempt to make a false distinction between black and white magic when in reality the distinction ‘does not exist, because magic is always a turn to the devil’.
Wherever one looks, Christianity in all its forms appears to be in retreat. In Latin America – the Vatican’s continent of hope – health officials from twenty countries gathered in Mexico at the end of 2001 in a three-day conference of more than 250 participants to help Latin American governments establish ‘a free exchange of ideas’ about the possible legislation of abortion. These predominately Catholic countries were concerned at the large number of secret abortions that resulted in the death of the pregnant woman. The figure was estimated as ‘6000 lives each year’. In March 2000 in the Pope’s home country the Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski vetoed a bill that would have brought into force new tougher anti-pornography measures. The President declared that the bill ‘would unfairly curb personal freedoms’. In a country where ninety per cent rate themselves practising Roman Catholics, voters were evenly divided on the President’s action.
Notwithstanding all these signs of decline, the official Vatican figures rate the Wojtyla papacy and his compulsive travelling a resounding success. Global figures for baptised Catholics at the end of December 1997 were just over one billion, a figure that continues to rise. Global figures for example for the year ending 31 December 2000 show an increase in the number of Catholics of just under 12 million on the previous year. But as always the devil is in the detail. For the continent of Europe the figures show a drop of just over 1½ million. The number of priests, brothers and sisters were all also down in Europe. Major areas of growth in most categories were recorded in all other continents except Oceania, but all the figures were based on baptism and take no account of whether the people concerned actually practise or believe in the Catholic faith.
If John Paul II’s mission to evangelise the world were to succeed anywhere it should surely be within Italy. Apart from the fact that he was surrounded on all sides by the Italians, he made the most strenuous efforts to cover every strada, piazza, villaggio, citta and every sacred shrine in Italy. He made 726 pastoral visits to the various parishes within his personal diocese of Rome, a further 140 pastoral visits within Italy beyond the Rome boundaries. He preached, prayed and generally spoke to the Italian nation almost every day for twenty-five years. Every citizen, every man, woman and child was fully exposed to the views of John Paul II on an extraordinary range of subjects, particularly those having a bearing on Roman Catholic teaching.
The official figures state that Italy’s population is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. Nearly eighty per cent consider themselves Catholics. Among those who would disagree was the late Pope himself. In 1996 he called for the ‘evangelisation’ of Rome, which the Vatican regards as a pagan city. Volunteers went from door to door in attempts to persuade the citizens of the capital to ‘return to Church’. It transpired that many had never set foot in St Peter’s.
The decline in the Italian birth rate is matched by the fall in church weddings. Curial heavyweight Cardinal Julian Herranz, the President of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, sees part of the reason being the high cost of a church wedding but acknowledges the more profound factor of ‘the loss of a religious sense in society’. The Catholic Church in Italy suffered a national demonstration of that loss in 1984 when the Roman Catholic faith was disestablished and ceased to be the official religion of Italy.
The Pope has correctly been described as the ‘most Marian Pope in history’ but his infatuation with the biblical mother of Christ and his desire to awaken a genuine Marian spirituality made him alarmingly vulnerable to any exploitation of the Mary legend. It was a vulnerability formed very early in Karol Wojtyla’s life. Returning home from school on 13 April 1929, the eight-year-old boy was confronted by one of his neighbours in the courtyard, who told him bluntly, ‘Your mother has died.’ Emilia was only forty-five years old and had suffered frequent crippling pains, caused by myocarditis and nephritis (acute inflammation of the heart and kidneys) for fifteen years.
When Wojtyla was a young man he would speak of his mother with loving affection as he recalled her invaluable, irreplaceable role in those first years of his life. Later there was a change of tone, and a bitterness replaced the love as he recalled how preoccupied his mother had been with her illness and how little time she had had to devote to him. The young boy lost the most important person in his life at an achingly young age. It was undoubtedly crucial in the formation of his paradoxical personality and the Marian obsession that dominated his view of women.
Wojtyla regularly spoke and wrote as if the only role for secular women was motherhood. His unremitting hostility to abortion even in the case of raped women, his veneration of women who had died giving birth rather than abort and save their own lives, echo the traditional Catholic teaching which prevailed at the time of his own mother’s early death.
Deprived of maternal affection at a desperately early stage of his development, Wojtyla was also surrounded by a culture that deeply venerated Mary the mother of Christ. Wojtyla’s childhood hero Pius IX also declared the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, ‘the Virgin Mother of Christ’. In Poland Mary has many names, many titles. Apart from the universal Virgin Mary, Wojtyla was also able to pray to The Blessed Mother, Queen of Heaven and Earth, Virgin Bride, Sorrowful Mother, Refuge of Sinners, Comforter of the Afflicted, The Black Madonna of Czestochowa and the title above all others that ensured that she was inexorably identified with Polish nationalism and the Motherland, Queen of Poland, Mary Mother of God.9
A lifelong friend of Wojtyla’s, Halina Królikiewicz-Kwiatkowska recalls, ‘We were always running to church. And in church we were praying, usually to the Virgin Mary.’ Eugeniusz Mroz, one of his other childhood friends, remembers the death of Emilia.
‘He impressed us with his inner peace. He believed that this loss was the will of God. Wojtyla’s flat was on the second floor. His mother’s room was never used after her death. Sometimes when Karol was studying, he would take a break, go into her room and pray. The Holy Father kept a special picture that he always took with him wherever he went. He never parted with this picture, even on long pilgrimages. It shows him as a young child in his mother’s arms.’
Three days after his mother’s funeral, the father took his two sons on a pilgrimage to the Marian sanctuary at Kalwaria Zebrzydowska. Pointing to a famous painting of the Virgin Mary he told Karol, ‘This is your mother now.’ Throughout his life, Karol Wojtyla returned to this place where on the eve of the Feast of the Assumption, Poles believe the Holy Virgin dies every year and enters heaven. After an all-night vigil, hymns and prayers, they celebrate Mary’s triumph over death and ascension into heaven. The eight-year-old boy may not have received all the comfort he needed at this time, for ten years later he penned these lines of poetry:
On your white tomb
Blossom the white flowers of life
Oh how many years have passed
Without you – how many years?
On your white tomb
Closed now for years
Something seems to rise
Inexplicable as death
On your white tomb
Mother, my lifeless love . . .
Until the latter part of the fourth century, the devotion of Mary was kept well in the background but her apparition had in fact been sighted earlier. In the third century while Gregory Thaumaturgus was wrestling with theological doctrines shortly before entering the priesthood, the Blessed Virgin appeared, accompanied by St John. She instructed St John to disclose to Gregory the ‘mystery of godliness’. John duly obliged, ‘enunciated a formula well turned and completed and then vanished’. In the late fourth century Augustine felt compelled to protest against ‘extravagant and ill-founded praise of Mary. This kind of idolatry . . . is far removed from the grave character of theology – that is, of heavenly wisdom.’ One wonders what Augustine, who next to Paul did more than any man to shape Christianity, would make of Karol Wojtyla’s lifelong ‘idolatry’ of Mary.
Through the centuries there have been repeated claims of sightings of Mary, conversations with her, miracles by her and statues of her shedding tears of blood, many of which have been officially recognised by the Roman Catholic Church. The manifestations, particularly at Lourdes and Fatima, have wrought dramatic changes at the locations and the surrounding areas. Whether or not miracles have occurred is a matter of continuing debate, but beyond doubt the profile of the Church has been enhanced, the faith of a great many has been strengthened and huge amounts of money have been generated.
In early June 1981 Medjugorje was a poor rural village in Bosnia-Herzegovina within what was at the time Yugoslavia. On 24 June six Croatian teenagers made varying claims to have seen ‘Gospa’ – the Blessed Virgin Mary. At least three of the children also claimed to have seen the Christ child in the arms of his mother. The following day they again saw the image of Mary who this time conversed with them. The apparitions and the conversations were to continue each day and they allegedly continue to the present time. Not all of the six are still privileged; by the end of 2003 only three were still on daily message.
Ten years after the first alleged apparitions at Medjugorje, the US State Department requested from their embassy in Belgrade that ‘Medjugorje updates be included in the embassy’s daily sitreps [situation reports]’. Successive American administrations had become increasingly concerned about Medjugorje. This particular cable sent during October 1991 alerted the Belgrade embassy to the fact that: ‘There are 30 AMCIT [American Citizens] pilgrims in Medjugorje right now with a Sister Mary from Philadelphia. Another group of 50 pilgrims led by Sister Margaret plans to travel there leaving New York. Ann is trying to head this group off. Please forgive me if I am misspelling the name of this godforsaken place. And I do mean godforsaken. Ann also hears that the Medjugorje children have left town, apparently on instructions from the Virgin Mary.’
Ten years earlier the cable traffic from the American embassies in both Rome and Belgrade was already conveying concerns about the alleged Medjugorje appearances. In September 1981 Ambassador Wilson reported back to Secretary of State General Alexander Haig with a detailed briefing on a conversation between a visiting American and Cardinal Franjo Seper, the then Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of the Faith, and the Pope’s chief advisor on Yugoslavia. Cardinal Seper had expressed deep concern that the religious revival that had been sparked off in the largely Croatian village of Medjugorje and the surrounding area would lead to increased tensions between church and state and resurgence of Croatian nationalism. Events were to prove Seper’s fears well founded. Cardinal Seper also told his American visitor,
‘The Vatican will not comment on or investigate the reported appearances of the Virgin Mary as this is under the jurisdiction of the local bishops. I think they will be afraid of punitive reaction from the Yugoslavian Government and will therefore do nothing.’
In that at least the cardinal was wrong. Bishop Zanic of Mostar, having initially formed the view that the children were sincere, conducted an investigation and rapidly changed his mind, condemning the whole affair as a hoax and ‘hysterical hallucinations’. The bishop’s unequivocal condemnation, with the full authority of the Vatican, should have ended the affair. But as with some of the earlier alleged sightings of Christ’s mother, people with different agendas had begun to see a huge potential.
The Franciscan Order had for many years been involved in a series of increasingly bitter disagreements within the diocese of Mostar. They saw many of the parishes as their exclusive domain, while the bishop and Rome disagreed and the Order had been forced grudgingly to yield to Vatican authority. Now with the countryside electrified with the stories of Mary and her daily messages to the six children the Franciscan Order swiftly seized control of the phenomenon.
The apparition told the children she should be known as The Queen of Peace. Her daily messages, which only the six could hear, had recurring themes: ‘Make Peace. Pray. Fast. Confess’. In addition a number of very specific instructions and messages were received, but from the outset they were excluded from general release by the Franciscans and were transcribed by themselves. They were used by the order to buttress their attempts to prevent further reduction of their influence in the region. This agenda would be greatly helped by the spiritual and commercial exploitation of the faithful, the needy, and the just plain curious flocking to Medjugorje. The ‘secret’ messages were also used by the Franciscans in their attempts to end the tribal ethnic and religious clan wars that had for centuries been a part of everyday life.
The site of the original apparitions had been on the stony path leading to the top of Mount Podbrdo. For the benefit of the tourists, this was rapidly renamed ‘Apparition Hill’.
When the mountain was declared a no-go area by the Communist authorities the visions continued, but this time before evening Mass in one of the side rooms of the local church. By happy coincidence this also was close to car parking facilities and the terrain was much less of an ordeal for the elderly, the sick and the frail who were soon coming from near and far.
Within two years the authorities were taking a much more enlightened view of the Virgin Mary of Medjugorje. The mountain was re-opened, and the church grounds and a surrounding area were made available for confession and prayers. Confessions were held continuously, with extra confessors brought in to meet peak demand. What had changed the Communist regime’s position? Late in the day, Belgrade had realised that there was ‘tourist gold’ to be made from the Queen of Peace. The Franciscans negotiated with the regime and $500,000 a year began to hit the coffers of central government. This was but a fraction of the money that was pouring in. The ‘tourist gold’ turned into a Balkan gold rush.
By 1990 the Franciscans were claiming that over 18 million visitors had come to Medjugorje since that early June evening in 1981. The fact that at least some of the six children had sneaked up the mountainside for an illicit cigarette had been rewritten to ‘a search for lost lambs’. This deliberately echoed the young shepherd children of Fatima, which unlike Medjugorje has been recognised by the Vatican as a genuine occurrence.
There is in nearby Mostar a very small bank. In the early 1980s it was insignificant in international banking terms with a world ranking of 2,689 but Hrvatska Banka DD Mostar had some very unusual features. A bank’s political and commercial standing can be gauged by the quality of its correspondents, the sister banks acting on its behalf in various countries around the world. The diminutive bank at Mostar, that held the accounts for the Franciscan Order and was also part owned by them, had the banking world’s crème de la crème among its correspondents: Citibank, Deutsche, ABN-Amro, Bank Brussels, Lambert, Nat West, BCI Skand, Enskilda, CSFB, Bank of Tokyo, Cassa di Risparmio, Bayerische, Bank of America were just a few of the major league players, with Citibank acting as correspondent for New York and London. One international banking consultant found it ‘very strange. Such a small bank, such a top-drawer list of correspondents.’
Ownership at the time was shared among a number of banks with illustrious names, including Unicredito Italiano Spa Genoa. One of the directors of the group of companies that controlled Unicredito, Franzo Grande Stevens, was regarded in banking circles as one of the Vatican’s ‘Men of Trust’. His presence on a Board of Directors is often seen as an indication that the Vatican Bank has a financial interest. Clearly the little bank in Mostar was doing something right and indeed still is. Since mid-1981 up to the present day it has acted as the financial nerve centre of the multi-million-dollar enterprise built on the alleged Medjugorje apparitions. It was taken over a few years ago by the rapidly expanding Zagrebacka banking group. The Franciscans control the Medjugorje operation from their University in Steubenville, Ohio. There are major Medjugorje centres at a number of locations in Indiana, Ohio and Alabama.
The Vatican has nonetheless repeatedly avoided openly confronting the issue of Medjugorje. No public statement on the alleged daily sightings has ever been made by a Vatican official, yet a variety of cardinals, bishops and other luminaries are on record as quoting the Pope’s full approval. These include Monsignor Maurillo Kreiger. ‘I told the Pope:
“I am going to Medjugorje for the fourth time.” He concentrated his thoughts and said, “Medjugorje. Medjugorje. It’s the spiritual heart of the world.” On the same day I spoke with other Brazilian bishops and the Pope at lunchtime and I asked him: “Your Holiness, can I tell the visionaries (the six that claim to see the Virgin Mary) that you send your blessing?” He answered, “Yes. Yes,” and embraced me.’ According to Father Gianni Sgreva, ‘The Holy Father listened to me, drew close to me and right in my ear said to me, reminding me not to forget, “Don’t you be concerned about Medjugorje, because I’m thinking about Medjugorje and I pray for its success every day.” ’
In private conversation with one of the seers, Mirjan Soldo, the Pope himself is supposed to have said, ‘If I were not the Pope I would already be in Medjugorje confessing.’ The Pope allegedly endorsed the ‘apparitions’ on at least twelve other occasions. On the other hand there is the unequivocal statement made by Monsignor Renato Boccardo, the Pope’s Head of Protocol. During the Pope’s trip to Croatia in 2003 Monsignor Boccardo was questioned closely about rumours that the Pope might comment on the alleged apparitions and might also be going to Medjugorje. He responded, ‘There has never been any question that the Pope would go to Medjugorje, or make the slightest allusion to it.’
It is curious that within the initial torrent of words and messages apparently flowing from the apparition there was not a single word about the attempted assassination of the Pope or her ‘intervention’ in St Peter’s Square on 13 May 1981. Even more inexplicable is the failure of the Virgin Mary to comment on the consecration of Russia to her by the Pope and his bishops around the world on 25 March 1984. This was an act that the Virgin Mary had allegedly specifically requested when reappearing to one of the Fatima visionaries in June 1929. She had also promised that this act would be followed by world peace and the end of atheism. The Pope chose to interpret the third message of Fatima as directly relating to the attack upon him.
As previously recorded, analysis of that third message indicates that it is far more likely to have referred to his immediate predecessor Albino Luciani, not least because it allegedly foretells a papal murder – not a papal attempted murder. Equally the words of the ‘third secret’ could be interpreted as foretelling the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador.
Karol Wojtyla’s lifelong Marian obsession may have clouded his judgement on the events of Medjugorje. Since 1981 the Vatican has defended its inaction over the alleged apparitions by saying that it awaits pronouncement from the local bishop. The opinion of Bishop Pavao Zanic of Mostar that the apparitions were ‘hysterical hallucinations’ was confirmed in 1982 when he established a diocesan commission to investigate further. In 1984 the Bishops’ Conference of the former Yugoslavia declared that Catholic leaders, including priests and nuns, could not organise official pilgrimages to the shrine until its authenticity was established. In 1985 the Vatican concurred with that position. The tourists meanwhile kept pouring into Medjugorje. In 1987 Bishop Zanic addressed a packed congregation of parishioners and pilgrims in the local Medjugorje Church of St James. He asserted that the visions were false and then continued,
‘Through all my prayers, my work and research, I have sought one goal only: the discovery of truth.
‘It is said that Our Lady began appearing at Podbrdo on Mount Crnica, but when the police banned going there, she went into homes, on fences, into the fields, into vineyards and tobacco fields, she appeared in the Church, on the altar, in the sacristy, in the choir loft, on the roof, on the bell tower, on roads, on the road to Cemo, in a car, in a bus, on a carriage, in a few places in Mostar, in more places in Sarajevo, in the convents of Zagreb, in Varazdin, in Switzerland, in Italy, again at Podbrdo, on Mount Krizevac, in the parish, in the parish rectory, etc. Surely not even half the places of the so-called apparitions have been counted, and a sober person who venerates Our Lady would naturally ask himself: “Dear Mother of God, what are they doing to you?” ’
On 10 April 1991 the Yugoslavian Bishops’ Conference (with a single dissenting vote) supported Zanic, declaring, ‘On the basis of investigation up till now it cannot be established that one is dealing with supernatural apparitions or revelations.’ Bishop Zanic retired in 1993. His replacement, Bishop Ratko Peric, launched his own investigation into the apparitions. He, too, declared them a hoax and dubbed the visionaries liars. Yet still the Vatican declines to make a pronouncement. Still the spiritual, financial, and physical exploitation continues. And the money continues to pour into both Franciscan and Vatican bank accounts; as a member of the Secretariat of State explained: ‘A fraud? Of course it’s a fraud but the money is genuine.’
There were two wars involving Great Britain and Argentina that were fought during 1982. One is well documented and was triggered after the Argentine military dictatorship invaded the Falkland Islands and claimed them as a repossessed part of their nation. After various diplomatic initiatives failed the British, who had occupied the islands for some 200 years, were soon at war.
When the Pope visited the United Kingdom between 28 May and 2 June the fighting was at its height, but by then the other war fought very privately had been fought and won. The winners were the Pope, Cardinal Basil Hume, the Primate of England, and the British bishops. The losers were a clique of Spanish, Argentinian and Brazilian cardinals and the extreme right-wing element of the Roman Curia.
The Pope knew long before this crisis that the Curia was full of men whose philosophies were wholeheartedly fascist. They are not a new phenomenon, nor one that is confined to some of the Spanish and Argentinian residents. They can still be found among a wide cross-section of priests, bishops and cardinals from a variety of Latin American countries and from several European states. They aspired, and still aspire, to regain for the Catholic Church the degree of control that Rome exercised in the distant past; a control over every aspect of national life, in fierce reaction against socialism and democratic egalitarianism. Their predecessors created the Vatican Ratline by which thousands of Nazis, fascists and their collaborators, who should have stood trial for every conceivable crime perpetrated during the Second World War, escaped justice and found new lives in Latin America and the United States.
The fascists within the Church did not die or fade away after Mussolini was killed. They were there before him; they are still there. They rose up in 1982 and against great odds the Pope outflanked them and prevailed.
The papal trip to the United Kingdom had been some two years in the planning. The Argentine military dictatorship deliberately launched their adventure in the Falklands to coincide with it – a fact overlooked or ignored by their fervent supporters in the Vatican. Bishop Marcello Carvalheira from Brazil was one of a number who were openly critical of the planned visit to Britain.
‘So long as the hostilities in the south Atlantic continue, the Pope’s visit would not be a friendly gesture to the Latin American people. An original sin was committed when the British invaded the Falkland Islands.’
The Argentinian ambassador to the Holy See lobbied everyone to ensure the visit was cancelled. The Vatican Secretary of State, Agostino Casaroli, and his deputy, the Spaniard Cardinal Martinez Somalo, took every opportunity to urge the Pope to withdraw from the trip. The papal nuncio in Argentina, Archbishop Ubaldo Calabresi, a regular dinner guest of the junta, asked the Pope how he could travel to Britain while the British were spilling Argentine blood.
Throughout the years of military rule, not one of this Catholic hierarchy showed concern for the spilling of Argentinian blood by the military junta, never lifted a finger when Catholic men and women were tortured to the brink of death and then taken away in helicopters, accompanied by priests who performed the last rites as the victims were thrown into the Atlantic. Cardinal Basil Hume, with a suggestion that could have come from King Solomon, single-handedly neutered much of the opposition when he suggested that the Pope might announce plans for a visit to Argentina. The Curia, mostly hostile to the UK trip, argued that such a visit would take years to plan. The Pope ignored the protests and grabbed at Basil Hume’s suggestion. He announced that that was exactly what he would do.
The joy of the Catholic faithful of the UK was nothing compared to the reaction of the executives of Papal Visit Ltd, the company created by the Catholic Church to manage the Papal tour. Equally relieved were the men at Mark McCormack’s International Marketing Group – IMG – who had been hired to advise on the financial aspects.
More accustomed to marketing the potential of sports stars like Björn Borg and Jack Nicklaus, McCormack’s men had been rapidly advised that it was all to be done ‘in the best possible taste’. Advertisements saying ‘Welcome To Coventry’ in the official mass book, initial print run 1.3 million copies, were ‘not felt to be consistent with the pastoral reason for the visit’. However, mail order catalogues passed the test and were sent to every parish, school and Catholic social organisation in the country. There were more than 200 items to choose from, each with the image of the Pope, including candles, brass plates, jam spoons, sweets, clocks, folding stools, cutlery, books, ornaments, medals and glassware. All items sold earned a ten per cent royalty to help defray the cost of the tour. Only much later was it revealed that twenty per cent of that royalty went into the pockets of IMG. Nothing was overlooked. Trusthouse Forte had won the contract to supply the faithful with their cups of tea and meals during the various stops. The Church again drew a royalty on every cup of tea sold, as it did on every other official amenity where charges were levied.
As with most of Wojtyla’s tours, the media were overwhelmingly supportive and the tour was hailed as a great pastoral success. The pastoral impact was much reduced in Scotland, where attendances and enthusiasm were at their highest, when those attending at the open air mass in Glasgow were subjected to body searches and kept over half a mile away from the Pope.
Excluding Scotland, attendance figures told a different story. Church authorities had seriously overestimated how many people would want to listen to the Pope continually condemning the Falklands conflict with oblique references to war in general. At the time, nearly ninety per cent of the United Kingdom supported the Thatcher Government’s action. Neither did the majority wish to hear condemnations of abortion and a ‘contraception mentality’. The papal mass at Heaton Park, Manchester was attended by 200,000 after the Church had predicted one million. The Church had talked of catering for 750,000 at Coventry but less than half that number actually came. This underwhelming enthusiasm was reflected in the commercial disaster that the visit produced for many traders in England and Wales. Unsold were framed portraits of the Pope, 20,000 cans of Coke and 1,000 packed lunches. Low sales resulted in heavy losses for the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales. Years later, it was still attempting to recover some of the £6 million cost of the tour.
The ‘great pastoral success’ was confirmed as a media fantasy when two decades later Britain’s leading Catholic clergyman described the nation as ‘a pagan country’. The Pope himself passed judgement with his feet: he never returned to Britain, unlike Argentina which the Pope revisited in 1987.
Neither the British nor the Argentines took the slightest notice of the Pope’s often very moving pleas that the fighting should stop. The fighting only ended when Britain had won the war. Within a few short months it was as if the Pope had never been, congregations in churches all over the country continued to get smaller and in Argentina, losing the war succeeded where papal entreaties to stop fighting had failed. The head of the military junta, General Galtieri, was promptly removed and the first steps towards free elections were taken. With the election of Raul Alfonsin in December 1983 democracy was finally restored.
Although many lay Catholics and clergy grew increasingly appalled at the marketing of the Wojtyla Papacy, Archbishop Marcinkus’s view that ‘You can’t run the Church on Hail Marys’ has prevailed.
As a senior American member of the Curia said to me, ‘We are talking product. The Catholic faith is the best product in the world. Of course you have to market it. If you want to sell any product you have to market it.’
Under John Paul II, the Vatican became a modern corporation, in pursuit of the dollar, releasing comics that recount the early life of Karol Wojtyla, CDs and videos of approved music, ‘prayers, homilies and chants, video singles such as Pater Noster’. The Vatican has wholeheartedly embraced the Internet, triggering a furious debate to determine who should be its patron saint. Tickets for papal masses are sold on line or through agencies, or you can sing along to the mass in traditional Latin in the comfort of your own home on the net. Going to confession via the net has currently been prohibited but it is an issue that will undoubtedly return. No need to travel to Rome any more to hear the Pope reciting the Angelus: the prayer plus the Pope’s regular general audience on Wednesdays now go out into cyberspace. (The debate concerning the net’s patron saint was finally resolved in favour of Saint Isidore of Seville, a sixth-century priest. His main claim to fame was the creation of a twenty-volume dictionary that had a tree-like concept similar to a primitive database. A hot rival had been San Pedro Regalado, a fifteenth-century priest who was said to have appeared in two places simultaneously, at the monasteries of La Aguilera and El Abrojo. An excellent attribute when surfing the net.)
Inevitably the Pope’s best-selling book Crossing the Threshold of Hope went multi-media and became available on CD-ROM and, equally inevitably, the Roman Catholic Church pronounced on the sins that could be perpetrated on the net. In February 2001 it was announced, ‘E-mails of a carnal nature and illicit on-line relationships are a sin.’ Virtual sin was born.
As the 1990s were drawing to a close, the Catholic Church continued to demonstrate its determination to require maximum sponsorship. In Mexico during January 1999 the message was no longer the Gospel. The message was the sponsor. Many weeks before the Pope arrived for a five-day visit the posters and billboards gave a clear message that the Holy Father had taken up the Pepsi challenge: rejecting ‘the real thing’ he had come out as a fully paid-up member of Generation Next. ‘Pepsi always faithful,’ read the giant signs alongside blow-up photographs of the Pope.
To help pay for his fourth trip to Mexico the Church had done a host of sponsorship deals, all centred around the Pope’s image. He was helping to sell everything from soft drinks and computers to crisps. The El Globo baking chain had presumably not paid quite enough for an ‘exclusive product placement’, because nearly 100 huge billboards sponsored by ‘Bimbo’ bread commanded the citizens to ‘feed the spirit’ of joy, and the cash tills of the rival bakery. Mercedes-Benz provided two Popemobiles, Hewlett-Packard supplied the computers and Electropura were giving away nearly two million litres of drinks.
Twenty-five companies sponsoring the five-day trip as ‘Official Collaborator’ were picking up seventy-five per cent of the trip’s expenses. The Pope, not unlike San Pedro Regalado, could be found simultaneously in several places. He was on that bottle in your hand, in your packet of crisps, on the stamp that you put on the card telling those back home that you wished they were here. Local comedians had a field day. One renamed the soft drink ‘Popesicola’, another publicly enquired as to whether the Pope’s punishing endorsement schedule would leave any time for him to pray, and in all seriousness a Church spokesman, aware that the Spanish word for both Pope and chip is ‘papa’, felt it necessary to reassure Mexico’s 86.3 million Roman Catholics that the Holy Father ‘would not celebrate Mass dressed as a potato chip’.
Notwithstanding that reassurance, many devout Mexican Catholics were deeply unhappy at such crass commercialism and dismissed the whole affair as a corporate sponsored tour.
One political activist, who had repeatedly over the years bitterly attacked the Mexican Government for its use of torture, kidnappings and organised violence to repress an increasingly desperate populace, observed of the Papal visit: ‘Romans are always the same. When there is no bread they have a circus.’
Within the papal entourage and the accompanying press corps, defenders of the Pope’s travels often dwell on individual moments. They recall the Ukrainian woman kneeling alone in the mud drawing comfort from the Pope’s visit to her homeland; the Polish workman who asked his friend who interrupted a papal speech on the 1979 tour to ‘be quiet while the Pope is talking to me’. They remember the woman dying of Aids in an Indian slum who found solace in her memory of the moment the Pope held her or the unemployed man who had walked through the night to hear the Pope during his visit to the United Kingdom. These people and countless others undeniably drew strength and comfort from such moments.
Others in the papal entourage and the Vatican pack have been disgusted at the trappings of triumphalism and pop-star superficiality that swirled around the papal tours. The World Youth Day rallies have been compared to the Nazi Nuremberg rallies, with the same ‘intense fanatical devotion to a great leader’. Still others believe that the constant travelling has ‘centralised authority in the Catholic Church in an unprecedented and spectacular manner’. After the deeply disturbing spectacle of the Pope’s September 2003 visit to Slovakia I discussed the implications with a number of Vatican residents. One Prince of the Church assured me that the show had continued and would do so because
‘the Pope wishes it to continue. The actor within the Holy Father is dying hard. He simply refuses to walk off stage. He is a man terminally drugged on the adulation of the audience.’
In a number of countries that audience has dramatically declined over the years; in others, says the managing director of one opinion poll organisation, it is ‘haemorrhaging at an alarming rate’. The Church can derive little comfort from the fact that apart from the charismatic evangelicals other sections of the Christian faith have also shown a decrease both in congregations and the number of priests. Roman Catholics have suffered the highest rate of decline of any religious group within many countries. The number of practising priests within the United Kingdom has fallen from a postwar high of 7,714 in 1964 to 5,040 in 2003. By contrast, there are currently 30,000 psychotherapists practising in the United Kingdom. In Ireland only one Catholic seminary remains open. In 2004 it produced just eight new priests.
In April 2003 a poll of nearly half of the remaining priests in England and Wales revealed that sixty per cent believed that sexual intercourse with a married woman should not debar the priest from active ministry, twenty-one per cent believed that homosexuality should not be a debarment, forty-three per cent ‘actively opposed’ the Church’s teaching on contraception. Inevitably, a spokesman for the National Conference of Priests questioned the methodology of the survey but a year later the Roman Catholic hierarchy had produced no evidence of its own to refute the earlier findings.
The current position of the Roman Catholic priests in the United Kingdom is truly wretched. A continually diminishing group confronting growing cynicism and disbelief, they struggle to survive in Third World conditions with no pension funds, no national wage, declining attendances that result in shrinking contributions from the remaining churchgoers and twenty-three dioceses each headed by an autonomous, Wojtyla-appointed bishop.
Paradoxically, the number of Roman Catholics on paper in the same period increased from 4 million in 1963 to nearly 5 million in 2000 but as in other countries many of them are only nominal Catholics who rarely if ever enter a church. During the same period the number of Roman Catholics in Great Britain attending mass declined from 2.63 million in 1963 to less than 1 million in 2000. A European values poll undertaken in mid-2003 shows just how deep and widespread is this curious doublethink throughout Europe. Asked two simple questions, 1. ‘Do you belong to a religious denomination?’ and 2. ‘Do you attend services once a month or more?’ not one single European country produced anything approaching a matching set of figures. In Italy the figures were 82.2–53.7 per cent. In the Pope’s home country of Poland 95.7–78.3 per cent. In Great Britain the disparity between nominal and practising religious people was an enormous 83.4 – to 18.9 percent. Christianity can still claim to be Europe’s main religion even if the figures hide a very large percentage of notional Christians. But since 1978, when Karol Wojtyla became Pope, no matter how the figures are shuffled and cut, the number of practising Roman Catholics in Europe has fallen by more than a third.
In the United States Time magazine carried out a poll in 1994 to coincide with their award to the Pope of ‘Man of the Year’. It revealed that 89 per cent of American Catholics believe that it is possible to disagree with the Pope on doctrinal issues and still be a good Catholic (a position that he would have vigorously disputed). It also showed that three quarters of American Roman Catholics wanted to make up their own minds on the birth control issue. With regard to attending mass, the American faithful showed the same elasticity as the self-serving Europeans. Only forty-one per cent of those who considered themselves Roman Catholics in the United States claimed to attend weekly mass. In Canada, recent surveys suggest that less than twenty per cent of nominal Roman Catholics actually go to Church each week, and the figure drops to twelve per cent of those aged fifteen to twenty-four years. To find good news for the Holy See one has to look to the Third World.
The Vatican for several years had anticipated the Millennium Holy Year as a potential bonanza, notwithstanding the Pope’s declaration, as he formally ended the Holy Year by closing the Holy Door of St Peter’s, ‘It is important that such an important religious event be completely disassociated from any semblance of financial gain.’
In fact the ‘financial gain’ made during the year had been so great that the Pope announced that after all expenses had been paid, the balance would be donated to charity. The Vatican marketing machine had come a long way since the Pope’s face adorned bags of Mexican chips. Reproductions of celestial charts by Ptolemy hand-painted with 22-carat gold leaf could be purchased at $1,400 from the Vatican Library Collection (and are still available online) – or, for that expected and happy event, ceremonial baby clothes starting at $105 for a minute white polyester matt satin tuxedo.
The Jubilee sponsors were also a far remove from the total tackiness of former years. Telecom Italia, in exchange for exclusive rights and a Jubilee logo, provided more than $80 million worth of telephone and Internet services including the installation of a secure Internet link between the Holy See and its 120 embassies around the world.
The pilgrims could take their pick of a range that included $17,500 platinum watches to the parchment papal blessings, a bargain at $48, or the $125 Ferragom services. The ultimate market pitch for the Jubilee was inevitably made by the Pope. To stimulate tourists or pilgrims he announced that God would be honouring indulgences earned by making ‘pious pilgrimages’ to ‘Rome, Jerusalem and other designated places’. With this offer the Pope had turned the clock back nearly 500 years to Martin Luther and the Pre-Reformation. With the Holy Year at an end, the Vatican, having duly donated a profit they refused to disclose to a charity that remained unidentified, had opportunity to consider the future.
With its more than four hundred million Catholics, Latin America is, without doubt, the ‘Catholic Continent’ in the early years of the new millennium. More than one member of the Curia has described it to me as ‘the Continent of Hope’. Representing about forty-two per cent of all Catholics, both nominal and practising, in the world it is frequently seen as the new power base for the faith as Europe slips ever deeper into ‘godlessness’. That being so one would expect the Pope and those around him to lavish great care and attention upon the region. In fact, in Catholic terms, Latin America lags behind the rest of the world. In North America with 68 million Catholics there is one priest for every 1,072 Catholics. In South America with its 400 million faithful there is one priest for every 7,200 Catholics. Even Africa does better than that with one priest for every 4,393 Catholics.
Within weeks of becoming Pope, Wojtyla had identified Liberation Theology as one of the greatest threats to the Roman Catholic Church. The fact that much of that theology is strikingly similar to early Christianity speaks eloquently on the current state of affairs within the Church. In 1987 the then Secretary of State, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, during the course of a confidential meeting with members of the second Reagan administration elaborated on the Church’s position on Latin America.
‘The Vatican wants to see a true democracy in every Latin American country. But this means democracy in the fullest sense of the word, including socially and economically just societies.’
Casaroli then shared his concerns about the future of religion in the poorer countries,
‘where poverty and injustice can lead the faithful and even some of the clergy towards socialism. Certainly the Vatican is concerned about proponents of Liberation Theology. But we are even more concerned about the concrete conditions of economic and social injustice. We are particularly worried about Mexico where we believe a radical and anti-religious revolution is possible.’
By the late 1990s the identified threat, and a very real one, was the corresponding rise of religious sects and capitalism as the Catholics of Latin America began to embrace alternative religions and simultaneously the message of the shopping mall. In October 2002 the Brazilian bishops were making their ad limina visits to Rome. Representing a country in which at least nominally over eighty per cent were Roman Catholics should have ensured that their audience with the Pope would be a far happier experience than that endured by their European colleagues. Unfortunately for the Brazilians, the Pope, if not his Curia, was well able to distinguish between nominal and practising. ‘Brazil must rediscover her Christian heritage . . .’ Calling for leadership in the world’s most populous Catholic country, the Pope urged his bishops to ‘combat the difficulties that threaten to obscure the message of the Church’.
Notwithstanding the strictures of the Pope and his Secretary of State on Liberation Theology, the missionaries in the field, confronted with everyday realities, whether in Latin America, the far reaches of Africa or the vast highlands of South East Asia, frequently operate on a mixture of socialism and Liberation Theology among the oppressed, the downtrodden and despised societies. They often pay the ultimate price. In 2001, thirty-three Catholic missionaries were murdered. Other Catholics were killed in riots in Nigeria, a massacre in Pakistan and during attacks by Islamic extremists on the Moluccas Islands of Indonesia. Increasingly the missionary is confronted by institutionalised hostility and laws that forbid religious conversion, India being the latest to impose such restrictions. In the Indian Federal Supreme Court in September 2003 it was ruled that there is ‘no fundamental right to convert’. In China anyone caught bringing a Bible into the country faces imprisonment. The Islamic faith under sharia law calls for the death penalty for those who convert to other faiths. Though it is a law that is not widely implemented in the majority of Muslim-dominated countries it certainly keeps conversion figures down. The battle lines between the two Abrahamic faiths grow more clearly delineated with every passing year and Judaism is hardly more tolerant towards the competition in the market place. Proselytising children in Israel is a criminal offence. In December 2001 when an Israeli sixth-grade student brought a Bible to school that he had been given by a missionary, one of the teachers publicly burnt the Bible in front of the entire class.
Confronted with this range of hostility, the Pope and his central government in Rome appeared to be much more concerned with retreating further into the past by creating ever more saints and demanding that Christianity and its contribution to Europe should be fully recognised within the written constitution of the European Union. The Pope never failed to lobby on this issue when given the opportunity. He bitterly complained of ‘the marginalization of religion’ in the European Union.
As 2003 drew to a close the issue of Christian recognition within the constitution had begun to obsess the Pope. He constantly complained of the omission and marshalled his forces. The Jesuit Journal Civilta Cattolica weighed in with an attack declaring that the omission was ‘a clear ideological deformation’. The Jesuits were profoundly dissatisfied with a preamble that makes a ‘generic allusion to religious heritage without any clear recognition of the historical fact that the Judeo-Christian heritage was a major factor in the development of a common European culture’. The omission is ‘a silence that speaks in a significant way, and will always speak that way’.
The Vatican redoubled its efforts with strenuous lobbying of predominantly Catholic Spain, Portugal and Poland. The Pope passionately declared that the answer to Europe’s problems lies ‘in a return to its Christian roots that are the sources of its original strength. These offer an indispensable contribution to progress and peace’. Critics recall that this same Europe has over the past 2,000 years also spawned not only the Holocaust but also a seemingly endless list of wars and suggest that Christianity has much to answer for. In June 2004 the Pope lost the argument, the European Parliament having concluded that Europe was a largely secular continent, a view that has received support from some surprising quarters.
The Catholic Church believes that it was divinely founded and that it is divinely guided. The greatest irony of the reign of the late Pope John Paul II is that, during his watch as God’s representative on many parts of the planet, both Communism and its deadliest adversary Christianity have been largely reduced to insignificance. Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, the current leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, described Britain as a country where ‘tacit atheism prevails’. His opinion was shared by the then head of the Anglican Church, Archbishop George Carey.
The former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, close friend and confidant of the late Pope, head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a latter-day version of the Inquisition, one of the most powerful and influential men not only in the Vatican but within the entire Roman Catholic Church even before his papal election, recently remarked of his mother country: ‘Christianity must start anew in Germany.’ In France Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger presided over what he described as ‘a remnant Church’. One of the Italian Church’s most brilliant theologians, Bishop Alessandro Maggiolini, has recently published a book entitled The End of Our Christianity. He believes that the forces that are weakening the Church come not from outside but that they were born and are flourishing within the Church. Many in the higher reaches of the Vatican have a range of explanations for what they see as the greatest calamity in the Church’s history. They include ‘watching too much television . . . consumerism . . . New Age practices . . . modernity . . . the “transient” pleasures of alcohol, drugs and recreation sex . . . the permissive Sixties . . . rock and roll . . .’
The pernicious and continuing saga of the sexual abuse of children, young adolescents and women by priests is in the Pope’s words the fault ‘of your modern society which is corrupting my priests’. The blame for the various financial crimes perpetrated by the Vatican Bank ‘has nothing to do with Holy See; the bank is not part of the Holy See’, according to Cardinal Szoka. In fact the Pope owns the bank. Cardinal Castillo sees the Vatican as the victim of a conspiracy.
‘Here in Italy there is a big Masonic influence in some banks and in some newspapers and they attack the Holy See and the IOR (The Vatican Bank) in everything.’
Cardinal Martini widened the attack to exonerate the Vatican City State, the Holy See and the Roman Catholic Church and asserted, ‘We should blame society as a whole.’
The collective humiliation within the Catholic hierarchy after the rejection by the European Parliament coupled with the further European rejection of one of the Pope’s close friends, Rocco Butiglione, because of his opinions on homosexuality and abortion, has provoked a very un-Christian response. Italian journalist Vittorio Messori has denounced what he sees as ‘anti-Catholicism’ as
‘a substitute for anti-Semitism . . . before blacks, women, Jews and homosexuals were the object of sarcasm and criticism . . . now fortunately these groups cannot be attacked but I don’t see why other groups have to be harmed.’
Cardinal Ratzinger returned to the fray to declare that the European Parliament action ‘tends to reinforce Islamic perceptions of Europe as a decadent society. What offends Islam is the lack of reference to God, the arrogance of reason, which provokes fundamentalism.’
Archbishop Domingo Castagna of Argentina sounded a warning that ‘in some traditionally Catholic countries such as Spain and Mexico an open merciless campaign of de-christianisation exists’.
The president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace agreed. ‘Opposition to the Catholic Church is dominated by the new holy inquisitions full of money and arrogance.’ These influential lobbies in the Cardinal’s mind ‘try to ensure that the voices of the Pope and the Catholic Church are not often heard especially in the environment of the rich and comfortable countries’.
Vatican insiders give many reasons for the spectacular collapse of Christianity and the Roman Catholic faith in particular, but they never remotely consider that it has any connection with the papacy of the late Pope John Paul II or the Church’s particular position on a number of issues. The current global figure of some 1.1 billion Roman Catholics, based on all available data, would be less than half that figure if one extracted the merely nominal Roman Catholics, the ‘pick ’n’ mix’ Catholics who practise their faith – in the words of Pope Benedict XVI – ‘on a do-it-yourself basis’.
As 2004 neared its end, Karol Wojtyla was continuing to defy the reporters who for two or three years had been preparing to flash the news of his death around the world. His resilience continued to astonish many within the Vatican. The day-to-day running of the Catholic Church was in the hands of others and the papal input to many decisions came through his secretary, now Archbishop Dziwisz. This had convinced many of the cynics that ‘the other Pope’ had become the power in front of the throne, but only when dealing with the minutiae of state affairs. All major policy decisions were on permanent hold as the Roman Catholic Church continued to drift.