[Dialogue] More on the Pope by Anna Quindlan - Newsweek, April 18, 2005

[Charles or Doris Hahn]

We thought this was a good read, in case you haven't
already run across it.
Doris and Charles Hahn


St. Andrew’s or St. Bernadette’s? asked the stranger
on the train. “St. Andrew’s,” I replied. Part of the
last generation of Americans who grew up cocooned by
Roman Catholicism, the two of us nodded in mutual
understanding. Our world was our parish. Our teachers
were nuns. Our lives were simple: confessing
minor sins on Saturday afternoons to the faceless
silhouette behind the screen, at¬tending an
incomprehensible Latin mass on Sunday mornings with
the priest's back turned to the pews. Pagan-baby
collections at Christmas, May procession as the winds
grew warm. Mantilla in my pocket, catechism on my
desk. Form as much as faith.
It was a simpler time, with only one answer for each
question, unless you hap¬pened to know some Jesuits.
The world today is more complex and contradictory, and
it is fitting that the man who oversaw the Catholic
Church during these years was complex and
contradictory as well.
John Paul II was the first pope of the celebrity age,
his face as recognizable as that of any movie star,
his mass masses a cross between the Sermon on the
Mount and a Rolling- Stones concert. A man of God who
was a jock, a theologian who was quick with a quip: he
appeared to be all things to all people, even in
death.
But the contradictions are deeper, more enduring and
more divisive than that. This was a man who expressed
"so¬licitous care" for divorced Catholics but refused
to allow those who remarried to receive the eucharist.
He wrote of the "equal dignity and responsibility of
wom¬en with men" but would not even discuss the
question of women's ordination. He advocated
"responsible fertility" but con¬tinued a ban on
contraception. He spoke the language of modernity
fluently but capped it with the unyielding conclusions
of the past.
He knew it was possible to embrace change and yet to
cleave to the essential teachings of Christ. Pope John
XXIII did so when the Second Vatican Council dragged
the Catholicism of my childhood into the modern age,
changing the mass to a language the congregation could
under¬stand, turning the priests toward the peo¬ple
not just at the altar but in other essen¬tial ways as
well. In the fashion of the true leader, that pope let
the church prosper from the ground up, empowering
parishes to engage personally with parishioners. By
contrast, this pope was painfully hier¬archical. While
he was shutting down discussions of the celibacy
requirements, he ignored the crisis of sex abuse among
the clergy that tarnished the church. The greatest
social-welfare group on earth, which followed its
founder by feeding the hungry and providing solace for
the sick, instead became known best as a breeding
ground for pedophiles.
A man of great intellect, he appeared to bring little
of it to bear on the contradic¬tions facing the modern
church: celibates teaching about sex, men assessing
the rights of women, the childless giving lessons on
the challenges of family life. As the AIDS crisis
killed millions, the pope decried the use of condoms.
But where is the evil if a man who has been infected
uses a condom to protect the health of his wife? In
1976 a pontifical commission con¬cluded that there
were no scriptural rea¬sons to prevent the ordination
of women. With a critical shortage of seminarians in
some countries, John Paul merely trotted out the
boilerplate ban. "Is there only the tired reply that
'we never did it that way before’?” wrote one Chicago
monsignor just days before he died.
This pope did great things. He helped bring down
communism, spoke out against the war in Iraq and the
death penalty and was a model for bearing infir¬mity
with courage. Because he spoke so many languages, he
appeared to hear many voices. Because he was
personally engaging, he appeared to engage with
ordinary people. But this was illusory. It is
demoralizing to feel that the voice of the soul is not
heard. It is doubly demor¬alizing to feel
unacknowledged by one whose calling card is supposed
to be human connection.
Perhaps the most telling thing about his papacy is
that he has been mourned by mil¬lions who
unapologetically acted contrary to his directives.
Women using birth con¬trol, couples living openly
together, conser¬vatives who support capital
punishment, liberals who support legal abortion: so
many have spoken of their admiration for John Paul II
even as they defy him in their daily lives. This
brings to mind one tenet of the Catholic intellectual
tradition: that the insistence on a law that is
clearly not en¬forceable risks contempt for all laws.
It also throws into powerful relief his greatest gift.
First principles: it was his unwavering and
particularly vivid personal relationship with God.
When the pope ap¬peared to be channeling Leviticus,
stand¬ing for orthodoxy simply for orthodoxy's sake,
he appeared less like a spiritual leader and more like
an ecclesiastical politician, seeing only the trees
and not the forest. But when he stood testament to
God's goodness in man, he shone like the sun. His
successor might keep that in mind.