[Dialogue] Spong on the past pope

[KroegerD@aol.com]

April 27, 2005 
Assessing the  Pontificate of John Paul II 
We have just witnessed a moving transition in the best-known, most powerful  
office in the Christian world. In many ways the final days before this  
transition were painful to watch as the increasingly infirm John Paul II walked  
quite publicly through the dying process, fulfilling his papal duties. This man  
had been a towering figure standing astride the whole world and exuding a  
charisma that few popes or even heads of state have ever possessed. He had  
superstar quality. His signature act of kissing the soil of every country he  
visited, symbolically claiming it as holy ground, helped to move our world away  
from its tribal origins into a growing sense of world community. Everyone felt  
they knew him and everyone had opinions about him. When he died there was a 
rush  to evaluate his pontificate, something that I resisted for two reasons. 
First,  for many people the death of a religious leader is a moment of profound 
grief  during which time a critical evaluation of his life and his career 
simply seems  inappropriate. Second, a leader's successor is always the first 
public  commentary made on a leader's accomplishments. The perspective of history 
also  adds a more substantial kind of evaluation, but that takes at least a  
generation. Time, for example, has not treated Pope Pius XII well as his role 
in  World War II has become better known and his close association with Nazi 
Germany  could no longer be denied, but on the other hand time continues to add 
luster to  the star of Pope John XXIII. So today all one can do is to begin 
the process of  assessing John Paul II. There are, however, compelling reasons 
to do that.  
Why, people ask, should one like me, who stands inside the Christian Faith  
but specifically outside the Roman Catholic Church, bother to participate in  
evaluating their leader? The reason is that just as a Republican president  
affects Democrats, so the papal office affects all Christians. Our lives  
intertwine, so we have not just a right, but also a duty to join the debate.  
John Paul was a complex man. He did not fit easily into normal categories. On 
 the positive side this Pope was a major force in dismantling Communist rule 
in  Eastern Europe. As a Pole, who knew what it meant to live under 
oppression, he  threw his not inconsiderable influence behind Lech Walensa, as Poland 
became the  first Communist state to throw off the Soviet yoke. That act began 
the larger  crumbling process that ultimately brought down the Berlin Wall, led 
to  independent status for the nations of Eastern Europe, and finally caused 
the  Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to fall apart, creating independent,  
self-governing entities from the Baltic States to Uzbekistan. John Paul's 
role  in those events is praiseworthy.  
Secondly, this Pope used his voice and his position to be an advocate for  
world peace. He spoke out against war in general and the pre-emptive war in Iraq 
 in particular. It was interesting to watch the incumbent American president 
seek  papal support on wedge issues in American politics like abortion and  
homosexuality, while either avoiding or ignoring the Pope's pleas for diplomacy  
to be exhausted before war was engaged in Iraq and the end of capital  
punishment. Mr. Bush, himself an evangelical Protestant, acted exactly like most  
Roman Catholics in America in that he felt free to ignore the Pope according to  
his own likes and dislikes as well as with regard to his political agenda.  
Having said those two things with admiration, I must now state my conviction  
that this Pope's negatives finally overcome all of his positives. His 
position  on birth control represented the attempt to force a dated idea on a world 
where  it no longer fit. His hard line on abortion made it impossible to build 
a  pro-life coalition. No one is pro death. If life is our ultimate value then 
 surely abortions should be rare. Most pro-choice people agree with that. 
When  one attempts to make abortions either impossible or illegal, what happens 
is  that women become the victims of illegal practitioners and both their 
health and  their lives are put at risk. A consistent pro-life position must also 
support  life for women. To serve the cause of making abortions rare requires 
the  development of a competent and realistic government program of sex 
education,  yet this Pope and conservative Christians alike, have always viscerally 
opposed  that. Both appear to think that sexual activity can be controlled by 
lectures on  abstinence. Naiveté is no substitute for competence. Their 
inconsistency at this  point reveals that they do not understand that this world can 
no longer support  a rapidly expanding human population. Millions of children 
are born today in  countries unable to support such numbers, only to die 
before the age of six. The  absence of birth control is thus a death sentence for 
them. That is neither a  pro-life stance nor an effective way to proclaim the 
sacredness of life. It is  also to ignore the fact that birth control is the 
major reason for the gradual  emancipation of women throughout the world. Real 
pro-life advocates must value  this emancipation.  
Religious pro-life zealots seem eager only to repress sex with moralistic  
lectures enforced by guilt. One gets no sense that they understand that in our  
society puberty and marriage is now separated by 10 to 15 years, making the  
repression of our human sexual drives neither good nor possible. I see no 
reason  to think that a religious system run by celibate males has either the right 
or  the wisdom to make moral judgments in this area. Confused, contradictory 
and  unhealthy ideas will never constitute a realistic pro-life policy. 
Furthermore,  this Pope's refusal to countenance the use of condoms as a moral 
option even in  marriage to protect a wife from infection by her HIV-positive 
husband reaches  the height of irrationality. Antiquated rules, applied in the name 
of religion,  actually bring about the death of innocent persons. Murder 
accomplished by  religious decree can never be called "pro-life," moral or 
Christian!  
This Pope's definition of homosexuality as either deviant behavior or  
unnatural, is so wrong that it constitutes another reason why his reputation  will 
not be honored long. Operating on that inadequate definition John Paul led  a 
public campaign against any lessening of the great injustices perpetrated upon  
gay and lesbian people. He maintained his allegiance to his discredited  
definition in the face of the data being produced every day by the vast majority  
in the scientific and medical community, acting as if religious truth could 
not  possibly be wanting. Perhaps he did not remember how wrong his church was 
on  Galileo in the 17th century and how pitifully slow that church was before  
admitting that error in 1991. Perhaps he was not aware of the oppression or  
left-handed children in Roman Catholic parochial schools until well into the  
20th Century, just because they still defined left-handedness as both deviant  
and unnatural. Ignorance does not become less destructive when it is wrapped  
inside religion's embrace!  
As bad as this record of the John Paul years has been on issues around women  
and human sexuality, I believe the most destructive aspect of this papacy was 
 the deliberate war he, along with his chief enforcer of orthodoxy, Cardinal  
Ratzinger, waged on creative Catholic scholars. Holding tightly to an almost  
idolatrous claim that truth had been captured once and for all inside the  
infallible dogmas of the Roman tradition, this Pope began a process of  
systematic oppression of that church's creative scholarship. No one was allowed  to 
think outside the box of imposed dogma or to press the edges of a real  dialogue 
between an exploding world of knowledge and an ancient faith tradition.  This 
mentality seemed not to notice that the Church's creeds assume a three-tier  
universe that the western world has not believed since the 17th century. The  
discovery of the fact that a woman has an egg cell and is thus a genetic  
co-creator of every child that has ever been born has rendered a literal belief  
in a biological virgin birth impossible. Charles Darwin's view of life as ever  
evolving into higher levels of consciousness renders inept the basic  
anthropology against which the traditional Christian story has been told. We  were 
not created perfect, as the Bible contends, only to fall into sin through  an ac
t of rebellion, which necessitated a rescue operation, by an intervening  
savior. We are evolving creatures. What we need is the positive power that  
enables us to become more deeply and fully human. This new perspective  necessitates 
a whole new Christology. If a church hierarchy attacks and harasses  its most 
creative scholars, that church guarantees that there will be no new  thinking 
for an entire generation. That is exactly what has happened to Catholic  
scholarship under this Pope. Today the Roman Catholic Church rewards dullness,  
clichés and propaganda while punishing creativity.  
When I add to this indictment the institutional denial on the part of this  
Pope and the Vatican of the sexual scandals that have all but destroyed the  
American church, symbolized by John Paul's appointment of Cardinal Law of  
Boston, the chief architect of the cover-up, to a prestigious position in Rome,  I 
become quite disillusioned. One cannot with integrity stand in vigilante  
readiness to punish those who practice birth control or to inhibit those gay and  
lesbian Christians who accept their sexual orientation as healthy and not  
deviant, while turning a blind eye to the sexual abuse of the clergy that  
includes the complicity of the cardinals in covering up these acts of violence.  One 
cannot stand for life and not react to that which violates life.  
These issues also must be faced openly when evaluating the College of  
Cardinal's choice of the person to succeed John Paul II. In choosing one who  denies 
that the Church lives in a changing world, one who called the sex  scandals 
'the creation of the media,' they have voted for the most destructive  aspects 
of John Paul's papacy to become the primary face of this Church in the  
future. I do not see hope in this scenario. I am not willing to pretend that I  do! 
-- John Shelby Spong 
_Note from  the Editor: Bishop Spong's new book is available now at 
bookstores everywhere  and by clicking here!_ 
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060762055/agoramedia-20)