Defender of the Faith

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John Paul II had the courage to revisit the painful past, if not the willingness to let his church stand totally naked before it. Toward the end of the 20th century, reflecting on the Catholic Church's two millenniums, John Paul issued extraordinary apologies for the Inquisition and the Crusades. He rehabilitated Galileo for the "heresy" of espousing the theory that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the solar system. In 1998 he released "We Remember," a much anticipated penance for the Holocaust. Many Jews criticized the document for confining itself to the culpability of individual Christians rather than admitting church complicity and for defending the wartime Pope, Pius XII. That did not prevent them from shedding tears in 2000, when during a trip to the Holy Land, John Paul prayed at Jerusalem's Western Wall without making reference to Jesus and was reunited at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial with a Jewish concentration-camp survivor who remembered him as the young cleric who had saved her life as the war ended. Recalling "friends and neighbors" who perished, he said, "Men, women and children cry out to us from the depths of the horror that they knew. How can we fail to heed their cry?" "He understood Jews, not just with his head but with his heart," says Rabbi James Rudin of the American Jewish Committee. "His contributions are historic, and probably in history, he's the best Pope the Jews ever had."

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THE PRINCIPLED CONTRARIAN

Over time, it became clear that the Pope's world view was considerably distanced from U.S. attitudes, many of which he found annoying. Dismayed by what had been called the cafeteria Catholicism of a flock that continued to attend Mass while largely ignoring much of what he preached, he grumbled that "you cannot pick and choose." Conversely, liberals in the U.S. and Europe came to see the Pontiff as a gloomy authoritarian whose ideology was a raft of contradictions--the doctor of philosophy who wanted to limit intellectual discourse, the vigorous advocate for human rights who defined homosexuality as a disorder.

Yet careful analysts found--agree with it or not--a powerful internal consistency to John Paul's thought, although not along the individual-rights paradigm so central to Western secular social philosophy. His oft-repeated concept of the "dignity of the human person" defined person as a divine creation intrinsically inclined toward God and thus subject to divine laws best enunciated through the church. In his view, that dignity, which commenced at conception, was mortally affronted by contraception, abortion, euthanasia and the death penalty and wounded by war, anti-Semitism and the crushing debt repayments imposed upon poor nations. The pursuit of individual freedoms, untempered by moral teaching, meanwhile, would eventually lead to a "culture of death" corrosive to respect for family, for church and, eventually, for life. The West, he warned, was in the grip of that culture.