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Monday, April 11, 2005
A pope’s courage
By Orlando P. Carvajal
Uncut gems
What I admire most about the late Pope John Paul II was the vigor, the courage on one hand, and the sincerity, simplicity on the other, with which he fought for, defended and otherwise promoted his convictions on what the Catholic Church’s posture should be towards its members and the rest of the world. His posture, as we know, was understandably conservative coming out of the doctrinal trenches in the war against communism in his native Poland. This fight was to effectively determine pretty much how he would guide the Church and was at the root of his conservative stance.
While I have misgivings, therefore, about his conservatism which substantially erased the gains made by Pope John XXIII, I can understand perfectly why. From his vantage point as a priest, bishop, cardinal and eventually pope, in a communist-run country, he saw the Church as a castle being laid siege to by communism. So, he dug a deeper moat around and reinforced the walls of the castle, the better to keep the enemy, communism, out. He, of course and as we know, succeeded admirably in working with Walesa in Poland and with Gorbachev in Russia in dismantling communism. He loved the Church and he fought with all the might of his throne to free the Church from the shackles of communism.
Like all great men, as John Paul undoubtedly was, his greatest strength was also his greatest weakness which I define to be his treatment of the rest of the free world like it was Poland. His courage to defend the castle in Poland did not include the courage to get out of the castle’s comfort zone to fight the enemy outside in countries other than Poland. He did not dare, and understandably so as I have said earlier, tiptoe on the fringes of orthodoxy and bend doctrine somewhat to solve post cold-war problems in other parts of his realm.
In the Philippines, for instance, the primary enemy is poverty. Communism is only an offshoot of the neglect of both government and Church of the unacceptably large percentage of poor people. John Paul II’s conservatism, riding on strict Church discipline, prevented the local Church from making bold moves by itself or in cooperation with government to eradicate the poverty that grips many and which breeds despair, rebellion, communism if you like. In the Philippines, we need to be liberated not from communism but from the shackles of poverty. In the Philippines, the Church cannot dig a moat around the castle but must sortie out into the real world of hopelessness and despair of a not negligible portion of the population.
In the rest of free Europe, the Churches are empty. The Church there is losing the youth to a materialist mono-culture partly because the conservatism of the Church made it fail to address Europe’s alienation from a Catholicism that they find irrelevant. In post-modern Europe, Christianity has to find new meaning and relevance for the young who are grappling with complex post-modern problems.
Of course, I believe that life will always have absolutes, otherwise, it will be utter chaos. I just do not think they are as many as the Church of John Paul II would have us believe. The centuries have in fact shown the demise of many absolutes in the Church. The next pope I hope will pick up where John XXIII left off, reduce the moral absolutes some more, discover hidden parts of traditional doctrines that will make them relevant to today’s problems. The Church simply cannot continue promising a medieval heaven to people grappling with non-medieval problems.
Long Live the Pope
(April 11, 2005 issue)
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