A Reactionary
In Shepherd's Clothing
By Barry Healy
05 April, 2005
Green
Left Weekly
Karol
Jozef Wojtya, known as John Paul II since assuming the office of pope
in October 1978, will be remembered as one of the most significant,
though certainly not the most progressive, figures in the history of
the Roman Catholic Church.
Pope John XXIII,
who preceded Wojtya as head of the Church by two papacies, is still
revered by many Catholics for radically reorienting the church by convening
the Vatican II Council, which directly fed the growth of what is known
as liberation theology. From Vatican II the democratic notion
emerged that the whole church laity and clergy were united
as the People of God.
John Paul II's pontificate
was organised as a conscious counter-revolution against Vatican II
a winding back of the clock towards an archaic Catholicism politically
aligned with violent terror against liberationists around the world.
Wojtya was born
in Wadowice, a small city 50 kilometres from Cracow, Poland, on May
18, 1920. During the Nazi occupation he worked in a quarry while secretly
studying for the priesthood in a clandestine seminary.
William Johnston,
who teaches Modern Church History at Melbourne's Yarra Theological Union,
thinks Wojtya felt exiled from the direction Europe took
in the second half of his lifetime.
Remember he
grew up under, really, three dictatorships first Pilsudski in
Poland, then the Nazi occupation of Poland which was the worst anywhere.
He grew up not many miles from Auschwitz, and then of course the Communists
came in from 1945 on, Johnston told ABC Radio National's Religion
Report in 2004. So this is not a man who ever experienced democracy,
and his hopes for a post-dictatorship Europe have not been fulfilled.
The closed world
of Polish Catholicism under the heel of Cold War Stalinism was staunchly
patriarchal and anti-communist but warmly supported by masses of Poles
as the one institution through which they could organise free of the
bureaucratic Stalinist regime.
After leaving Poland
for the wider world and the peak leadership position within Catholicism,
Wojtya never wavered in his Cold War mindset. His guiding beliefs were
that communism is the greatest danger to Christianity, that only deferential
obedience to the church hierarchy is the proper behaviour for the Catholic
masses and that collaboration with the great power designs of brutal
capitalist temporal forces was the way to advance the banner of the
faith.
This, combined with
aspects of medieval theology, directly conflicted with the waves of
liberal thinking that swept the church following Vatican II.
In Latin America,
in particular, the freeing up of the Catholic structures combined with
the example of the Cuban Revolution propelled masses of Catholic workers,
peasants and lower-ranking priests into revolutionary formations such
as Nicaragua's Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). This broad
trend was characterised as liberation theology and was typified
by grassroots democracy, an anti-capitalist reading of the New Testament
and egalitarian religious leadership.
In Europe and North
America there were less radical but nonetheless democratic rumblings.
In 1997, for example, 2.5 million German and Austrian Catholics petitioned
the pope to admit women priests and married priests and abandon the
church's hostility to homosexuality; the Vatican was unmoved.
John Paul II brought
considerable energy and political acumen to his reactionary crusade.
He made 104 pastoral visits outside of Italy, wrote five books, issued
14 encyclicals and was seen by literally millions of people.
He was also a great
cannoniser canonising 482 saints, more than any previous pope.
His thinking was that by providing each nation with its own saint the
Catholic tradition of incense and obscurantism could be revived.
Bizarrely, one of
those saints was the last of the Hapsburg rulers of the Austro-Hungarian
empire, Emperor Karl, who ruled during World War I.
John Paul II also
appointed 231 new cardinals, which has stacked the college that will
elect the new pope with archconservatives.
One of his great
political alliances was with US President Ronald Reagan. In 1980 the
gang that organised the Reagan for the presidency movement met in Santa
Fe for a conference and issued a statement saying: US foreign
policy should begin to confront liberation theology (and not just react
to it after the fact). Unfortunately Marxist-Leninist forces have used
the church as a political weapon against private ownership and the capitalism
system of production, infiltrating the religious community with ideas
that are more communist than Christian.
Reagan, as president,
quickly moved to form a united front with John Paul II against liberation
theology. The pope fought the theology while the Reagan administration
nd its Latin American allies murdered the liberationists.
Among the fallen
was El Salvador's Archbishop Oscar Romero, murdered in 1980 by a right-wing
death squad while saying mass. The Arena party, the death squads' legal
face, sent a delegation to the Vatican weeks before the assassination
protesting Romero's public statements in defence of the poor.
While the Salvadoran
people regard Romero as a saint, John Paul II attempted to ban any discussion
of Romero's beatification for 50 years. However, popular pressure from
El Salvador later led the Vatican to put off the issue for only 25 years.
John Paul II's preferred
saintly role model was the Spanish fascist Josemaria Escriva, founder
of Opus Dei, one of the reactionary and weird Catholic secret societies
that the pope has used as weapons against progressives.
After failing to
discipline the Brazilian bishops, John Paul II simply started appointing
Opus Dei members as bishops died. In this manner he undermined one of
the strongest bases of liberation theology.
Australia's most
prominent liberationist parish, St Vincent's in Sydney inner-city suburb
of Redfern, has been saddled with priests from another Catholic cult
called the Neocatechumenate (visit for some illuminating stories of
John Paul II's priests studiously avoiding contact with Redfern Aborigines).
Reagan and John
Paul II found another area of common interest in Poland when the Solidarity
trade union movement burst into prominence in 1980. Vast sums were funnelled
through the church into the Polish movement.
The Vatican encouraged
an activist priesthood in Poland that it moved heaven and earth to destroy
in other areas of the world. According to Time magazine, a grateful
Reagan agreed in 1984 to alter the US foreign-aid program to comply
with the Catholic Church's teachings on birth control, specifically
abortion and birth control.
The capitalist news
media has created John Paul II personal popularity in Poland with the
collapse of communism there in 1989. More than a decade
after John Paul II's blessed the restoration of capitalism in Poland,
a public opinion survey in 2002 by the Public Opinion Research Centre
(CBOS) found that 56% of Poles said their lives were better
under the 1970s Stalinist regime of Edward Gierek than they are today.
In 2000 John Paul
II made a rhetorical flourish of calling for an end to Third World debt
through his call for a jubilee the mechanism by which
debts were wiped out once every 50 years in ancient Jewish society (it
was the demand that Jesus raised and died for).
However, the Vatican
never attempted to build a popular movement around its call. While criticising
the excesses of capitalism, John Paul II feared communist revolution
more. His real ideology was integralism the medieval idea that
the state will rule the people and the church will guide the state.
By assiduously aligning
himself with the most reactionary elements of late 21st century power
politics, John Paul II left a profound crisis in Catholicism in his
wake. Latin America was once overwhelmingly Catholic but the US rulers
have used their Protestant fundamentalist sects as weapons against liberationist
Catholics there. Now 10% of Brazilians are believed to be talking in
tongues!
In the developed
capitalist countries, Catholicism continues to bleed membership as believers
tire of the ridiculous strictures on their sexuality and democratic
rights within the church. As AIDS threatens millions in the crucified
impoverished world and wars and indebtedness worsen, the Catholic Church's
lame responses are simply making it irrelevant.