Pope John Paul II

Pope John Paul II has passed, and Rebunk has been noticeably reticent thus far. Only two of us are Catholics, only Tom is a halfway decent one, and so perhaps we felt that it was enough to let others speak. And as with the passage of any important figure, there has been no lack of words written about a man who was, if nothing else, vital.

I come neither to bury nor to praise the Pope. When any historical figure dies, there is an inevitable wave of hagiography followed by the similarly inevitable wave of, for lack of a better term, debunking. But I come not to rebunk the debunkers, nor to debunk the bunkers. I think it is enough to say that the Pope was a very good man, perhaps a great man, who often did the right thing, but not always.

Read the hagiographers too closely and you would think that he single-handedly ended the Cold War and that he was the only one manning the barricades against Communism. The Pope was a courageous and consistent voice against tyranny. There is no need to overstate the case. Anti-communism was hardly a rarity during much of the Pope’s life, and it should be enough to say that he expended a good amount of his considerable resources and influence to oppose tyranny. This alone is enough to assure that the Pope’s legacy will forever be on the side of angels.

Criticism has been slower in coming because that is the natural order of things after someone dies. It is untoward to be too harsh toward the newly departed, and the Pope was a good enough human being not to have had a lot of detractors. Nonetheless, a few folks have pointed out that John Paul II’s doctrinaire nature when it came to the church’s positions on sex and reproduction made it all the more difficult to combat the scourge of AIDS in Africa and elsewhere and that the church seemed awfully concerned about protecting its own and very little concerned about the rape of young boys and teens that had become rampant in the last few decades. Indeed, the cases of child rape seem to have risen almost in lockstep with the church’s rigidity on issues related to sex. These failings are a blot on the Pope’s escutcheon, but they should not define his legacy either. Good people can endorse wrong policies. For now, let’s leave it at that.

What I will most remember about John Paul II is the crowds. Wherever he went, there were masses there to greet him. Seeing the Pope, even if only from afar, is one of those experiences that tends to rank high in the lives of those Catholics who made the pilgrimage to get to within a zip code of him. This may have been the first Pope who had something of a populist touch. It might be easy to be cynical or churlish about this, but for those millions who saw him, whose lives were, if only briefly, improved by his very presence, his passing has marked a profound moment.

Upon the death of Franklin Roosevelt, it has been said that millions mourned because he was the only president they had ever known. This was the case both because of the duration of his presidency but also because he had that common touch. His fireside chats made millions of Americans feel as if they knew their president, as if he spoke to them and truly cared about their troubles and was going to do something to help them. I cannot help but wonder if millions of Catholics are not feeling the same way now: That this man who came to them in his popemobile or who said mass to them or who visited Boston or Washington, Vatican City or Warsaw came to see them, to speak to them, and that he truly cared about them. To me that is at least one good measure of a man’s life.