The Exaltation of John Paul II: A Motion to Table

Hopefully, the voices clamoring for advancing Pope John Paul II to the status of “The Great,” and for putting him on a fast-track to sainthood, will stay quiet enough to let the Roman Catholic hierarchy continue getting the ministry of Benedict XVI into high gear without too many distractions. For one thing, a sober look at the pontificates of Leo and Gregory, the other so-called “Greats,” should be enough by itself to cool the passions of anyone now viewing John Paul in their lights.
As for sainthood --- well, of course, this isn’t any of our business really, or likely that of anybody else now alive. No track will be fast enough for the new Pope’s own generation to appreciate. But the idea of a Saint Karol Wojtyla still may be worth a look, primarily because it can provoke us to think more deeply about what truly exemplary character and leadership should be in a world like ours, and his.

Right off the bat, though, there is a lot of downside to the idea of a St. Karol. After all, this is the leader who stayed notoriously above the scandal of pedophile priests across his church, entering the fray primarily to reward some of the very leaders who contributed most to the problem. Does resigned Cardinal Bernard Law leading Mass in Vatican City bother you as much as it does me? There is also the matter of the late Pope’s intransigence on the issue of contraception, even as many of the world’s peoples continue to overpopulate themselves, and eventually us, too, to death. Neither he nor anyone else can get a natural law out of Genesis 1:28. The invitation to be fruitful and multiply was just that: an invitation.

As American Catholics are now preaching by their practice, the notion that there is something not quite right about married couples enjoying sex together without intending to procreate is a notion that has been lingering for far too long. Getting this mob of faithful Catholics to be more circumspect in the bedroom will be something that not even former Cardinal Ratzinger can pull off.

And then there are all those celibate priests. Actually, not all priests, alas, and that is the shame of it. If it took over a thousand years to get this flawed practice cranked up as policy in the first place, and if it is now driving capable men away from the priesthood by the hundreds of thousands, then surely the time has come to let this ignoble experiment go. But the Vatican will continue to hear nothing of it.

Or of the possibility of women priests. This issue is a little more difficult, primarily because an all male priesthood seems to supported by the scriptures and not just  tradition. You have to go up against a really big bunch of people --- the Orthodox Churches included --- to get anywhere on the ordination of women. But going up against tradition, the scriptures included, as well as entrenched authority was no problem for Jesus. And for an institution that could change its mind completely on such things as  usury, slavery, and religious freedom, not to mention the Latin Mass and fish on Fridays, putting women in priestly garb should be a walk in the park.

Unfortunately, the new Pope is not much for walking this kind of walk. The Point of these four points is not to sully the memory of a truly good man, or to be catty toward his successor. (Not too catty, anyway.) It is, rather, to point to a path, already cleared, to the late Pope’s goodness itself. Some of the most devoted Catholics who have cleared this path are precisely those who have been the most frustrated by John Paul’s manifold failures to hear their concerns, e.g.: parents with more children than they can even feed, much less nurture, deans of seminaries with applicant pools a quarter of what they were forty years ago, priests with 60% fewer attendees at Mass in a single generation, and called and gifted women who have much to celebrate and no altar at which to celebrate it.

How could folks like these have left kin, country, and parishes behind in order to sleep on dirty streets for only a fleeting glimpse at enactments in which they could not possibly have participated, and all the while let tears of sadness, gratitude, and hope flow from their eyes like a ever-rolling stream? Perhaps because they saw something in the man Karol, not the saint, that can inspire a quite extraordinary faith from very ordinary people like themselves, and like us.