So much was expected of Karol Wojtyla when he became pope in 1978. Here, for the first time, was a pontiff plucked not from the Vatican’s perfumed inner chambers, but a man of the world. He was not Italian; he skied, he kayaked, he acted in dramas. His fellow clerics compared him to John Wayne.
His faith, too, seemed tested. He had lost his mother early, lived in the shadow of Auschwitz, performed forced labor in a limestone quarry. “Do Not Be Afraid” was his motto at his inauguration, and one sensed that after living through Poland’s brutal mid-century, he no longer was.
So even before his first papal pronouncement, he was granted a place in history as the Roman Catholic Church’s first modern pope, charged with leading the centuries-old institution into the next millennium — the “new springtime of Christianity,” as he called it.
And 26 years later, it’s by that yardstick that Pope John Paul II’s legacy will be judged, both in the church he transformed and in the world he tried so hard to influence.
For those who expected more from the modernization — American priests ordained in the 1960s, say, Catholic women who wanted to be priests or Latin American leaders who wanted a partner in revolution — the pope not only betrayed his promise but locked the church in place for years to come.
But to his many admirers, John Paul succeeded brilliantly. Armed only with the Gospel, using a title that could have easily faded into irrelevance in a secular age, he made himself a world leader on the order of Franklin D. Roosevelt or Winston Churchill.
Less than a year into his tenure, he made clear what feats a modern pope — especially a former actor — could pull off on history’s stage. June 1979, Victory Square, Warsaw, standing in front of a 36-foot-high wooden cross. “Do not be defeated,” he told the gathered masses, and they shouted back: “We want God! We want God!”
For years after, Cold War historians debated how much that nine-day visit helped destabilize the country’s Communist government or lent moral force to the Solidarity movement that eventually toppled it.
But even those who give him less credit acknowledge that whatever got stirred in Poland those days, the papacy itself was forever changed. Popes have always been diplomats, negotiating with local powers to protect the church’s interests. But here was a pope who defined the church’s interest in the broadest way possible — as the liberation of the human spirit, for Catholics and non-Catholics alike.
For the rest of his 84 years, he took his portable altar to every forgotten corner, making more trips in a typical year than any pope before him had made in his entire tenure. The trips produced unforgettable moments: The pope kissing a concrete floor at the Auschwitz death camp; stirring teenagers at Madison Square Garden into rock-concert frenzy; touring a synagogue in Rome; visiting his would-be assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca, in prison to grant him forgiveness. At each stop the crowds responded to his particular charisma, the showmanship of a former actor deepened by the serenity of a man who prays six hours a day.
But over the years, it became less clear if his popularity translated into moral authority. Communism in Poland was an easy, familiar target and his victory was clean. But later in his pontificate, John Paul began to focus on more difficult targets such as capitalism. And here, the will of the people was not always on his side.
In his prodigious writings, he used church theology to fashion an alternative to modern materialism, to try to teach Catholics how to live in a world with fading respect for authority and human dignity, and amid scores of new-fangled temptations. He tried to find a way “to engage with the world without becoming of the world,” explained Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete, a theologian and New York writer.
To accomplish that, he reoriented the theology of the church in fundamental ways.
Simplified radically, his theology was this: Without fixed moral principles, people can fall into the trap of treating one another like objects of commerce or pleasure or vengeance. The proof was in nearly all realms of human activity. In “The Gospel of Life,” his famous 1995 indictment of modernity, he cited the Second Vatican Council in listing murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia, slavery, prostitution and disgraceful working conditions.
The task was his most ambitious, because it meant beating back not just one government or movement but the whole course of the modern world. The strain of his struggle showed. The pope meant his message to fill people with hope. Yet often, his tone turned dark and brooding. “In addition to the ancient scourges of poverty, hunger, endemic diseases, violence and war, new threats are emerging on an alarmingly vast scale,” he wrote in an encyclical that read more like a Human Rights Watch report than a spiritual message.
The future looked even bleaker to him: “With the new prospects opened up by scientific and technological progress,” he continued, “there arise new forms of attacks on the dignity of the human being.”
To the Catholics who felt betrayed by how little he changed the church, his popularity was a kind of trick, the thing that most reminded them of the gap between what he appeared to be and what he was. Conservatives accepted his teachings on morality but played down his emphasis on social justice and the limits of the free market. Liberals did the opposite.
The final years of his papacy were often defined by his physical limitations.
Rumors would circulate that he was canceling a trip; he almost always showed up, but was barely able to move, his every clearly enunciated word a grand triumph. “A soul leading a body,” his spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, often said during this period, and the sentiment could be read as either excruciating or inspiring.
In the end, though, he could not win over everyone, and his tenure ended for him with many disappointments.
He left his beloved Europe cold to his charms, more secular than ever. He left America more adoring than faithful. His evangelization of the Third World had only limited effect. But maybe he found spiritual fulfillment in his disappointments. The example of Jesus teaches nobility in suffering, so perhaps the pope’s leadership can ultimately be measured not only by its accomplishments but also by its scars.
