[Mb-civic] 3 differnt takes on Pope John Paull II and his legacy

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

The Pope, the War, Modernity, & Sex: Should the Church
After John Paul II Seek Restoration or Renewal?

Submitted to Portside

By Rabbi Arthur Waskow *

What did John Paul II intend, and what did he
accomplish, in his long reign?

First, a personal vignette of my own. During the pre-
war crisis of early 2002, some American activists who
opposed the war knew that the Pope was condemning the
plans to attack Iraq. But we felt there needed to be a
dramatic act or focus -- something much stronger than
the Vatican or the American bishops had yet ventured --
to give weight and bite to that condemnation.

So in January and February 2002, I was among a network
of religious folk who tried to persuade the Vatican to
send the Pope to address the United Nations and then to
meet with American religious leaders. In this way he
could express far more publicly, dramatically, and in
the United States itself his strong condemnation of the
onrushing war. He could play in America the kind of
role that he had played in Poland.

Indeed, when I was invited to speak on February 14,
2002 -- the famous weekend of world-wide opposition to
the war -- at a huge antiwar gathering of Italian
Catholic social workers and activists in Rome, I made
this plea both in public and in private.

No act by anyone would have better galvanized the
effort by Americans of every religious and ethical
tradition to prevent the war.

But he, and the Vatican, did not take that step

When he faced the Soviet Union, John Paul II proved the
stupidity of Stalin's old challenge, "How many
divisions does the Pope control?" But not when he faced
the United States.

Why?

To answer that question, I think we need to look more
deeply at the question he himself posed as the
overriding issue of the century: How should the
Catholic Church deal with Modernity, in both its
capitalist and communist variants?

All the religious traditions on our planet have been
upended by Modernity. The Modern project has brought
into human hands enormous power over the earth and the
human future that once were beyond us, in the hands of
a King/ Lord. (For example: the power to wipe out life
on earth, to create new species, to overthrow tyrants,
to have sex without children, to have children without
sex.)

There have been three major responses of the religious
communities to this wave of expanded Control:

Surrender: Modernity brings more human weal than the
old traditions; so we keep only shreds of the old
patterns. Maybe one or two festivals a year, maybe
marriage, probably death rituals. Little else. The
domain of religion dramatically shrinks.

Restoration: The whole Modern project is disgusting and
destructive, from the H-bomb to the shattering of
families and neighborhoods. Go back to the 17th
century, or as close as possible. Put women, the earth,
and other traditions back in their place: subordinate.

Renewal: Some important aspects of Modernity are
destructive; some are new forms of holiness. Instead of
being swallowed up by Modernity or vomiting it out,
taste it with care, digest what is sacred, eliminate
what is disastrous. Among the new forms of sacred
practice; the equality of women, and recognition of
profound holy wisdom in traditions other than one's
own.

John Paul II pursued the Renewal path in regard to
other communities than Roman Catholicism. - That is why
many Jews have been grateful to him, and why Arab
television carried the news of his death with such
respect.

But when it came to the role of women, not only in his
Church but beyond it, and when it came to issues
involving sexuality, he made every effort to Restore
the past.

His opposition to women or married men as priests and
his failure to move swiftly and vigorously to squelch
those powerful prelates who had tolerated the sexual
abuse of children by priests have debilitated his
church. His opposition not only to abortion but to most
forms of contraception, not only for his own church but
for all peoples, overrode his respect for other life-
paths. - And his actions in these regards have been
affronts both to the moral dignity of women and to the
world's efforts to meet the dangers of the
overproduction of human beings and the shattering
thereby of ecological balance.

Indeed, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, though
John Paul's writings sketched opposition to the run-
amok capitalism of the triumphant West, he did little
to mobilize the Catholic Church against the evils he
decried: consumerism, oppression of workers, and
poisoning of the earth.

He and the Vatican did far more to mobilize the Church
against abortion, contraception, the full equality of
women, and public respect for gay and lesbian
relationships.

For the Pope to have taken his opposition to the Iraq
war into the teeth of the Bush Administration itself in
2002, and to have turned his theoretical opposition to
runaway corporate capitalism into a real campaign
against it, would have meant weakening the same forces
in American society that agreed with the Pope about
issues of sexuality and gender.

To have mobilized such efforts might also have required
unleashing a grass-roots movement of Catholics that
would have vastly weakened the top-down power structure
of the Church itself.

Pope John XXIII began to take that risk. Paul VI was
moving more slowly in the same direction. John Paul I
in his three-month Papacy showed signs of a similar
willingness.

Not so John Paul II.

Now the Church must choose: Restoration, or Renewal?

Given the overwhelming domination of the College of
Cardinals by men (!) named by this Pope, it would take
something of a miracle to renew the Church on issues
involving sexuality and women.

Perhaps there is more hope when it comes to issues of
globalized corporate capitalism, oiloholic addiction
and its threat to scorch the planet, and the tendency
of the present US government and of some elements of
the Muslim world to ignite a shattering war between the
US and all Islam.

More hope that the Cardinals will see these questions
as both more urgent and more consequential than their
desire to put women and sex back in their subordinate
places.

As the Cardinals meet, sealed off for the moment from
our planetary earthquakes, let us pray.

Shalom, Arthur

*Rabbi Arthur Waskow is director of The Shalom Center
www.shalomctr.org


----

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/04/1336240

AMY GOODMAN: And capitalism?

Blase Bonpane: And on capitalism, extremely interesting. We 
sawhe had a
horror of Soviet communism, but when it came time for the first 
conference 
that he attended in Puebla in Mexico – I was there,as 
wasArchbishop
Romero -- this was 1979. The condemnation at Puebla was of 
unrestrained 
capital. He was very much against the deregulation. He was very 
much 
against what is called neoliberalismo today, the 19th century 
laissez-faire 
capitalism that showed only regard for profit and no regard for 
the common 
good. So to the surprise of everyone at that conference, the only 
thing 
condemned in the conference was unrestrained capital -Marxist 
analysis 
was kept as a methodology that was fully acceptable. He was not 
talking 
about people becoming Marxist, as such, but the use of Marxist 
analysis, 
that is, to recognize class warfare, to recognize the lack of 
distributive 
justice in society, was completely acceptable. So these things 
were on the 
positive side. And it was curious that prior to the conference in 
Puebla, 
the newspapers were coming out saying Pope John Paul II 
condemns 
liberation theology. It just didn't happen.The capitalist world was 
so 
afraid of what liberation theology implied that they wanted to 
condemn it in 
the press before the Pope even made a statement on it. So that 
part was of 
great interest to all of us, and liberation theology is simply a 
response to 
imperial theology, which has been with us since 312 A.D., since 
the time of 
Constantine, the emperor becoming a Christian. He brought the 
sword into 
Christianity and conversion by way of the sword, and that was 
ultimately 
seen in the Crusades, in the Inquisition, in the conquistadores. 
And these 
are all things for which Pope John Paul II apologized. He was 
horrified by 
Church history, and that included the Holocaust. I don't know of 
any pope 
that had apologized for the history of the Church prior to him.He 
was an 
extremely complex man. And there are many, many facets to this 
person, 
some that we're sorry about and many that we find quite unusual.

***
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5162343-103677,00.html
The Pope has blood on his hands 
The Pope did great damage to the church, and to countless 
Catholics
Terry Eagleton
Monday April 4, 2005
Guardian
John Paul II became Pope in 1978, just as the emancipatory 60s 
were declining into the long political night of Ronald Reagan and 
Margaret Thatcher. As the economic downturn of the early 70s 
began to bite, the western world made a decisive shift to the 
right, and the transformation of an obscure Polish bishop from 
Karol Wojtyla to John Paul II was part of this wider transition. The 
Catholic church had lived through its own brand of flower power 
in the 60s, known as the Second Vatican Council; and the time 
was now ripe to rein in leftist monks, clap-happy nuns and Latin 
American Catholic Marxists. All of this had been set in train by a 
pope - John XIII - whom the Catholic conservatives regarded as at 
best wacky and at worst a Soviet agent. 
What was needed for this task was someone well-trained in the 
techniques of the cold war. As a prelate from Poland, Wojtyla 
hailed from what was probably the most reactionary national 
outpost of the Catholic church, full of maudlin Mary-worship, 
nationalist fervour and ferocious anti-communism. Years of 
dealing with the Polish communists had turned him and his 
fellow Polish bishops into consummate political operators. In 
fact, it turned the Polish church into a set-up that was, at times, 
not easy to distinguish from the Stalinist bureaucracy. Both 
institutions were closed, dogmatic, censorious and hierarchical, 
awash with myth and personality cults. It was just that, like many 
alter egos, they also happened to be deadly enemies, locked in 
lethal combat over the soul of the Polish people. 
Aware of how little they had won from dialogue with the Polish 
regime, the bishops were ill-inclined to bend a Rowan-Williams-
like ear to both sides of the theological conflict that was raging 
within the universal church. On a visit to the Vatican before he 
became Pope, the authoritarian Wojtyla was horrified at the sight 
of bickering theologians. This was not the way they did things in 
Warsaw. The conservative wing of the Vatican, which had 
detested the Vatican Council from the outset and done its utmost 
to derail it, thus looked to the Poles for salvation. When the 
throne of Peter fell empty, the conservatives managed to swallow 
their aversion to a non-Italian pontiff and elected one for the first 
time since 1522. 
Once ensconced in power, John Paul II set about rolling back the 
liberal achievements of Vatican 2. Prominent liberal theologians 
were summoned to his throne for a dressing down. One of his 
prime aims was to restore to papal hands the power that had 
been decentralised to the local churches. In the early church, 
laymen and women elected their own bishops. Vatican 2 didn't go 
as far as that, but it insisted on the doctrine of collegiality - that 
the Pope was not to be seen as capo di tutti capi, but as first 
among equals. 
John Paul, however, acknowledged equality with nobody. From 
his early years as a priest, he was notable for his exorbitant belief 
in his own spiritual and intellectual powers. Graham Greene once 
dreamed of a newspaper headline reading "John Paul canonises 
Jesus Christ". Bishops were summoned to Rome to be given 
their orders, not for fraternal consultation. Loopy far-right 
mystics and Francoists were honoured, and Latin American 
political liberationists bawled out. The Pope's authority was so 
unassailable that the head of a Spanish seminary managed to 
convince his students that he had the Pope's personal 
permission to masturbate them. 
The result of centring all power in Rome was an infantilisation of 
the local churches. Clergy found themselves incapable of taking 
initiatives without nervous glances over their shoulders at the 
Holy Office. It was at just this point, when the local churches 
were least capable of handling a crisis maturely, that the child 
sex abuse scandal broke. John Paul's response was to reward an 
American cardinal who had assiduously covered up the outrage 
with a plush posting in Rome. 
The greatest crime of his papacy, however, was neither his part in 
this cover up nor his neanderthal attitude to women. It was the 
grotesque irony by which the Vatican condemned - as a "culture 
of death" - condoms, which might have saved countless 
Catholics in the developing world from an agonising Aids death. 
The Pope goes to his eternal reward with those deaths on his 
hands. He was one of the greatest disasters for the Christian 
church since Charles Darwin. 
· Terry Eagleton is professor of cultural theory at Manchester 
University 
***


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