by Rod Benson

Expression of condolences

Baptists in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory join with millions of Christians around the world in honouring the late Pope John Paul II as a great Christian statesman and moral theologian. We especially remember his vibrant faith, his clear Christian teaching especially in response to the rise of secular liberalism and relativism, and his courageous example in the face of tyranny and suffering.

We express our sincere condolences to our Australian Roman Catholic brothers and sisters, and to all Roman Catholics, in the loss of their esteemed Holy Father. We pray with them for consolation and hope at this time, for divine guidance in the selection of a godly successor, and for the triumph of Christian love and truth in our world.

A reflection on the life and legacy of Pope John Paul II

There is a scene in the Australian television drama Sea Change[1] where police officer Karen Miller (played by Kate Atkinson) and magistrate Laura Gibson (Sigrid Thorton) discuss religion in Laura’s office in Pearl Bay.

“What do you believe in, Karen?” Laura asks.

“Ah, um, I’m Catholic,” Karen replies with conviction, “I don’t have to think about it.”

Karen’s confession may reflect the collective opinion of popular culture with respect to Catholicism, but it is worlds apart from the faith and life of the most recent occupier of the papal throne. Pope John Paul II died at 9.37 pm on 2 April, ending the reign of the 265th pope. Unmarried and childless, he nevertheless left a great theological, moral and political legacy.

John Paul was born Karol Wojytla in 1920 in the Polish village of Wadowice, fifty kilometres from Krakow. His father was a retired non-commissioned Polish army officer; his Lithuanian mother, a schoolteacher, died when he was eight. At 19, when the Nazis invaded Poland, he was condemned to forced labour in a chemical factory, and later a quarry. By 1942 he had lost all his immediate family.

After studying in secret in Nazi-occupied Poland, Wojytla was ordained a priest in 1947, installed as Archbishop of Krakow in 1964, and created a cardinal (by Pope Paul VI) in 1967. He was inaugurated Pope on 16 October 1978 at the age of 58, young by papal standards. Two previous popes inspired his chosen name: John XXIII, the reforming genius behind the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65, and Paul I, his immediate predecessor who ruled for only 33 days. John Paul was the first non-Italian to take up the symbolic crook of St Peter in 455 years, and the first ever Slav. Significantly, he was the third-longest reigning pope in the 2,000-year tradition of his church.

Perhaps one of the keys to interpreting John Paul’s pontificate lies in words he uttered at his inauguration. “Fear not,” he said, “Open wide the doors to Christ and his authority of salvation. Open the frontiers of states, [of] economic and political systems, of broad domains of culture [and] civilisation [and] development.” His enduring conviction was that the classical, orthodox Christian faith, based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, applied to all without exception.

John Paul the people’s priest

John Paul possessed a strong charismatic presence, an apparently immense personal magnetism that endeared him to crowds. He was also a prayerful and spiritual person. Some called him a mystic.

Within days of his inauguration, his papal staff realised that times had changed. In place of stuffiness and isolation, he brought joy and engagement. He trained in philosophy but loved sport. He took to swimming and mountain skiing. He kissed children on the forehead and touched visitors on the arm in greeting. He talked freely with journalists. He was a dynamic evangelist and skilled apologist. He loved mass rallies where his oratory and theatrical skills could be displayed.

His motto was Totus tuus – “entirely yours.” He travelled the globe as no predecessor had done. It was his custom, on arriving in a new country, to kneel and kiss the ground, apparently in honour of those he was visiting. After surviving an attempted assassination by Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agka in St Peter’s Square in 1981, he sat humbly with his would-be killer in a prison cell in an act of forgiveness and attempted reconciliation. This is part of the scandal of the cross of Christ.

Cardinal George Pell, perhaps a little prematurely, has called him “one of the greatest Christian pastors in history.” It is true that during his reign the number of Catholics around the world rose by over 40 per cent to about 1.1 billion. But the statistics are not all good, for it is also true that, during the same period, more than 100,000 priests left the Catholic priesthood, most apparently because they were unable to accept the pope’s insistence on priestly celibacy. As always, on this principle John Paul remained resolute. Faced with revelations of widespread and entrenched sexual abuse of parishioners by Catholic priests, in 2001 he formally apologised to victims, and confessed that “As priests we are personally and profoundly afflicted by the sins of our brothers who have betrayed the grace of ordination.”

Even with the signs of advancing age and finitude, John Paul maintained the adulation of the faithful, including millions of children and young adults who had never known another pope. We recall television images of his last years and months, voice slurred, face expressionless, hands trembling (he suffered from Parkinson’s Disease for some 14 years), unable to walk, eventually unable to breathe without assistance. His willingness to allow people to observe his humanity, to witness his physical suffering, only strengthened his appeal. He was a faithful priest and pastor, in word and deed, to the day of his death.

And yet he was also an authoritarian and disciplinarian at heart, arguably one of the most illiberal and reactionary popes of the twentieth century.

John Paul the moral theologian

On hearing that Wojtyla had been chosen as pope, African Catholic leader Francis Arinze, now Cardinal and a papal front-runner, said, “Ah, we’re going to have some order in the church. People are going to know where they stand.” He was right. A year later George Pell, now Cardinal and Archbishop of Sydney, wrote that in John Paul the Church might have “a great Pope, who, building on the foundations of the Second Vatican Council, will substantially develop and change the way in which the relationship between the Church and the world is seen in industrialised society.” He too was right.

No one doubts John Paul’s capacity for intellectual labour or the breadth of his interests. He preached more than 4,000 sermons, and produced something like thirty pages of prose for every day of his 26-year pontificate. In his 1994 best-selling book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, he identified a common thread running through this large body of work. Where the other great twentieth-century pope, John XXIII, had focused on reforming the nature of the church and its liturgy, this pope directed his attention to the great social and moral problems of the world, and the theology that ought to undergird the solutions. Thus his concern was to affirm “the value of existence, the value of creation and of hope in the future life.” For him, the twentieth century witnessed a fundamental rejection of human dignity, and it was the church’s responsibility to call people to a Christian understanding of human persons as created in the image of God and constituted as moral beings with the freedom to realise their full spiritual and moral potential.

In his formal teaching, John Paul reinforced the traditional teaching of the church and addressed a broad range of contemporary moral and social issues. Most notable among his 14 encyclicals are Redemptor Hominis (Redeemer of Humankind, 1979), Laborem Exercens (On Human Work, 1981), Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (On Human Concerns, 1988), Centesimus Annus (The Hundredth Year, 1991), Veritatis Splendor (The Splendour of Truth, 1993) and Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life, 1995). Each of these is worthy of careful reading and reflection, offering rich resources for theological dialogue, ethical debate and moral deliberation. As Christopher Pearson has observed, John Paul may be the first pope to be remembered not for telling people that they should be Catholics but that they should be good. [2]

In contrast to the isolationist policy of his predecessors, John Paul advanced the cause of ecumenism. The official conversations between the Vatican and the Baptist World Alliance are, in part, a result of this.[3]
He also encouraged interreligious dialogue, especially with Muslims and with Jews. In 1986, he arranged a gathering of 150 world religious leaders at Assisi, the birthplace of St Francis, including Buddhist, Japanese Shintoists and Native American representatives.

John Paul championed human rights, speaking for the oppressed, the unborn and others who cannot speak for themselves. His worldview and mission led him to consistently oppose contraception (even in the face of a global AIDS epidemic), sex outside of heterosexual marriage, divorce, abortion and euthanasia; he coined the term “the culture of death.” He defended marriage and the family, and developed a significant “theology of the body,” dealing with sexual ethics. As recently as December last year, he condemned same-sex marriage as an attack on the fabric of society. He has been generally anti-war, in particular opposing both Iraq wars and warning George W. Bush, “God is not on your side if you invade Iraq.” He also upheld patriarchy and hierarchy within the church, insisted on mandatory celibacy for male priests, and refused to allow moves toward the ordination of female priests.

There are numerous other instances of John Paul’s theological influence and desire to right apparent wrongs. Some are striking in their reach. After 359 years of condemnation by the church for insisting on the scandalous heresy that the earth revolved around the sun, Galileo was finally rehabilitated in 1992. Also in that year the pope issued a new universal catechism (hundreds of rules regulating doctrine and liturgy), the first revision in five centuries. In 2002 he marked his 24th jubilee by revising the prescribed way in which rosary prayers are recited, the first change of this kind in nine centuries.

Billy Graham, the famous Baptist evangelist and statesman, said in a statement on John Paul’s death, that the pope “was convinced that the complex problems of our world are ultimately moral and spiritual in nature, and only Christ can set us free from the shackles of sin and greed and violence.” Although emerging from radically different cultures, these two men spoke the same religious language, and their life’s work arguably had the same great spiritual end in mind.

Much of John Paul’s teaching and moral influence has understandably drawn the ire of liberal secularists. Central to his life’s work has been the question of the meaning of human life and, in particular, of suffering. In his final weeks and days, the world witnessed the pope’s physical and emotional suffering more intimately than ever before. The one who had defended the rights of the oppressed, the unborn and those who cannot speak for themselves now demonstrated by his silent example how to suffer and die with human dignity, “serenely abandoning himself to God’s will,” as the Vatican media put it. Reflecting on this, George Pell observed, “the radical secularist view that suffering is meaningless, that a life of suffering is without value, is no longer enough for people.” This too is part of the scandal of the cross of Christ.

John Paul the global statesman

No previous pope travelled as widely or as frequently as John Paul II. The world was literally his parish. He visited 129 countries, although not Russia or China. Nor did any previous pope understand the nature and power of mass media, or exploit it to such advantage. Where earlier popes had merely dabbled in secular politics – or had standing armies – this pope walked the world stage as an eminent statesman as well as a spiritual leader.

As a young man John Paul watched his country overrun first by the German armies and then by Stalin’s Red Army. More than three decades later, in June 1979, as newly inaugurated pontiff, he preached to more than a million people in Victory Square, Warsaw, in the heart of communist Poland. “Come, Holy Spirit,” he called, “fill the hearts of the faithful and renew the face of the earth.”

Then he added in his distinctive, sonorous voice, “Of this earth,” indicating with a gesture the people gathered to hear him, and Eastern Europe, and the wide world. If there was a defining moment in his pontificate, suggests Vatican expert John Cornwell, “it was that declaration of liberation made in the heart of his oppressed homeland.”[4]

Vatican II helped to liberate the church from the dead hand of tradition; John Paul II helped to liberate Europe from the dead hand of Soviet communism. He will be remembered as the person who championed the banned Solidarity trade union movement in his native Poland in 1987, instigating and assisting a process that led to the eventual collapse of the Soviet empire. He was instrumental in encouraging Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to implement his program of democratising reforms known as perestroika. Baroness Margaret Thatcher remarked that “he was the moral force behind victory in the cold war.” The fall of the Berlin Wall was, in part, due to his diplomacy and fortitude.

There were other diplomatic victories. In 1982 he visited Britain and Argentina, urging the two nations to negotiate a peaceful end to the Falklands War. In Chile, hours before meeting him, John Paul publicly blasted General Augusto Pinochet’s military government as dictatorial, and was widely credited as influencing his downfall. He advocated human rights in the Philippines in the presence of President Ferdinand Marcos. In 1984 he publicly denounced apartheid in South Africa. In 1986 he crossed the Tiber River to the Rome Synagogue, the first papal visit to a Jewish place of worship. In 1992, Israel and the Vatican forged full diplomatic ties after hostilities reaching back two millennia. In 1997, in a major speech, John Paul frankly acknowledged that Christians had failed to oppose the evil of the Holocaust. In 2000, he formally asked pardon for the church’s sins, including against Jews, heretics, women and cultural minorities. In Syria in May 2001 he became the first pope to enter a mosque.

“Prophets don’t always thunder,” writes Jerzy Zubrzychi. “Sometimes, with bowed head and trembling hands, they tuck a prayer of repentance into a crevice in a stone wall – and nudge 2000 years of often bloody, shameful history towards a new course.”[5]

Finally, it is worth recalling that this pope elevated more than 470 of the faithful to sainthood, and beatified 1300 others (most notably Mother Teresa of Calcutta). It has been said that he declared more people saintly and holy than all of his predecessors combined. This has undoubtedly left an indelible mark on ecclesiastical history, and signals the triumph of the gospel over distinctions of race, class and gender.

While it is premature to call the late pontiff “John Paul the Great,” as the Archbishop of Sydney is already doing, there is a faint aura of greatness about his person and his legacy. Let us leave the hagiography to future historians, and be content in the knowledge that John Paul II was indeed an extraordinarily gifted Christian man, and an extraordinary gift to the church of Jesus Christ at a critical moment in its existence in the world.

Conclusion: On Baptists and Catholics together

I was raised in a conservative Protestant tradition where it was understood that the use of liturgical candles was a symbol of Rome, Rome of the Pope, and the Pope of the devil. My parents and grandparents recall, in childhood, exchanging projectiles and insults with their fellow Catholic students on the way to and from their separate schools, a practice not conducive to either mutual understanding or friendship.

Times have radically changed. Today Protestants and Catholics have much in common, and have much to learn from each other. But they also differ on certain important beliefs and (to a lesser extent) practices. Baptists, for example, do not accept the view that the Catholic Church is the one true and authentic church of Jesus Christ. Some reject appeals to ecumenical creeds as authoritative, viewing this as supplanting the authority of Scripture. There are other concerns regarding authority such as the doctrine of the primacy of Peter, apostolic succession, papal supremacy and infallibility. There are substantial differences in interpretation of the doctrines of justification, Mary, the sacraments and the mass. There is also concern that the Second Vatican Council’s apparent admission that salvation is possible without explicit Christian faith may open the door to universalism.

However, at the beginning of the twenty-first century it is clear that there is greater dialogue and deeper understanding between Baptists and Catholics than ever before. Scholars, clergy and laypeople are increasingly bridging historic gaps and learning to speak a common ‘language.’ Further, Baptists in Australia are generally evangelical in their theological orientation, and evangelical Baptists have far more in common with orthodox Catholics than they have with liberal Baptists. The same may be said for orthodox Catholics with respect to liberal Catholics.

While acknowledging the significant differences that continue to divide our two communions, the prospect for greater mutual understanding, closer ties and more effective collaboration, especially on social and ethical issues, appears good.

Returning to the scene in Sea Change mentioned at the beginning of this article, the next lines of dialogue illuminate what I see as some of the strengths shared by many Australian Baptists and Catholics – strengths that might facilitate practical Christian unity, and encourage our common purpose and mission in the name of Christ:

“So, what do you believe?” asks Laura.

“Uh, I believe what Catholics believe,” Karen replies.

“All of it? The virgin birth, the resurrection, creationism?”

“Yeah, all that.”

“Without question?” asks Laura, surprised.

“Well, there’s not much point in believing in something if you question it all the time. It’s not like I’m obsessed, or anything. I don’t go to church that much since it got washed away.”

“What about eternal damnation for not attending weekly mass?”

“No, no. I don’t believe that one!” And she walks out.

I can almost see John Paul smile disarmingly, a twinkle in his eye, as he draws up a chair to the conference table to begin the dialogue.

Rev Rod Benson
Director, Centre for Christian Ethics, Morling College, Sydney
Email:
Phone: (02) 9878 0201
Mobile: 0412 421 678

FURTHER READING

John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope (New York: Knopf, 1995).
John Paul II, Memory and Identity: Personal Reflections (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005).
Hans K ¼ng, The Catholic Church: A Short History (trans. John Bowden; New York: The Modern Library, 2001).
George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (London: Harper Collins, 1999).

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[1] Series 2, episode 8, “Manna from heaven,” DVD, ABC, 2004.
[2] The Weekend Australian, 2-3 April 2005.
[3] See, for example, Ken Manley, A survey of Baptist World Alliance conversations with other Churches and some implications for Baptist identity,” http://www.bwa-baptist-heritage.org/krm2.htm, dated 11 July 2002.
[4] The Times (London), 3 April 2005.
[5] The Weekend Australian, 2-3 April 2005.