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The Pope Looks Toward the 21st Century
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13839 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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12 / 1988 |
2,541 Words |
| Author
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George Weigel
George Weigel, a Roman Catholic theologian, is president of
the Washington-based James Madison Foundation and the editor
of American Purpose. His most recent book is Tranquillitas
Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American
Catholic Thought on War and Peace. |
One measure of the personal accomplishment of Pope John Paul II is the difficulty many have in remembering the doldrums into which the papacy had fallen 10 years ago last month, when the cardinal-electors shocked the world (and quite possibly themselves) by choosing the archbishop of Krakow, Karol Wojtyla, as the 263rd successor to St. Peter.
The last decade of the 15-year pontificate of Pope Paul VI had been marked by continuous and often acrimonious controversy on subjects ranging from doctrine to styles of worship to sexual morality and on to the deeply divisive issue of the church's relationship to local, national, and international politics. But it was not so much the constant bickering that seemed debilitating, as it was the sense of exhaustion emanating from the apostolic palace in Vatican City. If Paul VI, a good and intelligent man who had been groomed for the papacy for 25 years, was unable to exert leadership over events within his church, then perhaps the papacy as the guiding center of world Catholicism was finished. The job, some suggested, had simply become too much for any one man.
Scholars continue to debate the theological nature and boundaries of papal authority, but 10 years into his pontificate, this much at least is clear: John Paul II has demolished the claim that the papacy had been overrun by history and modernity.
The most dramatic, if ominous, evidence in this regard was the 1981 assassination attempt on the pope, which was almost certainly the result of John Paul's efforts on behalf of the Solidarity movement in Poland. More positively, the pope's extensive travels have added modern definition to the "Petrine ministry" given by Jesus to Peter and, Catholics believe, to Peter's successors: the mission to "strengthen the brethren," wherever they may be (cf. Luke 22:32). And while it is true that Paul VI began the contemporary practice of papal pilgrimage to the four corners of the earth, it is John Paul II who has made global evangelism a central (some would say, the central) component of his mission. Over the past decade, the centuries-old image of the pope as chairman of the board Roman Catholic Church, Inc., may well have faded. But it has been replaced by the far more dynamic image of the pope as "universal pastor," a role made possible in fact as well as theory by the modern communications and transportation revolutions. After John Paul II, it will be difficult indeed for any future pope to define his task in essentially administrative terms.
But "after John Paul II" may well be far down the road.
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