A tale of two papacies

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A tale of two papacies 

21 July 2016 | by Christopher Lamb | Comments: 0 This week the Pope celebrates World Youth Day in Krakow. How will his gentler style go down in a country that idolises the muscular approach of his predecessor, John Paul II?
On Wednesday Pope Francis is due to travel to Poland, a country where one of his predecessors, John Paul II, is an icon – the national hero and saint who helped to free the Poles from communism, the man who created the template for a bold and strong pope. And just to make his legacy loom even larger, the reason for Francis’ visit is to celebrate World Youth Day, a mass global gathering of young Catholics which was established by John Paul II.

But here’s the difficulty: Francis’ papacy is taking a very different course from the one ploughed by Karol Wojtyla during his nearly 27-year pontificate, from 1978 to 2005. In a host of areas – from Catholic sexual teaching to papal infallibility – Francis has opened up debate where John Paul II wanted to shut it down. To compound matters, Francis’ critique of the capitalist system has led to accusations of him being a communist – not a helpful perception in a country that battled so hard to overthrow the influence of Soviet rule.

So what sort of reception is Francis likely to receive? As is expected at World Youth Days, he will be rapturously greeted by young pilgrims, including Poles: a Win/Gallup survey last March showed 78 per cent of the country view him positively.

Where things are less straightforward are with the bishops, with one Church insider telling me that just two of them are enthusiastic supporters. The Polish hierarchy was, for example, vocal in its opposition to any shift in teaching at Francis’ synod gatherings on the family, with its spokesman saying they preferred to stick to the “understanding of Popes Paul VI and John Paul II”. And when it comes to giving Communion to divorced and remarried people the contrast is stark: John Paul II said “No” while Francis has opened up the possibility following lots of impassioned synodal debate.

The Polish Pope also had a synod on the family, but at the end of it he ruled that divorced and remarried couples could not receive Communion unless they lived as “brother and sister”. Furthermore, the synods he oversaw are remembered as little more than talking shops where the Roman Curia wrote the conclusions. A crucial shift under Francis has been his view that Rome does not always need the last word on complex pastoral and moral issues.
John Paul II, on the other hand, sought to push his reading of moral theology to the Church with his book Theology of the Body, a long and philosophically dense work which forcefully reasserts the prohibitions of Catholic sexual teaching, including on contraception. By contrast, the whole tenor of Francis’ papacy has been to push a merciful and compassionate Church, summed up with his famous “Who am I to judge?” remark about gay people. John Paul II, however, is remembered for denouncing a gay pride festival in Rome in 2000 as an “affront” to Christian values and to the Church.

Differences between the two men can be seen on a host of other issues. While rebellious theologians such as Hans Küng were silenced for questioning papal infallibility under John Paul II, Francis seems comfortable about debate on the topic; while John Paul II closed discussion on the female priesthood, Francis has announced a commission to study women deacons; while liberation theology came under scrutiny during the Wojtyla years, the first Latin American pope accepts many of its principles.

A little historical context is needed here, however. John Paul II took charge of the Church in 1978 during the turbulent year of three popes. The heated debates of the Paul VI era – on contraception and sexuality in particular – were still raging. The reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which had finished just 13 years earlier, were still bedding down.

“John Paul II found a Church that was divided, lacking in self-confidence, and debilitated by years of internal debates,” says Austen Ivereigh, biographer of Pope Francis. “So his concern was to agree and enforce an agreed interpretation of Vatican II and then go out and energetically proclaim it. Francis, on the other hand, found a Church that had become conformist, distant from contemporary humanity and decayed at its core, so his focus has been on making the Church more merciful, more pastoral and more capable of dialogue.”

Another papal biographer, George Weigel, who has written authoritative accounts of the life of John Paul II, says there is more continuity between the two popes than people might think, particularly over their shared focus on mercy. “The ‘divine mercy’ theme that Pope Francis has stressed, and that will be very much front-and-centre at World Youth Day, was the central theme of the last half decade of the pontificate of John Paul II.” The same, he adds, can be said for John Paul II’s pushing of the “new evangelisation”, which “is the direct precursor of Pope Francis’ ‘Church permanently in mission’” – which he sets forward in the defining document of his papacy, Evangelii Gaudium.
But do Francis and John Paul II view mercy in the same way? This Pope wants to search out lost sheep, and is calling on confessors to be like the father of the prodigal son who runs out to meet his returning, wayward child. John Paul II, meanwhile, laid an emphasis on people first accepting their sinfulness.

For Eamon Duffy, professor of the history of Christianity at the University of Cambridge, the continuity argument doesn’t wash. Such a judgement, he wrote last year in The New York Review of Books, “carefully ignores the significance of Bergoglio’s consistent adoption of a rhetoric, in word and act, manifestly at odds with the ethos of the previous two pontificates”.

He added: “For admirers of the ‘dynamic orthodoxy – a euphemism for the vigorous exertion of central authority – that characterised the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, Bergoglio’s frank acceptance of clerical fallibility and the perils of authoritarian leadership are both startling and deeply unappetising.”

Francis’ style and approach are also markedly different from that of John Paul II. While the Polish Pope strode the world stage and brooked no opposition from internal dissenters, his Argentinian successor stresses dialogue and the need to “walk with” people. He is also critical of priests who “play Tarzan”, so confident in their own position they leave no room for self doubt. His view on the clergy has led to different criteria being used in the appointment of bishops; he has stressed the need for bishops who are pastors, while John Paul II wanted men willing to demonstrate doctrinal clarity. Francis’ appointments to dioceses across the world – from Bologna to Santo Domingo – have demonstrated this.

Weigel counsels here that the pastoral versus doctrinal distinction is a misperception, and when it comes to clerical “Tarzans” those who know Francis see him as “the decider” in a “far more stringent way” than his recent predecessors. “What is happening is that bishops with a more lax approach to doctrinal questions are being appointed in some cases,” says Weigel. “But it is very hard for anyone to say that this makes them ‘more pastoral’ when it is clear all over the world that ‘Catholic Lite’ is unattractive and moribund, while the growing parts of the Church are those that have embraced Catholicism in full.”

He adds: “If ‘pastoral bishops’ are what get us the catastrophe that is the Church in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, it is not all that clear to me what is ‘pastoral’ about an approach that empties churches, and in which there is no urgent sense of mission.”

Ivereigh, meanwhile, says a mutual concern for evangelisation is what the two Popes share but “the way they met that challenge has radically differed”.

It is questionable how comfortable Francis is with the whole concept of World Youth Day, which has a heavy focus on the person of the Pope. For him evangelisation is less about the big events and more effective in small communities and movements; with people rolling their sleeves up to serve the poor and marginalised. While World Youth Day has a big wow factor for those in more secular Western countries, some in Latin America question its effectiveness and baulk at the expense. It is likely that the Pope will try and put his own message on to this week’s gathering in Krakow – expect him to stress the need for service, of putting mercy into action.

Both John Paul II and Francis were surprise appointments as pope, and both came to Rome as outsiders. But while Wojtlya’s long papacy was one of retrenchment and of putting a seal on the box of church reforms unleashed in the 1960s, Francis is slowly finding a way to open the box again.