May 1, 2014
Popes John XXIII and
John Paul II Are Saints
By Mike McManus
For the first time the Catholic Church consecrated two former Popes as
saints: John XXIII and John Paul II before a crowd of perhaps 2 million. Both
were giants on the world stage.
John XXIII, who was pope from 1958-63, is best known for calling the Second
Vatican Council of the world’s bishops who he asked to “open the widows” of the
church to the modern world. One reform allowed the Mass to be spoken in local
languages, rather than Latin.
Earlier in his career, as a papal nuncio (ambassador) to Istanbul in World War
II, he gave false documents to Jewish refugees seeking transit to Palestine,
saving thousands. One biographer said he saw Jews as “the relatives and fellow
countrymen of Jesus.”
Similarly, John Paul II was the first Pope to visit a synagogue, and issued
public apologies for church sins against Jews, gypsies and other victims of the
Holocaust (against the advice of his cardinals).
His greatest achievement was a singular role in the collapse of European
communism. First, he helped his native Poland break free of Soviet control,
followed by Czechoslovakia and East Germany in 1989. “John Paul demonstrated in
action that Christian conviction can be the agent of human liberation,” wrote
George Weigel in “Witness to Hope.”
He also opened ecumenical dialogue between the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics and
nearly as many Protestants, Orthodox, Anglicans and independents. When elected
in 1978, he was the first non-Italian pope in 455 years, and served till 2005,
one of the longest pontificates in history.
In his first two decades he made 84 foreign pilgrimages, giving 3,000 sermons
and addresses, speaking to hundreds of millions. He sparked new codes of canon
law and the first Catechism of the Catholic Church in 400 years and was also a
prolific writer whose works stretch 10 feet on a shelf. “It is plausible to
argue that the pontificate of John Paul II has been the most consequential since
the sixteenth century Reformation,” Weigel concludes.
However, there is a dark cloud over his reign. “He failed miserably on the
sexual abuse crisis” of priests who molested children, asserts Jason Berry,
author of the pioneering 1992 book, “Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic
Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children.” Berry says the pope “gave no
leadership to the bishops as they were struggling with these cases.”
At the time his book was published, the church had lost $400 million in legal
and medical costs from cases involving 400 U.S. priests. By 2000 that number
grew to 1,000 priests and financial losses of $1 billion.
The scandal grew immeasurably in 2002 when The Boston Globe published 250
stories, many on page 1. That sparked research by many other newspapers and TV
networks resulting in 12,000 stories of priestly sexual abuse.
“Catholics were stunned, then outraged,” wrote Peter Steinfels in “A People
Adrift: the Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America.” Within a year,
Catholic church attendance slid 7% and the percentage of Catholics saying their
faith is “very important” to them dropped from 61% to 49% (compared to 70% of
Protestants).
Steinfels said the sex scandal occurred “because many church officials failed to
prevent those crimes and do everything in their power to repair the harm,
whether acting out of ignorance, naïve piety, misplaced trust, indifference to
children, clerical clubbiness, fear of scandal, subservience to lawyers, concern
for church assets…or downright complicity.”
A writer to the National Catholic Reporter said the bishops’ way of responding
to accusations of sexual abuse “was to commit heinous crimes, with total
disregard for the mental suffering of the victims, and to attempt to cover up
the situation with money and coercion.”
The Pope should have not only insisted that priests accused of these crimes be
turned over to the police to investigate, but also he should have fired the
bishops who were complicit.
He did neither. The one step he took was to put full authority for overseeing
the clerical abuse scandal under Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who later became
Pope Benedict XVI. He did remove 3,000 priests from the priesthood.
However, not one bishop was fired. Indeed, when the Boston Globe articles
exposed Boston Cardinal Bernard Law as an enabler of child abuse, he did resign.
But Pope John Paul gave him sanctuary in Rome as the leader of a large
cathedral.
Columnist Maureen Dowd wrote “John Paul may be a revolutionary figure in the
history of the church, but a man who looked away in a moral crisis cannot be
described as a saint.”
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