This excerpt is taken from Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church by H. W. Crocker III. (Regnery History, 2023)
The Era Of Pope John Paul II
In October 1978, the College of Cardinals chose a remarkable man. The newly elevated Pope John Paul II was the first non-Italian pope in more than 450 years. He was a Pole who had lived through World War II, witnessing both Nazi terror and Communist persecution. He was a scholar, philosopher, and linguist, but also a poet, playwright, and actor, as well as an athlete. Before becoming a priest he had had a girlfriend, considered a secular career, and worked as a manual laborer. It is to the great benefit of the Church that he felt called to a priestly vocation and pursued it — as was necessary — like a secret agent, studying surreptitiously and eluding Nazi death squads that marked every young Pole of military age for death. He served a suffering Church in Soviet-occupied Poland. When he was elevated to the papacy, Soviet KGB chief, and later head of the Soviet Union, Yuri Andropov immediately recognized a threat to the Soviet regime.
But the new pope was also a symbol to the West. Young, vibrant, brimming with élan vital, self-evident goodness, philosophical clarity, and strength, he could appeal to the media-drenched Western mind and its demand for charisma. He could also speak to it in terms of authority. When the pope issued challenges to respect human dignity even the commercialized West had to pay attention to this man who spoke having personally stood witness to the greatest Hell-bent ideologies of the twentieth century, a man who had come through that inferno not only with the wisdom that comes from suffering and the confrontation with evil, but with a love of life and the joy of Christ manifest in his face and spirit.
He was the first pope to actually turn the Second Vatican Council to good use. The Council’s documents became a means to sharpen St. Peter’s sword against the Communists who occupied his country. He had participated in every one of the Council’s sessions and had been keenly involved in the Council’s declaration of religious freedom as a fundamental right. He saw that the old altar-and-throne model of Catholicism had died with the Habsburg Empire after World War I, though the Church had never conceded this. What was needed now was a new banner of religious freedom to challenge the primary threat to the faith — Communist totalitarianism. When the Council decided to put the liturgy into the vernacular, the future pope, who understood the primacy of culture, saw springs of popular renewal. When the Council called for greater lay participation, it was apparent that what John Paul II envisioned were movements like Opus Dei — which he ardently supported — a Catholic “personal prelature” that seeks to sanctify work and everyday life. Opus Dei adopts the medieval idea that to work is to pray. It is an idea that also motivated the Polish labor union Solidarity, which, with the Church, was the vanguard of Polish resistance to the Communists. Pope John Paul II’s greatest triumph was in seeing the totalitarian menace collapse, seeing his fellow Poles chanting, “We want God!,” seeing the red tide of Communism ebbing away, evaporating, a nightmare struck by daylight.
He was committed to being an active pope and was, indeed, the greatest globe-trotter in the papacy’s 2,000-year history. He also proved a prolific writer of encyclicals and other papal documents applying the deposit of faith to issues of the contemporary world. As a priest, he had taken a particular interest in advising married couples, and he strongly supported Humanae vitae, which had drawn on his own book Love and Responsibility. He reaffirmed Humanae vitae in his own Veritatis splendor in 1993, and two years later condemned abortion in Evangelium vitae, as one of the most terrible manifestations of a “culture of death” that kept the world in its talons.
In 1994, he ruled out further discussion of the priestly ordination of women, saying that such consideration was denied to the Church on the basis of Christ’s clear example. That would seem an inarguable proposition, but this, too, proved controversial because it denied two great modern heresies: that sex is a form of class struggle, and that all principles and facts are soluble to modern ideas of equality, self-fulfillment, and human wishes.
Another, somewhat similar, heresy that the pope dispensed with was liberation theology, which viewed Third World Communist revolutions on behalf of the poor as the logical working out of the “social gospel.” In Nicaragua, Pope John Paul II stood on the runway and admonished Father Ernesto Cardenal, who served the Communist Sandinista regime, “Regularize your position with the Church.” The picture snapped of the event gave the clear impression, from the pope’s gestures, that he was delivering a papal rebuke to a wayward priest. In any event, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, these revolutionary regimes lost their patron, and liberation theology became a footnote in Church history.
The pope did not, however, neglect the Church’s mission to the poor. His writings on economics underscored the Church’s hostility, not only to Communism, but to economic liberalism if it considers man as a mere cog in a machine, or if it does not recognize the need to pay a man a living wage so that he can support his family, or if the rich neglect their obligation to help the poor. Equally condemned, in wealthy Western nations, is materialism that degrades the human mind and spirit—that can, in fact, in an age of mass marketing and communications, actually subvert the human mind and spirit.
At the level of ecumenism, the pope’s greatest wish was to heal the rift with the Eastern Orthodox churches. Their departure, he said, had left the universal Church, in his words, breathing “through only one lung.” But his hopes were disappointed, if not crushed, by the East’s lack of enthusiasm. With the Anglicans, the ordination of women widened the schism and also sent a small platoon of Anglican priests and worshippers into the Catholic Church. There were overtures to the Lutherans and cooperation with Evangelicals, who share the Church’s opposition to abortion, but there seemed little real hope that the separated Christian churches would restore themselves to Catholic unity.
The pope was interested in non-Christian religions, especially Judaism. It was under his pontificate that the Holy See finally extended formal recognition to the state of Israel; and as a Pole, he felt a special kinship with the sufferings of Jews in the Holocaust, though this did not shield him from occasional verbal attacks when he marked the graves of Catholic martyrs of the Second World War. He was the first pope to pray in a mosque. And if his repeated apologies for any conceivable Catholic historical offense grated on those of us who wish the Sack of Byzantium to be a feast day of the Church, it would seem churlish to deny the benign intent that motivated them — or the strength that lay behind the apologetic words, for the pope’s billion-strong Church does not suffer from what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences” that afflicts the Eastern Orthodox or the hydra-headed schisms of the Protestants.
All the globe-trotting, all the encyclicals and papal letters, all the political activity should not for a moment obscure the deeply powerful personal faith of Pope John Paul II, a faith that made him not a modern man — though his charm could make him seem that way to the news media — but a man whose faith was as old as St. Peter and linked to eternity. When he was struck by an assassin’s bullet, he credited his recovery to the Blessed Virgin Mother and prayed at her shrine in Fatima to express his devotion and gratitude. He promoted the Rosary, proclaiming a “Year of the Rosary” (October 2002 to October 2003), and adding five, optional, “luminous mysteries” to the prayer, building on a decades-long popular addition, covering Jesus’s ministry, to be said on Thursdays.
His hours of prayer were intense. His Catholic belief defined his every thought, utterance, and action, and he clearly sought to follow the apostolic path of being a missionary for the faith. He did as much as any pope could possibly do. He recognized, as with the early Apostles, that there remained a world to be won, and he reminded the world of where salvation, purpose, and meaning lay, with the Catechism of the Catholic Church, an extraordinary summary document, accessible to all, published in 1992.
For a man who ascended to the papacy as physically vigorous as any, his end was marked by a sad physical decline. A survivor of two assassination attempts that wounded him, and the inevitable erosions and calamities of age, his final years could sometimes be painful to observe, though his endurance in the midst of physical suffering was its own testament to his faith. That visible frailty had, however, perhaps a different message for the man who would succeed him to the throne of St. Peter.
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Harry W. Crocker III is vice president and executive editor of Regnery Publishing and former speech writer for Governor Pete Wilson of California. A former editorial writer for the San Diego Union, he has written for many outlets, including National Review, the American Spectator, the Washington Times, and the National Catholic Register, and is the author of half a dozen books, including the Custer of the West series, bestselling Robert E. Lee on Leadership and The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War, as well as the award-winning novel The Old Limey.
This excerpt is taken from Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church, by H. W. Crocker III. Copyright 2001/2023 by H. W. Crocker III. Reprinted by permission from Regnery History, an imprint of Regnery Publishing. (A division of Salem Media Group)
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