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By Andrew Nagorski
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The assessments are already rolling in, so let me be blunt about my own: I'm convinced John Paul II will go down in history as one of the greatest popes ever, whose intense spirituality, intellectual brilliance and sheer physical stamina are beyond dispute. So is the key role he played in inspiring his countrymen to topple the communist system. I'm also convinced that he has left some extremely difficult issues to his successor.
It's hard to overstate this pope's impact, reach and visibility. Consider the fact that his constant travels have meant that he logged the equivalent of three times the distance between the Earth and the moon. Those of us who accompanied him, riding in what would be the economy class of the chartered papal plane, often felt as if we were part of an endless marathon, and our biggest challenge was just to keep up. In the air, we couldn't tune out completely since we had to be prepared in case the pope made one of his walkabouts through our section. The pope, who spoke an amazing array of languages with varying degrees of proficiency, had the daunting habit of answering questions in whichever language the questioner used.
There were also some surrealistic moments. On a 1983 trip to Central America, we were loaded onto a Honduran airliner for a flight across rugged, mountainous terrain. At one point the plane started losing altitude. At first there were a few jokes in the press section about the next day's coverage: pope dies in plane crash in huge type, with a tiny wire-service item buried deep in the package: "Dozens of journalists were also killed." But as the flight kept dropping, silence descended on our cabin. We watched the Boeing 737 drop to within a couple of hundred yards over the treetops of a village before pulling up sharply and barely making it over the next mountain range. Later, we learned that the pope had been asked to bless the Honduran president's village as the plane flew over it, and the president had ordered the pilot to drop as low as possible to make that blessing stick.
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Everything about this pope was intense and some of it was subversive. When I was reporting on the fate of religion in Eastern and Central Europe, I became aware of the scope of his encouragement for the faithful in places like Ukraine and Czechoslovakia, where persecution was the norm. I talked with one of the Polish priests, dressed in civilian clothes, who traveled to parts of the Soviet Union to hold secret masses. As late as 1989 I went to a secret mass in the Ukrainian city of Lvov that was attended by dissidents who had spent as many as 18 years in the gulag.
But John Paul II's greatest contribution to the downfall of communism wasn't at all covert. In public pronouncements and at every possible opportunity, he bore a simple message: faith matters, the truth matters, freedom matters, injustice must be condemned. His audiences knew which truths and which injustices, without his taking any overtly political stands. He encouraged such dissidents as Poland's Lech Walesa and Czechoslovakia's Vaclav Havel to live "as if" they were free, undermining the elaborate system of lies that the communist system depended upon to survive. Once the pretenses were stripped away, more and more people realized they weren't alone with their dissident thoughts and began to act upon them. In talking about Europe's common spiritual genealogy, the pope was, in his own way, signaling that the Iron Curtain had to come down.
Those convictions flowed directly from his Polish upbringing and his encounters with both of the 20th century's brutal totalitarian systems--Hitler's and Stalin's. His rejection of any system that crushed the individual, that degraded people into objects, was instinctive. So was his rejection of anti-Semitism, which he occasionally witnessed growing up in Poland. His effort to reach out to Jews and others of different faiths can be traced to the same roots.
While the most dramatic public manifestations could be seen when he visited Jerusalem's Western Wall, I was struck by a smaller, private gesture. A few years ago, I spent a long afternoon interviewing a Polish priest who had discovered, only at the age of 35 when his "mother" told him the truth, that he was a Jew by birth. His natural parents had pleaded with a Polish Catholic couple to save the baby by adopting him as their own during the Nazi occupation. Until he learned more about his origins, he decided to tell only one person: the then newly elected pope. He wrote to John Paul II that his Jewish origins made him feel a special bond to the successor of Peter, a Jewish apostle. The pope's warm reply began with the words "Beloved Brother."
As inspiring and visionary as this pope has often been, there was also a persistent undercurrent of discontent with some aspects of his reign. "We are suffering from overcentralization," a senior member of the Curia admitted to me in 1982. "This clerical life of Rome remains a bit of a royal court, with some of the mentality of Louis XIV." At the time, this could be ascribed to a holdover culture from previous popes, but today internal critics claim that centralization increased under John Paul II's rule.
A Polish cleric who has worked in the Vatican talked about the "fear of innovation" in much of the church, due in part to the appointment of weak bishops. They haven't been able to develop the new ideas that are needed in this time when the church's traditional base--Europe and the United States--is suffering from a growing shortage of priests (with Poland a very big exception). While the pope has done a remarkable job of reaching out to the Third World, the crisis in vocations is only one manifestation of the broader problems facing the church in the countries where its influence is visibly declining.
Certain subjects--making celibacy for priests optional, the ordination of women--were off-limits under this pope. An even more telling omission was the lack of serious discussion of the church's position on birth control, especially in the era of the AIDS epidemic. But maybe it's only fitting that this pope left several difficult issues to his successor. Even a remarkable papacy like his is inevitably incomplete; for believers, after all, perfection is attainable only with God, not among men.
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