← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · friedrich braun
Thread ID: 16237 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2005-01-07
2005-01-07 23:49 | User Profile
[I]If itââ¬â¢s true, as Cornwell alleges, that John Paul ââ¬Åis nothing but a liar, a lunatic and a letdownââ¬Â than he certainly isnââ¬â¢t the first Pope to fit this characterisation. And frankly, to anyone even vaguely familiar with the history of the Papacy the current pontiff hasnââ¬â¢t been all that bad. [/I]
The pontiff with incurable vertigo
By C.S. MORRISSEY Saturday, Jan 1, 2005
UPDATED AT 6:40 PM EST
The Pontiff in Winter:
Triumph and Conflict
in the Reign of John Paul II
By John Cornwell
Doubleday, 336 pages, $34.95
He took Bono's sunglasses. They belonged to the U2 singer, yet the Pope tried them on. Not many care about debt relief for poor countries, but this memorable stunt grabbed headlines for a worthy cause. It prompted Bono to designate John Paul II as "the first funky Pontiff."
John Cornwell doesn't think the Pope is so funky any more. Many will suspect this snarky and irreverent book is a hatchet job on the pontiff's twilight years. Cornwell has no scruples about mocking the Parkinson's Pope for drooling uncontrollably in public or slipping in the shower. But the book's weird blend of ridicule and respect, more an artful aiming of arrows than a hatchet blow, betrays the author's own fascinating Catholic psychodrama.
Cornwell is an accomplished, urbane, liberal Catholic. Many disaffected believers share his complaints about the Vatican. How does he come to the verdict of this book, that the pontiff in winter is nothing but a liar, a lunatic and a letdown?
Cornwell thinks the papacy has been a letdown throughout the 20th century because, beginning with various bureaucratic innovations in the 19th, it has centralized control of the Roman Catholic Church. This was actually Cornwell's real thesis in Hitler's Pope, the book that first made him infamous. Notoriously, he questioned the wartime record of Pope Pius XII. Lost in the ensuing controversy was Cornwell's main complaint -- about centralized papal power.
Cornwell thought he had a slam-dunk proof for his thesis with Pius XII. If Hitler could dupe a pope and hoodwink him with diplomacy, he thereby controlled (thanks to papal centralization) the rest of the Catholic church.
In light of the controversy his book stirred up, a chastened Cornwell is now more agnostic about Pius XII's wartime record. But he maintains his low opinion of Pius XII's postwar conduct and -- this is the main point -- of centralized papal power in general. Pius remains a letdown, and John Paul, mutatis mutandis, is, too. Both are trapped by the "gilded cage" of papal power, the "strangest, most impossible and isolating job on Earth."
How the papacy ought to function is a legitimate debate; so too is a historical assessment of pontificates. Allegations surfaced this week that, after the Holocaust, Pius XII told churches to return Jewish children to their families only if they had not been baptized. But whether applied to Pius XII or beyond, the trouble with Cornwell's "one size fits all" thesis (a centralized papacy is a bad thing) is that he simply assumes what he sets out to prove.
Cornwell tendentiously blames the Pope for everything from the U.S. pedophile crisis to AIDS in Africa. Who will Cornwell have for a scapegoat if the Vatican decentralizes papal power as per his recommendations? At any rate, Cornwell's constant appeal for more collegiality and more democratic collaboration on the part of the Vatican ignores the wisdom of having a pontiff in the first place.
The Pope is a visible sign of continuity with previous generations. It is precisely the democracy of the dead that the Pope's person invokes. Even if all Catholics of the present generation wished to align with Cornwell on the fad of the day (abortion, contraception, gay marriage, cloning or women priests), and the Pope alone stood against them: His vote counts for more.
Besides, can't a case be made for the necessity of centralizing whatever the Vatican has centralized? Given the unprecedented virulence of modern secular attacks on Christianity in the past century, by Nazism, communism and sundry tyrants, surely it can.
After Hitler's Pope, Cornwell wrote Breaking Faith. In that book, he gave a fair account of the Catholic Church's internecine feuds between liberals and conservatives, while arguing vigorously for the liberal side.
More importantly, he also revealed that he suffered (non-clerical) sexual abuse as a child: "soul murder." He grew up, lost his faith, yet eventually regained it. Still, as a survivor of abuse, he is understandably a skeptic about the "official" appearances of anything in life.
No doubt this is the root of his struggle with the official papal manifestation of Catholicism. Cornwell's current charges that the Pope is a liar (says one thing, does another) or a lunatic (with a feckless mystical view of history) thus seem more emotional responses to recent church scandals than serious or fair arguments.
Cornwell views with skeptical eye the pontiff's mystical devotion to Mary, especially in her Fatima apparitions. He ridicules the Pope's interpretation of the assassination attempt on him (linking it to the prophetic Third Secret of Fatima) as being the lunatic abdication of reason before an already predetermined fate. Grossly unfair, this charge ignores Cardinal Ratzinger's official commentary on the meaning of the Third Secret as non-deterministic.
A mystical vision cannot be understood literally when it talks of angels who, with martyrs' blood, "sprinkled the souls that were making their way to God." Still, Cornwell and Garry Wills dismiss the Pope's appropriation of the Third Secret, objecting that the Pope neither died, nor did soldiers fire arrows at him, as the vision prophesied: "Having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big Cross he was killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him."
While reading Cornwell quoting this vision, I hear Bono singing. Perched with Vertigo atop rock stardom, athwart an iPod marketing campaign, Bono unashamedly sings out from celebrity's gilded cage of how God's "love is teaching me how, how to kneel."
I think: There's more than one way to wound a vertiginous pontiff. The pen fires arrows, too.
C .S. Morrissey teaches Latin at Simon Fraser University.