The New Republic on John Paul II

The New Republic provides a number of essays, collected under the title "After Pope John Paul II."   E.J. Dionne writes, in "Papal Paradox," that:

"A sign of contradiction" was a favorite John Paul phrase, and it might be said to define his papacy. In his effect on Roman Catholicism's relationship to the world, his achievement will be judged as liberal. But his impact on the Church he leads has to be seen as conservative. These terms are vexed, and John Paul himself would probably reject them--he'd insist on his own consistency in opposing both the Marxist and capitalist forms of materialism, in arguing that the spiritual is always primary, and in asserting that the Church's central obligation is to doctrinal clarity. But the Pope's version of consistency does not necessarily match that of the world that is judging him. That's the paradox at the heart of his papacy.

He adds:

Centesimus has to rank as one of the most successful papal documents in history. Rather than present a single line that Catholics should pursue in the area of politics and economics, it set the terms of debate among people of goodwill. John Paul ruled out dictatorships and highly centralized command economies. He also opposed capitalism without social safety nets and safeguards. But he left open a broad area for debate and experimentation. The Pope's approach was principled but not ideological. He was certainly egalitarian, but he did not demand absolute equality. He was open to the advantages of markets and to the positive uses of government. You could be on the right, as long as you acknowledged the imperative of lifting up the poor. You could be on the left, as long as you acknowledged the limits of the state and the right of individuals to personal initiative.

Michael Sean Winters writes, in "History Test":

Th[e] core theological belief that philosophic anthropology must be based on the person of Christ has appeared in all of John Paul's public writings. His tireless insistence on the dignity of every human person is rooted here, in the belief that, because Christ became a man, every man must be loved like Christ.

It is difficult to overstate the theological importance of the grace-versus-nature debate--an argument akin to that between the Federalists and the anti-Federalists on the creation of a powerful central government. That is to say, depending on how you resolve this one issue, every other theological issue is affected, altered, colored, changed. . . .

In a society debating how best to shirk governmental commitments made to the elderly while movie executives are paid upward of $100 million in severance, surely John Paul's humanism gets high marks for simple consistency. 

That humanism, which once underpinned and shaped the Enlightenment values of Western societies, seems so utterly absent from the spread-eagle capitalism of the West today, in which the market is the sole vehicle for assigning worth and resources. If the good of concrete human persons is not the criterion for social, political, and economic life; if the value of subjective freedom is so predominant as to trump all other values; if the moral life of the human person is consistently evaluated in utilitarian terms, is humanism still even possible? John Paul's consistent solidarity with the poor could not stand in sharper contrast to the predominant cultural ethos of the West.

Andrew Sullivan understands John Paul II primarily as an "actor," and laments:

I'm a Catholic now withdrawn from Communion whose entire adult life has been in Wojtyla's shadow. And, as a homosexual, I watched as the Church refused to grapple with even basic questions and ran, terrified, from its own deep psychosexual dysfunction. "Be not afraid," this Pope counseled us. But he was deeply afraid of the complicated truth about human sexuality and the dark truth about his own Church's crimes. This was a Pope who, above all, knew how to look away. How else do you warmly embrace Yasir Arafat and Tariq Aziz without moral judgment? But people--faithful people--noticed where he couldn't look. And they grieved, even as, in the aftermath of this brittle, showboating papacy, they now hope.

"Brittle, showboating papacy."  Whatever.  Noam Scheiber also misses the boat, I think.  He contends that the Pope was "an intellectual who was hostile to intellectual debate."

Finally, in "Central America," my friend and colleague John (not "James") McGreevy suggest that:

The next Pope and the next generation of American Catholic leaders will be to manage the transition from a Catholic culture to a Catholic creed. Until the 1960s, the faith inherited by American Catholics came from an extraordinarily dense network of Catholic families, schools, parishes, and Catholic associations. This Catholic faith was not an assent to an abstract set of propositions. Instead, it was the result of a shared culture--one that allowed Catholics to recognize that they had been speaking "Catholic" all their lives.

McGreevy states that, for the Church in America to succeed in its evangelizing goals, it will have to "reconcile itself to certain aspects of American culture." 

Managing two problems that prevent this sort of reconciliation is crucial. The first is the intertwined knot of gender and ministry. Few women within the institutional Church structure hold decision-making power, and women working in parishes--increasingly important figures in a Church with a rapidly declining number of priests--struggle to obtain the opportunity to perform even basic ministerial tasks. This situation runs against one of the most powerful currents in modern history: the expansion of vocational opportunities for women. The real question is not the high-profile issue of women's ordination, but whether the next Pope will have the courage, unlike John Paul II, to sever some of the links between an ordained male clergy and ecclesiastical power. . . .

The stakes in all this are considerable. Given the moral dilemmas posed by contemporary bioethics, social welfare policy, and military strategy, Catholics might offer a distinctive alternative to the values of the market, an alternative that should be present in the public life of the world's only superpower.

Rick