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F e a t u r e A r t i c l e
Will Pope John Paul II Be Styled "the Great"?
By Fr. Brian W. Harrison
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This Rock
Volume 14, Number 8
 October 2003 
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In this month commemorating Pope John Paul II’s silver jubilee as successor of Peter, his accomplishments are receiving considerable attention in the media. Some of his admirers claim not only that he is a living saint but that he may well go down in history as one of the few popes entitled Magnus ("the Great") in the Church’s official documents.
Every faithful Catholic will be able to think of many highlights of this unusually long pontificate: the Holy Father’s staunch championing of marriage, purity, and human life against an increasingly globalized and politicized "culture of death" and its effete fellow-traveler, the pursuit of sterilized pleasure; his major contribution to the downfall of totalitarianism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; his personal example of integrity, goodness, piety, and Marian devotion; and his promulgation of a universal Catechism that is helping to counteract the tide of rampant dissent that rose after Vatican II.
John Paul II’s personal charisma and globetrotting style of leadership have been inspirational to millions of Catholics, especially to young people, and above all in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. In these regions, vocations to the priesthood and consecrated life have shot up during his pontificate, even as they have continued to decline overall in the West. Among world leaders of recent decades, no individual on this troubled earth comes close to Christ’s present Vicar in being a powerful influence for goodness and truth.
Nevertheless, in the interest of well-roundedness, it is fair to point out areas in which John Paul II’s leadership has been less than what hoped. Some readers may feel that no criticism of a reigning pope can ever be legitimate, at least not in public. Such a stance does not take into account rights of the faithful that are explicitly recognized by the Church itself. The 1983 Code of Canon Law says:
"[The faithful] have the right, indeed at times the duty, in keeping with their knowledge, competence, and position, to manifest to the sacred pastors their views on matters that concern the good of the Church. They have the right also to make their views known to others of Christ’s faithful, but in doing so they must always respect the integrity of faith and morals, show due reverence to the pastors, and take into account both the common good and the dignity of individuals" (CIC 212 §3).
No clause in canon 212 exempts the words, deeds, policies, or omissions of a pope himself from such criticism. Moreover, by affirming the right of the faithful "to make their views known to others of Christ’s faithful" as well as to the Church’s pastors, this canon makes clear that public as well as private criticism can be legitimate.
Not everything a pope says touching on faith and morals requires assent. Popes sometimes express opinions on theological, exegetical, or other matters without requiring Catholics to agree with them. (For discerning how a pope manifests his "mind and intention" in this regard, the norms laid down in Lumen Gentium 25 are helpful.)
The category of "faith and morals" (Church doctrine) does not include matters of Church discipline (for instance, changeable liturgical legislation). The latter involves a pope’s governing office rather than his teaching office. As loyal Catholics we have to obey the legislative and administrative norms promulgated or approved by the pope, but we are not obliged to agree with them.
In what follows I will make some comments that, however bold they may seem to some readers, fall within the boundaries of legitimate free speech for loyal Catholics as provided for in post-conciliar canon law.
Liturgy
While I usually celebrate the post-conciliar rite of Mass, I welcome the Holy Father’s renewal of permission for use of the traditional Roman rite (now even in St. Peter’s Basilica), and I often avail myself of that permission when celebrating privately. Orthodox Catholics are appreciative of John Paul II’s periodic interventions—notably in this year’s encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia—calling for an end to a variety of common liturgical abuses.
Nevertheless, responsibility for the poor quality of many liturgical celebrations today—banal, desacralized, constantly changing, and all too often carried out in "worship spaces" of secular-looking structures—does not rest only with those who have disobeyed official norms. Liturgical quality has been affected by inaction and even bad example from the top.
Did we really have to wait more than twenty years into the present pontificate before Liturgicam Authenticam recognized the pitiful quality of the 1970 ICEL translations of the Church’s sacred texts and set in motion procedures to rectify the problem? The wait has been twenty-five years in the case of some new and important abuse-correcting decrees that have been announced as due for promulgation before Christmas this year.
After the reform implemented by Paul VI (a reform more extensive than the Vatican II Fathers called for), many of us are convinced that what the Church needed in the following pontificate was a period of liturgical stability and consolidation. But Pope John Paul II has yielded too often to "progressive" demands, allowing further novelties that would have startled his predecessors in the chair of Peter.
The most visible example has been the Holy Father’s surrender to pressure in deciding to permit female altar servers in the Latin rite Church. He reversed an unbroken bimillennial liturgical tradition and in effect rewarded the disobedience of those pastors who for years had illicitly permitted altar girls.
The 2002 typical edition of the Roman Missal can be considered "conservative" in that it insists on the observance of existing liturgical norms that have been widely disobeyed in the quarter-century since the previous edition was published. But it is unfortunate, I think, that the General Instruction on the Roman Missal also codifies departures from the Roman tradition that have been widely practiced for some time.
For instance, while the 1975 GIRM required a paten or communion plate to be held under the chin of each communicant, that requirement has been largely ignored, and the new GIRM eliminates it altogether. (Indeed, I was dismayed to see that requirement being disobeyed even during the Holy Father’s Mass when in 1990 I had the privilege of concelebrating with him in a private chapel of the Apostolic Palace.) The 2002 GIRM also adds a whole new chapter at the end contemplating still further and as yet unspecified local "adaptations" that Rome anticipates will be requested by episcopal conferences.
The Holy Father’s own Masses—frequently seen by millions on television— have sometimes led the way in novelty, introducing (usually in the name of "inculturation") practices of a secularizing or even paganizing nature. Bare-breasted women in grass skirts have read the epistle at papal Masses in New Guinea. Liturgical dancers have undulated with some regularity at the Pope’s liturgies for World Youth Day (among others), in disregard of a 1976 Vatican norm prohibiting such dancing.
The 1995 papal Mass in Sydney for Australia’s first-ever beatification included liturgical dance, female altar servers, and an aboriginal "smoke and fire" purification rite that replaced the official penitential rite. An ad hoc "creative" dialogue replaced the Creed, while nuns in secular dresses accompanied the bishops and Pontiff in the sanctuary. Large numbers of lay eucharistic ministers held ciboria filled with altar breads, raising them for the consecration almost as if they were concelebrating the Mass.
Someone might maintain that such abuses at papal Masses might have been sprung on the Holy Father without his prior knowledge. While this may have happened on occasion, the pattern has continued too long for this excuse to be plausible. Most of these unfortunate novelties have been orchestrated by the master of pontifical ceremonies, Msgr. Piero Marini, who was appointed in 1988. His Holiness has rewarded him with a bishop’s mitre and has kept him in office as papal emcee.
Ecumenism and Interreligious Dialogue
Pope John Paul has taken bolder initiatives than any of his predecessors in regard to relations with non-Catholics and non-Christians. But some of these initiatives appear to run the risk of neglecting, at least at the practical level, Pope Pius XII’s warning against "reduc[ing] to a meaningless formula the necessity of belonging to the true Church in order to gain eternal salvation" (Humani Generis 27).
Many "traditionalist" Catholics go too far in claiming that Vatican II documents on these themes stand condemned as unorthodox by Mortalium Animos, Pope Pius XI’s 1928 encyclical on religious unity. Such claims confuse a change in Church policy or discipline with a reversal of doctrine. It is true that Pius XI prohibited Catholic participation in any kind of interdenominational initiative aimed at restoring Christian unity, but since Vatican II the Church has encouraged such participation. But in his encyclical Pius XI did not define Church doctrine; he simply issued a norm of discipline that was later superseded by an ecumenical council.
Some of us are deeply concerned about the effect on public opinion that certain recent actions by the Holy Father have had, especially as reported and interpreted by the secular media. These actions have blurred important theological distinctions, leaving the impression that the Catholic Church is now admitting what it condemned in the aforesaid encyclical—namely, the idea that all religions are more or less good and praiseworthy.
Isn’t that the impression likely to have been given by the Assisi gatherings of October 1986 and January 2002? There the Holy Father invited not only separated Christians and other monotheists but leaders of pagan, pantheistic, and polytheistic religions to carry out their own respective cultic practices on Church property. (He did not invite them all simply to "pray" in some generic sense, as was claimed by the Wanderer’s editorial of May 8 this year.)
A similarly unfortunate impression was left by the Holy Father on May 14, 1999. Presented a copy of the Qur’an by some Muslim visitors from Iraq, he publicly accorded it the same gesture of honor bestowed on the holy Gospels at Mass: He inclined his head and kissed it—kissed this book that condemns to hell believers in the Trinity and the Incarnation, that insults and oppresses women, and that, with its repeated injunctions to slaughter "infidels," has inspired Christendom’s longest-standing and most dangerous enemies for nearly fourteen centuries.
Less than a year later, on March 21, 2000, while visiting Syria, John Paul II offered a prayer that included the aspiration "May St. John the Baptist protect Islam." This goes well beyond Vatican II’s teaching in Nostra Aetate, which limits itself to saying that the Church "regards the Muslims with esteem" (NA 3). It is one thing to express esteem for non-Christian people, who can be sincere in their erroneous beliefs. It is quite another to show esteem for—and indeed, to pray for—the beliefs themselves.
Key Appointments
That saintly and learned Doctor of the Church, Robert Cardinal Bellarmine, when asked for advice by a newly elected pope, replied that the most vital duty of the Roman pontiff is to appoint the right men as bishops. Indeed, if this duty remains unfulfilled, even the most beautiful and orthodox papal encyclicals and the most prudent papal legislation will remain ineffective, because they will go unenforced.
Some of John Paul II’s personal appointments have been good ones. Not all of the not-so-good appointments can be blamed on the Pope, since in most cases case he must depend on the recommendations of his advisors. But the Pope can change those advisors if generally weak, liberal, and insubordinate episcopates emerge (or continue) over time. There is no denying that such mitred mediocrity still prevails in many countries after a quarter-century of the present pontificate.
Some key appointments in which the Pope certainly had personal knowledge of the men in question are mystifying. For instance, as a theologian, Walter Kasper has "demythologized" many miraculous elements in the Gospels. He and Karl Lehmann were leaders in the German bishops’ campaigns of the 1990s to get divorced and remarried Catholics admitted to Communion and to resist John Paul II’s clear instructions regarding controversial abortion counseling procedures. How can the bestowal of red hats on such clerics be reconciled with the canon law that the Pope himself promulgated? Canon 351 §1 stipulates that those made cardinals must be (among other things) "truly outstanding in doctrine."
Let me conclude with a personal testimony. One of my professors in the seminary in Sydney, Australia, taught year after year—in the classroom and in published articles—that the Resurrection of Jesus was a spiritual, non-miraculous event that left his mortal remains somewhere to decay. This meant that the Gospel accounts of his subsequent physical appearances were mere mythologized descriptions of internal, intangible "experiences of grace" in the hearts and minds of the disciples. Archbishop Edward B. Clancy of Sydney, who had been a Scripture professor in the same seminary, was aware that this was being taught to his future priests, but showed no outward signs of concern.
The Vatican’s doctrinal congregation was concerned. When its prefect, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, learned of this scandal in 1986 and instructed Archbishop Clancy to correct the false doctrine being taught in Australia’s major seminary, the latter demonstrated his confidence in this priest’s orthodoxy by naming him a diocesan censor of books for the archdiocese of Sydney—a judge of other people’s orthodoxy!
The standoff between Rome and Sydney dragged on into a second year without resolution. By that time I had been ordained and was doing postgraduate studies in Rome. Assisting at a papal Mass in the spring of 1988, I heard the Pope read out, among the names of those he planned to elevate to the College of Cardinals, that of the archbishop of Sydney.
After prayerful consideration, I became convinced I had a duty in conscience to make known to the Holy Father the evidence I possessed that this appointment would violate canon law. After all, how could any Catholic as confused as the Archbishop evidently was about a foundational article of Christian faith be described as "truly outstanding in doctrine"?
At that time, I had access through a priest friend to a high-up Polish contact in the Vatican who was able to get messages personally and promptly to the Pope. I prepared a short, respectful letter, with appropriate documentary proof. My Polish contact accepted this material and undertook to place it personally in the Pope’s hands.
The comment from this man so close to Peter’s successor was sadly significant. Agreeing that the matter was a serious one, he added that he doubted whether John Paul II would take appropriate action. "We must pray very much for the Holy Father," he said gravely, "that he himself be strengthened. He needs to be firmer than he is in matters of this sort."
Archbishop Clancy received the cardinal’s red hat at the consistory of June 1988 and retains it to this day. The Australian priest at the center of the Resurrection controversy eventually received a wrist slap, but he was not ousted from the Sydney seminary, and within a few more years was publishing scathing criticisms of the "outdated 1950s theology" taught in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
John Paul II’s achievements and successes under difficult circumstances certainly deserve praise. I admire much of what he has done, and I revere him as a holy and prayerful leader of the Church. But I do not expect that he will end up as one of the few popes to be styled "the Great."
Fr. Brian Harrison is a professor at the Pontifical University of Puerto Rico. He is a prolific writer on matters of liturgy and canon law
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