Was Pope John Paul II just an out-of-touch "conservative?" Daniel Henninger says not so.
In Poland, people rallied behind him knowing the payoff would be liberation from communism's ideological opposition to two John-Pauline principles: freedom for the individual and freedom to manifest belief in the idea of God.Posted by Alan at April 8, 2005 05:16 AMIn the West, where a life of faith or belief was free for the asking, the Pope's message of spiritual renewal encountered a more sophisticated politics. Here it was understood that if one abetted a popularization of John Paul, it risked also elevating visibility for "Vatican" policies in other realms--abortion, sexual practice or preference, stem-cell research, the ordination of women, and all that.
And so it came to pass in beat reporting and liberal church circles that this pope--notwithstanding his affinities on the death penalty or economics or war--was described to the world as a "conservative." That is to say, he was ultimately an opposition political force to be kept at arm's length. It worked.
Until now. John Paul in death is proving a force equal to and possibly more powerful than what he was in life. Past some point this week it became clear that this pope's death was building into something else--a spirit moving in the room perhaps, whose ultimate effects and direction are hard to predict.
It is now estimated that several million people may have come to Rome, perhaps equal to its resident population. The Pope's funeral Mass will be seen world-wide by uncounted millions. And they will have witnessed a liturgy of an almost mystical beauty once common but barely practiced since the 1960s.
The ambience from St. Peter's this week, which so transfixed TV's audiences, is from a time that was set aside: the shining vestments and rows of white surplices, the slow and solemn pace, chanting voices rising ever upward, and the invocation of ancient saints in, of all things, Latin. "Sancta Maria Magadalena . . . Ora pro nobis."
There was a time when transcendent religiosity was part of the warp and woof of weekly life in America. Is it really such a threat to the modern order? Is that new order so fragile that it would be overwhelmed in the U.S. by a Khomeini-like theocracy of the "religious right"? Or is religiosity instead, as I think John Paul believed, a bulwark to the modern world and all of its inevitable, variable confusions?