Page 1309 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 5 April 2005
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It shows also, in contrast, that what is emerging probably is the standard media line on the papacy that goes roughly like this: John Paul II was a man of the people; a victim of Nazism and communism; instrumental in bringing about the fall of communism; a tireless traveller; an apostle to the world; a critic of both socialism and unbridled capitalism; a friend to the poor; a defender of the weak; charismatic; and charming; he appealed to Catholic and non-Catholic alike.
Then, Mr Speaker, there is the “but”. And it seems to be a key word. Then they say, “But somehow he is strangely conservative on issues of sexuality, of the beginning and end of life and things like clerical celibacy.” One might ask, “Conservative on what scale and conservative compared to whom?” It is perhaps too much to expect the press corps to be familiar with the history of the papacy. And perhaps John Paul II was a victim of his own longevity here, as the only pope most of them had known since they became journalists and, for many, since they were born.
In a sense, such an analysis misses the point of the Catholic Church. To attempt to analyse its teachings in social and political terms makes the mistake to which we are understandably prone—especially in this place—and which Cardinal Pell yesterday warned against in relation to the election of the pope’s successor. A conclave is not a pre-selection. In a sense, it is not even an election. And the Catholic Church is not a political party and is not a government in the ordinary sense. It is not simply that it adopts policies for higher reasons than electoral success. We know, despite cynical views to the contrary, that political parties, after all, do argue for their own views of what they think will benefit their electorate and not just themselves, albeit tempered with the knowledge that we are operating in the world of the possible, that we are operating in the here and now.
The difference lies in the fact that the Catholic Church deals primarily in doctrine, not in policy. The test is ultimately not what works in terms of the world but what is true. And the eternal truth does not change with the change of government. If a pope believes and teaches what his predecessors believed and taught, it is not because he is at heart a conservative. By any standard, John Paul II was not. He did much to reinvent the papacy, albeit within historic limits, and his work to reconcile the Catholic teaching with the schools of modern philosophy to provide phenomenological rationales for Catholic positions was a heroic undertaking.
Although many experts may differ on the degree of his success and laymen like myself struggle with the prose which, according at least to urban myth, was supposed to have been translated from Polish into English, then Polish into Italian, then into better Italian and then into the official Latin before it was translated and made available for monoglot English speakers like us, it was sometimes very difficult to come to terms with. But this does not mean to say that what Pope John Paul II was teaching was any departure from 2,000 years of tradition.
The church stands or falls on the proposition that it possesses the truth, the truth that is handed down by its founder, and it transmits that patrimony intact. Some of the implications from time to time may be drawn out for more detail, but it has to be transmitted intact. If it could be changed, it would not be the church. One of the things that struck me on Sunday—we had a gathering of 18-year-olds after a birthday party on
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