Why everyone’s wild about John Paul

Never has a Roman Catholic pontiff been so adored by the world—by the entire non-Catholic, non-Christian, non-believing world. Why? According to Catholic traditionalist Christopher Ferrara:

Whatever the Pope’s subjective intentions might have been (and these are known only to God), the world’s unprecedented praise for John Paul II clearly arises from the perception that his pontificate, unlike any other, served the world’s interests as opposed to the “narrow” sectarian interests of the Roman Catholic Church. As Colin Powell put it in his own tribute to the Pope: “His faith for the world transcended his Catholic background.” Whether or not one wishes to argue that the perception is unjustified, the world thinks of John Paul II as a Pope whose Catholicity was merely part of his “background”; it hails him as a “moral and spiritual leader” for the members of all religions or none, whose leadership did not involve any idea of submission to the Roman Pontiff.

How did this perception arise? Is the world not responding to the Church’s own “opening” to it at the [Second Vatican] Council? Is the world not rejoicing in the legacy of a Pope it sees as having, at long last, brought the Church down to earth, dispelling once and for all its aura of divine majesty as the one and only City of God, ruled by a king who is Christ’s Vicar?

While Ferrara rightly attributes this state of affairs to Vatican II and to various neo-Catholics such as George Weigel, I would add that the secular world is lauding the Pope for the very things that the Pope himself did in pursuance of an ever-wider Vatican II-style “opening.” Thus the adulation of the late Pope expressed by a host of non-Christians and secularists is not something that the world has been falsely imposing on him; rather the world has been responding to his own words and actions in making the Church part of the world. Ferrara, while he is very critical of the late Pope, didn’t want to go that far, so he just blames the problem on “the Council.”

There is much in Ferraro’s article that is worth reading.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 12, 2005 09:04 PM | Send