Ratification

VETERAN CHURCH observer John Allen, writing for Newsweek last week, revealed the factoid that Pope John Paul II’s recent beatification, coming only six years after his death, would have marked “a new land-speed record for arrival at the final stage before sainthood, beating Mother Teresa’s previous mark by 15 days.”

Such number-crunching isn’t the usual lot for any discussion of the cryptic, often decades—and sometimes centuries—long process of Catholic sainthood, but Allen’s figure was meant to highlight what a number of observers have complained about as the late pope’s date with beatification came ever nearer: that “Santo Subito!” (Sainthood now!), the thunderous chant that shook the Vatican at the late pontiff’s funeral and which the current Pope, Benedict XVI, has now officially taken heed of, might become a case of a saint made in undue haste.

While John Paul II was an enormously popular figure on the world stage, having been the most widely traveled pope in history, with millions of the Catholic faithful invariably coming out to meet him on his tireless visits to different countries, his long, historic papacy had its persistent critics. Progressive Catholics who had hoped the one-time actor and poet would prove to be a modernizing pope were disappointed with the strict orthodoxy of John Paul’s views. On the flashpoint issues of the times, from contraception and priestly celibacy to homosexuality and the ordination of women, the Polish pontiff was a bastion of conservative Catholic belief, immovable right up to his last breath.

In the twilight of his reign, John Paul would become even more vulnerable in the eyes of some, as horrific charges of sexual abuse in the Church exploded, rippling out from the first documented and widely reported cases in the United States into the worldwide conflagration that it is today. The severity of the charges—priests abusing thousands of mostly young boys for years, and the Church actively covering up the crimes by paying off complainants and shuttling erring pastors to other parishes, thereby facilitating more abuse—easily made the scandal the worst the Catholic Church has had to endure in centuries. In practical terms, it has bankrupted scores of dioceses all over the world as local churches have been ordered by civil courts to compensate the victims.

The loss in moral stature has been even more pronounced, with the Church now indicted, in many people’s eyes, as an institution more concerned with appearances of propriety than true Christian compassion for the victims of its wayward personnel and policies. And as the Vatican has stumbled from outrageous stonewalling to clumsy denial, to belated, often grudging, acknowledgment of its complicity in the harm wrought on many young lives all over the world, the question of overall responsibility for this scandal has habitually led to the pope who presided over its period of great metastasizing: John Paul II.

That is the record as it stands. Is it fair to raise these questions as the late pope is now being fast-tracked to sainthood? Yes. But might it not also be fair to weigh the other half of the man, those singular, perhaps mitigating, qualities that had stirred the throng in the Vatican years ago, unbidden and with one voice, to demand that the dead pope in their midst be formally and right away acknowledged as an exemplar of Christian virtue, in keeping with the towering affection he commanded in their hearts?

For, while John Paul II did have his flaws and failures, his personal saintliness was also a truth, and an inspiration, universally acknowledged. Was there any doubt that he was that rarest of creatures in the modern age—a holy man? While some could, and did, argue with his doctrinal bullheadedness and managerial skills, his extraordinary inner life of prayer and virtue—and the way it re-energized not only his billion-strong Catholic congregation, but also the larger world whose history he helped remake with the fall of Communism—marked him out as a paragon of everyday, accessible sanctity. One that wasn’t cast in cold plaster, but breathed, moved—even danced and laughed—on our TV screens.

Long before he was proclaimed “Blessed” and became the Church’s latest and most high-profile candidate for sainthood, John Paul II had already been one in the hearts of countless believers worldwide. History would ultimately be the judge of his papacy’s blind spots. For now, rushed or not, his beatification merely ratified what has been, for all intents and purposes, a fait accompli.