[Pope John Paul II] was a hard man to measure. Sternly authoritarian he nevertheless abandoned the use of the Royal plural in his encyclicals and allocutions: he was the first pope to write not as 'we' but in his own persona, as Karol Wojtyla. He was also a passionate believer in religious liberty, and at Vatican II played a key role in the transformation of Catholic teaching in that area. Often seen as dismissive of other faiths, he had an intense interest in Judaism, born out of a lifelong friendship with a Jewish boy from Krakow: he was the first Pope to visit the Roman Synagogue, and in 1993 he established formal diplomatic relations with the State of Israel. His openness to other religions extended to the non-Abrahamic traditions. In October 1986 at Assisi he initiated acts of worship involving not only Muslims, but Hindus, the Dali Lama and assorted Shamans. When praying by the Ganges at the scene of Gandhi's cremation he became so absorbed that his entourage lost patience and literally shook him back into his schedule. The uncompromising defender of profoundly unpopular teaching on matters such as birth-control, he was nevertheless the most populist pope in history, an unstoppable tarmac-kisser, hand-shaker, granny-blesser, baby-embracer. Convinced of his own immediate authority over and responsibility for every Catholic in the world, he went to the people, showing himself, asserting his authority, coaxing, scolding, joking, weeping, and trailing exhausted local hierarchies in his wake [...]
John Paul II's pontificate, the longest since Pius IX and the second longest in history, will also be judged one of the most momentous, in which a pope not only once more reasserted papal control of the Church, and thereby sought to call a halt to the decentralising initiated as a result of the Second Vatican Council, but in which the Pope, long since a marginal figure in the world of realpolitik, once more played a major role in world history, and the downfall of Soviet Communism. John Paul's own contradictions defied easy categorisations. Passionately committed to the freedom and integrity of the human person, he was the twentieth century's most effective ambassador for such freedoms, setting his own country on a path to liberation and thereby helping trigger the collapse of the Soviet empire. Two of his major encyclicals, Veritatis Splendor and Fides et Ratio, celebrate the ability of the free human mind to grasp fundamental truth and to discern the will of God which is also the fulfilment of human nature. Yet under his rule, the last quarter of the twentieth century saw a revived authoritarianism in the Catholic Church, in which, in the judgement of many, theological exploration was needlessly outlawed or prematurely constrained. Passionately committed to reconciliation with the Orthodox, his pontificate saw an expansion of Catholicism within the former Soviet Union which outraged Orthodox leaders and hardened the ancient suspicions he so painfully and sincerely laboured to dispel. This Polish pope did more than any single individual in the whole history of Christianity to reconcile Jews and Christians and to remove the ancient stain of anti-Semitism from the Christian imagination: his visits to the Roman synagogue and above all to the Holy Land in 2000, and his repeated expressions of penitence for Christian anti-Semitism, were imaginative gestures whose full implications and consequences have yet to appear. Yet he canonised Maximillian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan who voluntarily took the place of a married man in a Nazi concentration camp death cell, but who had edited an anti-Semitic paper between the Wars. Wojtyla also canonized Edith Stein, the Jewish convert to Catholicism who became a Carmelite nun and died because she was a Jew in Auschwitz in 1942. The Pope saw Stein as a reconciling figure. Jews saw her as an emblem of proselytisation and, as in the case of Kolbe, an attempt to annex the Shoah for Catholicism. Wojtyla was not deflected from his purpose, and despite protests both canonizations went ahead.
- Eamon Duffy, Saints & Sinners: A History of the Popes, Yale, 2006, pp.377 & 382-3.
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