Book Review

Paradoxes of a superpope

John Paul II: man of history

Fittingly for a biographer of a pope who made so many apologies for the Church’s record, Edward Stourton begins with one of his own. In a book he wrote in 1998, the BBC broadcaster, himself a Catholic, had suggested that John Paul II was fading from the attention of the world’s editors. He could not know then that “our man”, as he calls him several times, was about to make headlines again with his millennium agenda, then again as George Bush and Tony Blair led a second invasion of Iraq, and then once more, day after day, as his life drew towards its end. As Stourton says, with nice understatement: “Oh dear”.

He makes handsome amends with this book, published on the first anniversary of John Paul’s death. That fortuitous timing allows him to attempt a rounded and up-to-date assessment of one of the most remarkable papacies in history – and almost the longest. One might have thought that with so many papal biographies, there was no room for another, but Stourton’s fills a gap. Neither hagiography nor hatchet job, it seeks to present a highly accessible picture, redolent with BBC balance and journalistic flair, of a pope of paradoxes: try to typecast Pope John Paul, and you will get him wrong.

What was the reason for those extraordinary scenes in 2005 as John Paul’s body lay in state and then was conveyed to its last resting place? In Britain, a self-confessed Protestant nation which is now highly secularised, the Prime Minister put off announcing the date of the election as a mark of respect, and the Archbishop of Canterbury made it clear that if there was a choice between the marriage of the Prince of Wales or the funeral in Rome, he was going to Rome. Stourton thinks it was because this man’s life was not about managerial issues. It was about how to be truly human. Whatever they thought of the Catholic faith which made him what he was, people everywhere, willingly or unwillingly, responded to the challenge of that theme.

Stourton works his way through the whole panorama, from Karol Wojtyla’s upbringing in Poland to his acceptance of his priestly vocation, his rapid rise as bishop and cardinal, and accession to the papacy. He records the electrifying effect of the first Polish pope’s first return to his homeland (one watching academic said to another, “This is it, this is the end of socialism in Poland”), the powerful advocacy of human rights, the reining back of a runaway Church, the battles over liberation theology – the Pope had his own version – and the confrontation with the liberal democracies of the West.

On all these policy lines John Paul saw eye to eye with his right-hand man, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who would become his successor as Pope Benedict XVI. A gap showed, however, with the publication of Dominus Iesus by Ratzinger’s congregation in 2000 – a text, in Stourton’s words, “which insulted other Christian denominations more comprehensively than almost any Vatican statement of the past century” and dismissed the other world religions as “gravely deficient”. Although the Pope ratified it, things were “going wrong in the higher reaches of the Vatican by this stage of the pontificate”, Stourton observes.

Compared with John Paul II, comments Stourton, Benedict has moved at the speed of a “tortoise”. Noting the problems John Paul left behind him, particularly the failure to remedy the deficiencies in the church system revealed by the clerical sexual abuse crisis, Stourton regrets that “it is difficult to identify any of those issues where Pope Benedict has taken the discussion forward”. But John Paul’s achievement as a “superpope” came at a cost. There is a lot of healing to do, and Benedict XVI has allowed the Church to breathe more freely during this last year.

There is some particularly interesting material towards the end of the book about Cardinal Hume, including the struggles of faith that any believer – even John Paul II, according to one of Stourton’s informants – undergoes. Stourton relates that the late Archbishop of Westminster told one friend, a laywoman, that he was a closet supporter of women priests. I would have thought that pushes the evidence too far, but certainly Hume was one of the very few hierarchs to come out in favour of the ordination of married men, which he did at a meeting in Belgium. Stourton also records Hume’s overtures to the Russian Orthodox. He concentrates on one visit, but in fact there were three, two with Cardinal Danneels. Hume was “incandescent” when Rome spurned the initiative.

Stourton’s research and grasp of detail are impressive. But he is wrong to say that Paul VI was elected to succeed Pope John XXIII after three ballots, “one of the shortest conclaves in history”. It took six, and it was precisely the fact that the election was not a shoe-in that caused Paul VI thereafter to try to assuage the conservative opposition, leading to the twists and turns that so seriously marred his papacy. Throughout the book the judgements are acute, though the late Cardinal Suenens of Belgium, the begetter of Vatican II’s constitution on the Church in the modern world, must be dropping his harp over Stourton’s opinion that the Western bishops saw this document “as a way of staying in touch with the hip and hopeful politics of the swinging Sixties”.

Stourton’s approach in the book, though still sharp, is more urbane than when he presented four BBC programmes entitled Absolute Truth in 1998, dealing with Vatican II and its legacy. His stance there was radical. In Rome today, in the wake of John Paul II’s papacy, the assumption is that the great disputed questions of the last 40 years – sexual ethics, the relation between truth and freedom, the role of the Church as counterculture, the theory and practice of church governance – have all been settled in a conservative direction. This cannot surely be the Church’s last word. In the interim, Stourton feels able to stand back from the conflict to offer a measured verdict on the Pope whom many, including his successor, call John Paul the Great.

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