RELIGION
POPE JOHN PAUL II, A REACTIONARY IN SHEPHERD'S CLOTHING

Karol Jozef Wojtya, known as John Paul II since assuming the office of pope in October 1978, will be remembered as one of the most significant, though certainly not the most progressive, figures in the history of the Roman Catholic Church.

By BARRY HEALY

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GreenLeft Magazine, April 6, 2005:

http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2005/621/621p19.htm

Karol Jozef Wojtya, known as John Paul II since assuming the office of
pope in October 1978, will be remembered as one of the most significant,
though certainly not the most progressive, figures in the history of the
Roman Catholic Church.

Pope John XXIII, who preceded Wojtya as head of the Church by two
papacies, is still revered by many Catholics for radically reorienting
the church by convening the Vatican II Council, which directly fed the
growth of what is known as "liberation theology''. From Vatican II the
democratic notion emerged that the whole church - laity and clergy -
were united as the "People of God".

John Paul II's pontificate was organised as a conscious
counter-revolution against Vatican II - a winding back of the clock
towards an archaic Catholicism politically aligned with violent terror
against liberationists around the world.

Wojtya was born in Wadowice, a small city 50 kilometres from Cracow,
Poland, on May 18, 1920. During the Nazi occupation he worked in a
quarry while secretly studying for the priesthood in a clandestine
seminary.

William Johnston, who teaches Modern Church History at Melbourne's Yarra
Theological Union, thinks Wojtya felt "exiled'' from the direction
Europe took in the second half of his lifetime.

"Remember he grew up under, really, three dictatorships - first
Pilsudski in Poland, then the Nazi occupation of Poland which was the
worst anywhere. He grew up not many miles from Auschwitz, and then of
course the Communists came in from 1945 on," Johnston told ABC Radio
National's Religion Report in 2004. "So this is not a man who ever
experienced democracy, and his hopes for a post-dictatorship Europe have
not been fulfilled.''

The closed world of Polish Catholicism under the heel of Cold War
Stalinism was staunchly patriarchal and anti-communist but warmly
supported by masses of Poles as the one institution through which they
could organise free of the bureaucratic Stalinist regime.

After leaving Poland for the wider world and the peak leadership
position within Catholicism, Wojtya never wavered in his Cold War
mindset. His guiding beliefs were that communism is the greatest danger
to Christianity, that only deferential obedience to the church hierarchy
is the proper behaviour for the Catholic masses and that collaboration
with the great power designs of brutal capitalist temporal forces was
the way to advance the banner of the faith.

This, combined with aspects of medieval theology, directly conflicted
with the waves of liberal thinking that swept the church following
Vatican II.

In Latin America, in particular, the freeing up of the Catholic
structures combined with the example of the Cuban Revolution propelled
masses of Catholic workers, peasants and lower-ranking priests into
revolutionary formations such as Nicaragua's Sandinista National
Liberation Front (FSLN). This broad trend was characterised as
"liberation theology'' and was typified by grassroots democracy, an
anti-capitalist reading of the New Testament and egalitarian religious
leadership.

In Europe and North America there were less radical but nonetheless
democratic rumblings. In 1997, for example, 2.5 million German and
Austrian Catholics petitioned the pope to admit women priests and
married priests and abandon the church's hostility to homosexuality; the
Vatican was unmoved.

John Paul II brought considerable energy and political acumen to his
reactionary crusade. He made 104 pastoral visits outside of Italy, wrote
five books, issued 14 encyclicals and was seen by literally millions of
people.

He was also a great cannoniser - canonising 482 saints, more than any
previous pope. His thinking was that by providing each nation with its
own saint the Catholic tradition of incense and obscurantism could be
revived.

Bizarrely, one of those saints was the last of the Hapsburg rulers of
the Austro-Hungarian empire, Emperor Karl, who ruled during World War I.

John Paul II also appointed 231 new cardinals, which has stacked the
college that will elect the new pope with archconservatives.

One of his great political alliances was with US President Ronald
Reagan. In 1980 the gang that organised the Reagan for the presidency
movement met in Santa Fe for a conference and issued a statement saying:
"US foreign policy should begin to confront liberation theology (and
not just react to it after the fact). Unfortunately Marxist-Leninist
forces have used the church as a political weapon against private
ownership and the capitalism system of production, infiltrating the
religious community with ideas that are more communist than Christian.''

Reagan, as president, quickly moved to form a united front with John
Paul II against liberation theology. The pope fought the theology while
the Reagan administration nd its Latin American allies murdered the
liberationists.

Among the fallen was El Salvador's Archbishop Oscar Romero, murdered in
1980 by a right-wing death squad while saying mass. The Arena party, the
death squads' legal face, sent a delegation to the Vatican weeks before
the assassination protesting Romero's public statements in defence of
the poor.

While the Salvadoran people regard Romero as a saint, John Paul II
attempted to ban any discussion of Romero's beatification for 50 years.
However, popular pressure from El Salvador later led the Vatican to put
off the issue for only 25 years.

John Paul II's preferred saintly role model was the Spanish fascist
Josemaria Escriva, founder of Opus Dei, one of the reactionary and weird
Catholic secret societies that the pope has used as weapons against
progressives.

After failing to discipline the Brazilian bishops, John Paul II simply
started appointing Opus Dei members as bishops died. In this manner he
undermined one of the strongest bases of liberation theology.

Australia's most prominent liberationist parish, St Vincent's in Sydney
inner-city suburb of Redfern, has been saddled with priests from another
Catholic cult called the Neocatechumenate (visit for some illuminating
stories of John Paul II's priests studiously avoiding contact with
Redfern Aborigines).

Reagan and John Paul II found another area of common interest in Poland
when the Solidarity trade union movement burst into prominence in 1980.
Vast sums were funnelled through the church into the Polish movement.

The Vatican encouraged an activist priesthood in Poland that it moved
heaven and earth to destroy in other areas of the world. According to
Time magazine, a grateful Reagan agreed in 1984 to alter the US
foreign-aid program to comply with the Catholic Church's teachings on
birth control, specifically abortion and birth control.

The capitalist news media has created John Paul II personal popularity
in Poland with the "collapse of communism'' there in 1989. More than a
decade after John Paul II's blessed the restoration of capitalism in
Poland, a public opinion survey in 2002 by the Public Opinion Research
Centre (CBOS) found that 56% of Poles said their lives were "better''
under the 1970s Stalinist regime of Edward Gierek than they are today.

In 2000 John Paul II made a rhetorical flourish of calling for an end to
Third World debt through his call for a "jubilee'' &Mac247; the mechanism by
which debts were wiped out once every 50 years in ancient Jewish society
(it was the demand that Jesus raised and died for).

However, the Vatican never attempted to build a popular movement around
its call. While criticising the excesses of capitalism, John Paul II
feared communist revolution more. His real ideology was integralism -
the medieval idea that the state will rule the people and the church
will guide the state.

By assiduously aligning himself with the most reactionary elements of
late 21st century power politics, John Paul II left a profound crisis in
Catholicism in his wake. Latin America was once overwhelmingly Catholic
but the US rulers have used their Protestant fundamentalist sects as
weapons against liberationist Catholics there. Now 10% of Brazilians are
believed to be talking in tongues!

In the developed capitalist countries, Catholicism continues to bleed
membership as believers tire of the ridiculous strictures on their
sexuality and democratic rights within the church. As AIDS threatens
millions in the crucified impoverished world and wars and indebtedness
worsen, the Catholic Church's lame responses are simply making it
irrelevant.

From Green Left Weekly, April 6, 2005.