RONALD REAGAN’S DEATH LAST JUNE posed a dilemma for much of the press. How do you hash out the posthumous legacy of a man who, in life, you failed to understand? The befuddled fourth estate deployed the principle that says the simplest explanation is best. Reagan succeeded, they reckoned, because he was a jovial, lyrical optimist who cheered us up.
As with Reagan, press coverage of Pope John Paul II’s legacy has tended toward the simplistic. Western media types needed to analyze how a man rooted in an ancient faith harnessed the tools of modernity and spearheaded radical political change. Often lacking a firm grasp of doctrinal Catholicism, they broadly settled on this theme: The late pontiff embodied contradiction, so his papacy proved schizophrenic.
Thus, as the pope lay dying, CNN’s Paula Zahn asked former Maryland lieutenant governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, “Is there a paradox, do you think, in his papacy?” To which Townsend replied, “I do.” A day later, after John Paul had died, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, reporting from Rome, was “so struck by the seeming contradictions of this pope. . . . A pope who embraced AIDS victims and who went to Africa and talked to them . . . and yet who refused to sanction the use of condoms to stop the spread of AIDS.” Host Anderson Cooper concurred. There were “contradictions inherent in much of his rule.”
Writing in the New Republic, E.J.Dionne Jr. argued, “‘A sign of contradiction’ was a favorite John Paul phrase, and it might be said to define his papacy.” Why? Because “so much of what the Pope did in relation to the world outside the Church was progressive, [but] so much of what he did inside it was conservative.” And much of the Western press was right in step. Said London’s Financial Times: “His record is suffused with paradox. He was a beacon of freedom at the end of the Cold War yet his absolutism could brook no dissent.” In a piece titled “Pope John PaulII’s legacy of paradox,” the FT‘s Robert Graham and Tony Barber claimed his “exceptionally long pontificate” had reeked of inconsistency. “Paradoxically for someone so internationally adventurous and innovative, his spiritual and pastoral legacy was that of a conservative.”
In the London Independent, columnist Joan Smith described the John Paul “paradox” as follows: “This doughty opponent of communism was little short of Stalinist in his intolerance of dissent and relentless centralisation of power.” Writing in the same paper, journalist Paul Vallely noted (much less acidly) that “above all Pope John Paul II was a figure of paradox.” He was at once “radical” on some issues and “deeply reactionary” on others. “The secular world never understood this man of contradictions,” Vallely admitted. Perhaps proving Vallely’s point, London’s Guardian labeled John Paul “one of the most complex and paradoxical figures of his era.”
Back on this side of the Atlantic, the New York Times called him a “complicated figure” to Catholic eyes: a “champion of freedom,” yet one who “brooked no dissent” and “resisted all attempts to liberalize the church’s teachings on birth control, abortion, homosexuality, priestly marriage, divorce and the ordination of women.” A front-page story in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel chimed in accordingly: “Inspirational and paradoxical, John Paul vigorously defended human rights and freedoms in the secular world while centralizing authority and limiting theological debate in the global church.” Veteran reporter Carl Bernstein, a John Paul biographer, commented on MSNBC: “I was particularly struck again by the contradictions in Karol Wojtyla, which many people have remarked on over the years, but how, in the end, his papacy is so defined by some of those contradictions.”
Rick Hampson distilled this theme nicely in USA Today. John Paul, Hampson wrote, “was contradiction personified. In the world, he was a liberal, fighting for political freedom and religious tolerance. In the church, he was a conservative, fostering the traditional, hierarchical Catholicism he knew in Poland.” Hampson went on: “He espoused human rights around the globe, yet stifled dissent in the church. He reached out to people everywhere, yet those at the margins of Catholicism felt ignored. He alienated many liberals, gays, and feminists by refusing to reconsider church doctrines.” As if revising the teachings of the church were the job of the vicar of Christ.
Some writers cited the conservative aspect of the pope’s legacy to vent their own dim view of the church’s teachings. John Paul’s pontificate, tut-tutted the Washington Post‘s Richard Cohen, “serves to remind that faith . . . can be a form of blindness.” Cohen pointed especially to the pope’s anti-condom obstinacy. His Holiness “no doubt loved” the “poor and the ignorant”–“but not in a way that gave them truly effective control over procreation or protection from AIDS.” Christiane Amanpour said it more explicitly on CNN. “So many people have died because of his strict sanction against using condoms to stop the spread of AIDS.”
Unexamined by most was the context for the rejection of contraception–the church’s understanding of human sexuality, a gift of God and a subject on which John Paul reflected and wrote extensively. Indeed, it seems to have escaped the notice of many that the Catholic Church recognizes God, not the pope, as the author of the faith. If Jesus preached, say, against divorce or for forgiveness, it isn’t in the power of the mere bishop of Rome to teach otherwise.
Few journalists explored the possibility that what looked to them like inconsistency was actually fidelity to the essential doctrines of the Church. One who did was E.J. Dionne–not surprisingly, a Catholic. As he, at least, put it in the New Republic, “The Pope’s version of consistency does not necessarily match that of the world that is judging him.”
Duncan Currie is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.
