may perpetual light shine

Why do I feel differently about the passing of John Paul II than I did about Ronald Reagan's? In many ways, they had parallel public lives -- they were conservatives whose world views were shaped by the Cold War, and they were beloved by many of the same people. When Reagan died I had to acknowledge the profound impact that he had on American (and world) history -- but still, the headline that seemed to sum it up best for me was the one in the Village Voice: "Death of a Salesman." Ronald Reagan, I insisted on telling people, was indeed an "optimist" and he successfully sold Americans that optimism, but his optimistic vision of America was, to a great extent, illusionary (delusionary?) and the disconnect between his rhetoric and the reality of life for the working poor, AIDS patients and other forgotten people amounted to a scandal.

One might offer the same critique of this Pope, and I'm sure that many people (Catholics and non-Catholics) will. I've listened to some denounce this Pope in the past as "evil" for the negative impact that his positions on social issues like birth control and abortion have had on women around the world, for the way they've contributed to overpopulation and to the spread of AIDS. I can't deny it. It's a common claim that he's "stacked the ranks" with conservative bishops. He's stagnated any progress on Church reform issues like ordaining married men or women. He was curiously absent from the official response to the sexual abuse crisis in the American Church, almost as if he did not grasp its foundation-shaking impact. And one of his last public statements was to rail against the pernicious ideology of the homosexual agenda.

But still, I think the man may have been a saint.

It seems odd even for me to say that, but then I guess we might need to stop and think a bit about what it means to be a "saint." Saints are not always right, nor do they always make the right choices (or, rather, they're not out to please people). But they are imbued with a holy fire, they are filled to the brim with faith -- and it's hard to argue that this Pope was anything short of that. The manner of his death was the summation of it all. He remained a servant of God to the end, expending every last breath for what he saw as his calling, for the propagation of the faith. He accepted his suffering and turned it into a type of spiritual purification. He was both a mystic and an intellectual; a playwright in his youth and a poet even into his last years. He contained multitudes and the binary categories of "liberal" and "conservative" are insufficient when applied to him.

He made the papacy global, traveling more than any other pope -- and right up to the end. He reached out to the third world and to other faiths, notably Judaism. He opposed war and the taking of human life in any form, whether by an abortionist or by a government in the name of punishing crime. He was a world figure of immense stature and yet he was not a political leader. His concerns were not temporal (ostensibly) but transcendant, eternal. At his best, he was a strong and consistent countervoice to so much in our society that advances a militarist-consumerist-individualist agenda.

It was that anti-individualism that was both the most important and often the most troubling aspect of his mission. Americans are defined more than anything else by our strong sense of individualism (even liberal ones -- look at the ACLU) and he stood for a different ethic. We tend to think favorably about those instances in which he encouraged the world to think communally, as in arguing for debt relief, but many of his more conservative stances were based on similar reasoning. To place individual rights first, including the right to decide when you're going to get pregnant or the right to have sex with anyone you want whenever you want, was never something he cared much for. You subjected your own desires to some greater authority -- whether that was justice or God or simply the authority of Church teaching.

Even as I type those words, I begin to frame my own critique of that philosophy, but at the same time I find it hard to criticize the Pope. Devoted secularists would say that my faith muddies my thinking, that I give the Pope the benefit of the doubt because I've been raised to (irrationally) revere his authority. There is a strong element of loyalty in my respect for John Paul II. I tend to agree with Dorothy Day's saying about staying faithful to the Church despite its failings: "Even if your mother's a whore, she's still your mother."

The papacy is an outdated institution. It has nothing to do with democracy. Yet, though I agree with liberal Catholics that JPII never advanced the Church far enough along progressive lines, I don't understand the point of nit-picking and second-guessing when it comes to the papacy. I'm uneasy with "telling a pope what he should do." A pope is not a president (which is perhaps why I hold him to different standards than Reagan). He's not really my "employee" in the same way that George W. Bush is meant to be. By saying that, am I at some fundamental level saying that I'm happy to remain nothing more than a sheep as far as Church teaching is concerned? Perhaps.

But the pope is not the Church. The Church, as the Second Vatican Council attested, is made up of everyone, the clergy and the people. Both saints and sinners have been popes. And some of the most beloved saints, including Francis of Assissi, have challenged Church authority. The Church has changed (dramatically) over the centuries and now it is undergoing another time of change. It will not just be the new pope alone who will determine the Church's new mission, but rather the clergy and the laity, together and in tension with one another. God's will is never very simple.