After John Paul II
When the Pope dies – and it seems like it will be any minute now – there will be a lot of discussion of his legacy: his role in the fall of Communism, his opposition to inequalities in wealth distribution, his calls for justice against brutality, torture and the death penalty, and his ambivlent relationship with the “liberation theology” of the Church in Latin America. There will likewise certainly be those who decry his obstinacy on many lifestyle issues, and his tragic unwillingness to face the realities of the AIDS crisis, with calamitous consequences across the Third World.
But in the United States, I don’t think we are in a position to appreciate the huge transformation in the Catholic Church that has taken place in the era of John Paul II. Over the last quarter century, the Church has completely re-oriented itself, away from the communities of Western Europe and North America that it has served for the past 2000 years, and toward the developing world. The Catholic Church today is irrelevant across large swaths of Europe that used to fight wars over minor differences in religious doctrine. For all but a tiny minority of Europeans – even in previous strongholds like Spain and Italy – the Pope is a quaint, curious figure, somewhere between the Dalai Lama and the Prince of Monaco, with about that much spiritual and temporal influence.
It’s a different story in the Third World, where Catholicism, along with other brands of Christianity and Mormonism, have been growing at a ferocious pace. In Africa, the population of Christians has grown from 10 million in 1900 (about 9 percent of the continent’s population) to 360 million (45%) today. The numbers are similar across Latin America, South Asia and China. And we’re not talking about the urbane High Church style of a Desmond Tutu here, either. This is charismatic, snake-handling, talking-in-tongues, saint-and-miracle Christianity here, of the kind that would be more familiar to a Medieval Bavarian peasant than to even a devout believer in North America or Western Europe.
Now there’s one thing the Catholic Church knows, and that’s how to survive. Like any smart organization, they go where their customers are. And increasingly, that’s in parts of the world that are not concerned with the niceties of doctrine and the writings of Church doctors. They want salvation, they want miracles, they want exorcisms of the demons that are causing their poverty and misery, they want the unconditional love of Mary and the Saints.
The Church in Africa, Latin America and Asia is a militant, expansionist Church. It is not in search of ecumenical understanding, either with rival Protestant evangelicals or, certainly, with equally militant Muslims. Even as the West seeks solutions for lingering remnants of sectarian strife in Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Cyprus and Bosnia, new religious conflict is poised to explode (if it hasn’t already) in the simmering trouble spots of Sudan, Nigeria, the Philippines, Indonesia, the Black Sea and Western China.
Americans, and many American Catholics, may be perplexed at the pointed anti-modern slant of the Church under John Paul II. Surveys indicate, for example, high levels of disagreement with the Church’s position on contraception, divorce, women in the priesthood, and response to AIDS, even among regular churchgoers. Not to mention the child abuse scandals.
What is hard for Americans, who are used to being the center of attention, to grasp is that the Church isn’t interested in them. Oh, it’s interested in their money: North Americans remain among the biggest financial benefactors. But increasingly, the doctrine, theology and posture of the Church toward contemporary issues is crafted to appeal to a far less sophisticated and intellectually-demanding audience.
This is not by accident or institutional inertia. John Paul II understood well how the tide of spirituality was moving South, and rather than fight to reclaim ground that, no matter how historically significant it had once been, may now be lost forever to the Church, he turned the Church to face the new community of believers. In so doing, he took stands on issues of importance to devout parishioners in Europe and North America that alienated and confused some of them and perhaps even drove them from the faith. It was a calculated gamble: the doctrinal strength and inflexibility he demonstrated won him far more for the Church among the primitivists than it lost among the sophisticates.
The Pope’s own cosmopolitanism (he speaks over a dozen languages), energy and willingness to engage in First World political issues (principally and most significantly, anti-Communism) largely concealed the shift in the Church in the eyes of the West. But now that John Paul II is out of the picture, this fundamental change and its implications for the world will become increasingly evident. It will certainly come to the fore immediately if, as some predict, the next Pope is himself from the Third World.
Pope John Paul II, upon his death, will be celebrated for many virtues, and condemned for several flaws. What may not be clear for several years is that the last Pope of the 20th century may turn to be the last Pope of a Church that Europeans and North Americans recognize as their own.
2:13:14 PM 
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