Spiritual Rock Star

Terry Eagleton

The Pope in Winter: The Dark Face of John Paul II’s Papacy by John Cornwell
Viking, 329 pp, £20.00, February 2005, ISBN 0 670 91572 6

There’s a sexist joke, popular among theologians, in which God, a woman, is in the act of creating the world: ‘And darkness was upon the face of the deep. And God said “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God said “Er – could I just see the darkness again?”’ If this is not Pope John Paul II’s kind of God, it’s as much because of the hesitancy as the gender. If he were ever in two minds on a subject, both of them would be infallible. Not for nothing was the priest who taught him theology in Rome known as ‘The Rigid’. As a Polish bishop newly arrived in the city to take part in Pope John XXIII’s Second Vatican Council, he was appalled by the sight of his fellow bishops quarrelling, lobbying and criticising. This was not the custom of the traditionalist Polish hierarchy, assured in their monopoly of absolute truth.

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Vol. 27 No. 3 · 3 February 2005 » Terry Eagleton » Spiritual Rock Star (print version)
Pages 19-20 | 3005 words

Letters

From Dominic Kirkham

When I travelled through Poland as a young priest just after John Paul II’s election to the papacy, I was struck not only by the heroic stand the Church was making against the Soviet system, but also by the underlying similarity, which Terry Eagleton notes, between these two great antagonists (LRB, 3 February). It was quickly apparent that John Paul’s papacy was going to be characterised by Soviet-style double-speak and double-think: ‘renewal’ was merely the repackaging of past certainties; discerning ‘the signs of the times’ meant accepting official teaching; ‘dialogue’, even among bishops, became the ratification of preformulated conclusions. It was distressing that after a great reforming council – at which the Church decided it had had enough of autocracy – a pope had been elected whose notion of engaging with the modern world was to enforce absolute conformity to the traditional party line. The unifying theme of papal policy was the centralisation of power. In Latin America, charismatic figures were either crushed – like Helder Camara (‘I helped the poor and they called me a saint, I asked why they were poor and they called me a Communist’) – or marginalised, like Oscar Romero. Even Pedro Arrupe, the distinguished Jesuit general, was publicly humiliated.

As this papacy nears its end, it has taken on the characteristics of Brezhnev’s last days, when no one knew who was in charge or even if Brezhnev was alive or dead. Those of us who have become refusniks look forward to the future with interest.

Dominic Kirkham
Manchester