The Anti-Progressive Pope
Part from the Pope's quarter of a century-long obsession with the theme of the "Culture of Death", this papacy will no doubt be remembered for turning back the reformation process that was began by Pope John (XXXIII), more than 40 years ago.
Pope John (XXXIII) the initiator of the Second Vatican Council in 1962, sought to release the millennium old Church, inter alia, from the shackles of hierarchical order, bishops' authority, centralisation of power, canonical discipline and inquisition, theological and intellectual suppression.
When John Paul (II) ascended the papacy in 1978, the first thing he did was "to oppose the definition of the Church as 'a people of God,'" says Penny Lernoux, an authority on the Catholic Church.
Steeped in conservatism and the century-old orthodoxy teaching of the church, John Paul (II) has been consistent in his policy of a traditional hierarchical definition of the Church, in which the laity works under the direction of priests and bishops to achieve "truth".
Many Vatican watchers quickly noticed that "from the beginning of the John Paul (II) pontificate, he diagnosed the Church as suffering "internal weaknesses", springing from a reform process which had been underway since the middle 1960s, notes Jack O'Sullivan, a Vatican watcher for many years.
According to O'Sullivan, John Paul (II)'s answer then as now, to the perceived problem, has been a stiff dose of strong and generally conservative leadership from the centre, in order to maintain discipline all round.
Inevitably, therefore, from the early days of the John Paul (II) papacy, one of the most formidable constraints on the church's ability to strengthen its presence in the daily lives of the many Catholics all over the world, has been his insistence and persistence in restoring the authority pattern and traditional moral doctrines of the pre-Vatican (II) (1962-1965) era.
Madame Lernoux observes that the Pope's type of Catholicism is "a throw back to a Christendom when the Church was both the mediating force in secular society and the only source of spiritual salvation".
The earliest signal in the John Paul (II) papacy, that his "counter-reformation" agenda was headed for a confrontation with the progressive forces within the Church was the tensions that dominated the Vatican and Latin America Church immediately after he assumed office.
In Latin America, where the great majority of the world's Catholics live, grassroots movements and institutions were sprouting everywhere, carrying the promise of a new model of the Church, free from the Vatican domination.
A new form of liberation theology was taking shape and was threatening to engulf the entire Third World.
Began in 1968 by leading Latin American theologians such as the Peruvian Gustavo Gutierrez, Brazilian Leonardo Boff, Oscar Romero and Archbishop Dom Helda Camara, Liberation Theology spread like the harmattan in the wilderness in South America and the Caribbean to the great worry of the Vatican authorities.
The Vatican had cause to worry. Liberation Theology is a controversial school in post-Vatican (II) Council. Apart from being widespread in Latin America, it also finds its sympathisers in the Jesuit Congregation - the intellectual powerhouse of the Catholic faith.
It explores the relationship between Catholic theology and political activism in areas of social justice and human rights.
Some of the proponents in Latin America are thought to have spiced Liberation Theology with Marxist concepts and teaching.
As such, from the early 1980's, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office, charged with maintaining orthodoxy and order, geared to fight the proponents of Liberation Theology.
Under the guardianship of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the German ultra-conservative archbishop, and the most powerful cardinal in the world, besides the Pope, the papacy began a systematic attack on Liberation Theology.
Cardinal Ratzinger pursued his work with determined vigour and, as early as 1983, he had already hand-picked his "worthy opponents" in his crackdown on the Liberation Theology, which he had critiqued as a "deviant" theology because of supposedly infusing Marxist teaching with Catholicism.
Gustavo Gutierrez, also considered the father of Liberation Theology and Leonardo Boff, the Franciscan friar considered to be its chief proponent were Ratzinger's early targets.
In 1984, Ratzinger sent the vocal Boff a letter accusing him of "theological deviations" and summoned him to Rome to defend his "challenge" to the institutional authority of the hierarchical Church.
The same year saw Cardinal Ratzinger publishing a 35 page critique of Liberation Theology, widely interpreted as "particularly simplistic and reductionist in its condemnation of liberation theology as merely Marxist and anti-authority ideology."
Boff, who was to resign from priesthood in 1992 after serving the Church for a quarter of a century, was to write that "from the end of the 70's onwards, came the return to the grand ecclesiastical discipline".
"Groups in the Vatican bureaucracy which had been defeated, but were still present in the power-structure succeeded in reorganising. They (re-enacted) the justification for the Rome-centred centralising activity.
"They projected a mythical aura around the figure of the Pope. They made him travel around the world, giving the faithful the impression that he was really the only bishop for the whole Church and each individual".
In his famous resignation letter, which he wrote to "my companion in faith and hope", and which was titled, I Changed to Stay the Same: Why I left the Priesthood, Boff described the John Paul (II) pontificate thus: "It is cruel and without mercy. It forgets nothing, forgives nothing and exacts everything."
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