"The World is About to be Changed..."

English Church historian Eamon Duffy relates some fascinating analysis and anecdotes about Pope John Paul II:

"You said the key to John Paul II's character is to understand the importance of suffering to him. There's an amazing quote in Tad Szulc's biography of him where he says, "I understand that I have to lead Christ's church into the third millennium by prayer, by various programs. But I saw that this is not going to be enough. She must be led by suffering. By sacrifice. The Pope has to be attacked. The Pope has to suffer. So that every family may see that there is a higher gospel, the gospel of suffering, by which the future is prepared". Talk a little about what you say is this key to understanding this man." Suffering is crucial for understanding John Paul, both at a personal level, and at a racial, ethnic, historical, and a theological level. His own personal life is one of enormous personal deprivation: the loss of his mother, when he was very young; the loss of his brother, who was perhaps the person he was closest to in the world. Then when he was a very young man, and before he'd really shaped his own life choices, the loss of his father, whose piety had been crucial in shaping his own religion. So he was a very austere man, from whom all human support has been stripped away. And that's made him the very strong, self-reliant, and very lonely person he is. But also, he sees that personal record of suffering, which of course was exaggerated by the sufferings he endured as part of the suffering of the Polish people in the war, his own jobs in the war were grim. But the Polish people for 200 years have been a victim-people, partitioned between Germany and Russia, religiously oppressed, enslaved, abandoned by the world at the beginning of the Second World War. And that experience of desolation, for him, is part and parcel of the religious desolation of the East, a church which is the Church of Silence, which was cut off from the West, which was actively enduring persecution before the Communist era, from German Protestantism or from Russian Orthodoxy, and then in the Communist period from atheistic Communism. And he feels that has given the churches of the East a special vision, a special access to the Gospel of the Crucified, whereas the West he sees as soft, the churches of the West as having half sold-out to the material values of the Enlightenment, of having adopted alien philosophies, of cultivating forms of spirituality that are weak and soft and self-indulgent. He sees the church of the West as rotted by self-indulgence, by prosperity; of having softened, of having made compromising concessions to the culture, which the churches of the East, because they've suffered, have not done. So he sees there's an enormous contribution of intransigence, of focus, a greater sense of essentials and priorities that comes from suffering. And so his own experience, and if you like, his racial experience, his ethnic and ... the sense of being an Easterner are very important to him. But there's also a tradition, which dates from the nineteenth century which sees the pope as the focus of all this. You can find it in writings about the sufferings of Pius IX, attacked by the Italian state, the pope as the prisoner of the Vatican, the pope as the butt of intellectual criticism in Europe--people seeing this crazy old Italian denouncing the modern world, as being a fool and a buffoon. And so for this Pope, opposition is almost a sign of authenticity. So, of course the Gospel will be opposed. People who are fixed on self-indulgence, on sex, on material possessions, of course they will hate the Gospel, and of course the spokesman for the Gospel will be treated as some sort of freak, as being anti-modern, anti-life, anti-choice. But for him, choice is not about letting yourself off hard things. It's about opting for the hard thing. That's true freedom. "In The Gospel of Life, perhaps his most powerful critique of modernity, what he singles out is this vivid imagery--the culture of death, the earth as a vast planet of tombs. Could you focus just a little on his critique which is different in many ways? It takes the tradition of being counter to the culture, but he has his own special sort of take on what's spiritually dangerous in modern culture. What does he take from the past and what is singularly and uniquely his, and his distress and anguish over our times?" For him, the center of all moral existence is human relationship and human decision. Now he doesn't mean by that that you can make things, up, that you can shape the moral universe you live in. What it means is that your integrity comes from a chosen response to moral reality. And he thinks that all forms of secular modernity, whether it's Liberal Capitalism, or whether it's Marxism, substitute for human relationship and human freedom secular material objectives...Whether it's the sovereignty of the State, the absolute, people hypostatized so that all humanity is actually leeched out of the concept of the people. He can understand the notion of `a people', but people in bulk for him don't have much meaning. Because what matters is the individual choosing. And so for him, human relationships, including the sexual relationship, are enormously important. He's often seen as a figure who's anti-life, anti-sex. He's actually enormously in favor of human romantic relationship, of the male-female sexual thing. He's probably the only pope in history who's actually written about the female orgasm as a good thing. But for him, that's all within the context of a moral universe where sexuality has an objective. And therefore you're not free to shape it in the way that you might want to. But having seen Communism collapse, he thinks that Liberal Capitalism is just as dehumanizing, that it substitutes all sorts of material itches for true human choice. And one sees those terrible pictures of his last visit to Poland, where he, with tears streaming down his face, raged at the crowds because they'd freed themselves from Communism and what had they done? They'd built sex-shops. They'd got McDonalds. They were buying into the capitalist dream. And for him this was a great betrayal of humanity. What he wanted was a civilization which was based on people relating to each other, a simpler vision of life, which didn't put things at the center but put people at the center... "I've always been struck when I read comments he makes--whether it's in homilies or encyclicals or as early as those Latin lectures as well--he says, `Materialism is as great a spiritual danger as Communism, totalitarianism.' Yet this is a man who experienced the twin evils of totalitarianism. He experienced Nazism and Communism, and gulags, and millions of people died.. So to be able to equate the two, coming from his experience, is quite extraordinary." Yes, and I think work is a key here. Communism identified the individual as a worker. Capitalism identifies the individual as a consumer. John Paul can make sense of man or woman as a worker because he believes not that work is an affliction that has been imposed on us as the price of sin, but an ennobling thing by which we shape the world. And so human beings' work is part of the moral activity that makes them human. So that dimension of Communism, for him, has resonances, he can sympathize, he knows what's going on, what's being said, and he thinks that there's a dignity and nobility about talking about `the workers'. He thinks there is no dignity or nobility in talking about `the consumers'... "When people talk about this Pope, it ranges from a Gary Wills, who finds this Pope a man of immense contradictions--which is one school of thought about him--to a George Weigel, who says he's not full of contradictions, he's all of a piece and if you read his work carefully, there is no division between the social liberal and the doctrinal conservative. Or you get someone like the historian Tony Judt who says he's a man of extremes. Where do you end up in that debate, if at all?" I'd just say he's a complex man. He's the product, I think, of a religious tradition that's quite mysterious to us. The week after his election, I was giving a talk at Ealing Abbey, in London, where there's a big Polish community. And after the talk was finished, an elderly Polish professor, who was an exile, came up to talk to me. And I rapidly became convinced that this man was mad. I said to him, "You must be very pleased to have had a Polish pope elected". And he said, "More than pleased, the world is about to be changed". And I said, "Yes?" And he said, "Oh, yes. It is prophesied that when there is a Polish pope, Russian tyranny will fall, Communism will fall, and there will be a great re-evangelisation of the Slav peoples, which will be led by Poland. And that is a prelude to the end of the world". And I backed away from this man, I hastily changed the subject. And, in 1989, I remembered all that... And I think the Pope's own preoccupation with the Jubilee is part of the same apocalyptic mentality. It's a Catholicism which broods on history. Partly because the Polish people have suffered such historical reverses, and they've had to concentrate, focus on the meaning of their own religion, over against Orthodoxy, over against Protestantism, because they've been caught between pincer movements. So religion is more than just religion. It's a key to who they are, where the world is going, the nature of politics. I think it's quite hard for us to imagine what it must be like to be a thoroughly modern man, with an immense command of languages, quite widely traveled, who reads a great deal, who's thought a great deal, and yet to emerge from a type of Catholicism that seems light years away from modernity. And I think that a lot of what is mysterious to us in his personality is explicable in terms of his attempts to heal that gulf between the pre-modern world, mental world, which nourished him, and the modern world, of which he really is quite a master.