COMMENTARY: John Paul and America Had Ambivalent Relationship

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Along with many post-Cold War European leaders, Pope John Paul II viewed America _ and American Catholicism _ with gratitude for its support and suspicion of its swagger. To the former cardinal-archbishop of Krakow who played a major role in the defeat of Cold War communism, America was a […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Along with many post-Cold War European leaders, Pope John Paul II viewed America _ and American Catholicism _ with gratitude for its support and suspicion of its swagger.

To the former cardinal-archbishop of Krakow who played a major role in the defeat of Cold War communism, America was a fast-growing adolescent that had left home too soon and didn’t fully understand its own strength or how to exercise it properly in the world. He perceived that same upstart self-confidence in the American church.


Many wonder if John Paul II’s perceptions ever advanced beyond those of the Vatican bureaucrats who planned his first trip to the United States with a narrow East Coast itinerary based on musty maps and memories of a 13-colony rebel country. After American bishops protested, a quick, cantilevered trajectory into the Midwest was added to acknowledge the breadth of the country beyond the Hudson River.

Yet even after several more extended visits, John Paul II remained ambivalent about America’s tradition of dissent and what he regarded as its ill-managed military might and bad-mannered moral weakness. While professing to admire its democratic institutions, John Paul II indicted America as a “culture of death” that mindlessly pursued pleasure, money and power.

The pope’s ambivalence bred an ambivalent American response to him as he confronted what he viewed as the secular drift of the world. The secularization of his beloved Europe, where his efforts to prompt acknowledgment of the continent’s Christian roots fell flat in 2004, struck Americans as the dry wood described by Jesus as fit only for the fire when compared with the still-green wood of vigorous religious practice in the United States.

Many Americans, to be sure, admired John Paul’s energy and bravery, especially after a 1981 assassination attempt and his gallant struggle under a heavy mantle of illnesses. At the same time, however, Americans bristled at what they experienced as his demeaning attitude toward them, never fully convinced that he understood the United States or their own deep devotion to their faith.

The success with which John Paul managed to fashion the bishops of the United States into his own conservative image was overshadowed when the hierarchical style he demanded of his appointees emerged as top-down ineptitude in their handling of the clergy sex abuse crisis.

Ironically, the saga of Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law, who was forced out of his post because he shuffled known sex offenders from parish to parish, symbolizes John Paul’s complex feelings about the church and about America.

Law became the most powerful figure in the U.S. church by being the pope’s point man in clamping down on a rebirth of collegiality, the idea that bishops have authority in their own right and are not solely pawns of the pope. In its place, Law revived a hierarchy by which the pope dominates the bishops and the church from his Roman summit.


John Paul remained loyal to the loyal Law, blaming his troubles on the American news media and blaming American sensuality for a sex abuse scandal that was actually a worldwide reality. The pope welcomed Law with a plum ceremonial posting in Rome where he continues to influence everything in the American church. Meanwhile, John Paul continued to frown on American Catholicism as a superchurch with all the bad habits of the superpower of its homeland.

While the long-term ramifications of John Paul’s ambivalence toward Americans are yet to be worked out, he nonetheless captured their imagination and admiration for his defense of life, even as his own ebbed away before their eyes. He may have spoken haltingly in his later years, but they recognized that as a consistent moralist he never spoke with a forked tongue.

For these reasons, as well as for his support of justice and peace and for his obvious goodness, many advocate that he be referred to in history as Pope John Paul the Great. But perhaps just as many wonder if his quarter of a century of absolute rule, his repeal of central Vatican II reforms, and the revelation of a long-simmering sex abuse crisis among the clergy during his reign suggest that many years must pass before any final judgment can be made of his papacy.

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic

Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

KRE/RB END KENNEDY

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