Open a page at random in any one of that stream of Encyclical Letters that poured out from the Vatican during John-Paul's papacy, and what do you see? Chances are you will light first on a discussion of Scripture - not quoted as a proof but teased out as a way of framing a question in scriptural terms, in a preacher's way. You may land in the middle of one of those pages-long expository passages with which he was fond of framing his major utterances, like the unforgettable treatment of the rich young ruler at the beginning of Veritatis Spendor, or of Cain and Abel in Evangelium Vitae. Nothing is quoted as much as Scripture, but after that you are most likely to hit a reference to one of the Church Fathers, probably Augustine - more likely than to meet St. Thomas Aquinas, though, of course, he is not absent either. There is, as one might expect, a great deal of reference, too, to the Second Vatican Council and its developments. And what of the argument itself? It is expansive, well-highlighted, homiletic and explanatory. It will fairly quickly bring the topic round, whatever it may be, to the central themes of the Christian creed. And perhaps the most striking feature will be the Christocentric emphasis with which these are presented. "The Redeemer of man is at the centre of the Universe and history." Those were the words with which John-Paul presented himself to the church and world at the opening of his pontificate, a theological programme he affirmed consistently until the end.i
Yet is there still an ambiguity here? Back in the era of Pius XII Karl Barth wrote of a problem that faced the "Roman doctrine of grace". This doctrine, he contended, affirmed one grace, the grace of God in Jesus Christ, but it did "not make any use" of that affirmation. It made it merely "to ward off questions" about the irresponsible autonomy with which the subject could lay claim to grace in Marian devotion, in the self-consciousness of the priesthood and in the authoritarianism of the institutional church. But now Roman doctrine must confront a choice: either to acknowledge frankly that it was "much more interested" in subjective grace than objective, in Mary than in the Son of Mary, in the sacraments, the church and the priesthood than in the community's Lord; or else to "take fright" at its own preference and instead to "notice" the dependence of the subjective on the objective, to "trust" that objective grace in Christ, and nothing else, afforded subjective grace as well. In which case, Barth concluded with a defiance addressed no less to Protestants than to Roman Catholics, "Roman theology would necessarily become evangelical."ii
Has that now come about? Is the very Barthian Christocentrism of John-Paul's teaching of Christianity a proof of the triumph of objective grace in the post-conciliar Roman church? That question cannot be answered in haste. Those who are often exposed to the Marian devotions of even the most ecumenically friendly circles in the Roman communion will have been gripped from time to time by a queasy sense of something almost pagan: a parcelling up of divine power into separate local potencies, a thousand Virgins known by a thousand local surnames doing a thousand things at a thousand shrines. Even such a sophisticated ecumenical theologian as Cardinal Walter Kasper could speak, in an address last year on the return of a historic icon from Rome to Moscow, of "the help...lavished" on her people by the Mother of God of Kazan, who now, "thanks to her journey" in the West, will take initiatives to restore the unity of Eastern and Western churches.iii This culture is one in which the Polish Pope was deeply immersed. Yet we can only find it all the more remarkable that it has left virtually no trace on the teaching to which he set his name. Mary (unlocalised) habitually appears in the Encyclicals as a postlude, sometimes in the context of a closing prayer, not in the substance of the argument. Perhaps the Roman understanding of grace now faces a new problem, one which it shares with charismatic elements of the Protestant tradition: a dissonance between doctrine and experience, between lex credendi and lex orandi.
But that dissonance itself has been the product of a determined will to say things in a new way. Encyclicals read very differently in the era of the Piuses. A tool of policy-definition, not of instruction and encouragement, they were briefer and rarer; their language was drawn more tightly, was less discursive and more declarative, and they demonstrated little need to authorise their positions other than by reference to a narrow stock of scholastic texts recent institutional developments. In this difference lies one, perhaps the chief, reason for thinking of John-Paul as a figure of major importance. By reconceiving the papal role as a teaching-preaching ministry, he gave a voice to the central institutions of the Roman Catholic church that was more than an institutional voice. It was a voice proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ in late twentieth-century ways that Christians from all quarters, as well as non-Christians, had to recognise as authentic Christian proclamation, and had to respond to somehow.
Without the Second Vatican Council John-Paul's style of papacy would not have been conceivable. A pastoral and teaching papacy was possible because the Roman Catholic church had rediscovered itself as a "pastoral" church - a word that includes much of what we might perhaps rather call "evangelistic". John-Paul's vocation was to seize the opportunity the Council had presented and find scope for his own gifts, as author, teacher and actor, within a post-conciliar papacy. Of his wholly innovative travels and of their great theatrical moments there has been plenty said. But the preaching and literary production, too, was quite new in recent times. Even Leo XIII, the greatest of the earlier Encyclicalists, did not compose his mould-breaking documents himself. But John-Paul, the first active theologian-pope, perhaps, since Gregory the Great, has left his authorial fingerprints on every page of his official utterances. It cannot have been an easy business to work for him on a drafting committee!
There is a curious contradiction in labelling this innovator with the papal ministry as a "conservative" pope. The contradiction is inherent in the notion of "conservatism" itself, perhaps, a name that essentially refers to the earliest and most weighty political option of wholly modern provenance and with wholly innovative goals. A theologian may be excused the feeling that the terms "conservative" and "liberal", nineteenth-century imports into theological discourse, have been allowed to do enough damage by this time and should resolutely be pensioned off. However, the ambiguities in the label, if carefully teased out, may help us understand the peculiar position of John-Paul's papacy in relation to a world in which "liberal" had come to define the status quo of a fast-evolving West.
Let us begin with his relation to that earlier Encyclical tradition, springing from the end of the nineteenth century, which used these authoritative papal reflections as a vehicle for commentary on social and political forces in the modern world. It would not serve John-Paul's reputation to exaggerate his breach with that tradition. He valued it and, with several social Encyclicals of his own, built on it. Paul VI's great plea for third-world development, Populorum Progressio, was marked with a twentieth anniversary Encyclical in 1988, and in 1991 Leo XIII's most influential Rerum Novarum received a centennial appreciation. Yet a significant change is discernible, both in mood and in scope. The social Encyclical developed out of the need of the Roman see to reposition itself in the wake of the confidence-shattering rebuffs of 1870. As the wounds of that period healed, it followed a parabola of rapprochement with modernity, an initial critical stance increasingly giving way to overt progressivism and the embrace of modern liberal ideals. There were those who thought that the work of the Vatican Council should primarily have been to extend this parabola further. And of course the Council was partly about this, as was John-Paul's ministry. He has been given little credit for his support of technological progress in medicine, and it is easily forgotten that his early Encyclical on labour made him for a brief period the darling of the Catholic left. But both the Council and John Paul had to face a different and larger task, one of rediscovering the church's identity in the midst of a post-Christendom West, putting it back in contact with the sources of its faith and recentering it on the person of Jesus Christ, and all this implied a major reconfiguration of the social agenda, too.
For the modern world was changing, and not only the church. Liberal society would not sit securely on its casters while the church settled back and adjusted its cushions. In John-Paul's hands the tradition of social commentary posed sharper questions about the direction of Western society than had been heard since Leo himself, questions which did not take the progressivist meta-narrative at face-value. The man who was credited in some quarters with bringing the iron curtain down hardly needs defending as a democrat. Yet the unsparing eyes of an Eastern European who was also a careful student of European philosophy, alert to the rising waves of modernity-criticism before they broke upon the English-speaking shores, could see the contradictions in Western theory and practice. He warned: "a democracy without values easily turns into an open or thinly-disguised totalitarianism."iv New challenges to liberalism arise with John-Paul: a "soft", personalist liberalism, one might say, throws down the gauntlett to a "hard", formalist liberalism. Abstract freedom of choice was an inhuman parody, he thought, of the liberalism that grew out of a high valuation of the human person and the conscience. The failure to deliver world-development, far worse in its outcome than Paul VI could have believed possible a short twenty years before, was only the most immediate evidence of failure to serve the flourishing of fully human life. John-Paul's "pro-life" programme of across-the-board opposition to abortion, globalisation, capital punishment and armed conflict aimed to put a complacent liberal-capitalist establishment on its back foot, forced to re-examine its own humanistic bona fides. There we find the awkward essence of John Paul's social thought. Instead of treating separate topics separately, he insists on lateral connexions, looking sideways at the broader social agenda, sketching the structural framework of how Western society characteristically makes its decisions. There are, of course, problems with his line of thought. In prising open the fault-lines of liberal self-congratulation, it creates strains, too, within the Christian tradition, not least with regard to the responsibilities of lawful civil government.
It is commonplace to represent this papacy as dragging its feet on the ecumenical front, which, taken as a whole, is unjust. Of course, the heady hopes of the mid-twentieth century have proved elusive, but that is not only so in Rome. Rome, in fact, has witnessed some steady progress. The 1999 joint statement with the Lutheran World Federation on Justification was an achievement fought long and hard for, finally achieved by the intervention of Cardinal Ratzinger. New dialogues were begun, notably with the Eastern Orthodox churches, with Pentecostalists, and with a representative consortium from the evangelical movement worldwide. John-Paul's own highest ecumenical priority lay on the East-West frontier, tensely contested since the East opened up to Western influences after the fall of communism, but he was also deeply committed to the search for Christian unity on the broadest front. Protestant church leaders with uncomfortable experience of negotiating the rules for eucharistic hospitality would be taken aback to be warmly invited to receive communion at Mass in the Papal chapel. In Ut Unum Sint (1995) John-Paul reaffirmed ecumenism - and not only the enterprise as such but the theology of the enterprise, quoting in full some of the most daring sentences of the Council's Decree on Ecumenism and insisting on the title "sister churches" for episcopally governed Christian communities. In June of last year he assured Patriarch Bartholomew, with characteristic emphasis, "that the commitment assumed by the Catholic Church with the Second Vatican Council is irrevocable. It cannot be renounced!"v
Can Anglicans say as much? A somewhat jaded perspective is in fashion. It is partly explained by a misfortune in the middle of the pontificate, when the well-wrought Final Statement of the first ARCIC fell victim to a long-drawn-out piece of intra-Vatican turf warfare. But just as that was happening, the deep clefts in the Anglican Communion were coming to light, and the drifting, irresolute character of international Anglican polity in the nineties proved at least as trying to well-wishers in the Vatican as it was to Lambeth, offering little incentive to Rome to focus its efforts in our direction. But in the millennial year Anglican-Roman Catholic relations were given a second wind by the common statement agreed by Archbishop Carey and Cardinal Cassidy at Mississauga, Ontario; the structures of consultation created there proved helpful recently in the throes of our intra-Anglican controversy. It is a matter of some importance that this second chance should not be thrown away now by a slipshod parochial approach to the question of women in the episcopate.
There is, however, a different sense in which the label "conservative" can sensibly be pinned on John-Paul's papacy, and that is with respect to its bureaucratic style. The papacy is, of course, a naturally conservative institution, standing at the head of a large international community that will never move fast. This Pope was long in the job and grew old in it. Yet even at his most vigorous he did not match the adminstrative flair of Paul VI, that gifted insider who steered the Council to an ambitious and coherent conclusion and reorganised the structures of administration to deliver what it wanted. John-Paul was not an insider, and had other things on his mind. His biographer puts the issue starkly: "As Pope, Karol Woytila could lead the Church and challenge the world by embodying a new, pastorally and evangelically assertive style of papal ministry. Or he could spend his pontificate wrestling with the Roman Curia. Given those options, the only one real choice was to lead, not by fighting an internal war of attrition, but by creating new facts."vi There were, it is true, spasms of micro-management, such as the curious episode in which the Pope temporarily assumed personal command of the Jesuit order; but much of the time he preferred to let officials get on with their business while he got on with his. The effect tended to be that while the travelling-writing pope broke down barriers outside Rome, within it the bureaucracy continued to build them up. Confronted with struggles that were part of the church's landscape in the immediate post-conciliar period, the Pope shrank from knocking heads together; he preferred to sit parties down in one room to sort things out, which they did not always do. And worse may be admitted: like many another personally gifted and creative man with high responsibilities, John-Paul tended to surround himself with safe pairs of hands, or what looked like them. The cautious stamp of his appointments in Rome projected itself onto the various national hierarchies, which recruited some dismayingly inadequate leaders. It is a popular journalistic cliché that John-Paul made a leadership in his own image, to which one can only reply, "Would that it were so!" Those on whom responsibility for the communion has fallen may share many of the late Pope's perspectives, but rarely display either his intelligence or his imaginative flair.
The Cardinals will now have to decide whether to try to perpetuate the teaching-preaching style, or to look for someone to oil the institutional wheels, implementing John-Paul's vision as Paul VI implemented John XXIII's. Anglicans exhausted by the long dying of the reign will probably be glad to see the latter. Yet they should ponder this: John-Paul's personal style corresponded more closely than that of previous Popes to what Anglicans say they would like to see in a universal primate. His major contributions into the contemporary debates met with a warmer welcome from Protestant commentators for whom the debates were in themselves urgent, than from Roman Catholics inclined to look between the lines for indications of the power-balance in the Vatican. And for Anglicans as for other Western Protestants it has made a huge difference to have an articulate and intelligent spokesman for mainstream Christianity on the world stage at a point where Western culture has been increasingly hostile and the structures of church authority have been crumbling. The question this presents us with is put in characteristic terms by John-Paul himself. Explaining his role in terms of the Acts of the Apostles, where Peter, he tells us, speaks for the whole church, but avoids treading on the toes of James who is the spokesman of the Jerusalem church, he asks: "Do not many of those involved in ecumenism today feel a need for such a ministry?"vii "Sure, sweetheart!" we reply. "But are there many more like you back home?"
Oliver O'Donovan
Christ Church, Oxford
Notes:
- Redemptor Hominis (1979) 1.
- Church Dogmatics IV/1 §58.1, ed. G.W. Bromiley & T.F. Torrance, Edinburgh, T & T Clark 1956 p. 87.
- Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity Information Service (cxvi, 2004) 124-5.
- Centesimus Annus (1991) 46.
- Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity Information Service (cxvi, 2004) 117.
- George Weigel, Witness to Hope, Harper-Collins 1999, p. 267.
- Ut Unum Sint (1995) 97.
The Rev. Canon Oliver O’Donovan is former Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford and Professor of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology at the University of Edinburgh.