I was raised in blissful ignorance of the great prejudices of modern America, so much so that when I learned in 5th grade social studies that the Clansmen hated Jews and Catholics, I had no idea who any of these people were. This in spite of the fact that I went to school with children whose fathers were Jews, Catholics, and Clansmen. It was only in Graduate school that I got a sense of how different Roman Catholicism was from the Church I attended as a boy. I didn't know who any of the leaders of Methodist Church were, above the head of our own pastor. Nor had I any conception at all of the history of the history of that same Church. At Claremont Graduate School there was a small group (a conspiracy, as some of them liked to say) of Conservative Catholics. They knew exactly who the head of their church was, and had a good grasp of how that institution had risen and changed over the last two millennia. I could easily understand how my dear friend Doug Alexander had come to Catholicism because he had fallen in love with the Church.
I have to confess that, from the perspective of a political scientist nurtured on a watered down Wesleyism, its hard not to look at the Church of Rome the same way I look at the Roman Empire: as a great, foundational, but thoroughly human institution. What that confession would cost me if I were Catholic, I can only guess. But even judged from that perspective, what a figure it cuts! George W. Bush is often referred to as Bush 43, to distinguish him from his father who was the 41st President of the United States. John Paul II was the 265th bishop of Rome.
Karol Wojtyla has been recently described as the first modern Pope. This is to say he was the first Pope to effectively engage with modernity. He had the head for it, in two senses. He is the only Pope that most non-Catholics could recognize if they saw him dressed in flannel pajamas. His head was the sort that should have been sculpted by Michelangelo, if the latter hadn't died a year short of Pope 225. It was also the sort of head that recognized the political role that the Church as to play in our times.
We live in a thoroughly secular civilization. Courts and Congresses tell Priests and Pontiffs where the boundaries are, rather than the other way around. I'm all for this, but I do think that secular civilization needs an honorable opposition. It was John Paul II's insistence on the idea of truth against the relativism of the age that made him such a powerful and indispensable person. I recall a fellow grad student from Africa who spoke of the various communist dictatorships in this way: "they say they are democracies, but we know what they are." Distinguishing between lies and truth was the first essential step to resisting totalitarianism. This was what the new Pope brought to his native land, and thus helped begin the process of liberation in central Europe.
He was also a tireless and forceful adocate for the idea of a universal human dignity. Modern liberalism has put a great deal of weight on that idea. But it did not generate it. It inherited it. The idea of human dignity emerged in the history of Biblical Religion, and the late Pope was determined that it should not loose its connection to that source. Whatever one thinks about the truth and value of religion, there are worse legacies than that.
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