John Paul II is not the reason I'm no longer a believing Catholic: my lapse from the faith was set in motion well before I turned eighteen, the year Karol Wojtyla acceded to the papacy. He is, however, the reason I can no longer go to Mass.

It may seem incoherent to bear a grudge over being unable to practice a religion you don't believe in, much less to direct it at the head of the religion—but give me a minute to explain. By the time I reached my mid-twenties, the intensely emotional rejection of Catholicism of my adolescence had calmed down into a settled inability to believe: the doctrine was incredible, pure and simple, and I knew my own mind enough by that point to know I was never going to be able to reconcile with it, probably not even as pure mythopoesis. And yet I had a deep sense of the degree to which my formation, intellectual and aesthetic, was bound up with my Catholic history, and a wish to honor it. I had some hope that it might be possible to carve out a position as a Romish equivalent of a secular Jew, even to participate on that basis in the life of the Church. Latin Mass was being regularly indulged for the first time since Vatican II, and I went fairly often. I sang in a New Haven schola cantorum that performed Latin plainsong and the liturgical music of the great polyphonists: Palestrina, Josquin, Byrd, Tallis. (Singing the Missa Pange Lingua is still one of the great aesthetic experiences of my life.) The beauty of those musical structures seemed, obscurely, an argument for the worth of the greater structure they were created to serve.

There was always a suspicion that my aesthetic Catholicism was going to prove untenable, given the ideological direction of the Church under JP II. I had known of the Pope's brutal treatment of Fr. Pohier and the attempted silencing of Hans Küng and others, which showed his heavy ideological hand early in his papacy, and my Jesuit friends had begun to complain of the way he was attempting to establish dominance over their traditionally independent (and, at least in terms of the American Church, intellectually liberal) order. At some point I became aware of the degree to which John Paul was committed to promoting the frightening reactionary cult of Opus Dei. I remember as a watershed driving home from a Holy Week service in Waterbury, where we'd sung Tallis' Lamentatio Jeremiae, with the director of the schola—he spent the drive attempting to persuade me, in all seriousness, that Vatican II had represented a Freemasonic plot against true doctrine, and that it was the God-given mission of the current Pope to undo the damage. That drive marked my exit from my career as a liturgical chorist.

The Church I grew up in, one sees now, was a brief historical anomaly. The reforms of Vatican II registered through the '60s and early '70s as a series of shocks, mostly unwelcome (certainly to traditional Catholics like my parents, whose Church was the only one I knew as a child)—but those shocks made a space for question and experiment the likes of which no one before that time would ever have imagined American papists capable of. [It's infuriating to see the period of intellectual and spiritual ferment during which I came to adult consciousness described, as Laurie Goodstein does in today's NYT, as a time of "lost moorings" that required JP II's "reassertion" of "order and discipline"—as if there were at this point no question that the rightist critique of the '60s should be treated as received truth.] That Church, the one in which I imagined room for my own sort of secularism, is dead, and John Paul II killed it. However the books on his papacy and its larger effect in the world might be closed out, I can't find it in me to forgive him that.

It's painful now to set foot inside a Catholic church—I half expect the walls to convulse and the building to spit me out, a pro-choice anti-misogynist non-homophobe. There's hardly room any more even for the most respectful dissent, much less for live debate: the idiocy and political narrowness of the typical Catholic sermon in particular is unbearable. Perhaps we can credit John Paul II with a genuine belief in what he called the "culture of life," in its widest scope. (Juan Cole has collected a generous sample of the late Pope's progressive statements to make that case.) But in the actual life of the Church—in the causes to which John Paul lent his institutional weight, in the ugly work of his ideological hatchetman, Joseph Ratzinger, in the sort of men he selected for episcopal leadership—the Pope's "culture of life" has become exactly what its meanest and most intolerant advocates wanted to make of it. It is the reduction of the Church's social mission to an insistance on sexual hypocrisy, to be maintained at all costs: as if the whole ancient wisdom of Catholicism had been condensed in Humanae Vitae, and everything else discardable. (The American hierarchy has all but lost its voice these last few years on any issues that don't involve opposition to abortion , contraception and homosexuality.)

John Paul II's papacy was exactly what Thomas Sheehan, writing in 1980, divined it would be: a "restoration papacy." While he was still young and vigorous himself, Wojtyla had committed the Church to a sclerotic, authoritarian anti-modernism, a project perfectly emblematized by his late beatification of the execrable Pius IX. [Read the Pope's beatification message, by the way, to see an extraordinary exercise in papal cynicism. There was much wondering comment at the time about how Pius and John XXIII were being beatified together: the message essentially hijacks the great conciliar work of John XXIII to justify the elevation of Pius, and Pius's ideology of Vatican absolutism.] Even the Pope's personal devotion to Mary, so little understood outside the Church (little understood even within it, for that matter), is part of that anti-modernist program. [Somewhat off-topic, but I can't resist shoehorning it in here: Non-Catholics, secular ones at least, often find something intriguing and even charming about the Catholic Marian cult: see, for instance, the passing mention in Billmon's post. Having seen it from the inside—my parents became devoted to it in their later years—I'm here to tell you it's nothing of the sort. Marian devotion, with its veneration of virginity, isn't just a crucial prop of the ideology of sexual hypocrisy: in the American Church, it represents a kind of doctrinal and imaginative impoverishment. A great deal of the emotional energy of eschatological, Mary-centric Catholicism derives from a kind of will to self-infantilization, most likely a defensive, anti-intellectual reaction to the complications of modernity.]

This is hardly a complete judgement of John Paul II's papacy: but no judgement of it will be complete without this sort of reckoning. (Which, of course, we have no hope of seeing while the mainstream media busies itself with hagiography.) He may have come in looking like Gorbachev, but he goes out looking like Brezhnev. With Jeanne d'Arc, thinking hesitantly along similar lines at Body and Soul, I suspect that the legacy of repression left by JP II will be lasting, and lastingly damaging. In fact, it's likely to have an immediate and unfortunate manifestation: John Paul's long and ideologically narrow papacy has almost certainly narrowed the intellectual (and moral) range of the College of Cardinals, the body from which his successor will be chosen. For a Church that has lost an entire, crucial generation of debate and dissent, glasnost is in sore need, and no doubt in desperately short supply.

posted by michael  3:55:44 PM  
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