UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian
Paul Vallely
The Guardian, Sunday 29 September 2013
The date for the arrival of two more saints within the Catholic church will be announced on 30 September. So what’s two more, given the recent deluge from the Vatican? After all, Pope John Paul II, all by himself, created more saints than all the previous popes put together. But this time John Paul II is to be one of them, along with a predecessor pope, John XXIII. This is a bad idea.
For the first half of Christianity’s 2,000-year history, saints were created by the acclamation of ordinary believers. It often took centuries for the church authorities to then give official endorsement to this demotic sanctification. But John Paul II’s elevation to sainthood must be the fastest in history. His successor, Benedict XVI, even dispensed with the requirement that the dead pope had to wait a minimum of five years before the sainting process could begin.
There was a point to institutionalising delay in the procedure. A saint is an individual whose “heroic virtue” is an exemplar for others. The passing of the years allowed any personal failings the future saint may have had to be eclipsed by that virtue in popular memory. …
The Polish pope’s supporters are clear about the case for his greatness. The globetrotting rock-stadium-star pontiff was the most popular pope in modern times; some 17 million people travelled to Rome to see him in his time as history’s second longest-serving pope. He played a key role in the fall of Soviet-bloc communism. He was the first pope to visit a synagogue and a mosque. He went to Auschwitz and Jerusalem’s Western Wall and repeatedly begged forgiveness for centuries of Christian slander of the Jews. He apologised, finally, for the Crusades and the persecution of Galileo. And he gave dignity to the dying by his own protracted public illness.
But if the first half of his papacy was good for the world, the second was bad for the church. He suppressed debate, silenced theologians and outlawed discussion on women priests. He applied his condemnations of the “dictatorship of relativism” to pluralistic societies without qualification. The Vatican II doctrine of collegiality was changed to mean that bishops were being collegial if they agreed with him – and he appointed bishops who did that. Most grievously, for decades he ignored the mounting evidence of priestly sex abuse which devastated thousands of lives. And he refused to take action against the serial abuser Father Marcial Maciel, the founder of the conservative Legionaries of Christ later suspended by Pope Benedict.
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