Keeping the faith
I saw the Pope three times during my stay in Rome. Once, a distant figure, at his Wednesday audience, an emotion-less, ritualised occasion. Once, when he said the Angelus at noon on Sunday in St Peter’s Square – a far more moving moment, his hoarse voice struggling through a service he had vowed never to miss, accompanied by guitar-playing Italian pilgrims, an Austrian oom-pah band and thousands of tearful, prayerful well-wishers. And then, late one evening, at the climax of a procession – one of those huge Catholic processions that is majestic in its infinite tackiness. Representatives of dozens of church organisations carrying flags and insignia and wooden statues of the Virgin Mary, gathering in front of the vast dome of Santa Maria Maggiore to wait for the Pope while an opportunistic light aircraft trailed a banner saying “Vote communist” (it was the eve of the European elections). Then the Popemobile arrived and there were cheers, tears, wild celebrations, a thousand flashes and a man scarcely able to move, occasionally offering a flicker of a wave to the adoring flock that surrounded him.
Rome was the final leg of a seven-week, 30,000-mile journey which began at Pope John Paul II’s birthplace in Wadowice, southern Poland, and took in Malta, the Philippines, Honduras and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The odyssey was an attempt to take the pulse of Catholicism at the end of a long, controversial papacy. The mission, carried out in 2004 while the Pope’s own pulse was not yet stilled, had its uneasy moments – the embarrassments of a non-Catholic lost among the believers. At a street mass in Manila, Robert Reyes, a radical famed throughout the Philippines as “the running priest”, undiplomatically insisted on telling his congregation that I was preparing an article that would be published when the Pope died. Several women burst into tears.
Pope John Paul II was in many ways a divisive figure: his conservatism infuriated liberal Catholics; his opposition to the theology of liberation, the notion that the church could play an active part in fostering political and social revolution, alienated many in South America; he was accused of promoting conservative bishops, of being in hock to the traditionalist, plutocratic Opus Dei, of being dependent on a small group of ultras in the Vatican, notably Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the old Holy Roman Inquisition). And yet, by the end, most of that was forgotten: John Paul II now symbolised human fallibility rather than papal infallibility. An old man close to death but struggling on, doing what he perceived to be his duty.
“He demonstrated how to live as a young person and as an old person, as a well person and as a sick person,” said Sister Enrica Rosanna, under-secretary in the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life. Sister Enrica is the most senior woman in the Catholic world – hand-picked by the Pope to break the baroque glass ceiling that had previously excluded women from the congregations, the government departments of the Roman curia. Like every nun, she is a fervent fan of the Pope. “He was a man of silence and of goodness – two values that contemporary society does not set much store by,” she said in the echoing splendour of the Casa Santa Marta, the new Vatican palace-cum-hotel that will house the cardinals who will shortly be charged with anointing the 265th Pope. They will toast the 264th, if for no other reason than before the commissioning of Santa Marta cardinals at the conclave were housed in anterooms of the Sistine chapel, some under the stairs behind hastily erected curtains, perilously long distances from the loos.
Vatican City, the self-governing enclave in the heart of Rome, had grown tired of the media anticipating the Pope’s death. He had, it seemed, been dying ever since the attempt on his life in 1981. “You’ll probably have to hand the project over to a colleague,” joked one Vatican-watcher when I told him what I was doing. TV stations had been booking rooftop vantage points overlooking St Peter’s Square since 1999, renewing each year, parting with hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Jesuits had been offered $250,000 by an American network to use the roof of their large, austere house on the edge of the square. They said no. “But we promise not to disturb you,” said a TV executive in a vain attempt at persuasion. “We’ll put an elevator on the outside of the building.” The Jesuits are letting an Irish Catholic station film there instead. No money changed hands.
There are two great clichés about Catholicism – great because they are also truisms. First, “The Catholic church thinks in centuries.” This is said by everyone, everywhere, with a certain smug pride. It is a putdown: of naive questions about whether the church is winning its battle with materialism, secularism, sex, abortion, moral relativism, and of society’s obsession with soundbites and rolling news. The church is still coming to terms with the revolution ushered in by the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s, which sought to modernise the church and make it more accessible. “It takes a hundred years for a council to be understood,” say the sages. This would not satisfy Sky News.
The other cliché is that Catholicism is the universal church: 1.1 billion baptised Catholics (though the numbers game is a complicated one); Vatican officials, called nuncios, in 174 countries; a huge network of radio and TV stations, schools and hospitals; the second largest charitable organisation in the world in Caritas; and above all a vast army of priests and nuns, monks and missionaries. “How many divisions has the Pope?” sneered Stalin. The Soviet Union survived for 72 years – a human lifetime. The Catholic church, founded under the Roman empire, has lasted for almost 2,000. The Pope, like his often derided church, outlived the Stalinist system which he spent much of his life resisting. No wonder the red-robed cardinals and balding priests crossing St Peter’s Square clutching laptops look so pleased with themselves.
Poland: The view from Pope Town
Though he spent the last quarter-century of his life in Rome, John Paul II’s heart lay in Poland. That was where he was moulded – in the fieriest of furnaces. Nazi occupation, the devastation of war, the Holocaust (Wadowice is only a few kilometres from Auschwitz ), then postwar reconstruction and life in a communist satellite state. Only the hardiest survived; only those with an iron will achieved greatness; only Karol Wojtyla took on the communist system – at first carefully, later overtly – and won. The greatest Pole – nem con.
In Poland, the moves towards canonisation, the accumulation of miraculous occurrences, were already beginning when I visited. While working in Ukraine, Father Maksymilian Zydowski, from the monastery of Kalwaria Zebrzydowska close to Pope John Paul II’s birthplace, had been saved from a fire by an icon blessed by the Holy Father. He tells the dramatic story with a nice sense of timing and a beatific smile on his large, boyish face. “One night there was a big fire,” he recalls. “At two in the morning I heard someone knocking at my window and heard screams of ‘fire’. I quickly put on some clothes and saw the chapel surrounded by flames. I was in a dilemma: should I rescue the icon or the holy sacraments? First, I took away the holy sacraments, then the icon. The chapel was made of wood and the fire was all around, so I ran around blessing the walls. They were only able to put it out at seven in the morning, so for five hours it was a terrible situation. But finally the flames were doused and the wooden chapel had survived! It was a miracle. The chapel had been saved by the miraculous power of the Pope’s blessing.”
Nor was this the only miracle. Father Maksymilian knew a woman in Ukraine with a battered television set which hadn’t worked for two years. When the Pope visited the country, she was desperate to witness it on television, but was too scared to ask her Russian Orthodox neighbours to let her watch their set – religious rivalries run deep in Ukraine. Suddenly, just as the Pope was arriving in the country, her broken-down TV whirred into life. It continued to work for his entire stay, then died again. “Really, the set was garbage,” says Father Maksymilian, concluding his case.
Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, which the 46-year-old Father Maksymilian joined 25 years ago, is no ordinary institution, as the flocks of visitors on that cold winter’s afternoon attested. It was to this monastery that, after the death of his mother in 1929, the nine-year-old Karol Wojtyla was taken by his father – a train journey of 15km from the apartment they rented in Wadowice. His father took little Karol into the monastery, pointed to a portrait of the Virgin Mary and said: “Your mother is dead. This is your mother now.” The Pope never forgot the moment, or the monastery, returning frequently to pray in the private chapel during his years as archbishop of Krakow in the 1960s and 70s, and then making two visits as Pope – first, soon after his election, in 1979, and then on his emotional final visit to Poland in 2002. The first visit is commemorated by a large painting in the monastery’s church; the second by something more private – a small room where the old, frail Pope spent the afternoon resting after a meeting with the monks.
Father Maksymilian takes me through the dark corridors of the monastery and unlocks the door that leads into the suite of rooms in which the Pope had his afternoon nap. It is now kept as a shrine: the sheets on the bed are crisp and spotlessly white; the papal robes worn that day and donated to the monastery on his departure are hanging in glass cabinets; the golden goblets in which he celebrated mass gleam beside the robes; his rosary and a signed blessing lay on the bedside table. I can’t help wondering whether the opened box of cherry liqueurs in the anteroom leading to the small chamber also date from the Holy Father’s visit.
It’s a fair bet that nearby Wadowice didn’t have a tourist office before the elevation of its celebrated son in 1978. Now it labels itself “Miasto Papieskiw” – Pope Town – and even in the middle of winter coach parties come. Wojtyla must have been destined for the church – the house in which he was born in 1920 is no more than 15 metres from the side of the imposing church that dominates the town’s central square. He was baptised there – one of the leaflets in the church shows him, as Pope, kneeling before the font where, as he said, “I became implanted in Christ” –and was an altar boy in the church. It is Sunday soon after Christmas and the church in Wadowice is packed for the midday mass, one of seven that day. In the villages on the 30km journey from Krakow, lines of people are walking home after their devotions, mostly in family groups. In Poland, mass remains not a minority pursuit but a way of life; the family too.
The apartment in which Pope John Paul II lived with his parents and brother has been turned into a museum. It is also a shrine and as you enter you have to put on large, fluffy slippers like snowshoes. As well as photographs of his family, and robes tracing his progression from humble priest to Pope, there are his skis and hiking socks, and a striking photograph of him acting in the 1940s in which he resembles the young Marlon Brando. Actor, playwright, hiker, skier, canoeist – there was vivid life before the papacy, before the man was lost behind the symbol.
What are the characteristics of Polish Catholicism? Intensity, certainly. Here, the genuflections are deeper, the nuns’ headgear starchier, the faith more unyielding than anywhere else I visited. For a thousand years it has survived in the face of opposition from Orthodox Russia. More than that, while Poland – subservient to the behemoths of the Austrian empire, Germany and the Soviet Union – was denied an independent political existence, it found in Catholicism a means of national expression that made the religion the touchstone of Polish identity. It had, and still has, a power that is almost inconceivable in the de-Christianising (some would say de-Christianised) west.
I meet a group of young Catholics, part of a discussion group at the Dominican monastery in Krakow. Do they feel Catholicism will change now that the religion has lost its ideological power? Will Poland, free, untrammelled, part of the EU, as materialistic as the rest of us, become just another secular European country? Anna Zojekowska, a 23-year-old history student, accepts that the church will change. “There was a clear choice under communism,” she says. “If you believed, you weren’t communist; if you didn’t believe, you were communist. Today, it is more complicated. A lot of people were in the church just for political reasons; now they are leaving it.” “Sometimes, when I am in a Polish church, I feel ‘my goodness, tradition’,” says Stanislaw Milkowski, a thoughtful 23-year-old student of engineering. “Sometimes I feel the tradition is stronger than faith. It is important to ask yourself: ‘Why am I Catholic?’ What is most important is the quality of the faith, not the number of people in the church.”
Tradition. Even teenagers recognise its power. “It is our historical tradition to be religious and we want to continue the tradition,” says Justina, a 15-year-old attending a rock concert at a church in Nova Huta, the eastern suburb of Krakow that was supposed to be a Stalinist bastion against Catholicism. Stalin decreed that no churches were to be built in this grey, uniform model city. It took a generation, but eventually churches were built. The first, the Ark of Our Lord, was consecrated by Archbishop Wojtyla in 1977. Polish Catholicism has been tempered by struggle. No wonder it is so unbending.
“Don’t take notes; just listen!” one nun instructed me. She would not give her age. She said she dated her life from the moment she entered the Convent of Divine Mercy near the Solvay chemical factory, where Wojtyla worked during the war. He used to walk past the convent on his way home and stop to pray at the shrine of Faustina, a young nun who had had visions of Jesus and His mercy. As Pope, he canonised Faustina and sought to bring her message of divine mercy to the world.
The nun’s intensity is overwhelming. Often, I would ask priests, nuns, monks why they had entered the church. She was unusually reluctant to reply. “Vocations are a very private subject. The person who has a vocation feels that he is loved very much by God and knows that only in Him will he find love. God gives signs and speaks to the heart, and only the person who hears that calling from God knows why.” In seeking to rationalise the church, it is sometimes necessary to allow space for the irrational.
Malta: The erosion of belief
“Malta has always prided itself on being more Catholic than the Pope,” says Mark-Anthony Falzon, an anthropologist at the University of Malta. There is an imposing church on almost every street corner in this crowded island – 350 churches for 350,000 people. The bells start tolling early on Sunday morning, mass attendance is reckoned to be 50% (though estimates vary), and young families happily sing along to the Lord’s Prayer in Maltese – a foot-tapping pop version that could easily double as Malta’s Eurovision Song Contest entry. The Catholic Herald is on sale at Valletta airport; my local WH Smith back in the UK had never heard of it. Malta is a rootedly religious country, yet turn the topsoil and everything is changing.
The starkest assessment of Catholicism’s identity crisis comes from Carmel Cassar, historian of the Inquisition in Malta and former curator of the Inquisitor’s Palace museum in Vittoriosa. “The Catholic church bases itself on agrarian values,” he says. “It originated in societies where everything was based on the production of food and practically all the people were peasants. Peasants need large families because the more hands you have working on the land, the better it is for you. But now you don’t need to be tied to a family any more, so the value of marriage is melting.” Cassar offers a caustic view of the difficulties a modern-day inquisitor, charged with rooting out heresy, would face. “If the inquisitor was working today, he would commit suicide,” he says. “The church is propagating values which do not cater for industrial society. Its values are passé. The church is concerned about this, but it doesn’t want to recognise that things have changed and that you have to adapt yourself to new circumstances.”
Like Poland, Malta has recently joined the EU and is now exhibiting the social behaviour of that organisation’s long-standing members. More marriages are breaking up, the family is in decline, crime is rising, corruption too. Divorce is not permitted, but informal separations are common. In the confessional, some priests turn a blind eye to the use of contraceptives: the dam has been breached; the damned are in the majority. Not everyone, though, believes the cause is lost. “The church has a prophetic mission to reinforce certain values,” insists Father Joseph Bonnici, who oversees the work of diocesan priests in Malta. “We need to be near the people and to feel their pain, but we should not say that divorce is right. For the life of the people, it is better to say that divorce is not right. I meet many families and I realise that they have abandoned traditional values and are in a mess. They tell you that they are not living their life well and that they need something more. That is our role: to help them to realise this.”
At the time of the Pope’s visit in 2001, Bonnici talked of a “crisis of faith” in Malta. Father Joe Inguanez, executive director of the Institute for Research on the Signs of the Times, uses the same phrase. Inguanez, a sociologist at the University of Malta and the church’s chief trendspotter, is a more radical figure than the owlish Bonnici, but he has drawn the same conclusion. “Rapid social change in Malta has produced a crisis of faith,” says Inguanez. “Several European countries have passed through this experience and now they are in what they themselves call the post-Christian era. I wouldn’t say we have reached that point yet, but we are moving in that direction. I think the church hierarchy is aware of it – they would be stupid not to see it and I know they are not stupid – but they don’t talk about it. They wouldn’t like to say that we are a secular society, but we are a secular society.” Inguanez is not unduly concerned about social issues such as contraception and divorce. The crisis is more fundamental. “It is not just a question of sexuality,” he says. “The question is whether religion is an important dimension in people’s lives. Whether they are using contraception is a secondary question. If you don’t have faith, it is irrelevant.”
Malta has a rebel priest. Everyone I meet mentions him. On Malta, rebel priests are even rarer than self-confessed atheists. Mark Montebello is a Dominican monk at the Annunciation Priory in Vittoriosa. Last year, while protesting against property development in the Kalkara valley – further scarring of this horribly scarred island – he was arrested. “The bishop was bewildered,” he says. “He didn’t know how to deal with it. This had never happened in Malta – that a priest should be arrested. The powers-that-be had to negotiate with the police.” Being a priest, he was released without charge, but one day he expects an “Irish promotion” – a long-term assignment in central Africa or eastern Europe. Out of sight, out of mind.
Montebello is young, handsome, outspoken. I attend his mass: he doesn’t speak from the pulpit but from the floor, among his flock, theatrically, question-and-answer style. He wants to make the church anew; he seems to want to do it single-handedly. He has no time for the Pope. “He was elected as a liberal pope and that lasted until about 1981. But after the assassination attempt, more power was given to the curia. I lived in Rome and I know that he never fully recovered from that shooting. He had to delegate more power, and the people who were sidelined after the death of John Paul I came to the fore again. Today we are back to the times of Pius XII. It is as if the Second Vatican Council convened by Pope John XXIII never happened.” Montebello goes into rhetorical overdrive. “The council wanted to give more power to the dioceses, create a less hierarchical structure, foster the idea of a church not for the poor but of the poor – a church of the unempowered. Not a powerful church that gives assistance to the poor, but a church that is made up of the poor. That was at the heart of liberation theology – a movement that John Paul II neutralised by appointing conservative bishops.”
Malta is claustrophobic: too built up; each settlement running into the next; all those people with the same surnames – Cassars, Gonzis, Falzons, Vellas. It is a provincial town masquerading as a country. I escape to the smallest inhabited island of the five that make up the archipelego, Comino – a 20-minute boat ride from the northern tip of Malta and lying in the channel between that island and Gozo. I am in pursuit of the priest on the island, Father Carmel Scerri. Scerri, who is 70, has tended to the parishioners of Comino for more than 40 years. When he began, in 1963, there were more than 150. He was resident on the island; he ran the school. Now, the school has gone; the children have gone; and all but seven of the parishioners have gone too. But Scerri remains. Or, rather, he now lives on Gozo and comes over by boat each weekend and on feast days, to say mass for the seven.
I express sorrow for his evaporating ministry – after all, this is an island whose principal feature is a large pig farm – but he brushes it aside. “If I didn’t enjoy it, I wouldn’t do it.” He assures me that in summer the island is transformed: the hotel opens, people camp, yachts moor in the harbour, the church is overflowing. He has to say extra masses and put up loudspeakers outside the splendidly named Return from Egypt of the Sacred Family chapel. I am almost persuaded I admire the valiant weekly ritual. When Scerri came to Comino in 1963, succeeding his brother as rector of the Return from Egypt, he brought a Land Rover with him. It is still there, rusty, ramshackle, wheezing up the hill to the ancient watchtower. Perhaps the Land Rover, rather than Scerri’s predicament, is a metaphor for the church in Malta – battered, but still functioning. Just.
Philippines: Fighting for justice
At the bishop’s palace in Krakow, when I tried to make an appointment with Karol Wojtyla’s successor as archbishop, I was forcefully ejected by his squat, crop-haired chaplain. In Malta, the archbishop said he was far too busy and foisted me off with his bronzed PR man instead. But in Manila, I breezed up at the archbishop’s residence and half an hour later was enjoying a cosy tete-a-tete with Gaudencio Rosales, the modest, goatee-bearded successor to the legendary Cardinal Sin, who stepped down in September 2003 because of ill health. Rosales, at 73, considered himself too old for the role, but it is one of the quirks of the Catholic church that it has no regard to age: “My getting the job is a joke that became a reality,” he says. “I was in Rome for one of our regular meetings at the Vatican when I was appointed. I tried to refuse but they insisted. They should have given it to a younger man.”
If Catholicism in the west has lost its raison d’etre, there are no such doubts in the Philippines. The fact that civil society barely functions leaves a void that the church attempts to fill. In the past 20 years, to the Vatican’s horror, the local bishops have twice intervened directly in politics – first to help overthrow President Marcos, then to oust President Estrada. On both occasions, Cardinal Sin was a leading oppositional voice, declaiming against corruption and human right abuses.
You can’t go far in the Philippines without finding a radical priest. Take Robert Reyes, known as “the running priest” following a series of marathons he ran across the country in the late 1990s (he covered a total of 3,300 kilometres) to publicise political causes. Reyes heads the leftwing group Gomburza and believes that, however much the Vatican might dislike the politicisation of the church, his mission is to fight for political and economic justice. “The church should be a vehicle for social change,” he says. “I want to see major structural change. The overthrow of Marcos and Estrada were not really social revolutions. It was just a change of personalities. I believe Catholicism and liberal and progressive ideas can come together, but the bishops are less sure. That’s my perennial struggle.” Reyes, like Montebello in Malta, is a charismatic fortysomething who makes headlines. There is a touch of ego in him. “The bishops don’t understand that social activism doesn’t only come from Marxism,” he says. “It can also come from the Gospel. I’m trying to show that I’m a priest.”
Father Shay Cullen, director of the Preda foundation in Olongapo City, 140km west of Manila, is even more messianic. His 35 years in the Philippines suggest that anything is possible. When Cullen, a Columban missionary from Dublin, arrived in Olongapo in 1969, it was Sex City, servicing a vast US naval base. He campaigned against the base, prostitution and sexual abuse of children, and the transformation he has helped to bring about is remarkable. The base closed in the early 1990s and Subic Bay is now an economically buoyant freeport area. “The essence of Christianity here is not the church as an institution but the dignity of the human person,” says Cullen. “It was hard to work through the church, so I set up Preda as an organisation wholly independent of church and state. When it comes to difficult apostolates like drug addicts, where there are syndicates and criminals directly involved, or the trafficking of women and children into the sex industry, the church doesn’t confront the system. But we feel that on every level we have to confront. We’re not just going to be a toothbrush brigade, bringing donations to prisoners and telling them, ‘Hang on, you’ve only got five years to go’. We want to go into their legal case and bring the children out of the prisons.”
Cullen, a fast-talking 63-year-old, started Preda in 1974 and says he received only patchy support from the church. His experiences have made him cynical about the trappings of church life. “What would Jesus do today?” he asks. “I don’t think he would take up residence in the Vatican. I think he would still be out on the dusty roads and down in the markets and on the radio and the TV, trying to get His message out. Jesus never wanted a church. He never talked about a big institution. Yes, he wanted a band of followers who would carry on his mission and live out the principles that he was teaching. But look where we are today. We have a huge institutional church which in many ways is alienated from the real problems of the world and is involved in trying to preserve traditional theologies and traditional standpoints which seem irrelevant to human problems.”
Cullen is one of the last of a generation of Irish missionaries – idealistic young men and women who had few opportunities at home, so went abroad to try to change the world. He doubts whether he would enter the church now; he would perhaps be working for the UN or running an NGO instead. All over the developed world, vocations are dwindling, religious orders are in decline, missionary zeal is abating. Soon there will be a reverse flow – of missionaries from the developing world attempting to re-evangelise the west. Cullen’s Ireland, secular, money-minded and now in many ways anti-Catholic following the furore over paedophile priests, will be one of the tougher nuts to crack.
Father John Carroll is another old-school missionary – a Jesuit from New Jersey who has been in the Philippines for almost 60 years. A pencil-thin, intellectually adroit 80-year-old who would easily pass for 60 (the priesthood seems to be the elixir of youth), he still gives mass on dust heaps in the north of Manila, taking religion to the masses of this sprawling, fume-filled city, the great unchurched. Two years ago, in the area in which he says mass, more than 200 people were killed when a mountain of garbage collapsed.
Carroll is another radical, hammering away at political corruption. “The church is a moral force,” he says, “and that is certainly needed in Filipino society with its endemic corruption. How effective that moral force is, though, is another question. The church is not really organised to engage in politics. It’s better organised for development work – credit unions, cooperatives, agricultural development – than for fighting political battles or even fighting corruption. There is tremendous resistance among the people to the church getting involved in politics. On the other hand, church leaders feel that political issues are often moral issues. We can’t simply stand back.”
After experiencing 60 years of turmoil in Filipino life and with the problems of poverty, corruption, internal instability and foreign influence (predominantly American) as great as ever, I tell Carroll that he seems remarkably optimistic. “My optimism isn’t based on sociological or political analysis,” he says in his wheezy New York accent. “It’s based on my faith. Faith tells us that at the heart of the universe there is a mystery of goodness which is greater than the mystery of evil. In the end, good will win out, but maybe through the cross, through Calvary. I hope that things will work out for the better, even in the short run, but I don’t guarantee it.”
The Philippines is 85% Catholic, so nominally the faithful number around 70 million (the gulf between being baptised and practising can of course be wide). Churches are few and there are only 7,000 priests, spread across 100 dioceses. Reyes’ parish has more than 100,000 parishioners; on Sunday, masses are said around the clock. In Quiapo church in Manila, home of the Black Nazarene, which is accorded miraculous powers, mass is said on the hour every day to a large, swaying congregation begging the statue of Christ for some personal miracle – the restoration of health, the staving off of bankruptcy, the provision of a job. There are women weeping, men kneeling, children clutching religious icons; tracksuited ushers try to keep order; outside in the densely packed streets are dozens of stands selling candles and rosaries.
Every taxi has a cross, a rosary and a tiny statue of the Virgin Mary on the dashboard, along with a nodding dog or cuddly pig. Many of the “Jeepneys” (the Filipino equivalent of public mini-buses) have signs on them – “In God we trust”, “God bless our trip”. There are several TV stations devoted to charismatic preachers. The Catholic church, Protestant groups and the indigenous movement Iglesia ni Cristo wage a bitter fight for the support (and money) of the faithful. A church is social and political as much as religious: it will offer soft loans to its members but, in return, may demand political support. A driver at my hotel, a member of Iglesia ni Cristo, told me that his church would always specify who he should vote for in elections. If they found out you had disobeyed the instruction, you would be humiliated, cut adrift.
In the Philippines, religion is close to the surface, part of the struggle of daily life. “Where else in the world could you find a church able to remove two corrupt presidents without bloodshed?” asks Romeo Intengan, leader of the Jesuits in the Philippines and a man who went into exile because his life was in danger under President Marcos. Catholicism is engaged here because the intensity of the challenges necessitates it. But will its desire to effect change succeed? “The problem is sustenance,” says Intengan, “having the stamina to see reforms through. Animating the people is the objective, but sometimes they are exhausted because of the sheer magnitude of the problems.”
Honduras: The limits of liberation theology
Honduras may be an ocean away from the Philippines, but the problems it faces and the way the church attempts to alleviate them are markedly similar. One reason to come to this small, impoverished, corruption-riddled country, living in the shadow of the US, was to meet Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga, the head of the church in Honduras and tipped by some as a future Pope (always fatal for any candidate). He is 62, telegenic, articulate, plays the saxophone and once wanted to be a pilot. He would be nothing if not a 21st-century Pope. In front of his palace, in the centre of the country’s dusty capital, Tegucigalpa, are a mass of wrought-iron railings, the pink paint peeling. It is a long way from the grandeur of the Vatican – a poor church for a dirt-poor country.
The principal complaint about the Pope in South America is that he killed off liberation theology – the notion of the church as transformative, revolutionary, at war with oppression. But Cardinal Rodriguez thinks the spirit of liberation lives on. “All of us in Latin America are for the option for the poor,” he says. “When liberation theology started in the early 1970s, I was only a seminarian. Those were very difficult times in central America because of the cold war confrontation. There was a lot of violence. All of us were for that option and I believe that we continue, but one extreme of liberation theology used the Marxist analysis and we never accepted that. There was a big temptation to try to change things through violence, and what did we get? Only dead people.”
Rodriguez has to steer a tricky course – to be politically engaged without infuriating the Vatican, to oppose corruption without alienating the government, to stand up for the environment without provoking the economically powerful logging companies. There are only 400 Catholic priests in Honduras, more than half of them foreign. Only now is the seminary system producing a steady flow of indigenous priests – there are currently 150 seminarians in Tegucigalpa. Unlike in the developed world, there is no vocations crisis here: the church offers a route to social status and a means of influencing society. It attracts ambitious young men in the way that the church used to in France, Spain and Ireland.
The church in Honduras has traditionally had a problem with priests ignoring their vows of celibacy – many fathered children – but Rodriguez insists that discipline is now being enforced and that no leeway is allowed for erring priests. (In the Philippines, which has had similar problems, the policy is more flexible – in effect, “two strikes and you’re out”.) Rodriguez also says that a married priesthood – many in the developed world favour an end to the celibacy rule to alleviate the vocations crisis – would be impossible in Honduras simply on the grounds of expense. The church finds it hard enough to feed its priests, let alone dependants.
A central motor of Catholicism in Honduras is the work of the laity. In a church with so few priests, their role is crucial, and in particular that of the “delegates of the word”, who number around 30,000. They are the foot soldiers of Catholicism, representing the religion in their local communities, evangelising, teaching the catechism, taking the word to remote rural areas. The movement began in the 1960s and is the country’s unique contribution to Catholicism – a possible post-Vatican Council blueprint for the church of the future, with a smaller clerisy and a far larger, more engaged laity.
The centre of Honduran Catholicism is the vast basilica at Suyapa, in a suburb of Tegucigalpa. Pope John Paul II gave mass for half a million Hondurans here on his sole visit to the country in 1983. It houses a tiny statue of the Virgin Mary which the faithful believe has miraculous powers. The statue occupies a small chapel beside the altar, and Hondurans begging intercession approach on their knees. It is moving to see a father approach in this way, insisting that his bemused-looking young son edge forward on his knees too. The boy asking himself why his father is behaving in this way; the father making an urgent prayer – for what? Where, you wonder, is the boy’s mother? Honduras is a young society, still finding its way, prey to the ministrations of outsiders. On every flight into Tegucigalpa come armies of US missionaries – to build orphanages, schools, hospitals; to save souls; to win converts. Again, Catholicism faces a battle with Protestant groups, and the focus of the battle is what they can offer in terms of food, education, medical care. The government is irrelevant in many areas; these church-builders provide the social cement.
The cosmopolitanism of the Catholic church in Honduras provided one of the strangest and most memorable moments on my journey. One evening, in the small, baked-brown town of Guiamaca, I sat down to a meal in a Chinese restaurant with Brother Albert, a shaven-headed Franciscan in his 20s, two Colombian nuns, a Honduran “delegate of the word” and a golf-loving, retired American teacher who worked alongside the nuns in the small clinic attached to the local church. The bored waitress spoke no Chinese; the Chinese owners spoke no Spanish; the food that arrived bore little relation to the order; Brother Albert ordered only rice and looked mortified when I was about to eat my chicken chop suey without saying grace. I lowered my fork while he said a few words in Spanish, adding a coda in English for my benefit: “For all those in the world who have nothing to eat tonight.” The chop suey was cold anyway.
Brother Albert could have been a figure from any century in the past two millennia. Boys on the dusty street outside the restaurant peered through the window making “we are hungry” signs and flocked around us as we left the restaurant. Probably they wanted money – this did not appear to be a town where people went hungry – but Brother Albert didn’t deal in money; he gave them the bread left over from the meal instead. Before Honduras, he had been in New York, where he used to demonstrate outside abortion clinics. “Sometimes there would be violence,” he said. “They could punch you, but if you punched them back you would be arrested. You just had to take it.” Brother Albert’s career will be worth studying closely; sainthood seems a certainty.
Protection of the environment is a major issue in Honduras, where the forests are disappearing rapidly, and the church has taken a lead in campaigning against excessive logging. I attended a meeting of the Olanchano Movement for the Environment in Campamento, central Honduras, and met Marcio Matute, a tiny, smiling Franciscan who seems an unlikely standard-bearer in the fight against the logging companies. Only the day before, says Matute, there had been a stand-off between local protesters and the logging companies’ armed vigilantes (guns are everywhere in Honduras, shootings common). “The community feared that our trees were about to be cut down,” explains Matute, “so we lay down on the road to block the loggers’ lorries. With our own lives we are willing to do anything. There is always a lot of tension – they pay people to oppose us, threaten us with guns. We are peaceful people, not violent. If they are going to cut the tree down, we hug the tree. We take the national flag out and just stand there, so the loggers can’t pass with their trucks.”
Matute says his organisation receives support from Cardinal Rodriguez, but cautious, qualified support. He has a nice phrase for the cardinal’s dilemma: “He has to be on good terms with God and the devil.” He can only follow the liberationist theology so far, and has to be careful not to be seen to condone law-breaking. His priests feel no such compunction: this is a life-or-death battle – for them and their communities.
DRC: Strength amid the shooting
My abiding memory of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is of small boys rolling wheels along the road, controlling them with a stick, joy and concentration on their faces. This country that has been torn apart by war – an estimated 4 million have been killed in the past 10 years – and where Aids, poverty and malnutrition affect great swathes of the population can still, it seems, be touched by simple pleasures.
I spent a few days in Goma, close to Rwanda and the epicentre of the refugee crisis at the end of the 1990s when the Rwandan genocide destabilised the entire region. Goma was wrecked by war, then wrecked all over again three years ago when a nearby volcano erupted, the lava consuming much of the centre of town, including many church buildings. The cathedral, only the shell of which remains, was destroyed, along with the seminary, the headquarters of Caritas and most of the priests’ houses. “At first I was very discouraged,” says Abbé Timothy Bushishi, parish priest at the cathedral. “I left the cathedral 30 minutes before it caught fire. All I could do was take the sacraments out before the fire took hold. But our bishop described it as a fire which destroys and purifies. It stops us thinking of material things as essential. It teaches us to humble ourselves before God, and to know that we are not the masters of the world.”
I talk to Bushishi in the new church he is building to house his parishioners (a new cathedral will eventually be built elsewhere in the city). He is supervising the work himself; the new church has been designed by an architect in the parish, working for nothing; it is being paid for by local collections. It exposes the myth that Africa cannot help itself. “When the cathedral burned down,” explains Abbé Oswald Musoni, director of Caritas in Goma, “the people themselves tried to give something, to at least build a church in which they could meet. It was their initiative. Previously we had to wait for everything from Europe, but now we are trying to make the people aware that they are Christians and they have to work for the church themselves.”
I stay with Father Oswald in a mission that houses a dozen priests and nuns, active and retired. It overlooks the local school and early in the morning, to the sound of beating drums, hundreds of neatly turned out schoolchildren come marching briskly across the solidified lava. The volcano spared the school by a few metres, but a black carpet now lies all around it. The headmaster of the school and head of the mission house is Monsignor Kanyamachumbi Patient, a sharp, funny man in his early 70s but a stickler for discipline and the sort of conservative African churchman who would send liberals in Europe and North America into apoplexy. Patient’s views are antediluvian: he denies that Aids is linked to sexual activity, opposes the use of condoms, and does not accept homosexuality as part of God’s plan. “If God has created a man and a woman,” he says, “and up to now the world has accepted that it is natural for them to marry and live with each other, then to me it seems a good thing. It is the one who changes who has to explain why it is better to change.”
The men who run the African church are very formal. Nowhere else did I have to submit questions in advance: here both Monsignor Patient and the Bishop of Goma, the imposing Faustin Ngabu, were adamant on that point. In the capital, Kinshasa, it was even more bureaucratic and slow-moving, negotiations for interviews and visits taking hours. It is, several people said, a young church; it is also a hierarchical, bureaucratic and conservative one – morally and theologically at one with the conservatism of the late Pope . The divisions that dog the Anglican communion, with conservative Nigeria at war with liberal North America, may one day affect Catholicism. “Be careful what you wish for,” one Vatican-watcher in Rome told me, as a warning to liberals who looked forward to the day when there would be a Pope from the developing world. “You may get it.”
I follow the bishop to the opening of a nutritional centre at Binja, a village in a parish run by Italian priests about three hours from Goma and close to the Rwandan border. It is a painful, bumpy ride over dirt roads in bandit country – the government exercises only the loosest control in the east of the country. The bishop, who has survived previous assassination attempts, drives himself and travels without bodyguards. The service to mark the opening of the centre lasts more than two hours under a murderous sun. There is a formal mass, a speech by the bishop, war dances by both Hutus and Tutsis (just friendly rivalry, I am assured), much singing, then a feast. It is all concluded in time for us to get back to Goma before nightfall, when the bandits and rebel soldiers become more confident.
After the meal, I talk to one of the Italians at Binja, Father Tommaso Barbona, a witty man who speaks lively, idiomatic English – and a hero, though he is reluctant to admit it. He has been a priest in the DRC for 20 years and refused to leave at the height of the war, despite being wounded in a gun attack. He and his colleagues, with support from a parish in Italy, have performed wonders in their two decades, overseeing the building of schools, hospitals and now the nutritional centre. He says he had always dreamed of working in Africa and, in 1984, responded to an appeal by Pope John Paul II for a new wave of missionaries to the continent. It has been a joyous fulfilment of his dream.
The following day I meet Barbona again when I go for breakfast at the bishop’s house. He is clutching a large white chicken – a gift from a parishioner. The chicken escapes from the boot of his battered old Toyota and hops across the driveway, the priest in hot pursuit, laughing. In fact, Barbona is always laughing. “There has been real war in this part of Congo, with shooting and rockets,” he says, “but they did not destroy our seminary. The volcano destroyed our seminary.” He laughs. “The volcano is more powerful than any war.” The chicken is cornered; Barbona stands above it to cast a shadow on the bird, then grabs it. “That,” he says, “is how to catch a chicken!”
The post-colonial missionary experience in Congo is inspiring. Leonila Lara, running a health centre in Goma, is 70 and shows no sign of retiring. “It is a welcoming country – I feel at home here,” she insists. Welcoming apart from the odd rocket, the rebels who invaded the convent, the burglars who took the cars belonging to the nuns. In Kinshasa, a few days later, I meet perhaps the coolest missionary of all. It is Sunday morning and a mini-coup has broken out. At three in the morning, I had heard the rattling of windows in the mission house in which I was staying, but thought it was a typhoon sweeping across the Congo river. It wasn’t; it was mortar fire. My driver has been attacked, his car stolen; there is shooting just a few streets away. I am panic-stricken.
Sister Marguerite De Clerck, a Belgian nun who had seen it all before in her 50 years in the country, calms me. “Sometimes nothing happens; sometimes everything happens.” She is hanging on in the mission house waiting for the shooting to die down before making her way to her office across the street. For 30 years, she has been running an anti-diabetes programme in Kinshasa. Once, there were 60 nuns from her order – Notre Dame de Namur – in the DRC. Now there is just her, an unforgettably vital and resilient 77-year-old. Her mother, she tells me, died only a few years ago. Congo will have Sister De Clerck’s services for a while yet. “I will go home when I can no longer make a contribution,” she says. “I don’t want to be a burden on these people.” When the streets are a little quieter, she gets up to leave. “Enjoy your stay,” she says.
Vatican City: Inside the curia
The administration in Vatican City is smaller than you imagine – just 4,000 personnel to oversee this vast, ramshackle empire. “Thank you for noticing that,” says Archbishop John Foley, who runs the Pontifical Council for Social Communications – he is, in effect, the Pope ‘s PR man. “Fortune magazine came to interview me and remarked on how big the curia was. ‘Big?’ I said. ‘The church is four times bigger than the US. Take a look at how big the federal government of the US is!’ “
John Paul II changed the face of the curia, accelerating the internationalisation begun under Paul VI, says Sean-Patrick Lovett, head of the English-language service of Vatican Radio. “You now see people from all over the world. You’ll have cardinals, bishops and monsignors from every country represented in the Vatican. At the end of the synod for Africa, you had dancing and singing and African drums. It’s no longer fair to see the Vatican as having a totally western image.” Lovett also insists that it is wrong to see John Paul II as an implacable conservative. “The Pope addressed the Italian parliament in 2003,” he recalls. “It was wonderful to watch. The chamber is divided into left and right. When he was talking about issues like immigration and human rights, he was getting huge applause from the left. When he was talking about family and moral issues, he was getting huge applause from the right. He was progressive in some things, conservative in others. When it comes to economics, he was incredibly progressive. He was the one who was promoting the whole question of debt forgiveness in Africa.”
Unity, says Lovett, is the overriding obsession of the Vatican, fearful of the schisms that undermined the papacy in the Middle Ages. “Individual countries’ churches see the tree; the Vatican has to look at the forest,” he says. “Many of the decisions it takes may be interpreted as conservative, but in reality they are attempts to hold the thing together.” “Is the church different in different places?” asks Archbishop Foley rhetorically. “Yes. There are cultural differences from place to place, plus some unfortunate ideological differences, but I like to follow the advice of St Augustine: ‘In necessary things, unity; in doubtful things, freedom; in all things, charity.’” The Vatican will only cut down part of the wood when it feels the overall health of the forest is threatened.
John Allen, Vatican-watcher for the US-based Catholic News Reporter and for CNN, says he spends about a third of his time dismissing five widely held myths about the Vatican: singlemindedness (that everybody in the Vatican thinks exactly alike on every issue), the quest for absolute control (that every decision in the Catholic church is being made by somebody in the Roman curia), obsessive secrecy, enormous wealth and rampant careerism. “The Catholic church is one of the most decentralised organisations in the world,” says Allen. “It is also one of the least internally coordinated organisations you’ll ever find. In theory, every question could be resolved on the Pope’s desk, but of course in reality it doesn’t work that way. A system is set up so that 99.9% of the decisions that have to be made never reach the Pope.”
The size of the curia and its relatively small annual budget (about $270m) demonstrate the looseness of its control. “I know to the outside world it looks like the heavy hand of authority and that everything is rigidly centralised,” says Allen. “But the danger that people in the Vatican constantly see is that the thing is going to spin apart. What strikes them is how little actual control they have most of the time. Bishops value their autonomy, and many of them would say ‘I’m the Vicar of Christ in my diocese, and my relation is to the Pope, not to the Vatican.”
Allen sees the election of the successor to John Paul II as a struggle between four groups: the “cultural conservatives”, headed by Cardinal Ratzinger, who want the church to turn in on itself, be more fundamentalist, if necessary shrink a little in the short term; the “cultural warriors”, who want to confront the secular world on issues such as biotechnology, sexuality and gender; the “liberal modernisers”, who want to engage with the world and downplay the Vatican’s hard line on sexual issues; and the “social justice cardinals”, mainly from Latin America, who concentrate on debt alleviation and anti-globalisation campaigns. None of these groups can win an overall majority, says Allen, which is why the result of the election is so unpredictable. The winner will emerge from a process of horse-trading and compromise; more unholy alliance than Holy Spirit.
“Electing a Pope,” says Allen, who has written a book on the conclave, “is a lot like buying a dream house. You start with an ideal list of things – I want track lighting, hardwood floors, a fireplace, three bathrooms – and then you look at what is on the market and what you can actually afford.” He also points out that very few of the cardinals would want to be Pope. “It’s not like being president or prime minister. You can’t retire and go off and write your memoirs and lead the good life. You carry this burden until you die. By contrast, being a retired cardinal is a pretty sweet gig. For most of them, when they’re contemplating their golden years, that is what they are interested in.”
According to one old Catholic joke, there are four things God doesn’t know. He doesn’t know how many orders of religious women there are in the church. He doesn’t know as much as the Dominicans think they know. He doesn’t know how much property the Franciscans really own. And He doesn’t know what the Jesuits are up to. The joke is instructive because it indicates just how vast and baggy the Catholic church is, how many orders and splinter groups have developed in the past 2,000 years. There are at least six orders of Franciscans, each carefully colour-coded by their roped robes. I spent much of my time trying, trainspotter-style, to collect new varieties of monk. No Pope could police an institution this vast and varied, which is why it offers a home to everyone, no matter how idiosyncratic.
Take Monsignor John Azzopardi, a slow-moving, roly-poly, beret-wearing priest with a high-pitched voice who runs a museum dedicated to St Paul in Rabat, Malta. (St Paul is reputed to have been shipwrecked on the island for three months in 60AD.) Azzopardi fascinated me. He could have been any age from 50 to 80. He had lived in Rabat all his life; born and ordained in the parish, he had devoted himself to St Paul and the grotto at Rabat associated with him. “I have been taking care here all my life,” he said simply, “and opened the museum 15 years ago.”
The Catholic church can accommodate obsessives, cranks even, who would fit in nowhere else. In return, they give it strength, variety, dynamism, unquestioning faith. They are not of the world, this world; they reside elsewhere, as their church wishes. When I took my leave of Azzopardi in the early evening, it was already dark and the streets of Rabat were eerily silent. He was buying a loaf of bread from a baker’s close to his small house, as, I presumed, he always did. I hoped he had some cheese to eat with it.
In what condition does Pope John Paul II leave Catholicism? Right at the outset of my journey, when I asked the information office of the Catholic church in the UK whether this papacy was viewed as a success, they said: “Of course. The church has doubled in size since he became Pope. We now have well over a billion Catholics.” But how many of them practise? Mass attendance is in decline all over the world. In France, where the church is almost being secularised out of existence, the proportion of Catholics who go to mass is estimated at 11%. The global numbers mean little and are being used to mask a growing crisis in many parts of the developed world.
Conversely, in much of the developing world, mass attendance would be a poor barometer of the health of the church. Priests and churches are few; travel difficult; much of the ministry is undertaken by radio and, increasingly, television. Numbers of practising Catholics are hard to establish, but my anecdotal experience was that popular Catholicism in the Philippines, Honduras and Congo have an energy unmatched in the west, in part because the social and political role played by religion is so central.
This leads to a curious paradox which bothered me throughout my wanderings: the church, which works for the alleviation of social problems, could almost be said to have a vested interest in failure. In the developing world, the church is central to daily life, largely because the government has abdicated many of its responsibilities. It has a clear role in failing societies – as moral arbiter, political conscience and supplier of humanitarian assistance. In countries where civil society is strong, the population on the whole well fed and educated, it is reduced to a theological talking shop, with fewer and fewer of the secularised, materialistic population of those countries listening. (The US is a partial exception – materialistic, certainly, but also fervently religious and a key source of Catholic funding.) The more the church succeeds in reforming the societies it serves, the more it undermines itself.
Foley, at the Vatican, accepts that the dynamism of Catholicism in the developing world – almost half of those alleged billion Catholics are in South America and there is rapid growth in Africa – is changing the face of the church. He also foresees a time when it will attempt to evangelise in China, the largest, most potentially fertile “market” of all. Perhaps that will be the story that dominates Catholicism in the 21st century. Where, though, does that leave western Europe? Foley refuses to accept that the fight against materialism and secularism in the developed world is over. “Whether we will win or not I don’t know, but we will survive,” he says. Some people [in the west] are so distracted that they don’t even seek meaning in life. The purpose of life is viewed as having as much money or fame or power as you can get. People go after that and then find that it’s empty.”
Foley does not shy away from the damage inflicted on the church by the sexual abuse scandal, especially in his native US. “The crisis continues,” he says. “One of the things that contributes to the crisis in the US is American jurisprudence regarding damages. It’s a very litigious society, and the ramifications will drag on for a long time. But, thank God, the actual manifestation of the problem seems to be much less now than it was 30 years ago.” One striking aspect of the paedophilia crisis is that it has affected what might be called the Anglo-Saxon world – the US, the UK, Ireland and Australia – far more than the church elsewhere. “It has had relatively little impact in Rome,” says John Allen. “Rome would see it as a localised phenomenon that the Vatican has responded to as best it could.” A view that would strike those who have suffered abuse as complacent, but a useful corrective to the notion that the church has been fatally undermined by the multiple scandals. It may never recover in Ireland and Boston, but these are ripples in a vast pond.
How much real power does the church have? The Pope was vehement in his opposition to the war in Iraq, but the war went ahead anyway. Perhaps Stalin was right after all. The church may be eternal, but is it also impotent? Foley says the church must be above party politics, free to indicate the ideal. But if it never gets its hands dirty, what’s the point? Politics is morality in action; the church can’t absolve itself from taking a stand. The politically engaged church of Cardinal Sin and the liberation theologians of South America is more attractive than the self-righteousness of Foley. But what if the church, as it was before the upheavals of the second Vatican Council, sides with the right? Then, suddenly, a politicised church looks less attractive.
The in-tray for the new Pope is bulging: biotechnology, abortion, gay marriage, celibacy, women’s ordination, the permissible degree of political engagement, the relationship with Islam. Vatican Radio’s Lovett warns not to expect early or rapid decisions: “The old adage is that the Vatican thinks in terms of centuries. It has to. Is it better to fragment into a thousand little pieces that are so small you can’t pick them up any more, or is it better to hold on for a minute, to breathe deeply, count to 10 and wait to see when is the right time to act? Is paralysis better or schism?” But the new Pope will at least have to indicate a way forward. Pope John Paul II’s long, slow decline was mirrored in the Vatican administration; his advisers grew old with him. The dynamism of the early years gave way to inertia. In truth, neither paralysis nor schism is desirable, and if they are the only two scenarios confronting Catholicism, its third millennium may be a nightmarish one. As in politics, “unity” is an insufficient rationale; it has to be unity for something; in the church, more than anywhere, there has to be a mission.
If the Catholic church as a whole is confused about its mission, many of the individuals I met were not. These footsoldiers make up for the dithering of the generals, and many made an indelible impression. Reinhart Kohler, for example, director of the Nuestros Pequenos Hermanos orphanage near Tegucigalpa, with his tales of children left at the roadside by parents who said they would be gone five minutes and never returned. Kohler, a teacher from Germany, went to do a year’s voluntary work in Latin America in 1982 and is still there. “This wasn’t the plan,” he says. “Well it wasn’t my plan, let’s put it that way.”
Köhler says, as do so many of these westerners who find a role in the developing world, that Honduras is now his home. “It’s odd to go back to western Europe,” he says. “Your sense of existence here, because you have to struggle with it, is so much clearer than in a country where you have everything. I go back to Germany and I find that even though people have everything, they don’t have what’s most precious in life – a basic sense of meaningfulness, of feeling connected to something that is larger than yourself.”
In the west we often see the church as bogus, counter-productive even; we may watch the ritual of the papal succession with detached interest but refuse to believe that there is any substance behind the grandeur. In many ways, we are right to be sceptical: this is a human organisation that claims divine influence but has the patchiest of records in defending human rights and freedoms. But there is substance – in the commitment of the millions of people who belong to the Catholic church, who see it as a supranational body that can transcend the petty jealousies of nations. The “people of God” is a phrase that resounds.
The passing of Pope John Paul II provides the church with a pause, a moment to reflect on what it wants to be – engaged or detached, liberal or conservative, preoccupied with this life or the next. But perhaps the rest of us, too, believers or not, could usefully take time to ponder our own connectedness, or lack of it.
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