Pope John Paul II’s most impressive quality was the one that
most media encomiums over the weekend didn’t even bother to
mention: his intense personal piety. He was at once the most public
Catholic and the most private one, reading a breviary on airplanes
and retreating to his sparsely furnished quarters to pray as Jesus
Christ taught: “When you pray, go into your room and shut the door
and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees
in secret will reward you.” In an anxiety-ridden, distracted age,
when the idea of praying for even four minutes a day sounds taxing,
Pope John Paul II prayed for four hours.
It was fitting that he lived past Easter: his speechless
struggling during Holy Week was more powerful than words in
testifying to a life of perseverance in silent prayer and confirmed
that though he was dying he would soon rise like the God whose
sufferings he shared to the end.
But a worldly press corps finds the Pope’s personal holiness
boring, if not a bit suspicious and troubling (the New York
Times’ obituary writers, arching their brows, reported that
“some” sources said that “in private he was somber, serious,
enigmatic, sometime quixotic, a man who hid his feelings and did
not say much.” Boy, what a weirdo.) So it largely reduces Pope John
Paul II to a worldly personality, a pretty nice, even fun,
humanitarian who said some things liberal journalists like to hear
from time to time (though it doesn’t occur to them that he reached
the positions they liked by reasoning they’d never accept, such as
concern for the salvation of a criminal’s soul). If the press cast
him as a holy man, it is not because of his frequent fasting but
because of his “statements against world hunger,” not because of
his piety, but because of his politics.
In the end, the journalists’ coverage, ostensibly about the
Pope, is more about their minds and souls than his. Like Ron Reagan
Jr.- who had no use for his Dad’s politics in life but claimed his
legacy in death — the Keith Olbermanns now jump on the papal
bandwagon (that they had tried in various ways over the last 26
years to upend) in the hopes of steering it toward a liberalism
Pope John Paul II would find abhorrent. Get ready for a month of
the most disingenuous coverage imaginable.
Apparently we’re supposed to believe that the Paula Zahns and
Aaron Browns stay up late at night fretting over the future welfare
of the Catholic Church. When they ask this or that unctuous guest
— usually some habitless nun, Jesuit ninny, or obvious heretic
like Richard McBrien — whether the Church will, say, junk its
teaching on condoms or bless birth control, we’re supposed to
believe that they have the Church’s best interests at heart. Every
problem they cite in the Church — from the sex scandals to the
decline in vocations — is due to the very worldly liberalism they
demand more of. They feign shock over indiscipline in the Church
(with the abuse scandal) but in truth they want more of it (hence
their knee-jerks calls for “decentralization”). Their interest in
reforming the Catholic Church is about as sincere as their interest
in reforming the Republican Party: calls for “reform” are just
self-projection and will amount to separating Catholicism from
Christ.
Toward the end of liberalizing the Church, the media will look
for fixes to problems from the liberal clerics most responsible for
causing them— such as Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony, who
couldn’t fly to Rome fast enough to start politicking with
reporters in tow for a liberal pope.
Pope John Paul II knew that a worldly liberalism had derailed
the Church and was trying to remove it. The project of the next
pope is to finish that job. The media’s “whether or not you agreed
with them, you respected the intensity of his principles”
formulation is nonsense: they didn’t respect Pope John Paul II for
his principles but for his power, a power they have long wanted to
appropriate for their own liberal purposes.
Their idea of honoring Pope John Paul II is to mau-mau the
Church into embracing heresies that he deplored. The greatness of
his life consisted in what the press ignores and seeks to undo in
the Church: holiness, the measure of which is never the will of men
but of God. The Pope made such a powerful impression on the world
not because he was wordly but because he was otherworldly. A
godless age had left an enormous vacuum; only a man who conformed
his life to God could fill it.
