Daily Mail, April 4 2005

With the death of Pope John Paul II, the world has suffered a loss which has touched it to the core.

In Rome, thousands of mourners gathered in St Peter’s Square in an act of mass respect and shared feeling. No fewer than one million people are expected to file past the coffin when the Pope’s body is taken to St Peter‘s Basilica today.

The grief of the Catholic faithful, who feel they have lost a father, is palpable. But the impact of this death has been felt way beyond the Catholic community. Millions around the world have found themselves profoundly moved by the Pope’s final illness.

People of all faiths and none -- even including many of those who disapproved of some of the Pope’s attitudes and actions -- feel that a great man has now departed from their midst and that the world is all the poorer for his passing.

This is not merely because, throughout his 26 year reign, he had become through the force of his personality a papal superstar, turning the world into his global parish as he travelled from country to country addressing the millions who flocked to hear him.

It was much more than that. By the example of both his life and the manner of his death, the Pope gave expression to some of the deepest yearnings of the human spirit and provided an uplifting example of transcendent human dignity, at a time when such attributes appear to be under siege.

The fortitude and courage he displayed during his long years of suffering from devastating illness were an inspiration. Both inside the Vatican and elsewhere, there was disquiet that as he became more and more infirm the papacy had to be effectively run on his behalf.

Nevertheless, what beamed out to the rest of the world, right up to that last agonising appearance when the tube in his throat prevented him from pronouncing the words he so desperately wanted to utter to the crowds below his balcony, was nothing less than the triumph of the human spirit over distressing physical adversity.

In an era when the gross infirmities of old age are regarded as an affront to the able-bodied, to be sanitised and swept away out of sight, the Pope’s refusal to allow the ravages of Parkinson’s disease to deter him from continuing to transmit his message of faith was an inspiration.

And after his final illness set in, when he knew he was dying, his insistence on continuing virtually to the end to be seen in public attempting to communicate his message to the world was a heroic demonstration of a spark in the human psyche which suffering can never extinguish.

We live in a society where death has become the great taboo, principally because it brings to an end the corporeal and material existence that so many believe is the only reality. As a result, the process of dying is usually shunted out of sight.

Yet by making his own dying so public and effectively inviting the world to share his experience, the Pope managed to transmute his suffering into a moving affirmation of stoicism, courage and faith.

He thus did not die a frail sufferer wrecked by a cruel degenerative disease. He died as he had lived, a person whose force of character and unshakeable faith carried all before him.

It was indeed a fitting end for a great man, a titanic figure who not only produced a vast stream of religious edicts which impressed through the force and wide range of his intellect, but who quite simply changed the course of history by playing a key role in bringing to an end one of the great tyrannies of the last century.

In effect, he held up his crucifix to communism which crumbled before it. Of course, many factors came together to bring communism down. But the Polish revolt by the Solidarity movement was crucial in starting the process that eventually led to the fall of the Berlin Wall; and the Polish Pope’s contribution to that revolt was key.

By preaching to the Poles against communism, he delivered to that regime the most lethal of blows. For by going into the heart of a society that enslaved people through the myth of its own invincibility and proclaiming that it was morally and philosophically bankrupt, he demonstrated its intrinsic weakness.

With his charismatic gifts of communication and his ability to reach out to the most disparate of people, he became in effect the spiritual leader of the Polish resistance. Having pronounced the Soviet emperor spiritually naked, he preached solidarity among all who loved truth; and with this universalising message, gave courage to those who eventually brought down the tyranny that had denied it.

Throughout his life, this Pope was animated by a passionate desire to defeat the forces of evil. Seared by his personal experience during the Nazi occupation of Poland, and horrified by the genocide against the Jews, he used his high office to fight on behalf of the oppressed all over the world.

Not only did he champion human rights, but in standing up for the poor he gave voice to the voiceless. And he reached out to other denominations and to other faiths -- most notably to Judaism, where he went out of his way to try to redress the ancient wrongs done by the Catholic church to the Jews.

Nevertheless, there was one group to whom he did not reach out at all - the left-leaning liberals who urged that the church should go with the grain of cultural change, rethink its iron opposition to contraception and abortion and admit women and homosexuals as priests.

Not only did the Pope refuse to budge an inch on any of this ground, but he also centralised power to such an extent that any localised room for manoeuvre became more and more difficult. As a result, liberals excoriated him for being an ultra right-wing arch-reactionary.

Yet this very same Pope also castigated what he saw as the ruthless pursuit of profit, championed the cancellation of Third World debt and, in an expression of near-pacifism, was against both wars in Iraq -- an agenda largely identified with the left.

In truth, the Pope could not be categorised as belonging to either the left or the right. What he stood for was upholding faith against secularism, spirituality against godlessness, and morality against selfish individualism.

And in this he struck a chord far wider and deeper than his detractors ever acknowledged -- even within those individualistic western societies against which he railed.

For despite the way it is often caricatured, so-called secular society is not godless. Even though most people no longer go to church, the majority still consider themselves to be Christian. And in an era of unprecedented freedom and material comfort, many people nevertheless feel acutely a spiritual void that they are anxious -- in some cases, desperate -- to fill.

The pull of individualism is certainly very strong. Many -- maybe most -- no longer believe in the supernatural narrative of the Bible story, or in life after death. And yet the very societies which have made a fetish out of instant gratification and which worship at the shrine of individual consumer choice have left many of their inhabitants feeling adrift: devoid of any structure that can anchor them securely, provide a common bond with others and most crucially of all, offer them hope of a better world.

This spirituality gap has provoked an upsurge in fundamentalist belief across the three Abrahamic faiths of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. So at the very same time that people are turning away from religious authority, others are in revolt against the attempt to negate or dilute it.

And even among people who do not subscribe to religious doctrine, there is widespread unease at the assault on values which underpin our civilisation and which derive from religious belief.

Most non-Catholics would not agree with the church’s absolute ban on contraception or abortion; indeed, many Catholics don’t agree with it either. But there is nevertheless widespread distaste for the progressive erosion of respect for human life in developments such as mass abortion, the sex-selection of embryos or starving and dehydrating a comatose patient to death, as well as continuing anxiety about such problems as the rising numbers of fatherless children or ever-younger teenage parents. Indeed, the issues that matter most deeply to people and animate them most vigorously are not political but moral questions like these.

And yet, critics say, while the Pope campaigned against such developments the church that he headed -- which made such strides in the developing world -- nevertheless haemorrhaged members in the west, saw a rapid increase in Catholic divorce and presided over a priesthood weakened by paedophile scandals which were never properly addressed.

This last failure was indeed a serious stain on his papacy. But the charge that he drove believers away because of his uncompromising stance on women and sexuality is deeply unpersuasive. After all, those churches which have sought to accommodate secular values have lost members too.

In other words, appeasing the modern world doesn’t stop the rot, which is caused by the retreat of faith itself against the onslaught of science and materialism.

These pressures have plunged western society into a savage ‘culture war’. The idea of truth has given way to moral relativism, which turns everything into an equal opinion. Militant secularism wants to remove religion from the public sphere altogether and destroy the Judeo-Christian foundations of western civilisation.

The Pope called this a ‘culture of death’; and so it is. It is designed to bring about the death of western society.

Its hallmarks are mass promiscuity, the breakdown of the family, the rise of mass fatherlessness, the epidemic of casual abortion and sexually transmitted disease, the decline in the birth rate within marriage, and the creeping acceptance of euthanasia and eugenics, along with the legalisation of drugs. All these things are evidence of a culture bent on social suicide.

Pope John Paul II, the slayer of communism, did not manage to win the even greater battle in defence of truth against relativism, faith against scepticism and morality against social anarchy. With the Pope’s death, the question now arises of whether the Catholic church will select a successor who will continue this epic struggle or who will abandon the global moral battleground for a quieter life or a period of clerical navel-gazing.

Karol Wojtyla was the most significant and important Pope for centuries. In an age marked by cynical opportunism and spineless compromises, his authority, certainty and leadership made him very special. Whether his successor will also possess such qualities, along with the subtlety to enable them to resonate among the troubled but self-absorbed peoples of the west, is a question on which the very future of our society could hang.

Posted by melanie at April 4, 2005