What will this Pope's legacy be? The future?

50 years from now he will be just a shadow like the other 300 popes that nobody can name. The only popes that get remembered are the corrupt ones (Alexander VI), the ones that lead armies (Julius II), or the ones that almost get kicked out of power (Pius IX). John Paul will be basically forgotten in 50-100 years.

What about the Pope John Paul of Vatican II - (WAS it John Paul?).

Som epopes are remembered for a time - and their beliefs affect millions. They have their effects.

Re: What will this Pope's legacy be? The future?


I think the Pope isn't dead until he's dead, and that a post like this certainly is premature. How you can call his legacy division is beyond me, though. In what sense does he "divide" by sticking to the heritage of the church? Should the doctrines of the church be changed just because people don't like some of them any longer?

Ah - division,

Yes - he is not dead yet - but a very old and ill man will not live forever.

Your post is an example of the very division of which I speak. I think such division inevitable in large faiths - but I think this pope has assisted in divisiveness by trying to turn the clock back - or "sticking to the heritage of the church" as you say - or, as others would say, by choosing to privilege some interpretations of the heritage of the church against others.

But - what do you think his legacy will be?

If you really did not think it appropriate to discuss it, I assume you would not have posted.

One would hope that the next Pope is more attuned with the times he's living in. There, that's nice & brief for you!

My point is that people have been "burying" him prematurely for a long, long time now, and yet he is still alive. For all we know he may still have many things to do.



What you call "turning back the clock" he would probably call "maintaining doctrinal purity". It's obviously not his opinion that the church should be altered in accordance with what is popular or fashionable at the moment. True, many things have changed during the last two thousand years, but the law is after all changeless. "For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished." (Matthew 5:18)

It is simply not the Pope's roll to break with the tradition of the church on which it is built. To call someone a divider because he is faithful to the tradition is quite absurd in fact if you ask me. A divider is someone who seeks to destroy unity and thwart reconciliation. The Pope, though, has shown that he is serious in his desire for Christian unity by for example making sincere apologies on behalf of the catholic church for the sins committed by it against the orthodox church.

He should die very soon, I mean, it's about time isn't it? The guy is ancient...
But it won't matter, the Catholic religion is dying, fading away ten times faster than the way it spread. Many European countries, many of the first to adopt the religion are becoming less, and less pious. In a few centuries it will all be a memory of backward and superstitious times. And of course, no one but bored historians will know who John Paul was.

As the first non-Italian Pope in several centuries and the only cleric from an Iron Curtain country to rise so high, his achievement will certainly be remembered for that alone. (Seems so dated to be referring to the "Iron Curtain", doesn't it?) That he is a hide-bound conservative in matters of doctrine is hardly surprising. This kind of thing has been a hallmark of the Church forever. One hardly rises to power in clerical circles by being a liberal reformer. OK, OK, yes, there have been some exceptions but they are just that -- exceptions.

But do you really think he will be remembered when the Catholic faith fades?
Others that have done more, for better or worse, have been forgotten.

It is true that Europe and North America are growing increasingly irreligious. However, Catholicism is on the rise in Africa and Asia. It will be around for quite awhile. Sorry to disappoint you.

Do you have any comments re the legacy of this pope, marsh_of_mists?

Oh - and welcome!

I had quite given up on getting anywhere on this thread.

Oh - I hadn't seen this comment!

Yes - an amazing achievement in so many ways.

What effect do you think his intense conservatism has had on the church?

I heard a program the other night that said that seething dissatisfaction has been held in check so as not to mar his last period of time in the job....

Well, dlowan, I do think that this pope will go down in history as an excellent pope. I'm not simply saying that because I'm Catholic. There have been many more mediocre popes than great and saintly ones. There have even been a few wicked popes. But I truly believe John Paul II will go down as one of the greats.

The Holy Father is greatly loved amongst both Catholics and non-Catholics; he is still an extremely popular and, more importantly, respected figure in the world. For one thing, he was instrumental in bringing down the Evil Empire. He tranversed the world spreading the message of the gospel and the Church's philosophy of life. Now that he has grown frail and sickly, many look to him as an example of holy suffering, akin to Christ suffering on the cross. He especially respected for this in Africa, where so many are suffering and where the Church is growing at a faster pace than it is anywhere in the world.

Unfortunately, he has preceded over the Church during a time a great trial, when scandal and heresy are rampant, particularly in the Church in the western world. However, he has remained firm, not bowing to the popular opinions of the time, not allowing the world to lead the Church, as the leaders of several protestant churches have (ending up with nothing more than empty pews for their troubles). He has merely stood and proclaimed the doctrine of the Gospel and of the Church, maintaining its truth to the next generation.

Nope. Pope John XXIII (known to the lay press as "Good Pope John") presided over Vatican II in the 1962. He was pope from 1958-1963 and has now been beatified. After him came Pope Paul VI, from 1963-1978. During his papacy, the Vatican II reforms were implemented (often quite haphazardly in my opinion). The next pope combining the names of two previous popes, becoming John Paul I. His papacy only lasted a few months, before he died in his bed. The cardinals then elected Karol Cardinal Wojtyla. At that time, Saturday Night Live made a joke that he would follow in the tradition of John Paul I, by combining the names of the last three popes becoming Pope John Paul John Paul! This wasn't very far from the truth: in honor of his predecessor, Cardinal Wojtyla took the name John Paul II. This pope is still with us to day.

View from Der Spiegel op ed re legacy of this pope:

CRISIS IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

The Pope's Contradictions

By Hans Küng

Outwardly Pope John Paul II, who has been actively involved in battling war and suppression, is a beacon of hope for those who long for freedom. Internally, however, his anti-reformist tenure has plunged the Roman Catholic church into an epochal credibility crisis.



Don't be fooled by the crowds: Millions have left the Catholic Church under Pope John Paul II's leadership.


The Catholic church is in dire straits. The pope is deathly ill and deserves every bit of sympathy he can get. But the church must live on, and in light of the selection of a new pope, it will need a diagnosis, an unadorned insider analysis. The therapy will be discussed later.

Many marvel at the staying power of this highly fragile, partially paralyzed head of the Roman Catholic church, a man who, despite all medications, is barely able to speak. He is treated with a sort of reverence that would never be extended to an American president or a German chancellor in a similar state. Others feel put off by a man they see as an obstinate office bearer who, instead of accepting the Christian path to his own eternity, is using all means at his disposal to hold on to power in a largely undemocratic system.

Even for many Catholics, this pope at the end of his physical strength, refusing to relinquish his power, is the symbol of a fraudulent church that has calcified and become senile behind its glittering façade.

The festive mood that prevailed during the Second Vatican Council (1962 to 1965), or Vatican II, has disappeared. Vatican II's outlook of renewal, ecumenical understanding and a general opening of the world now seems overcast and the future gloomy. Many have resigned themselves or even turned away out of frustration from this self-absorbed hierarchy. As a result, many people are confronted with an impossible set of alternatives: "play the game or leave the church." New hope will only begin to take root when church officials in Rome and in the episcopacy reorient themselves toward the compass of the Gospel.



Hans Kung

Hans Kung is one of today's leading Catholic theologians. Küng, a Swiss national living in the southern German city of Tübingen, has been embroiled in an ongoing feud with church authorities for decades. As a result of his critical inquiries on the papacy, the Vatican withdrew his church authority to teach in 1979. Nevertheless, Küng, 75, is still a priest and, until his retirement in 1995, taught ecumenical theology at the University of Tübingen. As president of the Global Ethic Foundation, Küng is also an advisor to the United Nations.
CONTINUE
One of the few glimmers of hope has been the pope's stance against the Iraq war and war in general. The role the Polish pope played in helping bring about the collapse of the Soviet empire is also emphasized, and rightly so. But it's also heavily exaggerated by papal propagandists. After all, the Soviet regime did not fail because of the pope (before the arrival of Gorbachev, the pope was achieving about as little as he is now achieving in China), but instead imploded because of the Soviet system's inherent economic and social contradictions.

In my view, Karol Wojtyla is not the greatest, but certainly the most contradictory, pope of the 20th century. A pope of many great gifts and many wrong decisions! To summarize his tenure and reduce it to a common denominator: His "foreign policy" demands conversion, reform and dialogue from the rest of the world. But this is sharply contradicted by his "domestic policy," which is oriented toward the restoration of the pre-council status quo, obstructing reform, denying dialogue within the church, and absolute Roman dominance. This inconsistency is evident in many areas. While expressly acknowledging the positive sides of this pontificate, which, incidentally, have received plenty of official emphasis, I would like to focus on the nine most glaring contradictions:

HUMAN RIGHTS: Outwardly, John Paul II supports human rights, while inwardly withholding them from bishops, theologians and especially women.

The Vatican -- once a resolute foe of human rights, but nowadays all too willing to become involved in European politics -- has yet to sign the European Council's Declaration of Human Rights. Far too many canons of the absolutist Roman church law of the Middle Ages would have to be amended first. The concept of separation of powers, the bedrock of all modern legal practice, is unknown in the Roman Catholic church. Due process is an unknown entity in the church. In disputes, one and the same Vatican agency functions as lawmaker, prosecutor and judge.

Consequences: A servile episcopate and intolerable legal conditions. Any pastor, theologian or layperson who enters into a legal dispute with the higher church courts has virtually no prospects of prevailing.

THE ROLE OF WOMEN: The great worshiper of the Virgin Mary preaches a noble concept of womanhood, but at the same time forbids women from practicing birth control and bars them from ordination.

Consequences: There is a rift between external conformism and internal autonomy of conscience. This results in bishops who lean towards Rome, alienating themselves from women, as was the case in the dispute surrounding the issue of abortion counseling (in 1999, the Pope ordered German bishops to close counseling centers that issued certificates to women that could later be used to get an abortion). This in turn leads to a growing exodus among those women who have so far remained faithful to the church...........


Article continues here

Yes, indeed, Deb. This was a very conservative pope indeed. The aspect of his leadership that I found most disturbing was his strong opposition to birth control. I found this stance profoundly depressing & well remember his many visits to third world countries extolling his message to the adoring poor of those countries .... those who would most surely benefit enormously from practising reliable birth control.

Good. I finally found the thread with the title I wanted to give a new one. I knew it had to be somewhere.

These are my opinions:

John Paul II will not go down to history just like another Pope. He will go as one of the greats, and will certainly be canonized.

The keyword of his papacy is charisma.
He was a charismatic leader in a world driven by the media. They blended quite fine. He was, somewhat, a showman.

He was charismatic also in the other sense. In the sense of the charismatic movements of the Catholic church (I'm thinking right know about Communione e Liberazione in the 70's in Italy): a "new" way of religiousness, closer in spirit to the newborn Christians, and quite usefule in the torover of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe.

He was a liberal on socioeconomical and international issues. He condemned savage capitalism, globalization and the mercantilisation of the modern world. He never condoned some typical US global attitudes, such as the embargo against Cuba (which he condemned explicitly) or the war against Iraq.

He was a conservative doctrinaire on socio-personal issues, such as birth control, divorce, abortion, stem-cell research, homosexuality, etc.

The Catholic church is certainly losing grip in Western Europe, and among cultured middle classes elsewhere because of this anti-reformist attitude.

At the same time, the charismatic logic keeps some ground for Catholicism in regions "threatened" by more fundamentalist religions: either Islam (Africa & Asia) or Evangelical new Protestantism (US and Latin America).

AS for the future of the church, the next conclave will somehow determine it, depending on who the successor is.

There are, generally speaking, 3 big currents:
The conservatives, who want to continue the steps of John Paul II, but do need a charismatic leader. Their candidates (Sodano, Tomko, Retizinger) don't seem so much at ease with the masses as Woytila.
The moderates, who are ready to cautiously open discussion and want slow changes in the much needed aggiornamento of the Catholic church (thinking on birth control, stem-cell, maybe divorce). Their candidates (Re, Tettamanzi), IMHO, have a good chance.
The social issues ones, mostly from third world countries, want to stress the church's advocacy of economic and social justice. Some are reform-prone on doctrinaire issues, some are conservative (Hummes, Rodríguez).

Somewhere, there's an English bookie making bets about the succesion. My lone peso for Tettamanzi, bishop of Milan.

I just KNEW there had to be a place.
These are the leaders, today:

Dionigi Tettamanzi (Italy) 11/4 3.3/1

Francis Arinze (Nigeria) 11/4 6.8/1

Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga (Honduras) 9/2 6.8/1

Joseph Ratzinger (Germany) 7/1 11/1

Claudio Hummes (Brazil) 9/1 7.8/1

Jaime Lucas Ortega y Alamino (Cuba) 14/1 39/1

Thank you, fb, for the analysis. I'll put a peso bet in for Tettamanzi also, given your description.

One of the last people I used to read about matters of theology before I waltzed away from catholicism and, a little bit later, religion, in the sixties was Hans Kung. I haven't paid all that much attention to catholic church doings since then, but I have noticed a great increase in the naming of cardinals during his papacy. I remember reading that he was effectively stacking the deck towards conservatism for many future decades by his choices. I read that quite a while ago and don't know if it has held true that conservatism was a criterion for the position.