The man known in life as Karol Wojtyla and at the apex of his career as Pope John Paul II is soon to be in line for yet another pietistic name change. Our current pope, a longtime friend and political ally of the lately deceased pontiff, has urged that the clock be sped up on making his predecessor a saint. Let me be the first to suggest a saint-name: Saint Crony - patron of short-cutters and line-jumpers everywhere.

Pope Benedict has given an ex cathedra blessing, likely the first of many, to what anyone paying attention to political discourse in the 21st century has already noticed. It is now infallibly recognized that conservativism, at least as understood for the two centuries following the Age of Enlightenment, is dead. In its place stands an impatient right-wing liberal capitalism that sees no tradition unexploitable and no icon undebasable. And the Roman Catholic Church stands willing to squander the tools at its disposal in the service of this trendy (and very earthly) ideology.

The desire to make the earthly realm comport more perfectly with the man-made ideology of capitalism couldn’t be further from the spirit of genuine conservatism. Wojtyla and Ratzinger have left behind the skepticism of modern all-embracing solutions that has liberated the Catholic Church for centuries the vagaries (and perfidies) of the marketplace of ideas. As a church that began the 20th century by demanding anti-modernism of its clerics with the Pascendi, the Catholic Church was upholding a tradition (albeit an imperfectly recognized one) that insisted that the Church not enter into the discursive intersubjectivity of the modern liberalism, capitalist or otherwise. To say that Pope John Paul II spent the coin of that independence too cheaply is being generous as that coin ought not be spent at all. In the place of the Church of the Anti-modernist Oath that the 19th century left to the 20th stands a shell corporation as we face the 21st century – one more interest group, one more voting block, one more diplomatic pouch with accompanying credentials.

Oakeshott, Burke, and others in the intellectual tradition of conservatism would find this abhorrent and rightly so. Where they viewed conservatism as a generous expansion of the franchise in modern affairs to those who came before us, the neo-cons of the modern Church care barely for those of the flock still with us in this vale of tears, much less the poor saps who had the misfortune to be born before the advent of their ideology. They see in the church built by Saint Peter only a useful brand name, like the Grand Old Opry in country music.

It seems a fitting tribute to the man who did more to bring this about that the centuries-old method of recognizing saints should be chucked to pad his resume. John Paul II’s promiscuous (10% of all) canonizations had grown to seem cynical and irrelevant. Trouble in the African church? Name a black saint. South America growing restless? Saint-up a couple of friars from the Southern Hemisphere. Would we really be shocked to learn that the Vatican had (in the parlance of political consultancy) ‘focused grouped’ likely candidates for sainthood? While no one would doubt the genuineness of the conversion of Edith Stein, a Jewish philosopher and student of Husserl who died after converting in the death camps, it is all too easy to view her transformation into Saint Theresa Benedicta of the Cross as driven less by the courage and powerful faith of Ms. Stein than by the political exegeses of a church facing criticism for its actions during the Holocaust. Pope John Paul II’s decisions about sainthood looked, as time went on, less and less like the deliberations of a church seeking the work of God on Earth and more and more like the selection process for gallery seats near the First Lady at the State of the Union – cynical sop driven by crass politics. No one doubts the good works of those so selected, but no one is blind to the political calculations that brought them there.

The mind reels at the thought that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame seems more committed to their rules about recognition than the Roman Catholic Church at this point in history. It is ultimately that that comparison can be made at all that should stand as the lasting legacy of Pope Paul II. The Roman Catholic Church has, by turning its back on the power of its traditions, ceased to be a functionally (if not doctrinally) conservative institution. The ideology of the Catholic Church of the 21st century could be more fairly described with a term coined by Edith Stein’s fellow Jew and student of Husserl, Hannah Arendt. And that term is totalitarianism.

-Keith McCrea, Reviews Editor & ex-altar boy

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 18th, 2005 at 11:01 am by Arthur. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.