If everything you knew came from cable TV news, you’d think the
nation’s predominant religion
was a pagan cult of celebrity worship: a neverending Dionysian
spectacle of sexual transgression,
violence and redemptive sentimentality. We create celebrity-gods, it
seems, largely to destroy them.
Shortly before the Schiavo carnival, I watched an hour-long MSNBC
newscast devoted entirely to
these five topics: actor Robert Blake found not guilty of murdering his
wife; celebrity wifekiller Scott
Peterson sentenced to death; a missing child and a pedophile on the lam
in Florida; Ashley Smith,
the heroic Atlanta waitress; and the Michael Jackson sexual molestation
trial. Evidently, nothing of
significance had happened anywhere in the world. Then came the death of
Pope John Paul II, and
suddenly everybody turned Catholic.
Except that, judging by TV
coverage, you’d think that the late pontiff was the spiritual head of
the
Republican Party and that the
"culture of life," as defined by GOP politicians, was the essence of
the
Catholic faith. Defined, that
is, by "hot-button" issues of sexual morality: gay marriage, gay
priests,
abortion, contraception, etc.
For purposes of TV ratings,
understand, it’s not so important what you’re saying about sex as long
as you’re talking about it.
Now there’s no denying where
John Paul II stood: firmly in the church’s centuries-old tradition of
sexual priggishness and medieval
scholasticism. Nor that, for all his personal courage, greatness as a
world leader and epochmaking
reaching out to Jews, Muslims and Eastern Orthodox Christians, it’s
partly due to his reactionary
views that American Catholicism seems to be in crisis: with church
attendance
steadily dropping, schools and
parish churches closing, priests and nuns in short supply, and the
laity
expressing declining confidence
in the church hierarchy.
Fully 78 percent of U.S.
Catholics told a recent CNN/USA Today poll that the next pope should
allow them to use birth control.
Sixty-three percent are in favor of priests being allowed to marry.
Fifty-nine percent think medical
research on human stem cells should be permissible. Most agree with
the views of former Missouri
Sen. John C. Danforth, himself an Episcopal priest, in a recent New
York
Times essay: "It is not
evident to many of us that cells in a petri dish are equivalent to
identifiable
people suffering from terrible
diseases."
Forbidding contraception in the
face of a rampant AIDS epidemic and runaway overpopulation
causing disease, starvation and
war throughout the Third World strikes the majority as moral idiocy.
In his final book, "Memory and
Identity," John Paul II suggested that advocates of gay marriage are
"perhaps part of a new ideology
of evil, perhaps more insidious and hidden, which attempts to pit
human rights against the family
and against man." Many wonder if "insidious" doesn’t better describe
American bishops and cardinals
who transferred serial pedophile priests from parish to parish,
endangering thousands of
children entrusted to the church’s care, in the futile hope of avoiding
scandal. An amoral secular
bureaucracy could hardly have done worse.
If the Catholic Church could
find a way to accommodate divorce—i. e., by dressing it up as
"annulment" and generating
healthy fees for canon lawyers—it ought to be able to solve
"gay marriage," too. Simply
calling it something else might be a good start.
But there I go, falling into my
own trap. And as I am no longer a communicant in the Holy Roman
Catholic and Apostolic Church,
perhaps it would be more appropriate for me to list a few ways
in which John Paul II was,
indeed, a great spiritual leader and most emphatically not a
conservative Republican.
Unlike President Bush, who
cribbed the "culture of life" phrase from a papal encyclical, John Paul
II
unequivocally opposed the death
penalty. Instances where society had no other means of protecting
itself, he wrote, "are
very rare, if not practically non-existent."
John Paul II also vigorously
opposed Bush’s war in Iraq, warning that armed conflict could only
worsen the plight of "the people
of Iraq, the land of the Prophets, a people already sorely tried
by more than twelve years of
embargo."
On his visits to Jerusalem, the
pope made a point of stressing the sufferings of Palestinians as well
as
Israelis by visiting a refugee
camp as well as the Wailing Wall. As he apologized to the Jews for the
Vatican’s moral blindness during
the Holocaust, so he prayed in a Muslim mosque in Damascus, Syria.
Having worked in a Nazi labor
camp and seen his native Poland fall under Stalinist tyranny, John Paul
II
also warned against purely
materialist capitalist economics in which "[t] he worker is treated as
a tool
whereas the worker ought to be
treated as the subject of work, as its maker and creator." He was
pro-labor union and a passionate
environmentalist. In short, John Paul II was a religious leader,
not an American politician.
Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author
and recipient of the National Magazine Award.