John Paul II was strikingly successful in many of his episcopal appointments over twenty-six years. Yet there were also mistakes, some of them serious, and at the end of the pontificate it was difficult to say that the world episcopate as a whole reflected John Paul II’s dynamic, courageous, intellectually sophisticated, and spiritually profound model of episcopal leadership. It would be absurd, of course, to expect the nomination process to have identified a virtually unlimited supply of men with the exceptional personal gifts of Karol Wojtyła. Yet the criteria by which candidates for the episcopate were initially vetted by apostolic delegates or nuncios were not significantly changed in order to reflect the evangelically assertive idea of the bishop’s office for which the Second Vatican Council called, and which John Paul II embodied. Consultations by papal representatives on potential nominees for the episcopate often took place within a narrow, dominantly clerical, and sometimes exclusively episcopal sphere. And while it was appropriate that priests being considered as bishops should be unimpeachably orthodox, a man’s demonstrated ability to make the Church’s proposal in a compelling and effective way did not seem to weigh as heavily as it might in the consideration of candidates: as late as the last half decade of the pontificate, the standard questionnaire by which candidates were first vetted asked about a man’s orthodoxy, but not about his talent in convincing others of the truth of Catholic faith, his success in bringing others into the Church, or his boldness in advancing the Church’s social doctrine publicly.124
At the end of the pontificate, and throughout the world Church, thoughtful Catholics who would have given their lives for John Paul II and who esteemed both the man and his teaching nonetheless believed that one of the Catholic Church’s most serious problems was the quality of its episcopal leadership—and this despite the Pope’s obvious accomplishments in reshaping parts of the world Catholic episcopate and his sponsorship of an impressive Directory for the Pastoral Ministry of Bishops, published in 2004. Debate on why that should have been the case would continue long after the Pope’s death, with the thoroughgoing reform of the criteria and process for selecting bishops—a reform that John Paul II did not effect—occupying a prominent place in the discussion.125
Critics of the pontificate from the Church’s progressivist wing argued that the “centralizing” tendencies they detected in John Paul II’s exercise of the munus regendi demeaned the role of national conferences of bishops, which had been mandated by the Second Vatican Council.126 This charge seems overwrought. In fact, John Paul’s typical response when a bishop raised a difficult pastoral problem during an ad limina visit was, “Have you discussed this with the conference? What can the conference do to help?”
The Pope’s experience of a unified and courageous national bishops’ conference in Poland may have colored his judgment about the inherent capacities of these institutions in the post–Vatican II Church. The Polish situation was, in many respects, unique; throughout the rest of the world Church, and especially in the developed world, some national conferences came to be controlled by their staffs, while concurrently exhibiting the negative qualities of old-fashioned men’s clubs in which criticism of fellow members was beyond the pale. Thus the more realistic critique of John Paul II’s relationship to national conferences of bishops is that the Pope put too much confidence in the capacity of these bodies to address key local problems forthrightly and effectively. That commitment to collegiality betrayed him on several occasions, not least when the failures of the U.S. bishops conference to address significant problems of clerical sexual abuse (about which the American prelates had been warned years before the Long Lent of 2002) burst into public view and suddenly had to be addressed in Rome. Similar incapacities marked many local bishops conferences dealing with dissident theologians and women religious, and in a few cases with fellow bishops of dubious orthodoxy. In many of these instances, national episcopal conference failures left the Vatican—and the Pope—with the unavoidable task of taking needed disciplinary action, and thus absorbing the inevitable, and sometimes harsh, criticism for enforcing the Church’s doctrinal and moral boundaries. Thus a strong case can be made that the failures of national bishops conferences to exercise the munus regendi effectively within their own spheres of authority were of far greater moment during the pontificate than any alleged centralizing by John Paul II.
The modus operandi of the Synod of Bishops under John Paul II was also criticized throughout the pontificate (including, in private, by the Pope himself). The general secretary of the Synod once defended its tortuous procedures on the grounds that the Synod (which was created by Paul VI as an institutional expression of Vatican II’s teaching on episcopal collegiality) could not be understood on a sociological or political model. The Synod, Cardinal Jan Schotte insisted, was “not a ‘legislature’ over-against or beside the papal ‘executive.’ ” Majority rule concepts did not apply, for the Synod was, “more and deeper,” a matter of “listening to Christ and the Spirit,” and thus a body that “cannot be understood in terms of its procedures.”127 The theology of the Synod here was true enough; but the cardinal’s defense of the Synod process did not address the question of why “listening to Christ and the Spirit” necessarily involved weeks of listening in the Synod assembly to ten-minute speeches arranged in no particular order with no follow-on debate, discussion being largely restricted to smaller language groups that formulated various theses for the Pope’s consideration.
Some Synod veterans respected John Paul II’s patience with the clumsy body’s lengthy deliberations (the Pope attended every Synod session in person), but found the process too diffuse and deficient in setting priorities. Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, however, thought that while the process could never yield more than a minimum consensus, given the substantial number of bishops involved, that was no bad thing: a minimum consensus, in addition to being an achievement in itself, left room for further reflection on the subject at hand.128 This was a striking observation, considering that the 1985 Extraordinary Synod had achieved “minimum consensus” on two crucial points—that Vatican II was to be interpreted as a Council in continuity with the Church’s tradition, and that the key to the Council’s teaching was the concept of the Church as a communio or “communion” of disciples. Defenders of the Synod also remarked on the importance of its informal moments, during which the leaders of the world episcopate got to know one another (and one another’s problems) better.
Still, the fact remained that the most notable products of the Synod of Bishops during the pontificate of John Paul II were the Pope’s own post-synodal apostolic exhortations. Pastores Dabo Vobis, to take one example, reshaped seminary life throughout the world Church. That result was far more the product of the apostolic exhortation than the Synod process, but Synod defenders could argue that, absent the process, the post-synodal document would have lacked the weight the Synod gave it.
Corruptions. The corruptions in the priesthood brought to public attention during the pontificate of John Paul II cannot in any fairness be blamed on John Paul II, who taught and exemplified an upright and heroic idea of priestly ministry for almost sixty years, and who inspired thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands, of priests to live in fidelity to their vocation—thus putting in place the medium-and long-term solution to the problem of abusive clergy. The corruptions manifest in clergy sexual abuse in the United States, Canada, and Ireland, which caused such scandal in the last years of the pontificate, did illustrate, however, the limits of even the most compelling papal example and the imperatives of a more thorough reform of the world episcopate; so did the problems of clerical concubinage that afflicted the Church in Africa and some parts of Latin America. For in virtually all of these instances, individual crimes became public scandals because of failures of leadership on the part of local bishops.
Throughout the pontificate, however, John Paul II’s exercise of the munus regendi with regard to religious orders of both men and women was a subject of legitimate criti
cism. Karol Wojtyła had long believed and taught that consecrated life was a kind of spiritual energy core for the entire Church; a man formed by these convictions would never deliberately countenance corruption in religious communities living under vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, as some suggested he did. Yet a pontificate that worked very hard to reform the diocesan priesthood did not expend a similarly serious effort on addressing the corruptions of doctrinal dissent and lifestyle that beset numerous religious communities of both men and women.
One particularly notable failure here was John Paul’s effort to instigate a reform of the Society of Jesus, which he took under a form of papal receivership in 1981 in an attempt to apply shock therapy to one of Catholicism’s elite religious communities.129 The intervention did not work as John Paul had hoped. And while the Jesuits in the last decade and a half of the pontificate attracted aspirants whose vocations were formed in part by the witness of John Paul II, the Society as a whole (which was sometimes beset by strange interpretations of poverty, chastity, and obedience) remained one of Catholicism’s premier centers of theological dissent on issues ranging from the unique status of Christ as universal redeemer to grave questions of sexual morality.130
Similar troubles weakened once vibrant American communities of religious women throughout the pontificate, to the point where a new body, the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious, was established in 1992 by leaders of communities dedicated to the vision of religious life that John Paul II would lay out in detail in Vita Consecrata. The new Council was explicitly intended as an alternative to the long-established Leadership Conference of Women Religious [LCWR], which was dominated throughout the pontificate by communities whose understanding of religious life was quite different from that of John Paul II, and who in some cases considered themselves post-Christian.131 Modest efforts were made to engage the LCWR congregations in an examination of their positions on issues including the ordination of women, homosexuality, and lifestyle. A commission led by San Francisco archbishop John R. Quinn was appointed by the Pope in 1983 and eventually produced an anodyne document entitled “Essential Elements in Church Teaching on Religious Life,” which many members of the LCWR repudiated.132 The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a warning to the LCWR in 2001, but during the last years of the pontificate, the LCWR continued to defend and live its understanding of religious life as one of “loyal dissent.”133
There seemed to be little interest at the Congregation for Religious, the relevant Vatican office, in coming to grips with a situation that to some observers seemed one of de facto schism, or at the very least, psychological schism; the same reticence characterized the attitude of most American bishops and of their episcopal conference.134 Attention would almost certainly have been paid, however, had firm instructions to do so come from the papal apartment. Here, as in so many other cases, John Paul II chose to affirm and support what was growing and healthy in the Church, leaving dissent to die of its own implausibility. Thus disciplinary actions were taken only when American sisters publicly challenged the truth of Catholic teaching on abortion and homosexuality, or refused to leave public office when instructed to do so.
John Paul’s strategy worked, in the sense that the communities of women religious that were attracting new members in the United States were those who took Vita Consecrata seriously, while the LCWR communities were dying demographically. This difficult situation may well have been inevitable, given post-Vatican II dynamics in American women’s religious communities that intersected with the more ideologically hardened forms of feminism. It is also true that primary responsibility for addressing these problems lay, first, with local bishops and the U.S. bishops conference, and then with the Congregation for Religious in Rome; it was not up to the Pope to act as an apostolic visitator assessing the orthodoxy and probity of life in American women’s religious communities. Yet the fact remains that the doctrinal and lifestyle troubles that had fallen upon communities of American sisters were known in Rome and little effective action was taken to address the problems. On this front, the papal munus regendi was not, to put it gently, assertive.135
The most dramatic questions about John Paul’s exercise of the munus regendi in relationship to consecrated religious life emerged with full force only after his death, when the Holy See took action against Father Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, a community of religious men, and Regnum Christi, a lay Catholic renewal movement. In 2006, the Holy See “invited” Father Maciel to retire to a “life of prayer and penitence, renouncing any form of public ministry.”136 The invitation, a de facto order, followed an investigation by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith into charges that Maciel had sexually abused seminarians and had further abused the sacrament of penance to conceal his sexual abuse; it is unlikely that Maciel would have been sent into what amounted to ecclesiastical house arrest had the CDF not found those charges credible. After Maciel’s death in 2008, reports that he had fathered at least one child out of wedlock, whom he supported with funds raised for the Legionaries of Christ, appeared in the international press and were confirmed by the superiors of the Legion.137 An apostolic visitation of the Legion was ordered by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009.
John Paul II was deceived and betrayed by Marcial Maciel, a master deceiver who successfully deceived many others. No one who knew Karol Wojtyła could possibly believe that the Pope, informed of Maciel’s sordid double life, would have continued to support him, the Legionaries of Christ, and Regnum Christi—as John Paul had done for decades.138 John Paul II was, in fact, badly deceived. He may well have been ill served by associates and subordinates who ought to have been more alert to the implications of the cult of personality that surrounded Maciel in both the Legion and Regnum Christi. The reasons that those associates and subordinates were skeptical of the charges that had quietly swirled around Maciel for years—charges that came to public light when those alleging previous abuse by Maciel filed complaints with the Holy See in 1998—will be investigated and debated for decades. The results are not likely to be edifying, in some cases.
The reasons that John Paul II gave his support to the Legionaries of Christ and Regnum Christi are clear: both the religious congregation and the lay movement embodied a vibrant orthodoxy that, as even their critics admit, produced many admirable religious vocations and lay activists. Legionary efforts in seminary formation were also of great interest to John Paul, who encouraged the Legion to pursue this work around the world and in Rome. It was this confidence in the good fruits that had been produced by the Legion and Regnum Christi that led John Paul to what may have been his gravest error in exercising the munus regendi with respect to the Legion: his approval of the constitutions of the Legionaries of Christ, according to which every member of the Legion vowed to refrain from criticizing a superior and to report to superiors anyone in the Legion who did. The constitutions had been under review in the Congregation for Religious for decades; according to Maciel, the Pope broke the logjam (which involved the Legion’s rules on assignment of personnel and its practice of maintaining a “centralized economy” headquartered in Rome) and facilitated the approval of the governing statutes of the Legion by a personal intervention in 1983.139 In the wake of revelations about Maciel’s double life, it seems likely that the constitutions’ proscription against criticism of superiors, and the “centralized economy,” helped facilitate Maciel’s sexual and financial corruption. But real clarity about the process by which the Legion’s constitutions were approved may be difficult to reach, given Maciel’s protean skills at prevarication and deception.
After the public revelations in 2009 of Marcial Maciel’s extensive perfidy, critics of the pontificate did not hesitate to point out John Paul II’s lengthy record of support for Maciel and the institutes he founded; genuine concern for the victims of Maciel’s crimes was at work here, as well as genuine concern for the Church. Nonetheless, and despite the negative implications for the evaluation
of John Paul’s reputation that some of these critics quickly drew, it was noteworthy that Benedict XVI and others who sought to save the good that John Paul II saw in the Legionaries of Christ and Regnum Christi did so with John Paul’s teaching on the priesthood and the lay vocation in the world in mind, recognizing that what was at work in this scandalous affair was deception in the service of the mysterium iniquitatis.140
The Last Years. During the last years of the pontificate, critics of the Pope’s exercise of the munus regendi sometimes suggested that Karol Wojtyła’s personal drama was impeding Pope John Paul II’s governance of the Church. The Roman Curia did revert to its accustomed languid pace at the end of the pontificate; whether this would have been the case had the cardinal secretary of state been a more forceful figure than Angelo Sodano is an open question. Throughout the pontificate, John Paul had declined the role of curial micromanager and was certainly not going to take it up at the end of his life. More vigorous leadership from senior curial officials, led by Cardinal Sodano, might have helped dispel the fin de régime atmosphere that characterized parts of the Vatican apparatus in the last years of the papacy of John Paul II.
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