That intention was then, and remains today, the destruction of the Petrine Office and, ultimately, of the Catholic faith as it has flourished and developed over twenty centuries.
One thing this superforce does not intend is the destruction of the physical institutions of the Church—the museums, the libraries, the abbeys, the hospitals, orphanages, great cathedrals, university complexes. For, in oversimplified terms, this superforce is a sort of ecclesiastical version of a hostile corporate takeover team. Those physical institutions are the corporate plant, the hard and useful assets the takeover team seeks to control.
For these corporate raiders of the Church, the Pope meanwhile—not to mention the Trinity, the saints, the Virgin and the whole immemorial paraphernalia of traditional Catholicism—represents the last vestiges of the prior management, the “old group” that is to be replaced by the “new.”
The agenda of the superforce—for, as in any hostile takeover attempt, there was and is an ordered agenda—was already well along its way in 1978 Twenty-five years along its way. Thus, by the time John Paul came to the papacy, the ever-increasing control of the superforce over the visible organs of Church strength had already guaranteed it a number of advantages.
Just how important those advantages were is easily seen by means of two basic facts faced by John Paul, and by those who were loyal to him and to the papacy.
The first was that no pope had been able to dislodge or control this superforce, or to exorcise its destructive purpose. Instead, the tide had gone so much the other way that within a very short time, John Paul II would see that he controlled no more than two of his own Vatican ministries, and even in those two cases, there would be, by the end of the 1980s, increasing evidence that his control was being effectively loosened.
More palpable for John Paul—but already a deep problem for his weak-willed predecessor Paul VI, who had been blindsided by the superforce, as by so many things—the second dire fact for the new Pope was a direct consequence of the first. With the channels of instruction, discipline and command so deeply affected by so many cleverly devised choke points, John Paul was faced with his own increasing papal impotence. As far as the superforce was concerned, he could travel, he could preach and exhort and command. But unless he could find some way to free up those choke points, such activity would be of no great avail. Slowly but surely, in a deadly circular progress, the Petrine Office would be nullified and excluded from contention by nonexercise. It would fall into disuse, in other words, because it would no longer work. And it would no longer work because its use was being steadily prevented. Papal instructions ordering “Tridentine” Masses to be allowed in each diocese would be “interpreted” to mean that such Masses would be said only if the bishops wished—the opposite of John Paul’s intentions. John Paul’s encyclical letters were called “personal meditations of the Pontiff,” not papal teachings.
The purpose and the agenda of this superforce were clear enough to John Paul. But what about the motive? What was this superforce after, should its adherents be successful in their hostile takeover attempt? And aside from the fact that many of them were cardinals, bishops, priests, prominent theologians and influential Catholic lay people, what characterized the members of this superforce?
According to those who even then opposed it as best they could on a daily basis, the partisans of this anti-Church-within-the-Church were, for the most part, as they are today, individuals who had for a variety of reasons exchanged their Catholic faith for another, more to their liking.
More serious than that, however, was the fact that a certain number among them—and virtually all of these were, as they are today, in ecclesiastically high places—had thrown their weight on the side of those outside the Roman Church who recognized in the papacy, and in the centralized governing structure beneath it, the global force that stood then as now between today and all the tomorrows of a brave new world.
The heart and essence of the struggle between John Paul and the superforce was clear to both sides. It concerned, then as today, the building of a new and global society whose outlines were even then emerging. The superforce consisted of visionaries who, along with John Paul’s adversaries in the secular world outside the Church, had long since thrown themselves into a tug-of-war for control of that global society.
Supreme realist that he was, John Paul knew in greater detail than most just how far along his competitors already were in breaking down, reorganizing and then reassembling the working structures of economic, political and cultural life everywhere. In such a context, there could be no illusions on any side that control of the unique, world-encompassing structures of the Universal Roman Catholic Church would be anything but a major prize in the battle for total geopolitical and georeligious preeminence in the new society.
So far had the situation gone by the time John Paul came to power that many who were both close and loyal to John Paul—those who knew at least as well as he what he was up against in this superforce competing with him for control of his Church—began to clamor at him as insistently as everyone else in the Church. Many complained that a course of action radically different from the one he had taken was open to John Paul. Another course of action was not merely possible, they insisted, but absolutely essential if the Church and the papacy were to survive such a global, deeply entrenched and dedicated assault from within.
This inner core of papal advisers lost little time, then, in laying before John Paul a clear if forbidding set of alternatives. And in turn, each set of alternatives was attached to a dizzying expanse of possible consequences, both for the Church and for the world at large. His Holiness would, he was told in the most respectful terms, have to make early and unequivocal decisions under at least five headings.
He must choose, these advisers said, between the remains of what was even then called the “Old Church” and the increasingly predominant “New Church.”
He must choose just as urgently either for the exclusive claims of the Roman Catholic tradition as the one true Church of Christ, or for the egalitarian ecumenism of non-Catholic and “new” Catholic alike. If he opted for the first, the danger would be that in defending the faith as it had been defended for two thousand years, his isolation would only grow greater. If he chose the second, the danger would be the end of the Roman Catholic institutional organization and, with that, any ability to defend or teach that faith with authority.
Third, he would have to make a long-awaited papal decision between the two dominant superpowers, each courting him as assiduously as they had John XXIII and Paul VI, and each with its important array of surrogates and enemies. For like it or not, the secular and religious worlds were divided into “East” and “West,” and as surely as the sun rose over the one and set over the other, the deeper causes of that division could not be reconciled even within the ambit of a pope claiming universal authority.
His fourth choice was made urgent by another sort of division. He must choose between the age-old formula of Peter with his all-powerful Keys of authority, and the new democratizing independence that was fast splintering the Church Universal into as many divisions as might care to claim autonomy—units calling themselves the “American Church,” the “French Church,” the “German Church,” “woman-church,” the “homosexual church,” the “Liberation Church,” and so on.
Finally, there was the choice that had been deferred by John XXIII and by Paul VI, the choice that the “September Pope,” John Paul I, did not live long enough to address. Urged immediately upon John Paul II was the choice between pointed and brooding admonitions of recent private revelations, and the perennial Christian hopefulness in the salvation offered by a loving and merciful God.
The pressure on John Paul to make these five basic decisions was heightened by the shrill laments of a broader array of advisers about the dreadful state of things in Rome and the world. Men who were normally calm and levelheaded had become convinced, and made every effort to convince the new Pope, that like it
or not, his recent predecessor, Paul VI, had been right. “The Church is engaged in autodestruction,” Paul VI had said; and so said these advisers. “The smoke of Satan has entered the very sanctuary,” Paul VI had warned; and so warned these advisers.
To be sure, there was immediate and heavy counterpressure to such voices. An already powerful if not yet preponderent majority, headed by the superforce that controlled so many of the choke points in the Church’s governing structures at Rome and abroad, scoffed at the Cassandras who whined at the Pope with such alarmist views. No such shrill laments were heard from this quarter. Rather, these were men bent on co-opting the new Pope, courting his blessing and favor for the furtherance of their ideas about what the Church should be: about “redefining the Church’s mission,” in the more recent words of one American cardinal, and about what the papacy should become.
It was not lost on John Paul—more experienced and worldly-wise by far than he was given credit for by either side—that the largest group of all, the rank-and-file Catholics the world around, made no clamor. Perhaps they were not organized into blocs or pressure groups. Perhaps they did not guess how they would themselves soon be blindsided by events, as Paul VI had been. Whatever the reason, these millions for whose allegiance the fight was on in earnest had no voice in the din. Nor could most of its members have known then, any more than they do now, what choices to urge upon Pope John Paul.
In any event, one has to think it would not have mattered. One voice more or less on any side of any fence would not have deepened John Paul’s understanding. For, in point of fact, before he came to the papacy, John Paul already knew the urgent issues that would be thrust at him for decision, just as he knew what each of those groups stood for.
It would not have mattered, moreover, because to everybody’s chagrin and confusion, no one—not the most intimate and trusted among his advisers—succeeded in swaying John Paul, any more than the hapless Cardinal Ratzinger succeeded in doing a few years later.
True, the Pope resisted the might-and-main efforts of the superforce to have him transform the papacy. But then, he also refused to exercise the authority that is the living heart of the papacy, in order to redress—or at least to arrest—the deterioration of his Church. And he steadfastly refused to address head-on that fateful series of options so urgently pressed upon him by his intimate advisers.
Instead, as John Paul set course on a pontificate that was to be longer and more influential than many in history, he presented to one and all the crowning contradiction and the greatest enigma. To adversaries and supporters alike, to superforce and loyalists, to the powerful in the secular world and to ordinary, faithful Catholics in their hundreds of millions, to everyone, in fact, John Paul appeared not merely calm as the debris of his Church and of his power piled high about the Throne of Peter; he seemed totally unconcerned. “Imperturbable” was the word many used to describe him. With a tinge of envy, perhaps, some of his counterparts in this-worldly power spoke privately even of some towering dimension that seemed to grow stronger in John Paul, even as the Church and his own power appeared to grow weaker.
For better or for worse, what lay at the heart of that towering dimension was John Paul’s vision of the near future that so many would have given so much to fathom. A vision of his own about the way our human affairs would go in the not distant future.
From the moment John Paul answered “yes” to the ritual Conclave question “Will you accept the papacy?” asked of him in 1978, he placed everything that had been entrusted to him as Pope on the line in his decision to enter that same grand-scale, winner-take-all competition in which the superforce and the anti-Church had long since thrown their weight on the side of his adversaries. He had no illusions going in. He knew he was a late comer. And though in reality there was nothing in history to compare with this competition, he knew that, as with any rivalry as deep and as global as the one under way, he was going to be only one of many, many players. And he knew one more thing: Not all of the players were yet in the game by 1978. He would not, he was sure, be the only newcomer. As for the stakes, they had to include even the essentials of the Roman Church, because those essentials had to be—indeed, already were—a prime target of those who were arrayed against him and of the player or players he still expected to take the field on the opposite side.
John Paul understood that, in their varied ways, his adversaries were all visionaries of that society they planned as the first truly geopolitical system of secular and government life: not a system that would stop at merely international or even transnational institutions; but a truly universal system whose institutions they were still groping to devise. Therein lay the importance of the institutions of John Paul’s Church: and therein lay the importance of the superforce control over those institutions. For the Church was very nearly unique in the true universality of its own borderless systems and institutions. It was unique as a georeligious and a geopolitical force.
The competition, then, was not a tug-of-war to decide whether in fact there would be a global society. Every major player in the competition understood that John Paul’s competitors were even then well along in their work of reorganizing and reassembling the economic, political and cultural resources of the world. Everyone who was a major player understood that structures were already being built that would soon enough include the world’s every nation and race, its every culture and subgroup. John Paul knew that neither he nor anyone else could reverse that momentum.
For John Paul and the handful of truly major players he faced, therefore, that was merely the arena in which his real competition would have to take place. For the few who were engaged in this struggle at or near the height of power where John Paul was determined to engage in it, it was a given that the real competition had to be far more profound than would ever be apparent in the merely visible rush of change and innovation. It had to be nothing less than a fight to capture the minds—to direct the very impetus of will—of men and women everywhere, at the unique moment when all the structures of civilization, including those of John Paul’s Church, were being transformed into the framework that would not only house the new global society but shape everything about it.
Within that unprecedented context, those closest to John Paul knew that he had, and still does have, his own unwavering vision of the way human affairs will develop and climax. He knows—or is persuaded that he knows—what the ultimately resulting system will be, should he lose this gargantuan gamble of his.
In other words, John Paul has a clear vision of our near-future world. And his reading of what that world will be is at serious odds with that of his dedicated adversaries.
All of the Pontiff’s papal actions, and his inaction as well, were and still are dictated by that vision. Moreover, everything he did, even in the earliest days of his pontificate, was undertaken according to a timetable linked to that vision.
This papal timetable was, and remains, as unprecedented in its way as so much else in John Paul’s pontificate. It is a timetable synchronized with the galloping historical developments of our present era. And yet, it was never defined or set out in days or weeks or years. John Paul never saw himself or his adversaries in the world’s supercompetition in a race against time, as might be the case in some more banal struggle. He was always certain that he would have all the necessary time of this world at his disposal, just as he always knew that his competitors were equally confident that time was on their side.
For whatever comfort it might be, John Paul’s vision did not, nor does it now, encompass bloody events in terms of bodies and lives. He did not, nor does he now, see the competition into which he had plunged in terms of wars and military weapons. He saw it, and sees it now, in terms of mind-destroying and soul-consuming clashes of irreconcilable humanisms ranged against himself and one another. Nevertheless, John Paul knew that the tension between himself and his adversaries would be no less fierce for the absence of crude weapons and invasion dates. A historian and realist,
the Pope knew that victory in any war—and certainly in this war—is made possible above all by the spirit of the combatants.
From John Paul’s point of view, then, and in the calculations of his competitors, the stakes were too high for lukewarm spirits or halfhearted efforts. Hence, he refused to break out in distraught laments and would allow himself only a few angry reproaches. Hence, too, he would refuse to lash out in a policy of harsh repression or sanctions. Despite constant urgings from every quarter, he would declare no wars of any expected kind on anyone.
For the many who believed then, and who may still believe, that this so public Pope was what they saw and no more, it was an irony that, while his efforts in the arena of papal foreign policy quickly evened up some of the odds against him, the enemies of his Church were scoring just as heavily through John Paul’s own failure to control his Church from within.
Meanwhile, for those of his enemies who understood, as they still understand, that there is much more to John Paul and to his pontificate than meets the inexperienced eye, worry rapidly replaced any sense of irony. No one of his enemies, and no combination of them who were in the arena at that moment, were able to match the international stature John Paul so quickly and skillfully made his own. Nor would they try; in this quarter, discretion was still the better part of valor. Nevertheless, if this Pope could not be beaten on what his adversaries regarded as their turf, perhaps he could not be beaten at all.
Of course, there was another side to that coin. The critical question even among the Pope’s staunchest supporters was: How far could John Paul advance without a vibrant and papally unified Church behind him? Papal serenity was all very fine; but how far could the shambles be allowed to go? How far would be too far? Or—and this was always the ultimate fear for some who had John Paul’s ear and for an ever-increasing number who did not—was it to be that the Church under this Pope would become invisible, reduced to some sad and tattered modern equivalent of the Church of the ancient catacombs?
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