Crawling from the Wreckage (6 page)

In the days to come, we will be hearing the days to come, we will be hearing a great deal about Pope John Paul II’s impact on the Catholic Church, the candidates for the succession, and what kind of straw they burn with the ballots to get that black smoke. This is the first time that a pope has died in twenty-seven years, and that finally gives me a hook for my story about how the last pope died. Or rather, about how I covered the previous pope’s death. Or actually, how I didn’t cover it.

It was late September of 1978, and I had been driving across the Alps all night from Germany with Mati and Tom—two hot-shot young journalists just like me. We were doing a radio series on war, and were passing through Italy on our way to Rome’s Ciampino airport and then on to an aircraft carrier out in the Mediterranean. But first, we planned to stop in Rome for a day or two, so I’d arranged for us to stay at my friend Fareeda’s flat in Trastevere, an area near the Vatican.

We stopped at a service area an hour north of Rome to phone Fareeda, because we needed to get the key before she left for work. We left Mati sleeping in the car, and when we came back he told us this weird story about how a truck driver had tried to tell him something. Mati hadn’t understood a word—the only languages he spoke were Estonian and English—but he was a great mimic, and he parroted what the man had said.

“Il papa è morto,” the man had said, and Mati had looked blank, so the truck driver repeated it in German: “Der Papst ist gestorben.” Then he’d put his hands together and laid his head on them, as if he were going to sleep—or dying. “That means ‘The Pope is dead,’ ” I said, and we all laughed at the poor trucker. How could anybody be so out of touch? The old pope had died over a month ago; Cardinal Albino Luciani had already been elected in his place, and had chosen the papal name John Paul.

We drove on into Rome. (There was nothing on the radio but hymns, so we switched it off.) We got to Trastevere too late to catch Fareeda before she left for work, so we went to the centre of town and had a second breakfast, then sat in a café and drank some wine.

Meanwhile, back in London, they were frantic to get in touch with us. They knew we were due in Rome that day, and we were just about the only English-speaking radio journalists in town. There were hundreds of them in town last month, when the new pope was crowned, but they’d all gone home. However, this was well before the age of mobile phones, so we sat there in blissful ignorance and had some more wine. And some more.

It was about three in the afternoon when I noticed a man walking by with a paper folded under his arm and the headline showing: “Il papa è morto.” Oh, bugger. The new one had died, too. We’re in trouble now.

We sent Tom off to phone London with some cock-and-bull story about how we were trapped all night in an Alpine pass and had just arrived in
Rome, while Mati and I dashed over to St. Peter’s Square to get some vox pop. By the time we got there, alas, everybody was long gone. Earlier the square had been full of weeping old ladies on their knees, but then they all went home to make lunch and didn’t come back. People do love an excuse to mourn together in public, but there was a limit to what you would do for a man who had only been pope for thirty-three days.

There was nobody around except for a few desperate journalists interviewing each other, so we did the same and “pigeoned” the resulting sorry effort off to London with an obliging Alitalia stewardess. (Yes, technology was once that low.) Mercifully, it got lost in transit. We solemnly vowed that we would never tell anybody else about the day, and sealed the pact with another bottle of wine.

The only thing I learned from all this was the real source of the Beatles song “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” The chorus had always seemed a bit obscure: “Bang! Bang! Maxwell’s silver hammer / came down upon her head / Clang! Clang! Maxwell’s silver hammer / made sure that she was dead.” But Paul McCartney had been born Catholic, and soon the media were once again full of trivia about Vatican rituals—like the deathbed one where a cardinal bangs the late pope on the forehead five times with a silver hammer, while calling out his real name, to make sure that he is dead.

Albino Luciani didn’t reply, so the brief reign of Pope John Paul I was declared over and Karol Wojtyla got the chance to remake the Catholic Church in his own authoritarian and ultra-conservative image. His rockstar charisma deflected attention from the collapse in church attendance, the hemorrhaging of priests (an estimated one hundred thousand quit the priesthood during his papacy), and the end of the Catholic monopoly in Latin America (where up to a quarter of the poor have converted to evangelical Protestant sects in the past quarter-century). How different it all might have been if Luciani hadn’t had his heart attack.

I never did like John Paul II. Just after he took over, I did a four-continent tour of the Catholic Church for a radio series. At that point, it was an institution in a ferment of new ideas: liberation theology, feminist critiques of the traditional hierarchy, social activism of every sort. Karol Wojtyla shut all of that down, and left the Church a poorer place than he found it. But he did do one thing right
.

It was the biggest photo op in world history, and everybody who is anybody was there. Even the Protestant president of the United States and the Muslim clergyman who is president of the Islamic Republic of Iran felt obliged to show up for the Pope’s funeral. But the media circus is already moving on to the next global event, and we have one last opportunity to consider the life of Karol Wojtyla.

Forget all the stuff about how he smothered all the new thinking and decentralization that were beginning to transform the Catholic Church when he was chosen pope in 1978. It’s true, but he was elected precisely to carry out that task. The conservatives in the Roman Curia who had been sidelined by Vatican II were determined to stop the rot (as they saw it), and they were well aware that Wojtyla was a man in their own mould when they pushed him forward as the dark-horse candidate to succeed John Paul I.

He acted as they expected that he would, and it would be foolish to condemn him for it. He held those conservative beliefs long before he became pope, and he never hid them. But there was one thing he did that astonished and appalled the conservatives; and that one thing will continue to define Catholic Church policy centuries from now.

Most of John Paul II’s policies are eminently reversible, if a subsequent generation of church leaders should decide that a different line on contraceptives or women priests is more in accord with divine teaching. That isn’t likely to happen any time soon, given the way that John Paul II has packed the College of Cardinals with like-minded individuals, but with enough time, many things become possible. What later generations are most unlikely to reverse is his acknowledgement that Judaism is a valid alternative path to God.

We are not just talking “apology” here—although Christians certainly owed apologies to the Jews for two millennia of slander and persecution—nor even “reconciliation.” John Paul II went far beyond that, though few members of the general public realized it at the time: he recognized Judaism as a true religion.

There is an old saying, beloved of Catholic theologians, that “error has no rights.” It drives the ecumenical crowd crazy, but it is perfectly
logical: if you believe that your religion is true, then the others are false. John Paul II was perfectly affable and hospitable to various Protestant Christians who came to visit, but he truly believed that they were wrong, wrong, wrong—and he refused to enter into the equal relationships that they imagined possible between the various Christian sects.

He was more open to the Orthodox Christian world, both because he came from Eastern Europe himself and because the quarrel between the Orthodox churches and the Church of Rome has always been about hierarchical and stylistic matters, not basic doctrinal issues. It was in his relations with non-Christian religions also in the lineage of Abraham, however, that John Paul II broke decisively with Christian and Catholic tradition.

After fourteen hundred years of constant and intimate contact between the Muslim and Christian peoples around the Mediterranean, he was the first pope ever to enter a mosque. He doubtless continued to believe that Christianity was the one true successor to Judaism and that Islam was a post-Jewish, post-Christian heresy, but he was the first pope to argue that cordial relations between them were possible and desirable. And, in the case of the Jews, he went much further.

It’s understandable that the new religion of Christianity, struggling to distance itself from its Jewish roots, should have insisted that the Christian revelation had invalidated and replaced the older faith. By implication, however, that meant that those Jews who refused to convert were in revolt against God—and from that mindset came the Christian image of Jews as “Christ killers,” and two millennia of savage Christian persecution culminating in the European Holocaust of 1942–45.

Karol Wojtyla was a witness to that Holocaust, which may be why he did the extraordinary thing that he did. On his visit to Israel in 2000, he posted a prayer in a niche in Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall that said: “God of our fathers, you chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your name to the nations. We are deeply saddened by the behaviour of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking your forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the covenant.”

By posting that prayer in the wall, he acknowledged that this uniquely Jewish method of communicating with the Almighty is valid; and by its contents, he accepted that the Jewish covenant with God is still in force.
It was a thing done in a moment, but it ended two thousand years of Christian rejection of Judaism. The Catholic Church, while still advocating the conversion of everybody else, no longer seeks the conversion of the Jews, which is as close as it can get to acknowledging the equal validity of the Jewish faith.

That was the Big Thing that John Paul II did, and it is more important and will last far longer than all the other things he did put together.

Doctrinal disputes, within or even among the three great Abrahamic religions, are of limited interest to those who do not share their particular beliefs, but the
political
relations among these three great religions matter a lot. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute poisons the relationship between Jews and Muslims everywhere. The Christian-Muslim relationship has been fraught from the very beginning, when half of the then-Christian world was conquered by Muslim armies in little more than a century. Unlike the localized, and to some extent encysted, quarrel between the Israelis and their neighbours, moreover, the Muslim-Christian relationship implicates more than half of the world’s people
.

The past year has been one of the worst in recent history for relations between Muslims and “the West” (as the part of the world formerly called “Christendom” is now known). According to the Pew Global Attitudes Project for 2006, an opinion survey conducted in thirteen mainly Christian or Muslim countries by the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C., the majorities who saw relations between the West and Islam as “generally bad” ranged from 53 percent in Russia and Indonesia to highs of 70 percent in Germany and 84 percent in Turkey.

There were purely local causes for some of the extreme reactions, like resentment among Turks at being seen as problem candidates for European Union membership simply because they are Muslims. The violent uproar in January over Danish newspaper cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad doubtless influenced the answers of many respondents, both Muslim and Western, in a poll conducted only months
later. But military confrontations that killed a lot of people were the core problem: Western armies fought local insurgents in two occupied Muslim countries, Iraq and Afghanistan; suicide bomb attacks by young British Muslims killed fifty-two people in London; and the nightmare images of 9/11 were never far from the surface in the United States. Furthermore, the Arab-Israeli fight over the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea had entered its seventieth bloody year.

Seventy years, give or take a few, depending on whether you date that long conflict from the great Palestinian revolt against Jewish immigration in 1936 or from some other clash of that period. Without that open sore, however, the deep resentment of Muslims at having been conquered by European empires—as they all were, apart from the Turks—would probably have mostly died down by now. It is the Israeli-Palestinian dispute that has kept it alive for generations of Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia.

The U.S. and British invasion of Iraq was a ghastly mistake that confirmed existing suspicions in the Muslim world: its declared motives were so transparently false that Muslims everywhere were driven to look for ulterior, undeclared motives—like a Western crusade against Islam. On the other hand, Muslims have remained in denial about how their own internal conflicts have spilled over into anti-Western terrorism. Majorities in most of the Muslim countries polled still refuse to believe that Arabs carried out the 9/11 attacks in the United States, taking refuge in fantasies about Zionist or
CIA
plots.

Descend from high politics to cultural stereotypes, and it starts to look like a classic family quarrel. A majority of Muslims see Westerners as violent and immoral, while the view from the reverse perspective is that Muslims are violent and fanatical. Majorities in every Western country polled see Muslims as disrespectful of women, and majorities in every Muslim country polled (except Turkey) see Westerners as disrespectful of women. But then, it
is
a family quarrel.

Just the same, you cannot really have a “clash of civilizations” between Muslims and “Westerners” (Christians and Jews, by belief or at least by cultural descent) because they are members of the same civilization—the twin descendants of the old classical civilization of the Near East and the Mediterranean world. That world was divided almost fourteen centuries ago between competing but clearly related religions—the Christians of
seventh-century Syria and Egypt who were the first to face Muslim armies surging out of Arabia saw Islam as a new Christian heresy—but it remains a single civilization whose fundamental cultural values are largely shared.