Interviews - James Carroll | John Paul II - The Millennial Pope | FRONTLINE

Now, in the debate, there were many bishops who did not want those points in there. And it was going back and forth. And my friend said to me, all of a sudden down at the far end of the table a man began to speak--a voice that he had not heard in any debate. In many debates, on many other questions, he had never heard this voice. He knew that it was a different voice because of the heavy accent. And the man spoke of the Church's responsibility to change its relationship to Jews. And my friend said to me, "I lifted up my head. I thought, "who is this prophet?" And I looked down and it was this young bishop from Poland. And no one even knew his name. And it was the first intervention he made at the Council. And it was very important.

That's, I think, the beginning of the large public impact that the Pope has had on this question. In Krakow he had already begun to change it, but that was the beginning of his impact on the Church. And the Nostra Aetate document stands as a monument, a turning point, in its history. Partly, I'd say, because of him. And so what follows then from his becoming pope isn't surprising.

What are the acts of the Pope regarding reaching out to the Jews that have been most significant?

Well, when you look at the history of this papacy on the question of Catholic-Jewish relations, there are a number of moments that are always cited as definitive. The great Shoah concert at the Vatican; the Pope's visit to the synagogue in Rome--the first Roman-Catholic Pope ever to enter a synagogue; the Pope's recognition of the state of Israel; the Pope's clear personal interest in Jews wherever he travels, wherever he goes.

But underwriting all of that is the clear personal experience and commitment he brings to the question. It's evident in the passionate statements he has made about the Shoah, and in the passion he brings to this, his own great affirmation of "Never again." And I think, as is true of many Christians and Catholics of his, down to my generation, what was revealed about humanity, but also about our religion during the Holocaust, is a touchstone of this man's identity and faith. And I recognize that in him. I claim it as something I have in common with him. He's a prophet to me on this. How can I be a Catholic after the Holocaust? It's not an easy question, really. And this Pope suggests the importance of it, I'd say.

Was there anything else in the Pope's personal biography that you know about that helps create this sense of personal urgency about the Jews and the relationship between Jews and Catholics?

I referred earlier to the power it had for me to stand in the house in which he grew up with Jews, and to understand in his biography that he was unusual in his time as a friend to Jews. He describes himself in one of his books, the impact it had on him in 1947 when he returned from Rome, and went back to his village. And even though I think in the abstract he knew this, he describes the impact it had on him when he discovered that all of the Jews of the village were simply gone. The absence of Jews in Poland he feels as a presence, quite clearly.

Do you think that Wojtyla led a very quiet life during the occupation? Do you think there might be any sense in him by not doing enough, watching an entire population disappear?

What I know of his biography is that he didn't actively engage in active resistance on behalf of Jews. I can only speculate with anyone as to how that might leave him feeling. It's quite clear to me, on the other hand, that he did, in his own embrace of public religion, at that moment during the Nazi occupation, engage in a very important kind of resistance. So his personal integrity, his courage, his rejection of everything represented by Nazism is very clear. What it means to him that he didn't directly participate in the rescue of Jews, one can only imagine. I wouldn't be surprised if that weren't part of what drives his passion on the subject even now. But that would be speculation on my part.

You said to me that John Paul II is the absolute right person to reach out to the Jews, yet there is this irony that he is unable to carry out this last crucial step. Talk about that.

Well, first of all, I'd say that the last crucial step in his story on this subject may be the step he takes when he goes to Jerusalem. So it's maybe premature. It may have been premature of me to say that to you. I have a dream of what that trip to Jerusalem might involve. As you know, it's scheduled now for the end of next March. I can't predict, but I certainly hope that in some large part it includes a very clear act of identification with the survival of Jews, which must include for a Catholic in his position a very clear act of repentance for failures of Christians down through the centuries, both as enemies of Jews and as passive bystanders when Jews are murdered.

Willy Brandt very powerfully simply fell to his knees at the Warsaw memorial many years ago, which was the beginning of public acts of repentance in relation to the Holocaust. We can expect the Pope to fall to his knees. So it has to in a sense go farther than that. What it can be I can't imagine. But he does have a strong sense of gesture and authentic expression. His time in Jerusalem will tell, I'd say.

This apology he makes to the Jews, what was remarkable about it? What was at stake? What was incomplete and why was it difficult?

We use the word apology in this discussion a lot. I think it may not be the most useful word, actually. Well, rather than apology, I'd rather see us talk about change. The paramount issue here is not the behavior of the Roman-Catholic Church during World War II. The paramount issue is the two thousand year long tradition of Christian contempt for Jews. That is what must change. A start has been made towards that change, and we simply must go much further. That's what's become clear under this pope. That Nostra Aetate was a beginning, but it wasn't enough. The affirmation that the Jewish religion continues to have the favor of God was a beginning, but it isn't enough.

How do the absolute and exclusive claims the Christians make, for Jesus Christ and for the Church, contradict the Church's attempt to respect not only Judaism but other religions? In other words, what's been revealed in this time, in the lifetime of this Pope and the Holocaust, certainly, are the limits of Christian exclusivism, Christian triumphalism, Christian superiority of various kinds, which gets to be an authority question. How is power exercised? How does authority deal with dissent? It's a question that surfaces in relationship to Jews. Why? Because Jews are the original, quintessential dissenters. The challenge to the Christian story from Jews, from the first generation, has been taken as a mortal threat by Christians. That's what has to change. So it's far more complicated than World War II, even though World War II is the epiphany, the revelation, of this broken structure of Christian contempt for Jews.

John Paul II understands the importance of this change, I believe. He's been inhibited in his inability to go perhaps even as far with it as he'd like to, I think mostly because he has an idea of the Church that doesn't admit easily the idea of change to it, and doesn't admit the idea of failure and of sin. Can the Church itself be regarded as having sinned? Well, I think until we can say "yes" to that question, we can't make much more progress on the larger question of the Church's relationship to the Jews. Because whether you're talking about the Church's effective neutrality during the Holocaust, or the Church's long history of the hatred of Jews, either way we're talking about sin. Why can the Church affirm that? Because the Church is in the world to lift up the idea of a God who forgives. A Church that can't acknowledge sin, in a sense denies the existence of a forgiving God. So there are very deep things at stake here - not just for Jews, not just for Catholics and Jews, but for Catholics, and for Christians.

What did the document "We Remember" do, and, did not do, that was so revolutionary?

The document "We Remember: A Reflection On The Shoah," which was published by the Vatican Commission For Religious Relations with The Jewish People under the name of Cardinal Edward Cassidy, the head of that Commission, was an act of repentance for the failure of the Church in relation to Jews. As such, it was very important.

And that's perhaps the first and most basic thing that should be said about it. It was intended to be an act of repentance. It also, by the way, puts the institution of the Roman Catholic Church firmly and forever on the record about the facts of the Holocaust, taking away any possibility that the Church would ever be able to be recruited by Holocaust-deniers in the future. So, very important.

The document was a disappointment to many Catholics and Jews because the implementation of that act of repentance was deeply flawed, ambivalent, confused. For example, in a clear attempt to distinguish between, as it says, "the Church as such" and those members of the Church who were guilty of crimes against the Jews, whether as bystanders during the Holocaust or as anti-Semites, it seems that this document is exonerating the institutional Church, which can seem to be an exoneration of the Vatican itself, which can seem to be an exoneration of Christian unity in relationship to the Jewish people going back through the years.

The history in the document is quite inadequate. In some cases it's dead wrong. For example, about World War II the document says, "Many Christians supported Jews. Some Christians collaborated with the Nazis." That's exactly wrong. It should say, "Many Christians collaborated with the Nazis. Some Christians supported Jews." The document uses the passive voice as if there is no moral agency. "It befell Jews." "Jews were sometimes treated as..." "It came about that..." There's no moral agency. You wouldn't know from this document that for three hundred years the Inquisition - the Inquisition's never mentioned - for three hundred years the Inquisition, an institution of the Church as such, carried out a ruthless campaign against Jews, Christians who were descended from Jews, and the whole world that is represented by interaction between Christians and Jews. The Inquisition is a disaster on this subject. There's no repenting on the subject of Christian contempt for Jews. Without facing up to the Inquisition--that's just one example. The history in the document is unacceptably flawed.

The longest footnote is a gratuitous defense of the behavior, the wisdom of the diplomacy, as it says, of Pius XII. It's too soon for history to render a judgment on Pius XII, I understand, and critics understand that there are arguments to be made on both sides of the choices he made during World War II. But it certainly doesn't serve the cause of Jewish-Catholic understanding or history for the Vatican in a document like this to be making unnuanced and sweeping and historically-dubious claims about the behavior and choices of Pius XII, as it does. So, you know, what seem to be a set of details about this document, when taken together, overwhelmed the very basic and positive aspects of the document.

The good news is that once there was a response of criticism and quite negative analysis, not just from Jewish groups but from within the Church as well, the Vatican, especially in the person of Cardinal Cassidy, made it very clear that this process is not over, this is not the last word. The Vatican archives must be opened as quickly and as efficiently as possible, fully, to get these questions of World War II resolved by historians. And the Church must do a much fuller job of acknowledging the history of its contempt for the Jewish people. And then the repentance will have the ring of truth about it. And then we can get on to the larger and more difficult and perhaps even more important questions of how to reconsider now the meaning of the claims the Church makes for Jesus and for itself--having learned all of this, you could really say, the hard way.

What do John Paul II's occasional missteps tell us about the journeys he has taken?

Well, when we're talking about the attitudes of Christians toward Jews, all of us who are Christians have to understand that our bones are just dipped in the acid of the contempt for Jews. And it's not a surprise that all of us continually discover ways in which we're still at the mercy of it, shockingly. Every Christian every Holy Week hears the slanders about the Jewish people read from the pulpit.

John Paul II, in October of last year, presided over the canonization of Edith Stein. The process of canonizing Edith Stein, even though it began, I'm quite sure, probably before he was Pope, has been near and dear to him, I think for a lot of good reasons, and I think he brought almost nothing but good intentions to this. But in that canonization ceremony, he said that he hoped that Edith Stein would be, as he put it, "a bridge of understanding between the Jewish and Christian people." Well, that hope betrays a sad lack of understanding for what this canonization has meant to Jews.

John Paul II expressed the wish that her Feast Day, the day on which she died in Auschwitz, August 9, would forever now be a day in which Christians would remember the victims of the Shoah. To which Jews say, "Remember them as what? As Christians?" If we're going to remember victims of the Shoah, why don't we join with the worldwide Jewish community and remember them on Yom Hashoa and in the spring, which has become a sacred day for Jews? Why do Christians have to have a separate day? Why is Edith Stein held up now as an icon of the Holocaust, when she's the convert whose life story has to be very problematic for Jews?

Understand as a young man, I learned about the Holocaust because of Edith Stein. Like many Catholics, I revere her. I have no trouble imagining her as a saint. But I understand why this is a terribly conflicted thing for Jews. It means that how her story is told is very important. In the Vatican, and at the canonization ceremony, you didn't hear anything about the letter that Edith Stein wrote to Pius XI in 1933, asking him to intervene for the Jews in Nazi Germany, a letter that was answered with a papal blessing. You didn't hear that talked about. In 1938, after Kristalnacht, Edith Stein herself, in her letter, said, "I wonder if the Pope ever thinks of that request I made of him."

Edith Stein dies, having refused to be treated differently as a baptized Jew, which can be made, and has been made, kind of evidence that she went to her death willingly, which is nonsense. She tried to get out, she wanted out. We don't have to think she went to it willingly to make her a saint. No, what it means is at the end of her life she was extending the circle of her concern to all Jews, whether they were baptized or not. And if we're going to remember her as a saint, we should remember that very few Catholics joined her in that, and very few bishops joined her in that. The bishops of the Netherlands did, which is why she was arrested. But almost no other national hierarchy did. So, there are ways to remember her, and I think that this Pope has not heard sufficiently the voices who lift up the complexities of Edith Stein's life story.

Who was Edith Stein? Why was she made a saint and why are many Jews discomfited by her canonization?

Edith Stein was to Catholics of my generation what Anne Frank was to the broader culture: the innocent woman, who was taken by the Nazis and murdered. It happened, as we discovered her story, that she was born a Jew. She became a Catholic having been an agnostic. She was a brilliant philosophy student in Germany, and she became a Carmelite nun, a contemplative nun. She entered the convent in 1933, a few months after Hitler came to power. And all around her, the movements against Jews began to ignite and take off. Edith Stein was a resisting woman. She resisted anti-Semitism as a Catholic, and she wrote a book, an autobiography, that she said herself was specifically designed to rebut the Nazi anti-Semitic slanders against her people. Life In A Jewish Family.

After Kristalnacht in 1938, the savage Nazi pogrom, she realized that she was in danger living in the convent in Cologne. She fled across the border to the Netherlands, from where she was snatched by the S.S. in 1943, and she died in Auschwitz. Now she's become a saint of the Catholic Church.

There are questions that Jews have a right to ask: what is the meaning of her conversion? Is conversion now being held up for a model of Jewish behavior? I don't believe it, and the Church is working hard to say "no" to that. But it's still a question. Is the Holocaust now being remembered as something that happened to Christians as well as to Jews? That's another question. It's a good question. I don't believe that either. I think that the Church has canonized Edith Stein with the best of intentions, but we're tone-deaf on subjects of our own religious tradition of anti-Semitism, and the fact that these questions get raised by this, we need to take much more seriously.

Where does the Pope's devotion to the Virgin Mary come from and how does it help explain his views about women?

Well, the Pope's devotion to Mary is one thing, but the real revelation of his views of women to the church is in his attitude towards ordination of women to the priesthood. It's interesting to imagine the Pope, who is so devoted to Mary - his crest, his motto are Marian, participate in the Marian cult, he prays to Mary, he refers to Mary. It's hard to imagine what he would say to Mary if she presented herself for ordination to the priesthood.

There's a political problem here. The patriarchy of the Roman CatholicChurch is essential to the kind of power John Paul II is exercising in the Church and trying to protect for the hierarchy. So anything that threatens that patriarchy has to be resisted. And that's my own understanding of why the question of women in the priesthood is so anathema to him.

As you try to imagine Mary living in the Church today, it's of course self-contradictory, and it's impossible to imagine that it will stand much longer, I would say, because it's such a basic issue of justice. The largest irony of this papacy is that John Paul II is an apostle of justice, and the world legend for that. But he presides over this rank injustice within the Catholic Church, this violation of rights to equality for women - more than half the Church's members. Women have a right to be really quite outraged about it. The energy with which this Pope has fought off every movement for equal rights among women, among Catholics, including women, is really scandalous, and it's especially jarring in relationship to his personal devotion to this great woman, Mary. So it falls into that category of "go figure." I can't understand it myself.

What theological reasons does the Pope present for his continued prohibition of the ordination of women?

As I understand it, the issue of ordaining women to the priesthood--which is now the symbol of admitting women to full exercise of power and citizenship in the Catholic Church--the reason it's closed in the mind of the Pope is because he takes quite literally, in a quite fundamentalist way, the structure of the church as it's recorded in the New Testament. It's a structure that emphasizes the authority of the twelve Apostles, all of whom are men. We hear it said again and again that the Church can't ordain women because Jesus only chose males. Of course, everyone in the Church, from the Pope down, understands in a hundred other ways that we aren't to take the proscriptions of the scriptures literally like that. We understand-- everyone, from the Pope down--how culture-bound the Church is at various points in its history, and we understand what it is to let go of narrow cultural notes of identification. So nobody says that Irish Catholic males can't be ordained to the priesthood because none of the apostles was an Irish person. I mean, nobody says that. It's only in this one way that we think so fundamentalistically about the definition of the Church in the first generation.

By the way, there's a lot of scholarly research that points out that, in fact, women exercised authority and leadership in the first and second generation of the Church in ways that go way beyond the imaginations of His Holiness and the people who don't want to give women power today. Having said all that, I think it's very important to come back to what is the basic issue here. It's an issue of justice. Are women fully equal human beings or not? The Catholic Church is showing a face to women today that the broad culture showed to people of color a couple of generations ago, and to people of other languages and to Jews a couple of generations ago. And we've moved away from all those things because we understand that there are basic issues of justice involved. For the Church to refuse to ordain women is morally equivalent to if the Church refused to ordain people of color. It's equally indefensible and it's equally outrageous. And there should be, in my view, much more - not less anger, rude behavior, pushing within the Catholic Church on this question.

Why does sexuality seem to carry so much weight in this papacy?

Well, one does wonder why questions having to do with sexuality carry such weight in the Catholic Church in this papacy. The Church's positions on a whole range of issues having to do with sexuality is quite unyielding. And one must wonder about it. It's the one realm within which there's very little nuance. The Pope is radically opposed to the death penalty, and yet Vatican statements always acknowledge there are conceivable situations in which a government might have to put someone to death. The Pope is clearly opposed in principal to war, and yet the Church is clearly prepared to affirm the necessary use of force at times. The Church has, in the words of liberation theology, a "preferential option for the poor." And yet we always want to protect the rights of all classes of people. But in this one area there's very little nuance. On abortion of course, there is no give. Abortion is defined with the kind of absolutism that even the loss of adult human life isn't. And certainly in relationship to questions that impinge upon the rights of women to make their own choices about contraception, abortion, even the rights of women to make their own choices in relationship to the family, and to a function in the workplace, the Church seems very suspicious, very unhelpful.

John Paul does not share the instinct of his predecessor, John XXIII, who recognized the women's movement as one of what he called "the hopeful signs of the times." The women's movement is clearly quite a threat to the present establishment in the Church. I'd only say also though, that because the Church, because the hierarchy, has put such emphasis on this question of women's ordination, practically speaking infallibly about it - if you believe some Church spokespersons, they have spoken infallibly about it - I think that it's a wedge in which authority itself will be changed within the Catholic Church. I would predict that the coming into full equality in the Church will be one of the things that leads to transformation of the way in which authority is exercised. And that's the good news in this.

How is the Pope a man of contradictions and how does this affect his religious views?

The man is nothing but contradictions, which is why we have such a complicated relationship to him. The most political Pope in modern history who refuses to allow a political role for clergy. A man who is a self-declared enemy of communism, but who's also suspicious of democracy; devoted to Mary, but suspicious of women as equal partners. The complexities of the Pope are part of what make him so large, I'd say. His deep intellectual commitment, his serious capacity as a scholar and as a philosopher, and yet this almost childish readiness to read, not only his religious faith, but in some ways the world itself, in a very fundamentalist way. One of the effects of such a set of paradoxes in a person is that it requires the Church's leading members to make, in a sense, their own choices about him, which is why we all finds ways both to accept him and to criticize him.

But for me, perhaps the single largest contradiction is the way in which he has simultaneously made himself the only priest that the church needs, by manipulating the mass media and the cult of celebrity so ingeniously - so he goes everywhere as the priest, and he is the favorite priest that Catholics around the world have - while simultaneously presiding over the collapse of the priesthood, the collapse of the very structure of ministry which makes the sacraments available to people.

The great tragedy of this papacy is that while he has traveled the world and become such a figure of religious devotion, the local experience of believing Christians and Catholics has gotten more and more and more impoverished. So that there are many churches without priests now, many priests working alone. The very structure through which we have the Eucharist, which is why we're Catholics, basically, is threatened. The priesthood is collapsing under this great world priest.

Specifically, how has John Paul II done this?

The priesthood collapses because the structures of the priesthood, rooted in the Middle Ages, aren't allowed to be changed. There's no question of admitting married men to be priests, unless they're Anglicans in flight from the ordination of women. There's no question of ordaining women. There's no question of opening up the clerical culture--this narrowly-defined, and I'd say rigidly-defined, culture of clericalism--so that we get out of that idea of the priesthood as a separate class, mostly a privileged class within the Church, and begin to return to a much more ancient tradition of the ministry as service, and the ministry not as an exercise of power but as a service of love. The priesthood belongs to the Church.

I used to be a priest. I left the priesthood. Lots of my contemporaries did. There was very little possibility of changing the church once John Paul II became pope. In some very important ways he has turned the clock back on the reforms of the Vatican Council. He has protected the clerical culture of the ministry, this narrow notion of what it is to be a priest. He has ruthlessly restricted the freedom of priests. One obvious example is his yanking priests back away from politics. His refusal to accept the fact that in some cultures, the ministry requires a political commitment, making priests choose between their political conscience and their vocation within the Church.

His refusal to open up the structures of priests to people who don't fit the usual mold: obviously married people, but also women. And the broader problem, that in his time, the Church has tried to restore an outmoded notion of what it is to be a Catholic. And people recognize that. What we have here is the last effort of the medieval church to protect itself, to spare itself from the assault of modernity. In that sense John Paul II is the last of the nineteenth century popes, even now at the end of the twentieth century. And for that reason, in that one regard, his papacy has been a tragedy for the church. He follows in the footsteps of Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI, both of whom were headed in a very different direction.

Comment on John Paul II's "culture of death."

The culture of death is a phrase that resonates very, very deeply with me. I confess it means different things to different people, but this Pope's steady critique of runaway market capitalism, militarism, dependence on weaponry, the refusal of the Western world to take the end of the Cold War seriously and disarm, this Pope's heartfelt, plaintive protests when bombs started to fall - he speaks very powerfully to me.

There's something very wrong in the world today, when rich people - and by rich people, I mean the people of the North, the people of Europe, the people of America - when we have so successfully walled off from our consciences and our consciousness the experience of the billions of people who are desperate. And I do believe that this Pope is quite attuned to that terrible tragedy. And that's what the culture of death is to me. He's protesting the way in which the affluent West and North has begun to wall itself off from the rest of the earth. And I believe in a sense it may be his greatest act, this protest of his. I wish it were more widely listened to.

Why is John Paul II suspicious of Western culture?

John Paul II's suspicion of so much that makes up what we think of as Western culture is partly the obviously negative aspects of it: suicide, the rampant use of abortion for birth control, the use of prisons instead of schools as a way of dealing with the dispossessed - his critique of the negative is powerful. But one of the problems of course is it's hard to have a sense - and maybe this is part of the tragedy here - it's hard to have a sense of what this Pope values in the world, what in the world does he love.

With John XXIII there was no question. John XXIII, the world could look at him and understand that he was rooted in a sense of the goodness of life, the joy of it, the thrill it is to be here on the earth. John Paul II seems to be a man who's deeply suffering, and it's not just in his later years, when the infirmities of his old age have obviously impacted him. He's a man for whom suffering seems to be the basic experience of the human condition.

And I do believe in a way there are two kinds of people. There are the people who experience life that way, for whom Jesus will be on the cross till the end of the time. But there are other people for whom life is goodness itself. And it may be with John Paul II that it's this deep-rooted sense of suffering that is the thing that overwhelms so much of what he's trying to say. And so much of the truth and power and relevance of his message seems to get overwhelmed by the apparent misery of the man who's delivering the message. And it's a poignant thing for a Christian, especially, to see, because we have a long and complicated ambivalence about suffering. My own feeling is, we would do well with less of it, and we would do well with less celebration of it. And that's a piece of my response to this Pope too. It's impossible to look at that face and not wish the man well.

Would you describe his view of the world as Manichaean?

That may make too much of it. It may be too abstract to think of John Paul II in theological and philosophical terms, as if the question of whether he's a Manichaean or a Puritan or a world-hating agnostic--I mean, it may be a simple question of temperament. And also of personal history. This is a man who has suffering in his face, but he also has suffering in his life. I wouldn't make too much of it philosophically. I think, however, the power of his sense of the power of the darkness in the world, and evil as a real threat is two things. It's a fair warning of the situation we're all faced with, and we're fools if we don't listen to that warning. But it's also far short of all that life is about. Because life is also about rampant goodness, happiness, hope. And we don't see that much of happiness and hope in this man. Although his goodness obviously is deep-rooted.

In regard to his writings about faith, what does this man believe? What makes up his faith?

We were talking before about his contradictions. Maybe another way to talk about it is: the thing that makes John Paul II so powerful for us Catholics is that he's so Catholic. By that I mean he does touch all the bases. He's very pious, and his piety is at the extreme end of Catholic piety. Someone who venerates someone, a person with the stigmata, after all--that's the extreme end of Catholic piety, after all. And he's capable of buying into very dubious, conservative movements, like Opus Dei. And at the other end, he's quite attuned to contemporary philosophy. He's trained as an existential phenomenologist. It's authentic. This is a man of authentic intellect. He's actually able to make you believe that the Catholic Church is big enough to embrace both things at the same time, in him. It's really quite nice.

I love the Church for the way in which it embraces contradictions. John Paul II embodies that about the Catholic Church. Most of the rest of us just stand on one place or the other in the community. He seems to be capable of standing at all places. Padre Pio, yes, at one end. But there he is, last year in Bologna, on the platform with Bob Dylan, quite at home. Do you remember what he said? Bob Dylan sang a couple of songs, and then the Pope went to the microphone and he said - it was a big gathering of youth, Italian youth, a large crowd--and he said, "How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?" And then he said, "There is one road, and it is the road of Jesus Christ." Which is the perfect moment of John Paul II, his capacity to be at home on the platform with Bob Dylan, and his impulse to use it as an opportunity to proclaim a very univocal, and I would say, a little too unnuanced message in this day and age.

I believe that Jesus is my road. But I don't believe there is only one road. And if you push him, he wouldn't believe that either, I don't believe. But that's the Pope: Padre Pio, Bob Dylan. Both things. Contemptuous of modern consumerist celebrity culture, the greatest celebrity of our time. Both things. It's fantastic, really.

How much do you see the Pope as an innovative intellectual/philosopher? What distinguishes John Paul II?

I don't think that his intellectual life has been--that he's kept up to it acutely. He wrote his two dissertations, one was on phenomenology at the university in Krakow, and the other was on Saint John of the Cross, I believe. As far as I know, his "intellectual work" since, you wouldn't read him as a philosopher. I don't say that from any position of superiority, because I'm not a philosopher either. But I've read several of his books, The Gift of Mystery - is that the title? And the other I've forgotten the title of. But I've read them both and I would say they're not the work of a cutting-edge philosophical theological thinker. But they clearly reflect a man who's intellectually alive and capable of asking questions, and attuned.

What is it for you that is most compelling about John Paul II?

When I think of John Paul II I don't think of an intellectual or spiritual resource. I don't read his work for inspiration or nurturing of faith or new ideas about what it is to be a believer. In fact I think in general he's committed to the defense of old ideas that have seen their day. What I find irresistible about him, and what's powerful for me as a Catholic, as a man, is his story. And the way he is publicly living it out. And the way he does make it available. He's obviously a private person, but there's a way in which he has made his own life story the message he's offering the world. Which is why his largest public act, his participation in non-violent, anti-Communist resistance at the end of the Cold War, was so powerful, because he put his own story as a Polish person at the service of that movement. His story as a Polish person who had become pope, after all. And also it's related to his story as a Polish person raised during the war years who has sought ways to help the Church renounce its tradition of anti-Judaism.

So it's his story that carries such weight. And I believe that's what people respond to when he draws crowds, on the road, wherever he goes. People recognize in him a man with a story that's really irresistible, and it is. It's the story for the end of the millennium. It's the story of the end of something. Maybe it's the end of some of the things that we most value and don't want to lose when we see him. It's also the story of the end of things that have passed. He's really a person of the past. He sums up what was great about what has gotten us this far. He is not someone who evokes the future. And you could say that's what a pope is for. But the greatest pope of our time, John XXIII, brief but powerful around the world-- before the age of celebrity and before the age of travel. Before the age, really, of television. And yet he touched the world by the simple, loving readiness to go into the future full of hope. Very different. Very different. I personally long for a John XXIII.

What do you think are the most significant elements of that story?

The elements of his story for a Catholic of my generation are of course his immediate participation in the church's struggle against Nazi Germany. His coming out of that clearly scarred by it, but resolutely determined to affirm his faith in the face of the oppression of Communism. A humane resistance to Communism, I would say, from what I know of it. Quite a brave one. His determination through those years to continue his commitment to writing, thinking, his apparent love of the theater.

I mean there are elements to this story that one doesn't know well, but that evoke a sense of what this robust man was as a young priest, and it must have been irresistible. I come of a generation that really looked to young priests for images of the powerful love of God. I can imagine him being a priest like that. The best of what that priesthood was.

And then, you know, his coming on the scene as the Polish pope. That's the story that we're most aware of. Liberating the Church from the parochialism, the narrow identification of a Church--as we saw especially in Pius XII--of a Church too identified with a narrow curial culture in Italy, in Rome. So a kind of explosion of that. The Church having a new sense of itself. Which means now it's possible to imagine an African pope. It's possible to imagine a Latin-American pope. His personal arrival on the scene changed the story of the Church.

And then of course his immediate commitment, through his own associations, with resistance in Poland, to help bring about - and this can't be emphasized enough - a non-violent end to the Soviet empire. What is the greatest, most unexpected event of the twentieth century? What a foolish question. But isn't there a good chance that it is that the Soviet empire was brought down non-violently? And isn't this man's story part of that? And how could we resist that? That's at the heart of it, also, for me.

The question of Pius XII haunts our generation of Catholics. And one of the questions that defenders of Pius XII always put is, "Well what really could he have done, faced with the challenge of Hitler and the Nazis?" And the answer of course now is obvious. He could have done what John Paul II did, faced with Stalin and Soviet communism. He found a real, practical, concrete way to help resistance that had effects. And after John Paul II, there is no going back and looking at the ineffectual, and ambivalent, ambiguous behavior of previous popes, and seeing it ever the same way again. He's changed the story of the Church.

How would you describe his role in destabilizing Communism not only in Poland, but its affect on neighboring countries?

Well I'm not a political scientist and I'm not a historian, so you know the story better than I do at this point, I'm sure. But I'm talking about the story of it. The story of this Pope's participation in the non-violent overthrow of Soviet communism, is as simple as the story of that electrician Lech Walesa, unemployed electrician who in the Danzig shipyard decides - out of what? - to stand up on a platform, at a certain point, and give a speech, and call for a strike behind the Iron Curtain. You don't strike behind the Iron Curtain! And Walesa struck, and Solidarity was born--a foolish, mad act. The one thing that every wise person in the West swore could never happen. You can never bring this totalitarian system down without a war, without weapons. Can't happen. Beginning with Walesa and Solidarity, with then crucial support--as the story goes, as I believe--crucial support from John Paul II, it happened. It happened.

And it's as simple as the relationship between those two men. And really their kind of resonance with each other. And had that moment not come in Poland, had the Pope not been Polish, obviously the story would have been very different, would have had to be different. The great, if you want to use the word "miracle," of the twentieth century was that connection, the electricity of that connection. It seemed fated, it happened only, what--months after this Pole was elected pope. Was that election itself part of what drove Lech Walesa to stand up? Maybe so, maybe so. Anyway, it gives you hope. It makes you think things can happen. The Soviet Union could be brought down without a war.

Does the Pope want to get our attention?

I gathered from you that you have the film of his wagging his finger in the face of Ernesto Cardenal. That feeling of having the Pope's finger wagging in your face is familiar to Catholics like me, even though I've never had the privilege of experiencing it firsthand. But one of the things I realize in a relationship with a powerful figure like this is that the tension, the conflict is the point itself, for him. He is not going to--as so many people in his position would--he is not going to just look the other way when there's opposition out there. He's going to track it down and get it. And you know what that does? It forces the opposition to be the Opposition.

I'm 56 years old. I left the Catholic priesthood 25 years ago. I'm passionately attached to the Catholic Church, and I care about its reform and the furthering of the values of Vatican II very much. Part of the reason I do is because this Pope has called me, constantly, to argue with him. To feel the other point of view on these great questions of faith and Curch discipline. He's invited people like me back into the argument of the Church. Not a bad thing.

You know, the Church is only a conversation, that's what the Church is. It's a group of people in conversation with itself. And unfortunately at times it is an argument. But even if you read the text of the New Testament, this is not a univocal community with one line. It never has been. It's always been a group of people who feel passionately about their beliefs, and are looking for the truth together. And even if this Pope and people who agree with him understand that they have the right to define the truth, those of us who disagree with that and who see the truth as ahead of all of us, not defined by anybody, have no choice but to answer back. Respectfully we hope, but no choice but to answer back.

Now I know this is not the case for many people who've left the Church. All I can say is, I recognize even in them, a sense of this phenomenon when this Pope comes. It's part of what draws the attention of the world to him. And the many millions of people who've left the Church behind of various Christian denominations still find something prophetic in him. And when they want to talk back to him, he's succeeded, I think.

How did you react to the Pope's opposition to liberation theology?

I found the Pope's opposition to liberation theology in a way to be the largest disappointment. Because of his own experience as an authentic opponent of the totalitarian system, for him to fail to understand that the people on the ground, especially in Latin America but not only there, who are opposing the faceless totalitarianism of the oligarchs and the owners who are keeping the masses of people dispossessed, that the Church had found a way to side with the masses of people, for a change. This Pope was needed on the side of the revolution there, so that, for one thing, as in Eastern Europe, it could be non-violent, but so that it could be powerful.

And liberation theology is - you know, there are ways it needs to be criticized, has been properly criticized - but it's a great act of God in history. And it's a tragedy that this Pope didn't recognize it as such. And I can only understand his failure to do so because he applied to it too narrowly the lens of his own fight against Communism, and the way in which liberation theology, in the fog of this lens, bled over into friendliness with Marxist communist movements, I think short-circuited his ability to see it for the true movement on behalf of the poor that it not only was but remains. It's not over, of course, and I think liberation theology also sharpened itself in opposition to this Pope, understood that it didn't need his permission to be what it was, to be what it is.

Another way of looking at the Pope's opposition is the interpretation of sin by liberation theologians and the Catholic Church...

...Well, one of the failures of religion generally, and it's been true of the Catholic Church, is to see sin in personal terms only. And when sin is seen in personal terms, of course what you're doing is supporting the political status quo. As long as what's wrong with the world is what I've done to it, then it's my job to feel guilty, it's my job to convert, it's my job, personally, privately, on my knees, alone, before God, to change. That idea of sin in the Catholic Church was essentially thrown out with Vatican Council II. Because in Vatican Council II we began to understand that we aren't in relationship to God alone. We're in relationship to God as a people. Which always involves us with politics. So that our goodness is political, but so is our sin. What that boils down to is, when we confess sin, we should be less concerned with our sins as if individual acts are what counts, and more concerned with our participation in what the scriptures call "the sin of the world," which in Paul's language are the principalities and the powers, which does refer to political structures. So, yes, my own personal responsibility is to the point, but always in the context of the community.

So after Vatican II, the theology of sin, if you want, changed. I don't believe John Paul II ever accepted that or understood it. He still wants us to have a personal notion of salvation, a personal notion of relationships one-on-one with God, and a personal notion of sin. But it isn't. It's political by definition, because we're a communal body. So theologians and activists who understand that hunger is a result - not just as an act of nature, which is under the old scheme the way it could be seen - but the result of decisions made by human beings, which are rooted in injustice, suddenly hunger can be denounced as sin. And liberation theology's emphasis on that - perhaps to the Pope, overemphasis - is a way of overcoming a deficit. Liberation theology has to overemphasize the political character of sin as a way of overcoming a long overemphasis on the personal character of it. Well John Paul II is solidly on the personal side of this divide.

What about the Pope is it that makes him so profoundly Catholic?

The Pope is so Catholic in the sense that Catholicism is all about embracing oppositions and contradictions, and not divorcing them. So he's the most political pope in modern history, but he won't allow priests to be in politics. He is devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary, she's at the center of his piety, but he's suspicious of women as equals. He's contemptuous of, especially, contemporary consumerist culture, and yet he's the master of the consumerist media, and has become a world celebrity because of it. He's an anti-Communist, a man who succeeded in helping to bring down Soviet communism, and yet he's profoundly suspicious of democracy. He's a man of tremendous modern sensibility, capable of being at home with rock musicians and young people, and yet he has staked everything on protecting a view of the Church that has its roots in the Middle Ages. He's a king, and he's trying to protect his kingship, and yet he's obviously, very clearly, a man who only wants to be at the service of the world. He's all of these things. He's an intellectual and he's a fundamentalist. He reminds us, in a way, even as sometimes he makes us confused and impatient, but he still reminds us of the range we're called to in this Church, which is why above all we recognize him as a Catholic.

Why is John Paul II so irresistible to the media?

I think what's irresistible about him to the media is his story. There are the obvious things: his robust masculinity, his having been shot--Ronald Reagan's power really begins when he gets shot and lives. I think this Pope's power really begins when he gets shot and lives. He becomes a kind of hero. So the media really are drawn, recognize in him a figure of tremendous narrative value. And he understands that. The truth is, as a preacher he's trained to understand it. It's just a much bigger pulpit. He was the master of the pulpit as a young man, and he still is. The pulpit is bigger, that's all.

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