Much as it does with the fictional Stephen Maturin, the born-in pull of the Catholic Church sometimes tugs against my social liberalism; the realities of suffering in the modern world conflict with the strict course set out by the Church patriarchy, particularly where it applies to sexuality and women's bodies. Maturin, the Irish-Catalan surgeon/spy of O'Brian's classic seafaring series, is a devout believer in both ritual and liberality; he prays on his knees in Latin and treats venereal disease and the ravages of prostitution without fault or judgment. Indeed, he reserves his harshest judgment for the punishment and customs of the Royal Navy, where disfigurement or death was the penalty for homosexuality below decks.
A concern for the unjustly punished, the victims of war, the poor, the powerless has always been at the core of Catholicism to me, from the bright Godspell-influenced Vatican II style catechisms my more devout altar boy youth to these lapsed, doubting, wilderness times. And while I disagree with Pope John Paul II on the many strictures of family and personal morality, I find I agree with him on the big issues of social justice and war.
And whatever your feelings for either the Church as an institution, or the Pope as a man, his long suffering in gradually passing from the world stage clearly writes this headline: we are saying good-bye to a giant.
When I was a child in parochial school, the Pope was a distant, almost mythical figure, an Italian relic that somehow spoke and breathed but lived his life behind the gauze of history and time and tradition. This Pope, who came to power in healthy, full-bodied strength of middle-age with the experience of a cruel real world in his past, changed all that. Karol Wojtyla was a playwright, a poet, a Polish patriot, an athlete and an anti-Nazi, anti-Soviet freedom fighter. He had heft, he had time to experience life, he glowed character.
And so I honor his suffering and his will to continue, and I will eventually mourn his passing. My liberal friends, a couple of whom I've spoken to about the Pope's failing health, will not agree with me in celebrating that life, arguing that he set the Church back a hundred years. My conservative friends will no doubt mourn the passing of a true conservative. Both will be wrong; this Pope wasn't red state or blue and his legacy should not be viewed in our alarmingly absolutist American debate.
Ask me if John Paul II was liberal or conservative and you'll get this answer (which will not qualify me for any attack poodle time on TV): he was both.
UPDATE: My bro Ralph gets off a righteous jab at the New York Press blabberer Matt Taibbi for dissing the Pope. The Sawpit dude is no church-goer, but I think he's right in slamming Taibbi's stupid, blatantly controversy-hoping, piece of hooey.
