Equally apposite as a heading for this piece would have been Perils of prophecy; listen. An essay by Peter Hebblethwaite in ‘Modern Catholicism, Vatican II and After’, edited by Professor Adrian Hastings, ended with some embarrassingly condescending remarks aimed at Pope John Paul the Great.
These were cited by William Oddie in his contribution to another collection of essays, John Paul the Great Maker of the Post-Conciliar Church.
“One would like to think” wrote Hebblethwaite, “that John Paul continues to learn from his stay in the West, not to mention his worldwide journeys; and that he might spend as much time trying to understand the rest of us as we have spent trying to understand him… At the conclave that elected him it was possible to argue that the Church needed a strong hand on the tiller. At the next conclave that argument will not wash: the conservative option will have been tried and may well be found wanting. In the spiritual life, everyone fails” – whatever that may mean. The seed falls into the ground and dies. But this will be a heroic failure on a cosmic scale, with that special Polish dash”. More condescending than that it is difficult to be.
Oddie also quotes Hebblethwaite as saying, sometime later to the Catholic World Report, that, “Nothing he has done will outlast him. Not the Catechism, not Veritatis Splendor, not the document on the ordination of women… The new man will put aside everything John Paul has done and start… again.” This could be straight out of the irascible mind of Hans Kung.
They turned out to be rash anyway, those remarks; his beatification today, six years after his death by “The new man…”, stamps Pope John Paul eternally in the minds of the faithful and, one dares say, in those of innumerable faithless, too. If the vox populi common people had been allowed a say, he would have been canonised “subito”, or so they chanted at his funeral Mass.
It was Pope John Paul’s magnificent achievement during a papacy that enthralled and captivated the world, to defend the Church from the near anarchic aftermath of Vatican Council II as priests and nuns threw off their habits and the habit of centuries and decided, in some cases, to question even Christ’s injunction to “go forth and teach all nations”.
This was hardly the “fresh air” Pope John XXIII had in mind when he called the Council, still less the aggiornamento that became a buzzword in the 1970s. Priests left in droves; not a few nuns decided that the way to heaven was, perforce, to ape the lay sisterhood in garb and the strumming of guitars; this absurdity making them, so they thought, “with it”, “relevant”.
As dissidents jettisoned the natural law and much else, Pope John Paul, upon which the late 20th century Church looked for guidance and moral leadership, provided both with an energy, zeal and an enthusiasm that took him round the world to preach the Gospel and the Church’s relevance to a world rapidly losing sight of itself, to a Europe that had lost its bearings and to a secular age that wished nothing less than to tear up the roots of Christendom, subscribe to the culture of death at both ends of a man’s lifespan, and to a rampant divorce mentality a culture that was weakening, and is ravaging, the very fabric of society.
Pope John Paul did not convert the world but he did force it to look at, and ask itself, whither it was going. He continued to do this in sickness and health. The new man not only refrained from accepting Hebblethwaite’s advice.
He continued to build upon John Paul’ legacy with the same intellectual vigour, unafraid to confront problems raised by Islam, to take but one example, by relativism, to take another, and to confront the debilitating effects of secularism and a new age atheism that was an insult to atheism, and to preach the truth when the world seemed to have taken on board the question put to Christby Pilate: What is truth? Unlike Christ, who declined toenter into a philosophical discussion with his executioner, Pope Benedict is, like his predecessor, ever ready to discuss the truth, however uncomfortable, and the Truth.
But today is the Polish Pope’s day, the colossus who contributed so greatly to the fall of communism, who developed an astounding theology of the body to a world falling in to the temptation of regarding the body as a commodity, whose Mariology brought the Mother of Our Lord centre stage after decades of neglect, whose social doctrines have within them the wisdom of the ages, who placed ecumenism at the forefront of his papacy – but not at the expense of truth, and who captivated a world thirsty for the Word.
Out of the mouths of babes…
Some two-and-a-half years ago, a survey conducted by a consortium, Luton First, aimed at giving voice to 1,600 children under 10. The result revealed some extremely interesting insights.
Eleven questions were put to the children, including: What is the most important thing in life? Will you marry when you grow up? Do you wish to have children? If you were Queen of the World, what laws would you bring into force?
Remarkably, pace the pro-divorce lobby, their answer to the fourth question in which no laws were actually suggested for them to choose from, first place went to this: “I would ban divorce”. Out of the mouths of babes…
A spokesman for Luton First said, “This particular age group has some very clear ideas on how the world could be changed for the better, but are very rarely given the opportunity to express them.”
A researcher involved in the study observed that “it might be expected that as divorce has become more commonplace, its effects might have reduced. Yet a comparison with children born in 1970 shows that this is not the case”.
And yet children feature little or not at all in the current discussions on whether divorce should be introduced in Malta. Why leave out those most affected when one partner in a marriage wants out even when the other is faultless. The ludicrous ‘no fault’ clause being touted will guarantee that within a decade the suggestion of a four-year period for reconciliation will be replaced with divorce on request in the civilised Europe some would mimic.
The reasons will be arbitrary: a ‘right to happiness’ (theirs, not the children’s) ‘a second chance for adults’ (not the children’s), the ‘right to a civil right’; anything but the children who have to lump the decision come hell or high water, more possibly hell. Little Johnny has no rights except the one that entitles him to emotional stress of a degree hard to imagine.
Last week, the pro-divorce lobby countered the slogan of the no-to-divorce movement ‘Together for our children’ – with a statement in which it held that children should not be used in the run-up to the divorce referendum. Why, pray? They are not being ‘used’; they are being granted their dignity as human beings.
To bring them into the debate, rather than zap them out of the picture may be harmful to the ‘no’ movement – else it would not get into such a tizz over their natural inclusion in the debate – but it would be outrageous to disregard their welfare, never mind their existence; to deny them consideration is to deny them their rights. A discussion on divorce that leaves children out of it betrays an attitude so narcissistic as tomake Narcissus seem quite other-regarding.
The report to which I made reference earlier concludes that divorce “has repercussions that reverberate through childhood and into adulthood”. Useless and out of court to argue that this may also be the case in other situations. The referendum is not about ‘other situations’ but about saying yes or no to the introduction of divorce and its effect on children, the innocent partner and society at large.
Hungarian rhapsody, Belgian discord
As governments in Europe pay lip-service to family-friendly policies, the Right-leaning Fidesz party elected to govern in Hungary has placed its money where its mouth is and put forward a radical proposal to give families an extra vote to cast on behalf of their young children.
If that does not provide the incentive necessary to develop family-friendly policies, nothing will.
Well to note that the new Hungarian government has adopted a new constitution that invokes God in its preamble, demands protection for the unborn child from conception and protects the sanctity of marriage as between a man and a woman – one in the nose for the European Court of Human Rights.
The EU’s left-liberal anti-life is shrieking that this might violate“our common European values”. Former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt called “on the Hungarian authorities to submit the text of the new constitution to the European Commission for evaluation and to revise any parts thereof that do not conform to EU values.”
Submit the text to an unelected body with no legitimacy in a context of democratic process? Give us a break, Guy; guys.