John Paul II: 'A Profoundly Reactionary Pope'

John Paul II's stance on issues like women, AIDS, and other faiths have driven Catholics away from the Church.

BY: Interview with John Cornwell

John Cornwell made headlines with 1999's "Hitler's Pope," which charged Pius XII, leader of the world's Catholics during World War II, with failing to denounce and fight the Holocaust. More than a decade later, Cornwell's book "The Pontiff in Winter" criticized Pope John Paul II with failures to modernize the Church and Catholic theology. Cornwell spoke to Beliefnet in late 2004.

What is your own relationship to the Catholic Church?

I departed from the Catholic Church as a conscious decision, rather than merely lapsing, shortly after leaving the seminary in my early twenties. After a gap of twenty years, I returned to belief and practice in 1990 and I now regard myself as a faithful Catholic, but also as a loving critic of the Church.

After my absence from the Church for such a long period I returned to find much that distressed and even angered me, including changes in the liturgy and the conflict between liberals and conservatives. My attempts to criticize the Church in a positive fashion, I believe, are not ultimately harmful; after all, if I can find fault with the Church and yet stay in it, that demonstrates that difficulties do not amount to destructive doubt.

What does "The Pontiff in Winter" say about John Paul II that other books don't?

The last serious biography of John Paul II, by George Weigel, finishes in the fall of 1998. Since then, we have had the Jubilee Year [2000], 9/11, the pedophile priest scandals, the Iraq war, and the War on Terror. Also the pope has become very ill and debilitated in the last four years: so who is really running the Church? The Church in the world therefore looks very different today than it did seven years ago.

My book is an attempt to update the papal story. At the same time, I wanted to offer a critique of this papacy as well as a credit account. Most biographies degenerate into hagiographies, especially if they are written by Catholics. There is a view that to criticize the pope is to attack the Church. I think that John Paul has been a great pope, but he is human, and he exists within historical circumstances.

What do you find most problematic about John Paul II's papacy?

Most Catholic critics, including even bishops, object to the way in which he has tended to draw the reigns of power into the Vatican center, thus threatening the strength of the diocesan or local Church. But I am much more interested in a kind of contradictory middle ground between the praise for the great things he has done, and criticism of his lack of collegiality (the authority issue).

For example, he preaches compassion for suffering (for AIDS victims, for example) and yet he is intransigent on the use of condoms in the battle against HIV/AIDS. He praises women, and yet he proposes a model of womanhood that is acquiescent and based on the obedience of the Virgin Mary. He encourages interfaith dialogue, and yet he has sanctioned as recently as the year 2000 a church document (Dominus Jesus) saying that other religions are "defective."

The net result is that we have a pope who keeps the liberals and the progressives occasionally happy with rhetorical statements which are undermined by deeper and more permanent policies. These policies, I believe, run counter in many respects to the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s. Hence my objection to John Paul is that on certain issues (obviously not all) he is a profoundly reactionary pope. The consequence of that reaction has been the departure of an incalculable number of Catholics from the faith.

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