article bout the pope

Touching America

He was both a critic and an inspiration. How John Paul II divided our nation with his bold stances.By Melinda HennebergerContributing EditorNewsweekApril 11 issue -

For all of his grandfatherly warmth, Pope John Paul II was a dependably harsh critic of American culture. He disapproved of our consumerism. He opposed our wars. And though fiercely anti-communist, he argued for the kind of structural economic change his staunchest friends in the United States would have called socialism. On the first of his four papal trips here, in the fall of 1979, John Paul bluntly compared Americans to the rich man in the Bible story who is damned for all eternity after a life spent feasting-contentedly oblivious to Lazarus, the beggar who longed for the scraps from his table. "It is not right," the pope preached in English at a mass in Yankee Stadium, "that the standard of living of the rich countries should seek to maintain itself by draining off a great part of the reserves of energy and raw materials that are meant for the whole of humanity."The Rev. Thomas Reese, a Jesuit and editor of the Roman Catholic magazine America, says he will never forget that moment. "He looks out and says, 'You are the rich man and Lazarus is at your gate, and it's the Third World.' That's scary! But we applauded, went home and went back to life as usual." It was the pope's pronouncements on sexual issues-from birth control to homosexuality-that got all the media attention, of course. Yet John Paul never stopped decrying our "excesses of capitalism." Last summer, after the pope lectured American bishops that their people were "hypnotized by materialism, teetering before a soulless vision of the world," the Catholic writer Eugene Kennedy responded: "Pope John Paul II might as well be French for the studied distaste he expresses about America."Most of us took no offense. As Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington put it, the reaction of many American Catholics has been, "I'm not sure I agree with him. But, oh, I love the Holy Father." And though his word was far from universally heeded, John Paul had a significant spiritual and intellectual influence on his American flock.A former philosophy professor and prolific writer, John Paul reinvigorated Catholic intellectual life in America and, in the series of discourses known as the Theology of the Body, authored what might well be the most idealized paean to sex in marriage since the Song of Solomon. At a time when church teaching had been reduced to the level of a JESUS IS LOVE bumper sticker, he reintroduced at least the ideal of a certain rigor in religious education. At the same time, he set off a panic in Catholic universities here by forcing a handful of theologians out of their teaching jobs after deeming them insufficiently orthodox.John Paul leaves his church in the United States in middling shape; while the number of Catholics here continues to grow, mainly due to immigration, the number of priests continues to fall. Seminary enrollment took yet another hit after the sex-abuse scandals of 2002. Only a third of American Catholics now attend mass in any given week, compared with twice that a generation ago.John Paul's most striking legacy in this country, however, is his influence on younger priests and lay Catholics. "We have what I would call 'John Paul II students' now," says University of Notre Dame theology professor Lawrence Cunningham. "We have a significant minority of students interested in his Theology of the Body and in retrieving devotions like the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament that we haven't seen since before Vatican II."That he was on the side of both the condemned and the unborn never ceased to puzzle those intent on placing him somewhere-but where?-on the usual left-right continuum. Some saw his influence in the erosion of public support for the death penalty here. Others assumed he was the Bush-Cheney team's man in Rome. John Paul's influence on American political life was almost surely overestimated.But his spiritual influence will endure. When the pope's admirers speak of him, they often cite St. Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians: "If the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?" With John Paul, the sound was never uncertain. And the battles he prepared us for certainly do not end with him. © 2005 Newsweek, Inc.© 2005 MSNBC.comURL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7369922/site/newsweek/