ROME
Irish Times
Paddy Agnew
He was a holy man, but was he a saint? As Pope Francis prepares to canonise two of his predecessors, two weeks from now, that question mark hangs over the head of John Paul II, if not of John XXIII.
It is not that John Paul, like John XXIII, was not a patently good man. More than that, in his 27-year pontificate he proved to be one of most influential figures of the 20th century, not least because of his fundamental role in the downfall of Eastern bloc totalitarianism.
On top of that, until his latter, illness-ridden years he was an unfailingly engaging, witty and often inspirational preacher. He was a mystic and a man of profound faith, yet he had tremendous political savvy, honed in years of struggle first with Nazi-German forces and then with Poland’s communist rulers. …
By the time the sex-abuse crisis finally made its way both on to mainstream Vatican radar and to worldwide public attention, John Paul was a very sick man, not fully able to run the show.
That may or may not explain the mishandling of the sex-abuse issue, but it certainly doesn’t explain another controversial question that broke early in the pontificate: the Latin American liberation-theology movement, with its emphasis on the church’s preferential option for the poor.
Both John Paul and his trusty guardian of orthodoxy, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger – head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the man who became Pope Benedict XVI – treated the movement with suspicion. They regarded it as a falsified Christianity that put more emphasis on Marx than on Christ.
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