Pope's prime strategy puts Third World in perspective

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): The story may be apocryphal, but as Karol Wojtyla celebrates his 20th anniversary as pope it sums up the tone of his whole reign. "As a bishop I feel forced to make you aware that there are many problems concerning the question of celibacy and the shortage of priests," began the Spanish cardinal. "And as Pope, I feel forced to dismiss you," replied John Paul II.

The first Polish pope will not mark the anniversary of his election to the papacy in 1978 in any way except for a mass in St. Peter's next Sunday, but it has been a defining two decades for the Catholic Church. What remains to be seen is whether his strategy was right.

The billion Catholics who are obliged to accept his judgments in 'matters of faith and morals' are the world's largest religious sect -- so large that even the word 'sect' sounds out of place in this context. Catholics are over half of the world's Christians, outnumber the world's Hindus or Buddhists, and are equal in number to all Moslems of every persuasion. But when Wojtyla became Pope, he found the Catholic Church in the throes of profound change.

Under the preceding popes, the Vatican had finally ended its fierce opposition to all things 'modern'. The rejection of the doctrine of human rights as the illegitimate spawn of the anti- religious French Revolution, the ultra-conservative immobilism that led the papacy to keep silent even about Hitler, all that had finally been thrown overboard, and the Church was coming to terms with democracy, freedom of speech, and religious pluralism.

Wojtyla had no quarrel with that. He trained secretly as a priest while working in a chemicals plant in Nazi-occupied Poland, and cut his teeth in the struggle against the Communist regime that was imposed on his country after 1945. In political matters, he is thoroughly modern, and has made equally cogent ethical critiques of totalitarianism and of unbridled global capitalism.

Indeed, some give John Paul II much of the credit for the greatest democratic transformation of our time, the fall of European Communism. "Everything that happened in Eastern Europe would have been impossible without the presence of this Pope," wrote Mikhail Gorbachev -- and even if that overstates the case, his role was certainly quite large.

But what concerned Wojtyla more than mere politics was the erosion of core Catholic beliefs and practices. Mass education, urbanization, mass media, free speech and democracy -- all the things that follow on industrialization -- have been undermining the hold of religion on people's minds in the West for several generations, and now the same phenomena are occurring worldwide.

Relatively few people reject religion utterly, but most people's belief becomes diffuse and conditional, and their practical connections with organized religion wither away. In Western Europe, this is more or less an accomplished fact, with ten percent of the population or less actively practicing any religion.

But what particularly worried Wojtyla (as it does non- Christian religious leaders) was the likelihood that global industrialization and global media would spread this phenomenon worldwide.

Non-Christian religious leaders publicly insist that this is only a European phenomenon, but they secretly fear that it may just have happened to Christianity first. Given an equally long exposure to the same influences, why should urban Moslems or Hindus be more immune than European Christians? After all, the latter were equally devout up to the end of the last century.

Even more to the point, from the Vatican's point of view: why should non-European Catholics be more immune? This is John Paul II's highest concern, because the center of gravity of Catholicism long ago moved out of Europe. It now resides firmly in the Third World: in Latin America (90 percent of the population), in Africa (25-30 percent), and in Asia (less than 5 percent).

This is where the future of Catholicism lies, and it is for this non-European Catholic world that the pope has designed his long-term strategy. He is open-minded, even 'progressive' on social and political issues, but utterly inflexible on questions of religious doctrine: no to contraception, no to divorce, no to married priests, no to women priests.

It's a more sophisticated approach than the fundamentalism that other religions have fallen prey to, for it does not reject modernity wholesale. It does involve quite autocratic behavior, but then the cosmos is not, in Christian doctrine, a democracy.

The point of all this, one suspects, is not merely to enforce Karol Wojtyla's personal values on the Church. It is also to put the whole question of core religious doctrine off limits to rational debate, because such debates will lead to differences of opinion, and probably a diversity of practice, and almost certainly a rise in doubt -- especially in the Third World.

While not precisely writing Europe off (and certainly not Eastern Europe), John Paul II has accepted that his approach will outrage the liberal sentiments of many European and North American Catholics. If it keeps the Church strong and undivided in the Third World, he reckons, it's a good bargain. And he could be right.

Right or wrong, the Catholic Church is committed to this strategy not just for his remaining lifetime (which may not be very long), but for the foreseeable future. Over the past twenty years, he has chosen 90 percent of the cardinals who will choose his successor: the policy will not change after his death.

Will the strategy work in the long run? Will one in six human beings still be a Catholic in twenty years' time? Probably not -- for only about half of the nominal Catholics in the world are fully observant even now. Maybe no strategy can save religions from the modern transformation into a devout core surrounded by a much larger number of half-believers and disbelievers. But at least it is a coherent strategy, and a good deal less pernicious than some.