The Pope, a gleeful contrarian

Hywel Williams, Guardian News Service, London

Ever since that surprise October election 25 years ago, Karol Wojtyla has been Christianity's main event. The papacy has been his best and longest gig -- a chance for this former actor and occasional playwright to play his best role (and real self): That of the gleeful contrarian.

Doctrinally, he's rejected modern liberalism as so much cocky materialism. Administratively, he's cold-shouldered Vatican 11 -- collegiality and all that -- as the boring preoccupation of second-rate academics.

Now the show is nearing its close. Earlier this week Josef Ratzinger, the cardinal in charge of enforcing Roman Catholic doctrine, said the faithful should start to pray for Wojtyla. But this is a papacy that has long since sent its friends to their knees. Its style has been relentlessly hostile towards modernity, castigating all questioning as faithlessness. A Wojtyla encounter with the risen Christ might well elicit the inquiry: "John Paul, John Paul, why do you persecute me?"

Although the rock star-like appetite for the world tour remains unsated, the 83-year-old body is giving out. And the Pope's nomination, with immediate effect, of an extra 31 members of the college of cardinals is a sign that John Paul is preparing for his final act.

These are overwhelmingly the Pope's men, raised and advanced in the career structures established over the past quarter of a century. And it is that college that will elect his successor. Long after his death, the Catholic church will remain a John Paul affair.

"Be not Afraid!" -- the keynote phrase in his address to humanity on the eve of the millennium -- is also the key to the man. He is a political activist who knows that the world can be changed as long as you are well organized and mentally sorted. Not for him the cultivated pessimism of some Catholic intellectuals. He has a powerful record of opposition to totalitarianism in both its fascist and its communist form.

And from that struggle he has learned the central lesson of his life: Evil only seems to triumph, but faith-driven politics can win through. It's a life example that rebukes the skeptical timidity of "professional" politicians.

Looking at a Catholic world transformed by his own optimism of the will, he is undismayed. While dark forgetfulness claimed those other 80s cold war warriors, Reagan and Thatcher, John Paul persisted. Josef Ratzinger, in most respects his alter ego, foresees a fortress and minority church, a slimmed down body entirely on-message.

But Wojtyla's instinct is that the 21st century will be the great Christian century -- a real springtime for Catholic humanity, despite all the present evidence of a decline in communicants and vocations. For vision and consolation he turns away from western Europe -- populated for him by bourgeois and parochial wimps. Africa and Latin America are where the action lies: Continents of peasant vitality and all signed up for the voyage on that ark of salvation.

And the peasant church is attractive to Wojtyla because it accepts so unquestioningly the Pope's exclusive custodianship of the keys of heaven. He has gone through the ecumenical motions with Protestant churches -- but no more. When he meets the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, today, he will, in his view, be shaking hands with an amiably muddle-headed university professor who has been deluded into thinking that he is a priest.

Wojtyla glories in the fact that the church is the light that stands out against the surrounding darkness -- and that the faithful are really called to a life in which they are bound to be misunderstood and persecuted by secular ideologies.

He is shaped by anti-fascism and sees clearly how national socialism was an alternative theology, a system of nature worship that uprooted the cross and replaced it with the forest. And the best of him is in those impassioned encyclicals that have called down papal judgment on the developed world's capitalism. He was an anti-globalist long before the idea was taken up by secular liberals.

As a social thinker he has followed and developed the Catholic church's teaching -- established since the late 19th century -- that capitalism has to be regulated by both church and state. The rights of individualism, in this perspective, run easily and heedlessly into gratification of the self.

Against such Anglo-American capitalism, John Paul has always expounded passionately the church's philosophy of the communal, of workers' rights as organized in trade unions and in political parties.

It's an aspect of Catholic truth that shows how the church is the body of the risen Christ and also the body of believers.

When it comes to the need to defend the rights of nations as well as individuals against the rule of might, Wojtyla has been a Catholic hero. From the defense of Polish independence right through to the condemnation of American aggression in the Middle East, the papal words are always a powerful reminder that the very notion of international order is rooted in Catholicism.

But the contradiction's greatest sign is within Wojtyla himself. He is the intellectual theoretician and defender of peasant Catholicism: The former professor with a penchant for the prophecies of Fatima. And he has behaved in ways calculated to justify the most arrant Protestant demonisation of Catholics as hypocrites. He has ensured that the laity live in a terrible system of double standards about birth control, while the pedophilia scandals, particularly in the U.S., are a direct result of his own arrogant system of centralized church government. Local bishops, denied autonomy, kicked the problem upstairs, where it was allowed to fester.

The catastrophe illustrates Wojtyla's attachment to 16th- century counter-reformation Catholicism, top-down rule from the center, as the ideal form of church government.

And in his beloved third world, it was Wojtyla's own decision to go on the heresy hunt against liberation theology -- that most potent gospel-intoxicated witness to the truth that the church's first mission is to the poor. Liberation theologians galvanized Latin American Catholicism -- and were then personally crushed by the Pope. What followed, especially in Brazil, has been a Catholic tragedy. The poor have left the church and flocked to the mass evangelical sects with their pie-in-the-sky consolations.

World-transformers are not easily disentangled. Their strengths tend to be part of their weaknesses. In much the same way, Christianity's own history shows that its superstition can't be easily separated from its truths. But the sadness of this papacy is that it is so haunted by one man's war.

For although his papacy was so triumphalist-baroque in style, this Pope has been incorrigibly a man of the underground resistance. He decided to fight totalitarianism in the secular world by cultivating a corresponding totalitarianism on Peter's throne. Ecce Papa -- a man of iron.