Traditionally anti-Catholic Britain gave the Pope a warm welcome during his recent visit. Clara Mulhern looks at the reasons for this papal popularity and some of the long term effects of his visit on questions such as contraception, marriage and the family.
The reception accorded to the Pope during his recent visit to Britain must have caught many socialists and feminists by surprise. The admiration almost universally expressed in the media as well as by large crowds of the 'faithful' was striking in a country which, for historical reasons, could have been expected to be hostile or at least indifferent to a visit by the Bishop of Rome. It was all the more remarkable at a time when Britain was in the throes of the nastiest and most irrational war hysteria of recent times — an issue on which the visitor expressed his disapproval from the start.
So, the visit served to confirm what his worldwide excursions have proved — John Paul II's claim to be the most popular Pope in recent history not excluding John XXIII, the first Pope to travel widely, who publicly befriended Communists and met Khrushchev, and who convened the reforming second Vatican Council of the early sixties. What is the significance of this phenomenon and what will be its effects on Britain?
The idea of a popular Pope is itself a paradox. Until recently, 'popularity' was an almost unheard of, even vulgar, and anyway irrelevant status for Christ's vicar on earth, whose task was to rule a rigidly centralised and hierarchical body in a spirit of divinely revealed and unchangeable law. It was only with the Second Vatican Council, which attempted to loosen hierarchy, widen the scope of moral discretion, and vernacularise the liturgy, that popularity became a conceivable condition for the papacy. The paradox is compounded by the fact that this most popular of Popes is also the most conservative in two decades, recalling in his positions much of the spirit of Pius XII, the last of the remote absolutist pontiffs.
The Previous Popes
A brief resumé of the careers of the last four Popes will serve to highlight the particular character of John Paul's papacy. Pius XII was the last of the old regime — a conservative, remote and scholastic, immured in a Vatican fortress at odds with the modern world. John XXIII, the reformer with the common touch, opened a period of unprecedented debate and discussion within the Catholic Church, which had some genuinely democratic moments. His concern was to ensure the Church's survival by its ability to respond to or at least to recognise, a changing world. The abolition of the old Latin liturgy to allow fuller participation of the laity in church ceremonial, went hand in hand with some encouragement to individuals to begin to use their initiative in questions of moral practice.
Paul VI, who physically resembled Pius XII more than his predecessor, was a cautious pragmatist who set himself the task of stabilising the Church after its recent upheavals, without completely reversing the 'process of renewal' started by the Vatican Council. For example his most severe criticisms were reserved for the traditionalist Lefevre, and he presided over the process of laicisation (or leaving orders) by thousands of priests and nuns. His two main encyclicals are indicative of his ambiguity: on the one hand Populorum Progressio (The Progress of Peoples) went further than any previous papal statements on social questions, conceding possible legitimacy to revolution in the third world. But Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life), to the surprise and intense disappointment of many Catholics, formalised the Church's implicit rejection of artificial methods of birth control. In this way Paul VI attempted to set limits on internal debate while remaining loyal to many of the Vatican Council's decisions.
But John Paul II is a thoroughgoing conservative. His concern is to restore the discipline of the pre-Vatican II days. His summons to the Vatican for a dressing down goes not to Lefevre and his followers but to dissident liberal theologians. He has revitalised the Church's traditional apparatuses of censorship and has stopped the flow of laicisation. His views on sexual morality reflect the old simplicities; he has been known to remark that 'there is no sex in heaven'. His modernity is confined to his mastery of the techniques of popularisation offered by the modern media. Whereas his predecessors merely acknowledged the existence of this technology, he exploits it. His uniqueness lies in the fact that alone of the recent Popes he mobilises the faithful in an unending succession of superbly crafted mass rallies of the kind usually organised by populist politicians and rock stars. And this mobilisation is the cause of his fundamentalism, not radical change. The content of his message, so enthusiastically received by the bedazzled crowds is simply this: 'You will have to be content with fewer individual freedoms than you have been led to expect.' John Paul is, in sum, a conservative populist.
A key element in his success is his Polishness. It is fundamental to his popular appeal that he is not an Italian, a prisoner of the Vatican but a vernacular Pope with an impressive command of the languages and cultures of many countries. Equally important however is the fact that the Polish Church is the most reactionary in the Catholic world. And it is this church which has acquired an identification with national resurgence against an oppressive regime. Polish Catholicism with its particular flavour of conservatism and popular vigour is a symbol of the present papacy.
The Pope's visit to Britain illustrated both features of his personal style — his media mastery and his conservatism. The eloquently televisual gestures — the now familiar one of kissing the ground as he emerged from the plane given a new twist by his repeat performance in Scotland and Wales, his embrace of his 'brother in Christ' Runcie in Canterbury his blessing of the sick in Southwark — all worked hard to create the image of a man sensitive to the passions and concerns of ordinary people. On the other hand, the central theme of each of his big masses was one of the seven sacraments. This included baptism, the recruitment ritual and sign of apartness from non-Christians, and confession, which underlines the authority of the ministry and the limits on the individual's 'freedom of conscience'. Most importantly it included marriage. In ringing tones the Pope emphasised the indissolubility of marriage denouncing sexual permissiveness and what he termed 'a contraceptive and anti-life mentality'. Commentators remarked on the fact that he hesitated to offend Anglo-Saxon sensibilities by denouncing contraceptive methods outright, but his phrasing indicated that he placed the question of contraception alongside that of abortion, which every Catholic knows is outside the bounds of discussion. The public gestures of conciliation were accompanied by a firm reiteration of traditional Catholic dogma, none of which, he indicated, was up for negotiation. Any 'problems' must be met with prayer (ie submission).
What lasting effect, if any, is his visit likely to have on Britain? British Catholics are a religious minority, organised on the whole in minority ethnic communities, such as the Irish and the Polish, and are working class or petty-bourgeois in social character. This gives them a sense, particularly in Scotland where they are surrounded by sometimes hostile Protestants, of being a morally beleaguered minority, at odds with the dominant culture. The populist style of the Pope is perfectly calculated to appeal to their communalism. The visit of so charismatic an international figure to the first European state to break with the Church of Rome, and the reception (varying in warmth but uniform in its respect) given to the self-proclaimed successor of Peter by representatives of various national churches, is bound to be a tremendous boost to collective morale among British Catholics.
And it is the most reactionary elements within the Church that will benefit most, notably the parochial network organised around church and school — which has proved so effective in transporting, assembling, and stewarding the crowds at the mass rallies around the country. This is the same network which forms the key organising cadre for anti-abortion militancy, as illustrated in the big SPUC mobilisations in the past. One effect of the Pope's visit to Ireland was a concerted and it seems successful attempt to commit the major political parties to a constitutional ban on abortion — and this in a country where abortion has never been seriously considered. Their English equivalents will never make their peace with the 1967 Act.
Moral Reaction
Another negative effect and one not confined to Catholics, will be on the inevitable renewal of moral reaction. His denunciation of modernity with its 'false set of values' and 'anti-life mentality' will strengthen the puritanism manifest in Britain in recent years. This 'moral majority' does not resemble the American equivalent in strength and resonance, but it can only benefit from the support of a man so much more formidably attractive than for instance Mary Whitehouse. Secondly, his emphasis on the centrality of the family as a social unit will cheer those who wish to see women further subordinated in the home, and will lend solidity to the justifications offered for the increased burden placed on women by the economic recession. It will also strengthen those elements of the 'law and order' brigade who believe that one of the solutions to last summer's disturbances is increased control by parents over their children.
And what of the areas where his visit might have been expected to have less objectionable or even beneficial effects — church unity and the Falklands war? Prospects for reunification of the Christian churches in England, however fascinating to some, are of comparatively minor interest to socialists, but it is worth remarking that the Pope is known to have little interest in this project anyway, preferring the prospect of unification with the Eastern orthodox churches, which are more to his conservative taste. His references to the non-negotiable core of Catholic doctrine will hardly have helped.
Certainly his unequivocal expressions of concern about the Falklands, his desire for peace in the area, were for many the saving grace of his visit. But they served only to underline the remarkable silence of church figures in this country on the question; after all he confined himself to reiterations of a rather abstract supra-national pacificism that is commonplace in the Vatican and familiar to any Catholic. He was careful not to allow any criticism of Britain's adventurism to pass his lips nor did he comment on Britain's claims to sovereignty over the islands. His remarks, exceptional because so few are prepared to say even that much in public, have had absolutely no effect on the conduct of the war either in Britain or Argentina. No, the enduring effects of his visit will be felt rather by those intoxicated young people that we saw in Scotland affirming their commitment to a narrow and restrictive discipline, and by those women who will be told by born-again priests in the confessional of the efficacy of self-control as a substitute for birth control.
I want to thank Shelley Charlesworth and Mary Francis Mulhern with whom I discussed the ideas in this article.
CLARA MULHERN is a member of the editorial collective of Feminist Review.