General Wojciech Jaruzelski and the pope each stood at a podium and addressed the crowd. A camera was positioned at the side of the stage, and from that angle one could see the right leg of Jeruzelski shaking violently.
This puppet dictator who had the full force of Soviet military power behind him was filled with awe and fear of the Lord at being in the presence of a man who, without any military divisions, was armed only with the authority of Christ and His Gospel.
Encyclicals are addressed to Urbi et orbi i. Rome and the world and indeed, it is not only Catholics who read them. It is in a way paradoxical, but not unexpected, that, during our enlightened era of technical and scientific revolution, the moral power of the Pope and the Catholic Church has increased considerably. It can even be said that it has never been so great.
In the globalised world, the Holy See is a global power. I remember how a Lutheran professor at the University of Helsinki announced with great irritation that the Roman Catholic Pope was merely a sick Polish geriatric who people listened to for some reason. The Pope is, in fact, a human being who is not safe from any human weaknesses, especially when it comes to his health. But the Pope is not merely a human being. He embodies the Holy See, the papacy, which was, according to Church legend, established by Jesus Christ, who told his apostle:.
Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah … you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Matthew —19 3. So the Holy See is not a man-made institution and every pope is a successor of Peter.
This aspect—the unity of temporary and evanescent on the one hand with timeless and eternal on the other—was keenly felt by Osip Mandelstam in his essay on the Russian Catholic Pyotr Chaadaev. Chaadaev stared at one point, mesmerised—the point where the unity [the story is about the sacred and secular dimensions of events] turned into flesh that is preserved with care and is passed down from one generation to the next.
The Pope! What is he? Is he not just an idea, a pure abstraction? Look at this old man carried around on a palanquin … nowadays, just like a thousand years ago, as if nothing has changed in the world: Indeed, where is the human here?
Is this not a symbol of the almighty time—not the one that flows, but the one which does not move and through which everything flows, but who itself remains unaffected and through whom everything is realised?
The persona of the Pope incorporates the temporal and the timeless and both are important. The Pope is not cut off from the context of the era; his messages are not abstract truths that are valid everywhere and always.
But at the same time, all his messages are addressed to the world of our time from a timeless perspective. In that sense he stands apart from all political leaders and public figures. The eternal dimension enlightens all statements by the Pope. Love is sharing, which is at the same time the distribution of both material goods and gifts from the Holy Spirit. In the case of the Pope, this is not merely a beautiful figure of speech.
The fact that the Pope stands outside the politics of the day makes him an important political factor, even in the field of diplomacy. It was not always thus. The election of Francis, however, has called into question the nearly year-long alliance between the papacy and conservatives. Francis has been so outspoken about the need to express compassion for those less fortunate that some have come to ask, Is the pope a socialist? Of course, the pope is nothing of the sort.
But his clear call for a reappraisal of capitalism and the relentless barren materialism that the market system promulgates, has left conservatives wondering whose side he is on. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation.
A new tyranny is thus born. The thirst for power and possessions knows no limits. There is always this anecdote about the papacy, at the end of World War II the Allies were talking about holding meeting and upon a proposal to invite the Vatican to the conference, Joseph Stalin, who did not fancy the idea, is said to have responded, "How many divisions does he have? The Papal States ended in when the totality of Italy was reunited. On Feb. The status of the Vatican was again that of a political power and had diplomatic standing.
However, it was highly symbolic as a state, as it was a few square kilometers within Rome, no physical borders or controls, a kind of a Monte Carlo of Catholicism. Thus, the pope had no divisions left; not even a police force with firearms. No one at the time thought that the Vatican could have a real presence in international affairs other than moral cautions here and there.
That was without counting the resilience and international experience of the Catholic Church, which, especially through the guidance of Pope John XXIII — Cardinal Roncalli as he is known to Istanbulites — reformed itself theologically and acquired an important place in world affairs. I do not want to ramble on the effects of Pope John Paul II accession over the dismantling of the socialist system, but there is the fact that the pope still has immense influence on moral grounds when it comes to human rights abuses around the world.
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