Reflections on the passing of John Paul II

So, the Pope has passed away. It has to be said that this has been a long time in coming; speculation as to who would succeed him has been going on for years, and the obituary the Guardian published the Monday after (it doesn’t publish on a Sunday) was originally written by someone who passed away in 1994, and updated by his wife and another person since. In the few days since, his life and work has obviously been a major topic of debate and appreciation, with both positive and negative coverage in most newspapers. Dictator Princess noted that the Pope’s death was all over the European media; well, there has been obviously much on the TV and in the papers since Saturday, but it has not been the saturation coverage we saw after Lady Diana Spencer died in 1997. Then, all of the UK’s terrestrial channels suspended their normal programming, and the channel which was first to resume received some criticism. I think the British media has learned from this sentimental outburst; then again, the Pope was somebody, rather than somebody’s relative, if you see what I mean.

I was actually brought up a Catholic myself – half-heartedly, although it didn’t seem that way at the time (my Dad recently told me that my Mum wasn’t practising before she had me). I went to Catholic schools from age 4 to 10 and 11 to 12, and my mother insisted on taking me and my sister to Mass every Sunday until I was eight years old, when she suddenly stopped, without any explanation. When I was 12 I had to go away to boarding school, and although we were taken to Church every Sunday (or Saturday evening for anyone who wanted to attend a Catholic service, which I chose not to), there was a thoroughly irreverent and anti-religious attitude within the school. I was a thoroughly lapsed Catholic by the time I even started investigating Islam.

The late Pope is remembered by different people for three different aspects of his career; the first being the reactionary pro-lifer, the second being the campaigner for human rights, and the third being the Polish national hero who helped bring down the Communist régime in his home country, and possibly the Iron Curtain itself.

Of course, his “reactionary” pro-life views are precisely why so many people also admire him, and Muslims made common cause with him, notably at the notorious UN Population Conference in Beijing. He was against not only abortion, but also artificial contraception and divorce. We as Muslims can agree on part of that. There is a piece in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph by Ferdinand Mount, who claims that among the four developments of the late 20th century that “seem to [him] unequivocally good in their effects” are the control of the “runaway population growth” of India and China, “often by pretty unpleasant methods”. These include corrupt and brutal methods – corrupt includes offering free guns to landowners who get a certain number of their workers vasectomised, voluntarily or otherwise, and brutal includes killing babies at the time of birth. I’m sure we can agree that that’s not even abortion – it’s just plain murder.

I even agree that population density is not actually the issue it’s made out to be. If it were, why is a vast proportion of the world’s arable land sown with useless and harmful crops, like tobacco, fruit and grain for producing alcoholic drinks, and vegetables grown for far-off customers who demand them regardless of the season? Clearly there is no imminent food shortage. When it comes to banning the use of condoms to prevent the transmission of diseases like AIDS, they are clearly letting their monastic inhibitions get the better of them. It’s no secret that the Catholic church has an enormous problem with sex, even between married couples; couples with no prospect of having any more children are supposed to practice “Josephite” (celibate) marriage. There are two problems here. First, there is an established way in the Catholic church to establish celibacy, which is to join a monastic order or become a priest (there’s a big shortage!). People who enter monastic orders do not live with members of the opposite sex, so their sexual awareness is lowered – which certainly is not the case with a married couple, who live in the same house and usually sleep in the same bed. Second, of all the things Catholics do purely for pleasure, like eating and drinking, why is sexual intercourse, between married couples, singled out for shame? And they tell married couples not to use condoms to prevent transmission of HIV in lawful acts of intercourse, and back it up with spurious claims about holes allowing the transmission of HIV. It’s just plain criminal. (Actually, if you’re going to commit adultery, it’s better that you use a condom and avoid passing whatever disease your fling has to your wife. It still doesn’t make adultery right, of course.)

The problem with people who criticise the late Pope for this reason is that they confuse this issue with real life issues like abortion. Feminists, who see that women have a vested interest in making sure abortion laws are even more liberalised than they already are, tell men (and this includes most religious leaders) that they have no right to an opinion on whether abortion should be legal. This is certainly the only issue where the notion that the people with the vested interest have the best authority has any currency! There is a stereotype of pro-lifers that they only care about unborn babies, and forget about people once they leave the womb, which besides being flatly untrue, is irrelevant. Most of these people are on the left side of politics and oppose the death penalty on principle, not just because our legal system, judged on its record past (Derek Bentley) and present (Clark, Cannings et al), cannot be trusted with people’s lives. It’s a gross hypocrisy that they consider the lives of murderers to be more valuable than those of innocent unborn babies.

On the other hand, his record on other moral issues, particularly internal ones, is said to have been severely damaging to the Church. The Catholic church remains the only Christian church which insists that recruits to the priesthood be celibate – but only if they are born Catholics. When married Anglican vicars become Catholic and are admitted into the priesthood, they are allowed to keep their marriages (in some cases, displacing born Catholics – no doubt genuine Catholics – who have left the priesthood in order to marry). (Eastern Christians, including the eastern-rite churches under Papal jurisdiction, allow married men to become priests, but don’t allow existing priests to marry.) This is known to have produced a severe shortage of clergy, as well as widespread covert relationships (as this article on the website of the Russian church in Felixstowe, England, alleges, “enter any bar in Braga and you will see”). Terry Eagleton, in Monday’s Guardian, called him “one of the greatest disasters for the Christian church since Charles Darwin”.

While Catholic Poles consider him a national hero, and he is widely credited with freeing Poland from Communism, I see reason to dispute this. The Communist régime in Poland was actually one of the less repressive, failing to nationalise and collectivise most of the country’s farmland, for example. When the régime built a church-free suburb, Nova Huta, near Kraków, it eventually gave in to demands from the local populace for a church. Many other Communist governments would not have done so. It allowed the Church to continue, it allowed Karol Wojtyla (pronounced Voytiwa) to depart for the conclave in Rome, and then allowed him to return as Pope for a visit, and then return to Rome. By comparison, the patriarchates of Russia and Bulgaria became discredited as instruments of Communist repression – for an example, see this obituary of the Russian Metropolitan (Archbishop) Pitrim of Volokolamsk and Yuryev:

But it is for his tireless propaganda work that he will be principally remembered. Not only did he consistently deny the fact of religious persecution, he slandered individual churchmen and human rights activists who stood up for religious liberty against the policies of the state.

He is on record as having criticised Patriarch Tikhon, the greatest martyr of the early Soviet period, for his “hostility to socialism”, the dissident writer Andrei Sakharov for the “mistake of creating conflict” with the Soviet state, and – perhaps most damaging of all – justifying the KGB’s campaign against the outspoken “dissident” priests Dmitri Dudko and Gleb Yakunin. In 1979, he claimed the latter had been detained for criminal “speculation in icons”, a slander that paved the way for Yakunin’s 10-year sentence to imprisonment and internal exile.

So, perhaps the real reason the late Pope was able to be a catalyst for political change in Poland and elsewhere in eastern Europe was simply because Poland is a Catholic rather than Orthodox Christian country. All of the countries where the Orthodox church has a major presence have their own national churches with their own patriarchs, although the ancient patriarchs of Constantinople and Moscow have a particularly high status. The Roman church, of course, just has one. On top of this, perhaps the people in the Communist party were not entirely convinced of the ideology forced on their country by their Russian occupiers. There are places where Papal intervention may well have had a greater effect than in Poland – notably Paraguay, where Alfredo Stroessner, one of the most repressive and corrupt of the South American dictators, was deposed in a coup in 1989 months after the Pope visited, rebuked him and met opposition leaders. (I notice that the church-goer Robert Mugabe, who unlike Stroessner has tried to starve people into voting for him, is going to the funeral – I wonder if a papal rebuke would do some good in Zimbabwe?)

Muslim coverage of the Pope’s death has been mixed, as we would expect. On one hand, he is remembered as an outspoken pro-life campaigner with whom we shared many moral standpoints; on the other, the fact remains that he was an unbeliever who advanced all the most offensive shirk (polytheism and idolatry) for which his church was notorious. The Salafi-oriented Islaam.com website published an article, Weeping for the Christian Monks, which declared him “a human being who possibly misled more other humans than any of his contemporaries” and a “taghut who promoted the worst sin, declared what is lawful as unlawful and what is unlawful as lawful, while people followed him”. One well-known anti-Islamic blogger remarked on this that “the people at Islaam.com consider the intrasigence and fire expressed in these sources much more important to maintain than any peaceful accord with their non-Muslim neighbors”. But the Catholic church’s opinion on the salvation of non-Catholics (not even non-Christians) is that “outside the Church there is no salvation”, by which is meant, according to the Church’s catechism (available on the Vatican’s website), “they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or to remain in it”. Saved means, of course, saved from Hellfire.

The fact that we seek good relations with our neighbours and work with them to establish moral understandings in order to combat the increasing secularisation of society does not mean that we sacrifice our own belief, which includes the finality of Islam, its universality (that’s what catholic means), its sole claim to be the true (orthodox) religion, and the fate of those who knowingly reject it. We should also be thoroughly grateful that we as Muslims are not subject to the dictates of any pope or supposedly infallible imam. The intransigence of the just-passed Pope on the administrative decisions of 800 years ago, intended to protect the Church’s property, has caused a crisis in his community. Our community could never be held hostage to one religious leader in this way, alhamdu lillah.