Such dissidence and discontent are not limited to the laity, liberal commentators add. Priests, who are enjoined to censure contraception as firmly as abortion, cannot deal in good faith with their parishioners, they say. And the church's insistence upon celibacy is one major reason that the ratio of priests to laity has steadily fallen throughout the world, most critically in Latin America and Africa.
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Our photo gallery spans the pope's youth to his last days at the vatican.
The numbers game does not rattle conservatives of the church. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, John Paul's trusted lieutenant and head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the kinder, gentler successor to the Holy Office and its predecessor, the office of the Inquisition), sees no problem in the church's having a smaller and more committed membership. The church as "faithful remnant," Cornwell notes, is one of Ratzinger's favorite metaphors. Others celebrate the fact that the pope's strictness weeded out what his biographer George Weigel calls the "Lite brigades" within Catholicism. "I think the church is much stronger now," says Novak, "with much stronger cadres of people who know what they are doing."
Liberals are quick to rejoin that the pope was needlessly cavalier about alienating one of the largest groups within the church: women. True, as those same critics acknowledge, he repeatedly lauded women's rights and called for equal treatment of women in the workplace and in the family. "I think he preached a good line about women's rights," says Margaret O'Brien Steinfels, former editor of the lay Catholic biweekly Commonweal, "but it didn't help matters within the church." It was not simply the pope's refusal to consider women's ordination that rankled some feminists. It was also his apparent unwillingness to engage the work of Catholic feminist scholars such as Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza who have tried to separate Christian teaching from the kind of historical prejudices that ban women from more responsible roles in the church. As a result, young girls are told that they cannot serve as altar girls in their parish churches. And even more dramatically, as Steinfels points out, the Vatican ruled that one of the leading candidates for the position of general secretary of America's National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Sister Sharon Euart, for 13 years an associate general secretary, cannot be considered for the office.
Conservatives counter that most feminist complaints against the pope came from women in advanced industrial nations, where gender distinctions are under steady assault. His teachings, they say, resonated far more sympathetically with women in the more traditional societies of Latin America and Africa. That may be true to some extent, concedes Maria José Rosado-Nunes, Brazilian coordinator of Catholics for the Right to Choose and a professor at the Pontifical Catholic University in São Paulo. For most poor Brazilian women, she says, "the figure of the pope is untouchable." But because the official church in Brazil became increasingly conservative under this pope, Rosado-Nunes explains, and because this hierarchy did not deal openly with issues of violence against women, child support, and sexually transmitted diseases, even devout women claim that they are "a different part of the church." "It is now harder," Rosado-Nunes says, "for women to criticize an abusive husband or to accuse priests who have raped or abused women." And so, she reports, such women said, "Let the pope alone; he doesn't understand. We do what we have to do with a sense of benediction from God."
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