If the pope seemed out of touch with women, as liberals charge, he appeared to be almost intentionally dismissive of the largest age cohort of the 20th century. The pope's disappointment with the postwar generation, particularly the baby boomers who came of age during the 1960s and '70s, was certainly no secret. It extended even to his fellow Poles, on whom he counted for a strong revival in piety and obedience, particularly after the fall of communism but who, in his eyes, became as lax as others of their generation throughout the materialistic, relativistic West. As Cornwell explains, the notion of a "generational failure" led the pope to place great hope in the young post-boomer generation as "the promise of a resurgence of Catholicism." But the real tragedy behind this vision of a failed generation, Cornwell says, is what it revealed about the pope's refusal "to see the problem as partly his own."
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Our photo gallery spans the pope's youth to his last days at the vatican.
A lack of realistic self-criticism is something that Wills, in his book Papal Sin, attributes to a deeper structural problem in the church: the danger of absolute power. Like Lord Acton, the 19th-century British Catholic and historian who warned of absolute power corrupting absolutely, Wills bemoans the corrosive legacy of Pius IX. In addition to being the pope who produced the infamous Syllabus denouncing such "errors" as freedom of conscience, he also convened the First Vatican Council, which, in 1870, to the horror of Acton and many other Catholics, produced the doctrine of papal infallibility.
The problem of imperial papacies did not originate with Pius IX, Wills points out. The Renaissance boasted many popes who ruled like sovereign secular kings. But the doctrine of infallibility declared that the pope could not err "in defining doctrine regarding faith and morals." Gone was the notion of the pope as first among equals, arriving at doctrinal truth in collaboration with his fellow churchmen using Scripture and tradition as their guide. (When one archbishop at Vatican I made the argument that the pope could never be infallible when acting apart from the church, Pius ix shouted at him, "I am tradition, I am the church.") And in Wills's view, no single greater blow to the cause of truth within the church was ever struck.
It was staggering, he argues, because it came to support the assumption, now widespread among those who call themselves traditionalists or orthodox, "that the whole test of Catholicism, the essence of the faith, is submission to the pope." Yet far from being in line with the long traditions of the church, Wills says, that principle is one that many of the respected church fathers, including St. Augustine, would have disobeyed. "And today," Wills writes, "it is a test that would decimate the ranks of current churchgoers."
What the Second Vatican Council under John XXIII sought to correct, then, was what most liberal Catholics consider to be a destructive break with tradition—and one that put the church at odds with the world in ways that were not necessarily reflective of the authentic teachings of the church. Such liberals do not believe that John Paul II killed the spirit of Vatican ii. Indeed, they believe that it will ultimately prevail. But the damage he did to it is, in their view, no small matter. "He's done some wonderful things," says Steinfels, "but he will have a lot to answer for."
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