Pope John Paul II is not just countercultural, he’s multicountercultural. He challenges the prevailing norms of virtually every culture he addresses.
To Communists, he preaches freedom. To capitalists, he preaches the dangers of materialism.
To warriors, he pleads for peace. From academics, he demands intellectual humility.
To soccer moms, football fans and workaholics everywhere, he says that the most important things to do on Sunday are worship and rest.
And to a world that gets its information live, snappy and in color, the pope makes his most important statements in dry, voluminous, official documents.
To be sure, the tradition of such papal bulls predates the current pope by about 800 years. But John Paul II has taken up the pontifical pen with gusto.
Since 1978, he has issued a dozen encyclicals, the most authoritative genre of papal document. During the same period, he has published more than 30 apostolic letters, on everything from the role of women to the meaning of human suffering.
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And that does not count the lesser documents, apostolic exhortations, apostolic constitutions and so forth.
In the last three weeks alone, the Vatican has released three new apostolic letters.
The first was Ad Tuendam Fidem, a letter about the nature of truth, dissent and church teachings. The second, Dies Domini, offered the pope’s reflections on the Sabbath. The third, Apostolos Suos, dealt with the authority of bishops and bishops’ conferences.
Typically these missives pop up in the Vatican press office about midday, with little advance warning. Sometimes there are press conferences at which Vatican officials speak about the documents; sometimes there are not. Sometimes there are English translations available immediately; sometimes it takes months.
And while some papal documents are 10 pages or less, some top 100 pages.
None of that meshes particularly well with the demands of the mass media. In the best of situations, the reporters and the experts they turn to for immediate analysis scan the document briefly, highlighting the juiciest sounding lines.
In the worst of situations–and I have some personal experience here–neither reporters nor experts has seen the actual text, and the basis for news coverage is limited to a few excerpts, or perhaps commentaries from Vatican officials.
Given those impediments, and the natural desire to tell stories about people rather than abstractions, most of the articles about the last three apostolic letters have turned on the theme of an aging pope working hard to consolidate his control over the church, making his indelible stamp before he passes.
But it is neither those journalistic speculations, nor the quick commentaries of experts, nor even the interpretations of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican’s doctrinal police chief, that matter in the long run. What lasts are the documents that bear the papal seal.
In ways that few other religious institutions do, the Catholic Church relies on a massive river of writings to carry its teachings from generation to generation. Those writings are not position papers or declarations of personal faith, but careful, sometimes legalistic arguments relying heavily on previous church teachings.
Catholic commentator Michael Novak has likened the process to maintaining a chain of evidence in a criminal trial–a meticulous process of documentation meant to convince jurors that what they see in the courtroom is a true portrayal of what was found at the crime scene.
So while the pope’s latest letter, Apostolos Suos, has been widely interpreted as Rome’s attempt to grab back power given to national bishops’ conferences by the Second Vatican Council, the letter itself relies heavily on Vatican II documents, citing its teachings 30 times in 8 pages.
In other words, if this letter is changing the course set for the church in Vatican II, it is a single tugboat nudging at the side of an ocean liner.
And while one popular analysis has a tyrannical pope curbing the freedom of bishops’ conferences, the letter itself suggests another, very different possibility–that it is protecting the rights of individual bishops from the potential tyranny of bishops’ conferences.
In practical terms–and this is what reporters least want to hear–most experts agree that none of these documents will have much noticeable effect on the way the church operates.
Only when the aggregate is studied closely will it become clearer what all these encyclicals and letters mean to the faith and lives of believers. Probably it will be both less and more than we think–not the kind of answer most people want to hear.
Then again, this pope specializes in saying what most people do not want to hear.
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