Ian On Sunday

I have been reading a magnificent biography of that powerfully charismatic man of God and extraordinary historical figure, Pope John Paul II. His rise from a hard childhood in lowly circumstances in communist Poland to the high throne of Peter is a tremendous story. But it is his rigorous intellectual and spiritual journey which is of compelling world-wide significance.

As John Paul got very old, he became, it was said, absolutely set in his dogmatic ways, more uncompromisingly condemnatory of any sign of back-sliding in matters of established Catholic faith. He was accused of taking an inhumanly hard line in reaffirming the Church’s doctrine on contraception, abortion, priestly celibacy and the ban on women becoming priests. He became a hate-figure for a wide range of the world’s intellectual elite who could not stand his insistence that there are absolute values in the world to which one must remain faithful. “Everything depends on the circumstances” is the motto which they could not understand why he fiercely rejected.

I admit to having difficulty myself with some of what the John Paul taught as holy writ. I cannot understand, for instance, the insistence on priests being unmarried. I also believe he was misguided about artificial birth control. In this respect Anglicans were surely right when in 1930, at the Lambeth Conference, they declared that a husband and wife must have the general intention of using the miracle of sexual love to create a family, but that the family size must be compatible with their means and that so long as their intentions are just the methods they employ to compose their family are secondary. This emphasis on intention is perfectly in accordance with traditional Catholic theology, so I cannot understand why the Catholic Church has not adopted the same sensible line.

However, though I disagree with some of what Pope John Paul II declared to be holy writ, I have an unquenchable admiration for the greatness of the man and what in general he stood for in the world. I think as time passes and the history of our age is truly written he will be seen as one of our era’s greatest figures. He will, I think, be recognized as the most important single influence in relegating the terrible, soul-destroying creed of Soviet communism to the dustbin of history. In him one sensed a shining certainty about values which he saw with absolute clarity as God-given, eternal, and therefore not subject to the constant sway of emotional whim and intellectual opinion-change.

In the world today, pleasure and possessions are widely considered just about the only really serious objects of existence. Television, films, newspapers, magazines, plays, advertisements, the proliferating internet websites endlessly emphasize the need to grab pleasure, get more possessions, accentuate physical attractiveness, achieve maximum sexual fulfilment, hang on to youth, squeeze the last drop of fun and excitement and profit out of life. Governments, right, left, and centre, declare as their chief concern the achievement of “progress,” growth, a higher national product, better incomes, improved services, larger payouts and increased material benefits of all kinds. The fact that gvernments never deliver and that the Utopias endlessly promised never come to pass or turn out to be veritable hells on earth makes no difference. We are encouraged to yearn for material things and hedonistic pap as if that alone could possibly be all that is good for us. Certainly developments in perfecting the Information Highway and proliferating instant access to the Internet will rapidly spread the holy grail of materialism wider and quicker than has ever been known in the history of the world.

Perhaps gradually we will become aware of that old man in white who said very difficult things on his travels around the world and in Rome to his dying day – that what is constantly being drummed into us is nonsense, that we have no “right” to happiness, that life is not about pursuing pleasure, that material possessions are just as likely to prove burdens as anything else, that sexual pleasure lasts while it lasts but to what purpose after all, that beauty fades, that youth does not last, that the world seen simply as man-made Disneyland is soul-destroying and lacks the lustre of the truly God-given.

We scoffed, grew cynical and embarrassed, as he reminded us again and again that we are living in a world made by God for purposes beyond fathoming and that our lives are at least partly to do with what is eternal and of unimaginable splendour. We tried not to listen as he insisted that in this life we have duties, responsibilities, obligations and that any contentment we achieve will be the result of fulfilling these requirements, not of blindly following our inclinations. In an increasingly selfish age we turned hard of hearing when he insisted that we must attend with dedicated hearts to the needs of others if we are to fulfil our sacred purpose in life. Was he serious, that old man with such a hard, incredible message? In the hectic rush of our everyday lives we hardly had time to think about it.

As we clutch desperately for as much immediate satisfaction as we can possibly get we are hardly likely to heed anyone who seeks to remind us that we have immortal longings too. Above the tremendous din of materialism we hardly heard what that stubborn old priest in Rome kept on trying to tell us. But, as the years pass, increasingly I wonder in the deepest part of me whether his critics, for all their perfect reasoning and fashionable intellectual insights, may not be completely wrong and he completely right.