Good pope, bad pope. - 'Pope John XXIII' - book review

Commonweal, March 8, 2002 by Christopher Ruddy

Pope John XXIII
Thomas Cahill
Lipper/Viking, $19.95, 241 pp.

Good Pope John. Bad Pope John Paul. Those who like their biography Manichean-style will enjoy Thomas Cahill's book on John XXIII. Those who don't will be entertained, informed, and ultimately disappointed.

With his contribution to the Penguin Lives series, Pope John XXIII, Cahill, the best-selling author of How the Irish Saved Civilization (Anchor Press) and other works, has actually written two books. The first is an engaging account of John's life, filled with anecdotes and lively writing. The second is a polemic that bookends this biography. The book's opening seventy pages, "Before John," and its concluding twenty pages, "After John," reveal Cahill's deeper purpose: depicting John XXIII as the counterweight to centuries of increasing Roman corruption and self-aggrandizement and its renascence under John Paul II.

Cahill's "first" book--a straightforward biography of John--succeeds in portraying that pope's essential goodness and warmth. Cahill writes insightfully about the realism and earthy joy of John's Italian Catholicism, his unheralded heroism in saving thousands of Jews during World War II, the clarity and breadth of vision given him by keen study of church history (including his own brush with Pius X's anti-Modernist crusades), the delight he had in serving as patriarch of Venice. Throughout Cahill writes with style--Venice's Saint Mark's Cathedral is a "vast and blazing cave of gold"--and humor, as when John, then apostolic nuncio to France, spots a woman wearing a large crucifix on her not inconsiderable bosom and exclaims, "What a Calvary!"

Like his subject, Cahill hits his stride when he reaches John's papacy. He captures the pope's boldness and tact in mediating between John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis, while his account of John's unprecedented Christmastime visit to a Roman prison evokes in the reader the tears that those present shed themselves. If Cahill is occasionally too adoring, he nonetheless makes clear why John's humanity and holiness were so attractive--and remain so today.

Cahill's "second" book, a survey of papal history both before and after John's papacy, is far less successful. His jaunt from Peter to Pius IX--heavily and openly dependent on the work of Eamon Duffy and Richard McBrien--is solid, if a bit tedious. In contrast to the relative balance of his papal overview, Cahill's forays into theology and contemporary church life are tendentious. He dismisses the Assumption as an "oddball" belief and an "ecclesiastical 'F-- you,'" thereby scorning the devotion of Catholics and Orthodox alike. Moreover, although he provides a decent summary of the achievements of Vatican II, his ecclesiology is a mishmash of egalitarianism and turn-of-the-twentieth-century Protestant diatribes against the institutionalism of "early Catholicism": The papacy and episcopate are a mere "Christian invention," while bishops "act validly only as the representatives of their people." When Cahill states that Yves Congar would be "certainly please[d]" by the idea that the church is "whole and complete wherever it manifests itself...even in communities not expressly Christian," it is clear how theologically careless Cahill has become. Congar and Vatican II affirmed that the church is fully present only where the baptized celebrate a true Eucharist and the local bishop is in communion with the bishop of Rome.

Cahill's portrayal of John Paul II is caricature. Even granting Cahill's assertion that "A self-denying athlete [John Paul] is unlikely to value a shuffling and voluble gourmand [John]," his conclusions are cliched and almost willfully inaccurate. In describing John Paul's "idiosyncratic Polish Catholicism" and "morose, even morbid" Tridentine Catholicism, Cahill merely repeats the misreadings of Marco Politi and Carl Bernstein's His Holiness (Penguin). "His ecumenical gestures have been few"? What about John Paul's pathbreaking encyclical on ecumenism and the papacy, Ut unum sint, or his unprecedented opening in Rome of a Jubilee Holy Door alongside the archbishop of Canterbury and a representative of the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople? "In nothing is he more certain than in the realms where his experience is least: sex and women"? True, John Paul has been unyielding in these areas, but surely his greatest certainty rests in his unwavering belief in the gospel and in the inviolability of human life. And, as the coup de grace, "we have come full circle and are back in the pontificate of Pius XII"? Only the most hardened of John Paul's opponents could make such a claim. Diplomatic inertia and regal aloofness are not John Paul's faults. And the claim that this pontificate is "restorationist" could only be made by someone who has paid only slight attention to the best theology of the last twenty years.

One need not subscribe to papal biographer George Weigel's flights of hagiography--wherein John Paul's only faults are that he is sometimes too patient, too visionary--to realize that Cahill has misjudged the current pope. Perhaps the time has come to call a cease-fire on polemical contrasts between John and John Paul. Aspects of the present pontificate (including some of those mentioned by Cahill) should be criticized. Ironically, however, Cahill's portrait of John Paul violates the gentleness so characteristic of his hero Good Pope John, and fails to exhibit the "primacy of charity" that Yves Congar held to be the first condition for all true reform in the church.