The bully pope

At best the chances are slim that the next pope, either spiritually or organizationally, will be able to undo the deep factionalism created by John Paul. Recent years have seen shelves sagging under the weight of books about the church's problems. A partial listing includes "Catholics in Crisis" by James Naughton, "The Dysfunctional Church" by Michael Crosby, "Toward a New Catholic Church" by James Carroll, "The New Anti-Catholicism" by Philip Jenkins, "Will Catholics Be Left Behind?" by Carl E. Olson, "Papal Sin" by Garry Wills, "Goodbye, Good Men" by Michael Rose, "Goodbye Father" by Richard Schoenherr, "Tomorrow's Catholics/Yesterday's Church" by Eugene Kennedy, "In Search of American Catholicism" by Jay Dolan, "A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America" by Peter Steinfels, "The Coming Catholic Church" by David Gibson and "Why Catholics Can't Sing" by Thomas Day.

The most prominent faction, at least at the moment, is the traditionalist one that has been summoned by the media to the airwaves and Op-Eds, there to hail the late pope as having been the fearless defender of all the rules that make The One True Church still true and still one. This faction, ever rankled at what Pope John XXIII wrought with the Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s -- every loony idea from altar girls to the handshake of peace at Mass -- saw in John Paul a no-nonsense leader. They cheered him for not yielding on the below-the-waist issues: artificial birth control, abortion, homosexuality, gay marriage. The traditionalists tend to be both theologically and politically conservative, with Antonin Scalia, Rick Santorum, Patrick Buchanan, William Bennett, Sean Hannity, Robert Novak, William F. Buckley, Phyllis Schlafly and Mel Gibson side by side in the pews.

The spiritual Catholics are those who see the papacy as irrelevant to their lives. When they pray, it isn't the prayer of asking, as though God, or Mary hailed by rote, dispensed favors, but the prayer of cooperation: Cooperate with the gifts you've been given and use them to become someone who is other-centered, not self-centered. If anyone speaks for them, it may be Leo Tolstoy in "The Kingdom of God Is Within You": "Christ could certainly not have established the Church. That is, the institution we now call by that name, for nothing resembling our present conception of the Church -- with its sacraments, the hierarchy, and especially its claim to infallibility -- is to be found in Christ's words or in the conception of the men of his time."

The pragmatic Catholics stay grounded in early church Christianity, when it was the works of mercy and rescue that kept the community together and when people practiced communism -- the pure communism of the commune. The lines from the Acts of Apostles speak to them: "All believers were together and had all things in common. And those who had possessions sold them and divided to each person according to need: Not one of them spoke of the property he possessed as his own."

These are the Catholic Worker Catholics, those who carry on the labors of Dorothy Day, who opened not homeless shelters but houses of hospitality. More than 100 of these houses can be found today, 25 years after Day's death, in both large cities and rural farming towns. Pragmatic Catholics remain loyal to the Christ described by Phillips Brooks in 1883: "In the best sense of the word, Jesus was a radical: His religion has so long been identified with conservatism that it is almost startling sometimes to remember that all the conservatives of his own times were against him, that it was the young, free, restless, sanguine, progressive part of the people who flocked to him."

Better than anyone, pragmatic Catholics understand the long-standing quip "Jesus came preaching the Gospel and ended up with the church."

John Paul, the traveling man, was helpless to keep American Catholics in line, however hard he tried. Who else did he have in mind in his railings against consumerism and hedonism? Had he stopped fuming about the rebellious Americans, he might have noticed that, with some millions attending Mass regularly in 19,000 parishes and giving more than $7 billion annually to the Catholic Church, the United States has the flock with the strongest faith in the developed world. David Gibson, a Protestant-born journalist who once worked for Vatican Radio, wrote accurately: American Catholics "are the most religiously observant Catholics in modern-day Christendom, attending church and supporting the pope to a degree that has no parallel in the industrialized world."

Someone might want to clue in the new pope.

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