Empire of the Spirit

By Paul Gray

People who see him -- and countless millions have -- do not forget him. His appearances generate an electricity unmatched by anyone else on earth. That explains, for instance, why in rural Kenyan villages thousands of children, plus many cats and roosters and even hotels, are named John Paul. Charisma is the only conceivable reason why a CD featuring him saying the rosary -- in Latin -- against a background of Bach and Handel is currently ascending the charts in Europe. It also accounts for the dazed reaction of a young woman who found herself, along with the thousands around her in a sports stadium in Denver, cheering and applauding him: "I don't react that way to rock groups. What is it that he has?"

Pope John Paul II has, among many other things, the world's bully-est pulpit. Few of his predecessors over the past 2,000 years have spoken from it as often and as forcefully as he. When he talks, it is not only to his flock of nearly a billion; he expects the world to listen. And the flock and the world listen, not always liking what they hear. This year he cast the net of his message wider than ever: Crossing the Threshold of Hope, his meditations on topics ranging from the existence of God to the mistreatment of women, became an immediate best seller in 12 countries. It is an unprecedented case of mass proselytizing by a Pontiff -- arcane but personal, expansive but resolute about its moral message.

John Paul can also impose his will, and there was no more formidable and controversial example of this than the Vatican's intervention at the U.N.'s International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in September. There the Pope's emissaries defeated a U.S.-backed proposition John Paul feared would encourage abortions worldwide. The consequences may be global and -- critics predict -- catastrophic, particularly in the teeming Third World, where John Paul is so admired.

The Pontiff was unfazed by the widespread opprobrium. His popular book and his unpopular diplomacy, he explained to TIME two weeks ago, share one philosophical core: "It always goes back to the sanctity of the human being." He added, "The Pope must be a moral force." In a year when so many people lamented the decline in moral values or made excuses for bad behavior, Pope John Paul II forcefully set forth his vision of the good life and urged the world to follow it. For such rectitude -- or recklessness, as his detractors would have it -- he is TIME's Man of the Year.

The Pope is, in Catholic belief, a direct successor of St. Peter's, the rock on whom Jesus Christ built his church. As such, John Paul sees it as his duty to trouble the living stream of modernity. He stands solidly against much that the secular world deems progressive: the notion, for example, that humans | share with God the right to determine who will and will not be born. He also lectures against much that the secular world deems inevitable: the abysmal inequalities between the wealthy and the wretched of the earth, the sufferings of those condemned to lives of squalor, poverty and oppression. "He really has a will and a determination to help humanity through spirituality," says the Dalai Lama. "That is marvelous. That is good. I know how difficult it is for leaders on these issues."

John Paul's impact on the world has already been enormous, ranging from the global to the personal. He has covered more than half a million miles in his travels. Many believe his support of the trade union Solidarity in his native Poland was a precipitating event in the collapse of the Soviet bloc. After he was nearly killed in 1981, he visited and pardoned his would-be assassin in jail. Asked an awed Mehmet Ali Agca: "Tell me why it is that I could not kill you?" Even those who contest the words of John Paul do not argue with his integrity -- or his capacity to forgive those who trespass against him.

His power rests in the word, not the sword. As he has demonstrated throughout the 16 years of his papacy, John Paul needs no divisions. He is an army of one, and his empire is both as ethereal and as ubiquitous as the soul. In a slum in Nairobi, Mary Kamati is dying of AIDS. In her mud house hangs a portrait of John Paul. "This is the only Pope who has come to this part of the world," she says. During his most recent visit, he sprinkled her with holy water. "That," she says, eyes trembling, "is the way to heaven."

In 1994 the Pope's health visibly deteriorated. His left hand shakes, and he hobbles with a cane, the result of bone-replacement surgery. Asked about his health, he offered an "Oh, so-so" to TIME. It is thus with increased urgency that John Paul has presented himself, the defender of Roman Catholic doctrine, as a moral compass for believers and nonbelievers alike. He spread through every means at his disposal a message not of expedience or compromise but of right and wrong; amid so much fear of the future, John Paul dared to speak of hope. He did not say what everyone wanted to hear, and many within and beyond his church took offense. But his fidelity to what he believes people need to hear remained adamant and unwavering. "He'll go down in history as the greatest of our modern Popes," says the Rev. Billy Graham. "He's been the strong conscience of the whole Christian world."

And then there was the sorry state of the globe he proposed to save. Patches of the Third World sank further into revolutionary bloodshed, disease and famine. The developed nations began to resemble weird updatings of Hieronymous Bosch: panoramas of tormented bodies, lashed, flailed and torn by the instruments of material self-gratification. Secular leaders dithered and disagreed and then did nothing about the slow death of Bosnia, the massacres in Rwanda.

Private behavior appeared equally adrift. People trained to know better showed that they did not, notably the younger members of Britain's royal family, who energetically pursued self-implosion, with TV documentaries and books their detonators of choice. In Los Angeles two separate juries could not agree on a verdict in the trials of Lyle and Erik Menendez, young men who admitted killing their parents, at close range, with shotguns. The nightly news became a saraband of sleaze: Tonya, Lorena, Michael, O.J.; after 10 days of claiming to have been the victim of a carjacking, a South Carolina mother confessed she pushed the vehicle into a lake with her two tiny sons strapped inside.

The secular response to the tawdriness of contemporary life was not uplifting; it largely amounted to a mingy, mean spirited vindictiveness, a searching for scapegoats. Many interpreted the Republican sweep in the November elections as a sign that voters were as mad as hell and ready for old-fashioned verities. That seemed to be the view of incoming House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who called for a constitutional amendment allowing voluntary school prayer in public schools. He also suggested it might be a good idea to fill orphanages with the children of welfare mothers.

John Paul was personally affected by the turmoil of 1994. He could not make planned visits to Beirut and Sarajevo because enmities on the ground were too volatile. Rwanda dealt him particular grief: an estimated 85% of Rwandans are Christians, and more than 60% of those Roman Catholics. Some priests were accessories to massacre. The new faith was unable to overcome tribal conflict.

But when circumstances allowed him to act, John Paul did so decisively. His major goals have been to clarify church doctrine -- believers may experience doubt but should be spared confusion -- and to reach out to the world, seek contacts with other faiths and proclaim to all the sanctity of the individual, body and soul.

He made advances on all of these fronts in 1994. The Catechism of the Catholic Church appeared in English translation, the first such comprehensive document issued since the 16th century. It clearly summarizes all the essential beliefs and moral tenets of the church. Some Catholics believe it will be the most enduring landmark of John Paul's papacy. In June, John Paul oversaw the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Israel, ending a tense standoff that had existed ever since 1948.

In May the Pope released an apostolic letter in which he set to rest, for the foreseeable future, the question of the ordination of women. His answer, in brief, was no. The document disappointed and outraged many Catholic women and men; even some sympathetic to the Pope felt that his peremptory tone, his strict argument from precedent, i.e., that Christ appointed only males as his Apostles, represented a missed opportunity to teach, to explain an exclusionary policy that contemporary believers find outmoded or beyond understanding.

The high or the low point of the Pope's year, depending on who did the reporting, came in September. The U.N. population conference convened in Cairo, with representatives from 185 nations and the Holy See in attendance. On the table was a 113-page plan calling on governments to commit $17 billion annually by the year 2000 to curb global population growth. About 90% of the draft document had been approved in advance by the participants, but the remaining 10% contained some bombshells John Paul had seen coming. The most explosive was Paragraph 8.25, which owed its inclusion in part to a March 16 directive from the Clinton Administration to all U.S. embassies; it stated that "the United States believes access to safe, legal and voluntary abortion is a fundamental right of all women" and insisted the Cairo conference endorse that policy.

John Paul was not in Cairo, but he kept in constant touch with his delegation. Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls recalls the Pope's reaction to Paragraph 8.25: "He feared that for the first time in the history of humanity, abortion was being proposed as a means of population control. He put all the prestige of his office at the service of this issue." For nine days the Vatican delegates, under his direction, lobbied and filibustered; they kept their Latin American bloc in line and struck up alliances with Islamic nations opposed to abortion. In the end, the Pope won. The Cairo conference inserted an explicit statement that "in no case should abortion be promoted as a method of family planning"; in return the Vatican gave partial consent to the document.

In public relations terms, it was a costly victory. There he goes again, the standard argument ran, imposing his sectarian morality on a world already hungry and facing billions of new mouths to feed in the coming decades. One Spanish critic said the Pope had "become a traveling salesman of demographic irrationality." Says dissident Swiss theologian Hans Kung: "This Pope is a disaster for our church. There's charm there, but he's closed-minded." The British Catholic weekly the Tablet summed up Cairo, "Never has the Vatican cared less about being unpopular than under Pope John Paul II."

Cairo perfectly crystallized reciprocal conundrums: the problem of the Pope in the modern world and the problem the Pope has with the modern world. The conflict boils down to different paths of reason and standards of truth. In Crossing the Threshold of Hope, John Paul locates the source of the great schism between faith and logic in the writings of the 17th century French philosopher Rene Descartes, particularly his assertion "Cogito ergo sum" (I think; therefore I am). The Pope points out that Descartes's formulation turned on its head St. Thomas Aquinas' 13th century pronouncement that existence comes before thought -- indeed, makes thought possible. Descartes could presumably have written "Sum ergo cogito," but then the history of the past 300 years might have been profoundly different.

Although not the only one, Descartes was a major inspiration for the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. Truth became a matter not of doctrine or received traditions but of something materially present on earth, accessible either through research or sound reasoning. "Know then thyself, presume not God to scan," Alexander Pope wrote in 1733-34. "The proper study of Mankind is Man."

The human intellect, thus liberated, proved prodigious; the fruits of its accomplishments are ever present in the developed world and tantalizingly seductive to those peering in from outside the gates. John Paul is not a fundamentalist who wants to repeal the Enlightenment and destroy the tools of technology; the most traveled, most broadcast Pope in history knows the advantages of jet airplanes and electronics.

Instead he argues that rationalism, by itself, is not enough: "This world, which appears to be a great workshop in which knowledge is developed by man, / which appears as progress and civilization, as a modern system of communications, as a structure of democratic freedoms without any limitations, this world is not capable of making man happy."

In essence, the Pope and his critics are talking at cross-purposes, about different universes. His reaffirmations of the church's doctrines on sexual matters actually form a small part of his teachings, but they have drawn most of the attention of troubled Catholics and the Pope's critics in the West. The conviction is widespread that sexual morality and conduct are private concerns, strictly between individuals and their consciences. But who guides those consciences? the Pope would ask. Many population experts see a future tide of babies as a problem to be solved; the Pope sees these infants-in- waiting as precious lives, the gifts of God. The church's doctrine that condoms should not be used under any circumstances has provoked, in the age of AIDS, deep anger. Henri Tincq, who writes on religious subjects for Paris' Le Monde, sums up this reaction, "The church's refusal of condoms even for saving lives is absolutely incomprehensible. It disqualifies the church from having any role in the whole debate over AIDS." As heartless as John Paul's position may seem, it is consistent with his view of the world: the way to halt the effects of unsafe sexual practices is to stop the practices.

Those who will never agree with the Pope on birth control, abortion, homosexuality and so on may nonetheless have benefited from hearing him speak out. Says Father Thomas Reese of the Woodstock Theological Center in Washington: "He's the one keeping these issues alive, things people should reflect on morally. He can't force them to do things, but he provides a constant reminder that these are moral questions, not simply medical or economic ones."

John Paul has never stepped back from difficulties, and he looks forward to an arduous 1995 agenda. First up is a scheduled 10-day trip in January to Papua New Guinea, Australia, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, where the Archbishop of Manila is in open conflict with the country's Protestant President over population control. The Pope is also laying strategy for the 1995 U.N. World Conference on Women in Beijing, which figures to be a replay of Cairo. In June, he plans to meet with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, the leader of the Eastern Orthodox Church. John Paul has long spoken of mending the breach between the Roman and Eastern churches that became final in - 1054. The Berlin Wall, put up in 1961, came down 11 years into his papacy; undoing the effects of a millennium may take him a little longer.

The Man of the Year's ideas about what can be accomplished differ from those of most mortals. They are far grander, informed by a vision as vast as the human determination to bring them into being. After discovering the principle of the lever and the fulcrum in the 3rd century B.C., Archimedes wrote, "Give me where to stand, and I will move the earth." John Paul knows where he stands.

With reporting by Thomas Sancton and Greg Burke/Rome, Joseph Ngala/Nairobi and John Moody and Richard N. Ostling/New York