Essay Kitchen Pope, Warrior Pope

By PAUL JOHNSON Paul Johnson, the British journalist and historian, is the author of the bestselling Modern Times (1992) and A History of Christianity (1983)

The modern Roman Catholic Church has been shaped by two men: Angelo Roncalli, Pope John XXIII, and Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II. The enormous changes that have swept Catholicism over the past 36 years cannot be understood without grasping the characters, beliefs and work of these two men -- both great Popes but very different Popes. John XXIII, TIME's 1962 Man of the Year, was nearly 77 when he came to the throne of St. Peter, and his reign lasted less than five years, from 1958 to 1963. John Paul II was by papal standards a comparatively young man when he was elected in 1978 -- only 58, making him the youngest Pope in 132 years. He has already reigned a decade and a half and, despite his recent physical troubles, is making plans into the 21st century.

The opportunities to reshape the church enjoyed by these two men were thus conditioned by quite different time spans. Nonetheless, their main achievements -- John's in introducing the Catholic reformation and John Paul's in terminating it -- are similarly weighty. It is also vital to grasp that despite their huge differences in character and temperament, the two men have much in common.

Roncalli was born in the first ridge of mountains east of Lake Como, and looked to the great Renaissance city of Bergamo, not Rome, as his capital. He thought of himself all his life as Bergamese. Donizetti was his favorite composer; he got another Bergamese, Giacomo Manzu, to design one of the great bronze doors of St. Peter's, and he liked to surround himself, as Pope, with Bergamese clergy.

Wojtyla is another mountaineer, from the Carpathian foothills near Cracow. This splendid medieval and Renaissance city, with its ancient Jagiellonian University -- which Wojtyla attended -- was the center of his youthful universe. Warsaw, the modern capital of Poland, meant little to him, and the summit of his clerical ambition was reached when he became Cardinal-Archbishop of Cracow. As Pope, he is a Pole, as Roncalli was an Italian. But both men, as instinctive regionalists, have repudiated modern nationalism and have tended to see Europe as an amalgam of historic regions -- a microcosm of a world of peoples rather than of nations. A regionalist finds it much easier to develop true internationalism than a nationalist, and this is one reason why both men were at ease as head of a global organization, speaking urbi et orbi -- to the city and to the world.

Both men were by temperament religious traditionalists. It is true that Pope John under the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit (this is the only way I can rationalize his decision to summon the Second Vatican Council) was capable of making startling and creative decisions. But his family background, training and career were totally unadventurous. He was steeped in old-style Catholicism. This made him, like the famous 19th century reformer W.E. Gladstone, a "conservative in everything but essentials." His spiritual diary reflects an almost childish simplicity in his devotions. The rosary was hardly ever out of his hands.

John Paul II is also a great man for the rosary. These days he appears to say it continuously and, when not actually talking, his lips move all the time in silent, repetitive prayer. Like Pope John, perhaps even more so, he loves holy pictures, relics, shrines, pilgrimages, saints and martyrs. Miracles, especially the possibility of a new one, fill him with delight. He reveres all the glittering -- some would say tawdry -- aspects of traditional Catholicism. Both John and John Paul would have found themselves at home in the pre- Reformation world of medieval Christianity.

Then there are the differences between the two men, which in part reflect the times in which they came to maturity. The year John was born, Chester Arthur was President, Disraeli had just died, and Picasso had just been born. In many ways John was a Victorian, and the church in which he rose to be Cardinal-Patriarch of Venice had not changed much since the 16th century. John was perfectly well adjusted to this old-fashioned church, but there were aspects to it he found stifling and frustrating.

His frustrations were increased by his career. He was not an intellectual at all. He had none of the instincts of an administrator or clerical politician. By nature he was a pastoralist -- that is, he loved the care of souls. People meant everything to him. His greatest delight -- and temptation, as he freely admitted -- was to sit in the kitchen of a teeming, pulsating Italian household, chatting to the women as they went about their work, telling stories to the children, cracking jokes with the men. Instead, his superiors made him spend most of his life as a diplomat, culminating in the grandiose post of papal nuncio in Paris.

As it happened, John made himself into a conscientious and accomplished diplomat. But he never particularly liked the work, and it gave him a huge distaste for the Vatican court as it existed under the long-reigning Pius XII (1939-58). He found it artificial and impersonal -- and undemocratic. He wanted to bring into the running of the church the thousands of bishops, hundreds of thousands of priests and the countless millions of ordinary Catholics throughout the world. Hence, in 1959, only a year after he became Pope, he summoned the Second Vatican Council. He compared the idea to a flinging open of windows, an airing, an exposure of a musty institution to fresh breezes.

John seems to have decided on holding a council, which began in 1962, without a clear idea of what exactly it would do. His saying was, "The Holy Spirit will provide." The council, which outlived him, proved a typical '60s event, sending one of the most traditional institutions on earth on a roller coaster of fashionable innovation and change for the sake of change. But while he lived, John's interventions in the council's work were well judged and effective.

The real trouble started after his death, when Giovanni Battista Montini, Archbishop of Milan, became Pope Paul VI. In theory, Paul was better qualified to be Pope, by training and experience, than any other 20th century Pontiff. In practice, he proved nervous, hesitant and indecisive. He simply could not make up his mind. John had foreseen this; he had a word for his successor: Amleto (Shakespeare's Hamlet). Under this wavering and unlucky Pope, the postconciliar church went off the rails. All over the world, but particularly in the Americas and Europe, discipline became shaky or even broke down. Thousands of priests gave up their vocations and married. Nuns took to feminism. Quasi heresies like Liberation Theology became the mode. Some hierarchies, such as the Dutch, virtually broke free of Rome. The Vatican began to allow annulments of marriage by the thousands -- amounting to a Catholic sanction of divorce. Its finances were out of control. By the time Paul died in 1978, the church was in its worst crisis since the Protestant Reformation.

John Paul II has never repudiated the legacy of John XXIII. On the contrary, no senior prelate had taken more pains to implement the decisions of Vatican II in his archdiocese than Wojtyla. Moreover, he had worked very closely with Paul VI, to whose memory he has remained conspicuously loyal, in trying to enforce what the council had actually decided, as opposed to what the ultraliberals claimed it had decided. But coming as he did from a church that had been notably successful in maintaining congregations, recruiting clergy, building churches and enforcing discipline, he was appalled by what was happening in the church, especially in Western Europe and the Americas.

What John Paul proceeded to do amounted to a restoration of the church on the scale of that carried out by the Council of Trent in the 16th century but in this case put through by the willpower of a single personality. Unlike John XXIII, who had led a sheltered life in seminaries and nunciatures, John Paul was a man of the world who had suffered under Nazism and communism. He was a philosopher, poet and dramatist, but also a very experienced fund raiser and administrator. His pastoral experience was determinative. In Poland he had founded and run perhaps the most successful marriage institute in Christianity, set up to deal with the problems of marital discord, family planning, illegitimacy and venereal disease, alcoholism, wife beating and child abuse.

Again unlike John, John Paul did not wait for the inspiration of the Holy Spirit: he acted himself, quickly and purposefully. This sometimes meant summoning and hectoring an entire hierarchy, as in the case of the Dutch bishops. More usually it involved inviting to Rome difficult or disobedient bishops for a quiet but firm admonition -- "an awesome experience," as one of them put it to me, "a premonition of being received by St. Peter at the Last Trump." John Paul has also taken more trouble than any of his recent predecessors to ensure that all new bishops appointed are loyal, orthodox and reliable. Over the past 16 years, virtually the entire episcopate has been renewed on the lines of the new traditionalism.

In the light of eternity, the work of John XXIII and of John Paul II is of comparable importance. Both men will be treated by history as great Popes. John has a more humane face, in some ways a more attractive face: a Pope for the home and the fireside and joyous festivals of the church. John Paul is a Pope for the public forum, for the vast congregation and the open battlefield, where the forces of Christianity fight for survival in an often hostile world. He is an intellectual Pope and a warrior Pope. But he is also, and increasingly, a praying Pope, a man rarely off his knees. He is even coming to resemble Pope John physically: an old, increasingly frail gentleman, still doing his formidable best to pray for and guide a suffering humanity and save it from the consequences of its weaknesses and follies.