Indomitable at 75, Pope Defies Health Concerns

He is aging and increasingly frail. He works seven days a week. He tires and he limps. He will embark soon on new foreign journeys and already has plans for millennial celebrations in 2000. His left hand shakes, and sometimes his voice quavers. He is more heard than heeded by followers around the world who increasingly challenge his authority.

The stooped pope of surprises trudges into a new year with the weight of age on his back but the future on his mind.

He is battered by infirmity and dogged by adversity. But he is again confounding doomsayers who question how much longer his remarkable reign can endure.

At 75, John Paul II, supreme pontiff of nearly a billion Roman Catholics, energetically abides in the conviction that he still has Masses to say and miles to go before he sleeps.

Challenges and problems abound in the Catholic universe he rules with spiritual vigor and patriarchal severity, but at least the latest alarm about papal health has eased.

John Paul interrupted a Christmas Day address being televised live around the world not because of some serious ailment, it seems, but because of a flu compounded by an old-fashioned upset stomach. A Polish Christmas delicacy, herring in cream sauce, consumed after midnight Mass ended after 2 a.m. is widely named as principal villain by Vatican insiders who are not themselves Polish.

Two days after the latest in a long list of health scares, John Paul went walking for several hours in the Appennini Mountains east of Rome. He has been in fine fettle ever since in a busy, multifaceted swirl of public appearances that are his trademark.

John Paul observed recent Epiphany celebrations by consecrating 14 bishops, demanding the release of kidnap victims in Sardinia, appealing for greater unity and dialogue among Christians and urging reluctant governments to accord legality and equality to immigrants.

On Saturday, he delivered a “state of the world” address to representatives of 161 nations gathered at the Vatican.

“This is a pope who has no weekend. We suggest that he pull down the curtain on Saturday afternoon and rest. He won’t do it,” says Joaquin Navarro-Valls, papal spokesman. “People see him only on his trips, 10% of his time. Here at the Vatican, he continues nearly all his activities--including Sunday visits to Roman parishes.”

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John Paul will be 76 in May, one year beyond the age at which he asks his fellow bishops to retire. He is not as mobile as he once was. But he walks better--and more often without a cane--than he did a year ago.

He finally submitted to intensive physiotherapy over the summer, more than a year after doctors prescribed it as essential rehabilitation for a right leg broken in a 1994 bathroom fall.

In the 18th year of his reign, the pope, who was gravely wounded by an assassin’s bullets in 1981 and had a colon tumor removed in 1992, is a far cry physically from the outdoorsman who once joyfully skied and tramped the mountains of his native Poland.

As a concession to John Paul’s health, stand-in cardinals and bishops are quietly beginning to take over Masses and other Vatican duties the pope himself once presided over.

Two bishops did the heavy work at the papal baptism of 20 babies in the Sistine Chapel earlier this month. John Paul seldom misses his Wednesday general audiences, but he sits now on a stage where once he walked about. A priest sings the “Our Father” that John Paul himself used to lead as the closing audience prayer.

Navarro does not dispute that John Paul is getting on. But old age is a relative thing, he says.

“Whatever their physical age, people get old when they begin to live more on memories than plans. You’ll never hear the Holy Father say, ‘I remember when I was in Krakow. . . .’ Instead, he’s talking about ideas, new plans, projects for the future. . . . I see no symptoms that he’s becoming an old man,” says Navarro, a physician by training.

John Paul has said repeatedly that he expects to lead his church into the third millennium.

He intends to pray in the Holy Land, preferably with Muslims and Jews as well as Catholics at his side, when the 21st Century dawns.

Meantime, he is gearing up his church for Holy Year 2000 celebrations that will bring millions of pilgrims to Rome, all of them anxious for a personal glimpse of the white-robed leader of their faith.

John Paul also clearly intends to remain busy and visible. History’s most traveled pope is scheduled to leave for a six-day visit to Central America and Venezuela next month, to be followed later in the year by trips to Germany, Hungary, Slovenia and France.

John Paul would go to Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, tomorrow if he could, but shots fired there earlier this month at the plane of a cardinal-scout are read by the Vatican Curia as a clear message: Not yet.

Like his routine at the Vatican, the foreign trips are expected to see some changes.

On his last visit to Central America, in 1982, John Paul zipped hither and yon. This time in Central America he will sleep four nights in Guatemala, making day trips to El Salvador and Nicaragua, then move on to two nights in Caracas, Venezuela. The remainder of the scheduled 1996 trips are quick-hit weekend visits.

One sure bet for all of his stops is that John Paul will preach oft-heard calls for no-compromise morality and obedience to dogma. Indeed, his constancy is the essence of John Paul’s attraction for many Catholics. It is also what critics consider to be his failing.

In the developing world, unremitting papal calls for social justice encourage rapid Catholic growth in Africa and Asia, although in Catholic Latin America the church encounters ever-greater competition from pragmatic Protestant denominations.

But it is in the First World, especially in the United States and Europe, where John Paul often seems a singer more prized than his song. Catholics tend to hail the man and ignore his teachings.

“Papal labors reap bitterness. He speaks, the people applaud. It is a church joyfully celebrated, not a church that is heeded,” says Domenico Del Rio, a senior Vatican analyst in Rome.

German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the keeper of Vatican orthodoxy, warned John Paul in November that “vast sectors of the church” do not fully heed his message. There is a need for more careful language and more sensitive presentation of teachings, Ratzinger says.

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Europe, as one example, is a great disappointment to a Polish pope who was a key player in the fall of communism.

John Paul imagined that newly freed Eastern Europe could become a spiritual counterweight to Western materialism. Instead, it became an overnight sellout to the consumerism he despises.

Last year alone, two of the most Catholic countries in Europe signaled growing independence from their religious roots: Poland turned against papal ally Lech Walesa and elected a former Communist as president. Ireland, where the church has been stung by a pedophilia scandal involving priests, narrowly approved divorce in a national referendum.

Rejection of papal teaching is sometimes confrontational, sometimes quiet. In Italy, 70% tell pollsters that they can be good Catholics without obeying church sexual precepts, and more than half accept artificial contraception. Only 20% condemn abortion, 45% believe that priests should be able to marry, and 40% would have no problem with female priests.

Rebellion is more outspoken further north in the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria and Germany.

About 1.4 million Germans signed petitions demanding dialogue on female priests and married priests, and greater participation by laymen and priests in the appointment of local bishops.

Naysayers are not hard to find, but John Paul does not preach to a vacuum. The Rev. Bartholomew Kiely, an Irish Jesuit who teaches a course on human sexuality at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, says future leaders of the church like what they are hearing from their pope.

“Graduate students in theology and other faculties are much more interested in, and open to, papal teaching than they were 20 years ago,” Kiely says.

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In context, the unpopularity of some of his teachings neither dismays nor deters John Paul. In the Scripture, notes the Rev. John Navone, an American professor of biblical theology, popularity was usually the province of false prophets who said what people wanted to hear.

How long John Paul’s reign will last is unknown. But his essence is predictable until his dying breath: righteous, indomitable.

An actor as a young man, John Paul now plays to the fullest a role that matches his personality and his sense of mission.

Then-Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev recognized it at a historic meeting with the pope at the Vatican in 1989. After their talk, Gorbachev introduced his wife, Raisa, to John Paul. “This is the pope of Rome,” Gorbachev said, “the highest moral authority on Earth.”

* ‘STATE OF THE WORLD’

John Paul II delivers stern speech to global leaders. A9