Despite Infirmity, the Pope Still Wants to Make Strides

Walking laboriously in the woods at his retreat near Rome not long ago, his stooped figure leaning on a cane, Pope John Paul II imagined himself in the Iraqi desert retracing the footsteps of the prophet Abraham.

An aide, whose task is to help make that vision come true, warned that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein might step into the papal limelight. No matter, John Paul said; the journey’s symbolism is far more important. “The idea is vividly on his mind,” the aide said. “He brings it up very often.”

The most peripatetic of popes has already visited 117 countries, held live audiences on the Internet, published a bestseller and blessed more people than his 263 predecessors combined. Perhaps no other leader--religious or secular--has reached out so effectively across so much of the globe.

But as he enters the third decade of his reign, the 78-year-old leader of the world’s 1 billion Roman Catholics is defying age and infirmity to tackle unfinished business as ambitious as what he has already achieved.

High on the agenda is a pilgrimage to the biblical lands of the Middle East and a summit meeting there with leaders of Judaism and Islam--monotheistic faiths that, like Christianity, trace their roots to Abraham. And healing the 1,000-year rift between the Vatican and Orthodox Christianity is a priority.

John Paul is also plotting a journey through time: a yearlong celebration in Rome to greet Christendom’s third millennium. And in the countdown to 2000, he is demanding repentance for sins committed by Christians down through history in overzealous defense of their faith.

“He is seeking a common cause among the great religions based on shared ideals of peace and human rights,” papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said. “The fact that religion has been present in so many violent struggles throughout the ages--he wants to overcome all that.”

Polish-born Karol Wojtyla was elected by his fellow cardinals Oct. 16, 1978, as the first non-Italian pope in 455 years. Only 12 men have sat longer on the throne of St. Peter. A Mass marking his 20th anniversary will be celebrated at the Vatican today.

John Paul has secured his place in history by helping inspire the downfall of communism in Eastern Europe. Historians credit his appeals for human dignity and social justice with boosting the church’s following in the Third World, even as his uncompromising stand on sexual morals has alienated many believers in the West.

The goals of his twilight years, however, may be elusive.

Official Biblical Tour a Long-Held Dream

The biblical tour--to Ur in Iraq, Mt. Sinai, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Damascus--is a long-nurtured dream for John Paul, who has not visited those places as pope. But it’s a logistic and diplomatic minefield for his aides, who must negotiate with five governments and a host of religious communities to arrange it.

What to do if Hussein lays on an official welcome in Iraq is just one quandary among many.

The pope has, in principle, accepted invitations from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat to visit in 2000. But the Vatican won’t schedule the trip without substantial progress in Middle East peace talks; otherwise, officials say, the pope’s presence might look like an endorsement of the current stalemate.

Nobody, John Paul once insisted angrily, can tell the pope where he can and can’t go. But aides under pressure to get him to the Middle East still aren’t sure which Islamic and Jewish leaders would show up to meet him. Neither religion has the equivalent of a pontiff.

“I can tell you that the pope went yesterday to Jerusalem,” quipped Michael L. Fitzgerald, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue. “In his desire, he is there. The actual fulfillment of this desire is more difficult.”

Bigger obstacles face John Paul’s millennium goal of “total communion” between Catholics and Orthodox Christians, who rejected the Vatican’s authority in 1054. That hope arose as the collapse of communism seemed to open a door for dialogue between the two faiths.

Instead, Orthodox leaders in the former Soviet Union have backed laws to limit missionary activity by Catholics and other “foreigners.” They have rebuffed Vatican appeals to return property they acquired when Soviet rulers shut down Eastern Rite Catholic churches.

For three years, Orthodox patriarchs have ignored John Paul’s invitation to meet and settle differences, including the disputed papal claim of primacy in Christendom. In a small breakthrough, the Orthodox Church in Romania has agreed to a papal visit there next year, but John Paul’s cherished hope of going to Moscow seems remote.

“It’s going to be one of the great disappointments of his papacy,” said Father Thomas J. Reese, Vatican-watching editor of the Jesuit weekly America. “He thought that Catholic and Orthodox theology were close enough to allow for a reunion. But he underestimated the cultural and political divide.”

Perhaps unwittingly, John Paul sent a negative signal to Orthodox leaders last summer when he curtailed the authority of national Catholic bishop conferences around the world by requiring a unanimous vote before a conference speaks out on matters of doctrine.

“If the Vatican won’t respect autonomy for bishops in the Roman church,” Reese asked, “why should it respect autonomy for the Orthodox if they were back in the fold?”

Conflicting Impulses Characterize Reign

John Paul’s papacy has been characterized from the start by such conflicting impulses and aims.

He faces down dictators and demands freedom for oppressed peoples but tolerates no public dissent among clergy, teachers and theologians within his own church.

In pioneering efforts to reconcile Catholics and Jews, he has prayed at the former Nazi death camp at Auschwitz and the main synagogue in Rome. But his condemnation of Christian passivity during the Holocaust reopened old wounds for many Jews because he coupled it with a defense of Pope Pius XII’s public silence at the time.

For a champion of reconciliation, John Paul can be indifferent to compromise. “When he’s convinced of the truth of something, he goes ahead without any regard for whether people agree with him,” spokesman Navarro said.

The same inner compass has guided John Paul on a grueling odyssey--through six bouts of surgery, bullet wounds from a 1981 assassination attempt and the onset of what appears to be Parkinson’s disease--toward a milestone he believes God set for him.

Speaking to 300,000 faithful in Poland last year, he recalled that his mentor, Warsaw’s late Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, told him moments after his election that God had chosen the new pope to lead the church into the next millennium.

“I am growing in years,” he told the crowd. “I ask you to beg God, on your knees, that I will be able.”

Many who watch closely can imagine John Paul persevering even if he becomes severely disabled by Parkinson’s, a progressive neurological disorder that causes tremors and limits mobility.

“He believes that the efficacy of his papacy is not so much what he does but who he is,” said Father Timothy Dolan, a church historian in Rome. “He has become an icon. The message is almost more credible because he’s delivering it at such personal expense. That’s why even the most cynical Catholics and those who have drifted from the faith find being in his presence an overwhelming experience.”

The mayor’s office in Rome expects 26 million pilgrims to descend on the city during the church’s millennium jubilee, which runsfrom Dec. 24, 1999, to Jan. 6, 2001. Most will come to see the pope.

He intends to appear almost daily at his window above St. Peter’s Square. On Ash Wednesday 2000, he plans to lead a “procession of repentance” to Rome’s Circus Maximus to atone for such dark pages of church history as the Crusades, the Inquisition and forced evangelization of the New World.

Beyond that year, his papacy is uncharted. But he is already working to secure his legacy.

His canon law revisions last summer aim to stamp out debate among Catholic theologians and educators--not only now but also after his death--over controversial church teachings against euthanasia, abortion, birth control, sex outside marriage and the ordination of women as priests. He has filled the College of Cardinals with like-minded conservatives, picking nearly 90% of the men who will elect his successor.

Still, John Paul seems to recognize that his prolific teachings--his 13 encyclicals, 84 foreign journeys, 877 general audiences and thousands of homilies--haven’t been persuasive enough.

“He’s going to keep saying the same things but in more depth,” Navarro said. “This is a pope with a strong pedagogic bent. He doesn’t mind repeating, especially when he is not completely understood the first time. In many areas, we can expect that he will repeat and repeat and repeat.”