The Pope is about to die, it seems. In anticipation of the wave of 'he was one of the greatest men of the twentieth century' tributes, I'd like to pre-emptively offer a rebuttal.
Lest anybody think this is tasteless, try to imagine how the tens of thousands of people slowly dying of AIDS because of this Pope's lies about condoms would feel to hear you make such a statement. I believe it would be tasteless to forget them at a moment like this.
So here's a piece I wrote this Febuary:
The Vatican has been one of the most powerful illiberal forces in human history. Who can forget the late nineteenth century 'Syllabus of Errors' written by Pope Leo XIII, in which he described liberalism, free speech and democracy as "terrible evils"? Who can ignore the Vatican's explicit co-operation with Mussolini in outlawing even the democratic Catholic Popular Party? Is it even necessary to mention the words 'Inquisition' and 'Galileo'? Yet in the current climate of foggy multiculturalism - where religious faith, no matter how reactionary, has been ring fenced from criticism - we are supposed to ignore this history and 'respect' the Catholic Church and its pronouncements. Any rational criticism of the Catholic faith, and the institution at its apex, is now treated as though it were akin to racism. John Cornwell's expose of the current Pope and the tens of thousands of deaths for which he is responsible is a reminder of why no liberal can afford to give in to this bullying taboo.
We all know the Catholic-propaganda version of Karol Wojtyla's life. The current Pope is, they brag, a moral prophet who stood against both the inhumanity of Soviet Communism and the materialism of Americanisation. His support for the forces of freedom in his native Poland shred the Iron Curtain; his voice spoke clearly against an increasingly rapacious corporate America. There's some truth in this picture. As Cornwell says, "The power and timing of his initiatives in Poland were impeccable." His actions helped to smother communism more swiftly and softly than might have otherwise been the case. It is also true that his stance on the inequities of global trade - upheld by the WTO and World Bank - is clear and just.
But this picture is partial; it hides Wojtyla's illiberal cruelties from view. In his new book, John Cornwell offers us the charge sheet against Wojtyla. The most famous is his policy towards contraception, which UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has described as "one that favours death rather than life." Contrary to the expectations of most Catholics, the virgin Wojtyla declared that contraception of all kinds is "evil" and "must not be tolerated." Cornwell shows that this view has been formed on the basis of eccentric and often simply false assertions.
A key influence on Wojtyla's beliefs about contraception was Dr Wanda Poltawska, a psychiatrist who survived Ravensbruck concentration camp. "She believed that contraception caused neurosis [and] that there was an equivalence between contraception and abortion," Cornwell explains. Wojtyla's became firmly convinced of her arguments after he witnessed a 'miracle'. He wrote to a priest asking him to pray for Poltawska's cancer - and it "miraculously disappeared". This is the level of superstition that informs policy-making in one of the most power non-governmental institutions in the world.
There is also a considerable dose of misogyny informing Wojtyla's position. When Mrs Nafis Sadik, the Pakistani head of the UN Fund for Population Activities, tried to explain to Wojtyla the case for a woman's right to choose, he howled at her, "Don't you think that the irresponsible behaviour of men is caused by women?" With beliefs like this, it is little wonder that Wojtyla deliberately ignores the evidence that his policy - which forbids the use of condoms even in a marriage where one partner if HIV positive - causes untold misery to some of the poorest women in the world. In several countries struggling with exploding birth rates and starving children, the Catholic policy is widely regarded as a major contributory factor to hunger and human misery.
It gets worse. In some of the poorest parts of the world, the Vatican has pumped out the message that condoms are "useless" and do not prevent the spread of HIV. Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo - speaking directly on behalf of the Pope - stated in 2003 that "serious scientific studies" had shown that the HIV virus could pass through latex rubber. The BBC's Panorama team revealed that no scientist believes these assertions, not even the ones the Vatican claimed to be quoting as their "evidence". The result is clear: development agencies now believe there are thousands of people unnecessarily condemned to die of AIDS in developing countries. Even the Bishop of Rustenberg in South Africa denounced this policy as "a death-dealing code". After reading the evidence he presents, few readers will dispute Cornwell's claim that Wojtyla has "condemned untold numbers of Catholics to death".
Yet - extraordinarily - while Wojtyla was damning people who use condoms as "wicked", he was knowingly negligent about the systematic sexual abuse of children in his own Church. An incredible 4% of all priests serving in the American Catholic Church had plausible public allegations of child sex abuse against them, and similar scandals have rippled across the world. Wojtyla averted his gaze from this abuse at several stages. For example, the head of the Austrian Church begged the Pope in 1995 to investigate Hans Groer, the former Cardinal-Archbishop of Vienna, after several plausible allegations of child molestation were brought against him. Wojtyla refused to countenance it.
Even after the Pope was forced to acknowledge the horrors perpetrated by his priests, he continued to act in a way that belittled child abuse. For example, at the very height of the paedophile scandal, he chose to beatify a known child abuser, Pope Pius IX. As Cornwell reminds us, in 1856 Pius IX orchestrated a conspiracy to kidnap and abuse a 7 year-old Jewish boy, Edgardo Mortara. The plot began when a Catholic maid came forward in Bologna, protesting that she had secretly baptised a Jewish child in her care shortly after his birth. The Catholic Church decided that, since this child had been inducted into the One True Faith, he must now be seized and “fully Christianized.” On the orders of Pius IX, the child was snatched and raised close to the Papal chambers.
The 'Holy Father' developed a habit of hiding him under his cassock in a way that would now be considered, as Cornwell puts it dryly, "inappropriate." This man would, in any contemporary democracy, "be facing a jail sentence for child molestation and kidnap,” Cornwell explains.
So a picture emerges of a man gripped with hatred for condoms but in practice equivocal about paedophilia. Homosexuality is to him "an objective disorder" and "intrinsically evil", but the rape of kidnapped boys is no bar to Sainthood.
Wojtyla’s ethical system seems to become more distirubing and crude the more it is explored. He believes in the most primitive possible religious concepts: exorcism, miracles, stigmata. He is convinced that God literally intervenes in his life on a regular basis. The Deity rescued him from a road accident in his youth. The Virgin Mary ensured that an assassin’s bullet missed his vital organs in 1980. In 1993, when he slipped and broke his femur, he announced that God had deliberately made him fall over in order to make him suffer for the sins against unborn children. Cornwell frets that the Pope may suffer from psychosis in the late stages of Parkinson’s’ Disease, but it is tempting to ask: how would we tell?
Yet Cornwell is even more damning of the Pope when he deals with an area where Wojtyla is widely praised: his commitment to human rights. While he was brave and tough and right in his criticisms of communist tyrannies, Cornwell shows Wojtyla has been persistently soft on fascist regimes. He refused to back the Catholic priests begging for his support in their resistance to neo-fascism in South America in the 1970s and 1980s. He has vigorously disciplined any priests inclined towards liberation theology, while relentlessly promoting Opus Dei, a group with explicitly fascist roots and a key plank of support for General Franco.
Again, Wojtyla's choice of saints reveals his underlying values. He has with great fan-fare canonised Jose-Maria Escriva, founder of Opus Dei and admirer of Franco. Yet he has refused point-blank to do the same for Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was murdered by fascist death-squads in El Salvador after his long campaign against them. The legendary American journalist Carl Bernstein even exposed in his 1999 biography 'His Holiness' that the Pope cut a deal with Ronald Reagan where he agreed not to condemn the neo-fascist Contra war against the democratically elected Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Hendrick Houthakker – formerly a close friend of Wojtyla - told Cornwell he has "no real appreciation of the virtues of democracy". It seems that the godlessness of Communism was more repugnant to him than its human rights abuses.
