John Paul II: Worthy of sainthood?

When Pope John Paul II is beatified on May 1, it will mark a new “land-speed record for arrival at the final stage before sainthood,” said John Allen Jr. in Newsweek. It’s been only six years since crowds chanted “Santo subito!”—“Sainthood now!”—at John Paul’s funeral. But the rush to make the widely respected, Polish-born pope a saint has raised questions for some Catholics, who contend John Paul failed to respond properly to the Catholic Church’s sex-abuse scandal. “How can you be a saint if you fail to protect innocent children?” asked Maureen Dowd in The New York Times. Despite repeated warnings from cardinals and bishops that the crisis was widespread, John Paul buried his head in the sand. He did nothing when informed of multiple sex-abuse allegations against one of his favorite clerics, the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, the founder of the ultraorthodox Legion of Christ; indeed, he continued to let Maciel accompany him on foreign trips. “Hold the halo”—John Paul had a fatal flaw.

What human being is not flawed? said George Weigel in National Review. John Paul had such innocent faith in Maciel and other priests that it took him time to believe the allegations, but once he did, “he took decisive action,” telling American cardinals that “there is no place in the priesthood for those who would harm the young.” Rather than focus on that one sad period, we should focus on John Paul’s life as a whole, said Vincent Carroll in The Denver Post. Growing up in Poland, he resisted the “exterminating jackals of Adolf Hitler” during World War II, helped trigger the peaceful uprising in Poland in the 1980s “that eventually dismantled the Soviet bloc,” and forged new links with other faiths. In his long lifetime and 27-year papacy, John Paul was “the most influential Christian of the past century.”

He was also clearly “a man of contradictions,” said Bryan Cones in USCatholic.org. Warm and human in his public appearances, John Paul refused to tolerate dissent from his conservative rollback of the Vatican II reforms, and insisted that only Catholics had access to heaven. That’s not to say that he’s not worthy of sainthood, however, because “holiness is not the same as perfection.” We honor saints because of their “heroic response to God’s offer of grace, even if that grace” does not overcome the “fatal flaw every hero seems to have.”

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