Tossed by the tempest
By Antonio Montalvan II
Inquirer News Service

CONSERVATIVE, moderate, progressive. Labels they all are. And there was a superfluous abundance of those labels as the world watched the death of Pope John Paul II and the rise to the papacy of Pope Benedict XVI.

But labels are not without agenda. Too often, it is our desire to shape persons in our mold that underlies our use of labels. Labels thus become a projection of our desire to have the object of our critique fit into our own agenda.

News, features, columns and commentaries, most especially from American media, were almost one in saying that the late John Paul II was "conservative." Oft cited as basis for this classification was his rejection of the advocacies for women-priests, married clergy, same-sex marriage, artificial contraception and abortion. And because of his "hard-line" position on those issues, he caused the Catholic Church to be "divided."

There is a so-called sin in postmodernist anthropology that is called essentialism. We commit this sin when we classify human events and people under hard-and-fast categories. It is similar to reductionism. It pigeonholes people into those categories, thus denying them the capacity to rise beyond their perceived limits. The common word for it is generalization.

Classifying John Paul II as a conservative easily shows us that labels are poor scales of analysis. Though not the first papal globetrotter (Paul VI also was), the late pontiff debunked the idea of a papacy exercised only from the splendor and gilded corridors of a palatial residence. His foreign trips consistently underscored the Catholic Church's preference for the downtrodden and the poor. At a time when the late Yasser Arafat was almost a pariah to the supposedly more polished West, John Paul was like a voice in the wilderness calling out for a Palestine for the Palestinians.

The late pontiff was the first in the modern age to de-Italianize the Vatican curia, something that was utterly unimaginable before his time. The election of another non-Italian Pope following his papacy is a phenomenon that should not be missed out on John Paul, a Pole. He also internationalized the apostolic nunciatures. One papabile, Ivan Cardinal Dias, the archbishop of Mumbai, India, was a papal nuncio to South Korea, Benin and several other countries. John Paul was hardly a conservative when it came to the youth. For sure, his "World Youth Day" meetings will now be a Vatican institution. I saw John Paul in the 1995 World Youth Day in Manila, doubtless a mammoth event. Despite being the old man that he already was then, he addressed the youth in banters, even as he gamely swayed his cane to the beat of music, and used the drama of stage lights to emphasize his message. How many young people all over the world have remained in fidelity to the Church because of the World Youth Day, a modernist device of evangelism, hardly the stuff of which conservatism is made?

Those with the bad habit of labeling Church officials as conservative are the same voices who come from the regions of the world where the pews are empty, save for a few geriatric members of their populations. John Paul once said that Jesus Christ has disappeared from Europe. The greatest paradox of modern times is the decline of the West. Once the principal source of Catholic missionaries, it is back to square one-as a mission territory. That alone should be a lesson for those who resonate with the so-called progressive issues.

On the other hand, Africa, which was close to the pastoral heart of John Paul, is now a bastion of Catholicism. The African nation with the third largest Catholic population in the continent, Uganda, is currently setting the example of abstinence and a change in moral behavior-not condoms-as the solution to the AIDS problem.

The election of Benedict XVI was greeted by those people with the same method of analysis they used in labeling John Paul. But where, I ask, is the wisdom of labeling the new Pope as a conservative? Is a pope who extols the richness of Vatican II a conservative? Is it religious rightist extremism when a pope says he will spare no effort to arrive at dialogues with various cultures, and then calls for a world order of authentic social development for man, in pursuit of the true and the good for human dignity? When a new pope vows to pursue interaction with local churches, following it with the key ideas of collegiality and devolution of power, does this show the stuff conservatives are made of?

When the boat is tossed by the tempest, will the one at the helm not repel the onslaught of the waves as they lash and thrash the boat, or will he not instead bring the boat to its safe destination, especially when that destination, as Benedict XVI announced, is a Church that is "courageous, free and young"?

Secularism has brought us into the world of shallow labels and essentialist thoughts which cannot fathom the great wisdom that the Church has handed down through generations as a legacy.

Comments to monta@cu-cdo.edu.ph