The Legacy of Pope John Paul II

By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!. Posted April 5, 2005.

The Pope died Saturday night at the age of 84. Officials announced the cause of death as septic shock -- an infection causing organ failure and cardiovascular system collapse.

A massive funeral is scheduled to take place on Friday. Rome authorities are braced for as many as two million mourners -- including more than 100 heads of state -- in the largest such event the city has ever seen.

John Paul's 26-year leadership of the Roman Catholic Church was the third longest in history and he was the first non-Italian pope in over 400 years. During his papacy, he visited a record 120 nations and was seen in person by millions.

On Sunday, mourners filed past the Pope as his body lay in state at the Vatican Palace's Clementine Hall. He was dressed in crimson vestments and a white bishop's miter, his head resting on a stack of gold pillows. A rosary was wound around his hands and a staff tucked under his left forearm.

Meanwhile, the College of Cardinals convened Monday in the Vatican's Apostolic Palace in the first of a series of daily sessions which will deal with the day-to-day running of the Church and prepare for elections for a new pope, to be held between 15 and 20 days after his death.

Amy Goodman: We're joined by Angela Bonavoglia, an award-winning journalist author who covers social, health, religious, and women's issues. Her latest book is Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church, released last month. We're joined on the telephone from New Jersey by Mary Segers, a professor of political science at Rutgers University, an expert on American Catholicism, the Roman Catholic Church, and the relationship between religion and politics in the United States. Her books include Church Polity and American Politics: Issues in Contemporary American Catholicism and The Catholic Church and Abortion Politics: A View from the States. We're also joined on the line by Blase Bonpane, the director of the Office of the Americas. He was a Catholic priest in Guatemala during the 1960s where he was expelled for his efforts on behalf of the poor and disenfranchised. His most recent book is called Common Sense for the 21st Century. He's also a commentator on Pacifica station KPFK in Los Angeles. We're going to begin with our guest on the telephone from New Jersey. Can you talk about the significance of Pope John Paul II, Professor Segers?

Mary Segers: This is an extraordinary papacy that we have witnessed, all 26 years of it. And I think he's remarkable for having restored or renewed or even inaugurated an appreciation of Catholicism worldwide, which is quite extraordinary. The Church may have been in disarray when he became Pope and through force of his personality and travels, he's made many people who are not Catholic aware of his view of the message of Jesus Christ. So what I sensed yesterday -- the churches were full here in the United States -- Catholics themselves finally got a renewed sense of the appreciation of this religious tradition. Too many times in the past the Catholic Church has been kind of dismissed or trivialized, at least in popular culture as a church that has sort of warped views on sexuality. Well, there's a lot more obviously, and I think John Paul II illustrated that.

Amy Goodman: Can you talk about the significance of where he came from, from Poland?

Mary Segers: Yes, he's referred to as a Polish Pope, and I think that is very significant. Clearly this was a pope who was influenced by the Nazi occupation of Poland through which he lived and then by the subsequent 43 years of communist rule of Poland. I think that left him with a sense of the importance of individual dignity. The battle that all of the Polish church authorities and leaders fought with the communist government was real. The Church in Poland at that time was about the only place that you could go to movies. It was the only place that you could assemble, talk about peaceful assembly, to discuss issues of the day. In talking to young students at the University of Warsaw five years ago who had lived through this, they described communism in Poland as immoral, as a system of complete cronyism, everything dependant upon whom you knew, a system of lies and deceit. They spoke about it in the harshest terms, as absolutely immoral. Now, that obviously influenced the pope, and so I think his sense of human dignity came from that distinctive experience of having Jewish friends who were carted off to the concentration camps during the Nazi period, and then this sense of being in a beleaguered church fighting for survival under the Polish communist regime.

Amy Goodman: Can you talk, Professor Segers, about what we expect in the future? Who are the people who could succeed this Pope?

Mary Segers: Well, the College of Cardinals today is very different from what it was in 1978 when John Paul II was elected. There are many more bishops now from Latin America and Africa and Asia. There are even fewer Italian cardinals proportionately. The cardinals, for example, from Brazil outnumber the Italian cardinals. And so it's quite possible that we could have another non-Italian cardinal. After all, the Italians do regard this as a position that perhaps an Italian should fill because the pope is the pope of the whole world, but he's also the Bishop of Rome. And so there's some speculation that maybe the Italians would dearly love to elect one of their own again. But, you know, I think that you could also see a possible candidate emerging from the Brazilian bishops or some of the other Latin American [countries]. There's a whole series of names put forward, of course, and there are Europeans, the Archbishop of Vienna Christoph Schoenborn, Godfried Daneels who is the Archbishop of Brussels, and Walter Kasper, who is a German cardinal. It's possible that some of those others could be named, as well. But it does seem to be doubtful that any American cardinal would be named at the moment.

Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally-syndicated radio news program Democracy Now.

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