When Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla) died in 2005, the pastor of my parents’ conservative Southern Baptist church in Alabama said something to his congregation that at one time would probably have gotten him fired on the spot. He informed church members that for much of the world, the pope is the face of Christianity and that we should hope the next pope would be very much like the one who had just died. How did a pope win such praise from a conservative Protestant in the American South? The answer is that John Paul II commanded respect for his willingness to forge ahead in faithfulness despite the prevailing winds of culture. In so doing, he won the respect of orthodox Protestants who shared his determination to resist totalitarianism and materialism in the last decades of the 20th century.
In a time when political sages counseled diminishing differences with the Soviet Union, John Paul reminded the world that his native Poland was unfree under Communist domination. During an era when abortion rates exploded after Roe v. Wade and elites constantly emphasized overpopulation, John Paul prophetically stood for the sanctity of life. While the broader culture sought to erase differences between men and women, John Paul’s theology of the body emphasized the complementarity of the sexes. The man the Catholic Church now calls John Paul the Great had a strong moral and spiritual compass that still provides the standard by which successors will be compared for a long time to come.
One of those successors, Pope Francis (Jorge Bergoglio) has now passed after a papacy that was noteworthy for the ways in which it differed from the conservative doctrinal stance of John Paul and his immediate successor, Benedict (Joseph Ratzinger). The change is perhaps not surprising. Francis came from Latin America where liberation theology was born. That movement sought to integrate Marxist thought with Catholic doctrine. John Paul had been at pains to help liberation theologians to see that collectivism had failed, but Francis was more sympathetic to such beliefs.
Francis was the pope during the time in which the United States and other nations moved to legalize gay marriage. While John Paul stood against the epochal Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, Francis seemed to be drawn toward harmonizing Catholic belief with the Obergefell decision. In the years before his death, he contributed to doctrinal confusion by telling priests they could offer blessings to same sex couples and engaged in what appeared to be a kind of sophistry to avoid the obvious conflict with Scripture.
Click Here To Read More (Originally Published at World Magazine)
Hunter (J.D., Ph.D.) is the provost and dean of faculty at North Greenville University in South Carolina. He is the author of The End of Secularism, Political Thought: A Student’s Guide and The System Has a Soul. His work has appeared in a wide variety of other books and journals. He is formally affiliated with the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission; Touchstone, the Journal of Markets and Morality; the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy; and the Land Center at Southwestern Seminary.