TC Washington -- When John Paul II creates 30 new cardinals tomorrow, including Baltimore's William H. Keeler, reams of commentary about a "conservative" pope securing his "restorationist" legacy are sure to follow.
It is true that the pope hasn't changed his mind about the central doctrines of Catholic Christianity -- the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the sacramental forgiveness of sins, the primacy of the bishop of Rome in the college of bishops. Nor need anyone expect John Paul suddenly to embrace the sexual revolution's permissive cornucopia. Some things don't -- and on the Catholic understanding of them, can't -- change.
But to read the pontificate of John Paul II through the political lens of "liberalism" and "conservativism" is to miss the radical character of John Paul's approach to the papacy, his distinctively contemporary enunciation of Christian dogma, and his bold departures in papal diplomacy -- all of which will reshape Catholicism's world role well into the third millennium of Christian history.
L * John Paul II has radically redefined the Petrine ministry.
The pope is, of course, the successor of the apostle Peter, who was charged by Christ to "streng- then your brethren." (Luke 22.32) But ever since the centralizing papacy of Pius IX (1846-1878), the bishops of Rome have functioned primarily as bureaucratic managers -- chief executive officers of institutional Catholicism. Mid 20th-century popes sometimes chafed under that burden.
John XXIII broke out of the bureaucratic gilded cage to become a kind of international pater familias; Paul VI cautiously probed the possibility of a more assertively evangelistic papacy during his visits to the Holy Land, Uganda and the Philippines. But that the pope's essential task was to manage the Roman ecclesiastical machinery, no one doubted.
The global evangelism of John Paul II has changed all that beyond recognition. For the Polish pope has interpreted his mandate to "strengthen the brethren" in the most literal terms, as a duty to be with the people of the church virtually everywhere they are found: instructing, exhorting, celebrating the sacraments, sharing the fellowship of the faith.
Moreover, John Paul has broken all previous rules of bureaucratic decorum by making dramatic use of modern communications technology to seize what he believes is a singular moment for evangelization -- the turn of the millennium.
"Crossing the Threshold of Hope," the pope's best-selling book, is perhaps the most impressive example of this strategy of open dialogue. For here is the bishop of Rome sharing his innermost thoughts -- about faith, prayer, other world religions, his own hopes and fears -- not in an official document, but in a public conversation to which everyone, believer or nonbeliever, is invited.
With John Paul II, the era of the pope as CEO of Roman Catholic Church, Inc. has ended. The era of the pope as world evangelist has begun.
* John Paul II has redefined the church's encounter with modern intellectual life.
Karol Wojtyla is not the first pope conversant with modern philosophy and theology; Paul VI had read deeply in the works of such eminent moderns as Jacques Maritain and Yves Congar, whose thought influenced the Second Vatican Council. But Wojtyla is the first modern pope who was a major figure in international intellectual circles before assuming the papacy; and John Paul has remained fully engaged in the life of the mind since his election.
Some Catholics (among those usually called "conservatives") reject modern consciousness altogether; others (among the "liberals") seem prepared to acquiesce to the relativist fashions in today's academy. John Paul II, the pope who invites atheist and agnostic philosophers to seminars at his summer residence, has defined a distinctively "post-modern" Christian intellectual strategy, acknowledging both the contributions and the limitations of modernity while boldly exploring the terrain that lies on the far side of humanity's loss of pre-modern naivete.
In public affairs, for example, John Paul has sounded themes strikingly similar to those argued by the president of the Czech Republic, the post-modern playwright and political philosopher Vaclav Havel; both men affirm democracy and the free economy, while urging that politics and economics be disciplined by a vibrant moral culture capable of sustaining an open, civil society.
In theology, John Paul has refused to choose sides between the strategies of ressourcement (a revival of patristic and medieval studies) and aggiornamento (updating). Rather, he proposes a radical (in the sense of deeply-rooted) third way: an aggiornamento that grows out of a more thorough appropriation of the ancient biblical and theological "sources" of Christian wisdom. The strikingly successful Catechism of the Catholic Church is an example of this method at work.
* Finally, John Paul II has dramatically reconfigured the papacy's role in international politics.
Vatican diplomacy continues. But that diplomacy now takes place in the context of a bold, public defense of basic human rights that does not hesitate to challenge the world's "principalities and powers." In Poland, the former Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Chile, the Philippines, Paraguay and Central America, John Paul's advocacy of freedom helped change the course of history; at the recent Cairo population conference, it stopped the Clinton administration and International Planned Parenthood in their tracks.
But this activism also marks a decisive "post-Constantinian" break with the traditions of papal diplomacy. John Paul does not enter world politics as another head of state playing by the usual power rules. Rather, he strides the global stage as perhaps the world's foremost advocate of the university of human rights, and the defender of the possibility of a universal moral discourse about world politics.
Asian authoritarians, Islamic militants, and western ) multiculturalists all argue that the very notion of "human rights" is an example of "Western cultural imperialism." John Paul insists that it is a matter of the moral logic hard-wired into human beings: the moral logic that forbids us to treat anyone as a mere instrument.
A "conservative" pope? Or a genuine Christian radical who will, one day, merit the title, John Paul the Great? Strip away the caricatures, and the latter is the far more plausible interpretation.
George Weigel is the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.