Mas que hablar de Juan Pablo II (muy conservador para mi gusto) y lo bueno que fue (para eso ver los articulos adjuntos), creo que seria bueno poner la conversacion sobre: A quien seria interesante tener como nuevo mandamas de la Iglesia Catolica. Obvio mi voto iria por un Jesuita , pero asi como en las elecciones uno tiene candidatos, por el proyecto pais que quiere, porque los cardenales no pueden mostrar su proyecto de Iglesia. Seria interesante ver como los Laicos se hacen cargo de una institucion tan antigua.
Los pobres no pueden esperar
Patricio Navia
La Tercera, abril 3, 2005
La visita de Juan Pablo II a Chile hace 18 años dejó dos grandes legados
polÃticos: los chilenos le perdimos el miedo a la represión de la dictadura
y la preocupación por los pobres se convirtió en la gran prioridad de las
fuerzas democráticas.
Aunque la visita del Papa fue un hecho fundamentalmente religioso, sus
implicaciones polÃticas son innegables. Más allá del incuestionable
espaldarazo al catolicismo que representó esa visita (y que consolidó el
cariño del pueblo chileno por el Mensajero de la Vida), la visita del Papa
se convirtió en uno de los sucesos polÃticos más importantes en el largo
camino de eventos que contribuyeron a poner fin al régimen de Pinochet.
Cuando Juan Pablo II llegó a Chile, muchos advirtieron contra el uso
polÃtico que intentarÃa darle el gobierno militar. Aún más aislado del
mundo por la creciente ola de democratización que recorrÃa América Latina,
Pinochet querÃa utilizar la visita del Papa para subrayar sus credenciales
anticomunistas. Pero si bien era anti-comunista, a diferencia de la
dictadura, Juan Pablo II siempre fue también un férreo defensor de la vida
y de los derechos humanos. Aunque el Papa sabÃa que tendrÃa que pagar
costos por aparecer en público junto a Pinochet, el Sumo PontÃfice creÃa
que su visita darÃa un impulso significativo a la recuperación democrática
en Chile.
Desatando cadenas
AsÃ, aunque esa lamentable foto junto a un sonriente Pinochet en La Moneda
fue un balde de agua frÃa a aquellos que trabajaban por la democracia, los
repetidos encuentros del Papa con jóvenes, pobladores y chilenos marginados
tuvieron efectos muchos más profundos y duraderos. El descontento que se
pudo expresar pacÃficamente contra el gobierno militar con la protección
que brindaba la presencia del PontÃfice terminó por derribar la cultura del
miedo que se habÃa cuidadosamente instalado con aparatos de seguridad y
represión.
Cientos de miles de chilenos pudieron protestar pacÃficamente contra
Pinochet sin temor a represalias ni a violencia polÃtica. En su recorrido
por Chile, parecÃa que el Papa cuidadosamente desataba las cadenas de temor
y represión que habÃan sido impuestas.
Pero el Papa también querÃa desafiarnos como paÃs. Mientras los economistas
del gobierno militar predicaban los éxitos de la revolución silenciosa, el
Papa insistió en la necesidad de combatir la pobreza. Su llamado a que “los
pobres no pueden esperar” subrayó mejor que nadie la gran falencia de la
polÃtica económica del régimen. En un Chile donde casi el 40% de la
población vivÃa en la pobreza, las palabras del Papa fueron una sentencia
condenatoria al discurso triunfalista de Pinochet. La preocupación -con
hechos y no solo palabras- de la Concertación por reducir la pobreza ha
sido, al menos parcialmente, una respuesta al desafÃo planteado por el Papa
en su única visita a Chile.
Separación de poderes
Por cierto, a los no católicos nos resulta inevitable sentir un cierto
rechazo ante la sensación de que el catolicismo se ha convertido en la
religión oficial de Chile en estas horas. Desde la programación especial de
televisión hasta los circunspectos rostros de autoridades (aunque algunos
ni siquiera sean católicos), muchos parecen olvidar que en nuestro paÃs
existe separación entre la Iglesia y el Estado. Dada nuestra creciente
diversidad religiosa, un adecuado homenaje de Chile hacia el sufriente
pueblo católico del mundo deberÃa incluir no sólo la voz del clero, sino
también la de muchos no católicos que comparten el pesar que reina entre
los adherentes al principal credo religioso del paÃs.
Precisamente porque Juan Pablo II hizo esfuerzos especiales por reconocer y
valorar la multiplicidad de cultos en el mundo, su partida debiera ser
ocasión para subrayar en nuestro paÃs la saludable separación entre la
Iglesia y el Estado, entre los principios y preceptos morales católicos y
los valores humanistas y pluralistas del Estado y del paÃs.
=========================================================
http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3622703
The legacy of a pope who changed history
Apr 2nd 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda
John Paul II, spiritual leader to the world’s one billion or so Catholics,
has died. He will be remembered as a pope who resisted pressures to
?modernise? the church’s values?and a man who changed history by
precipitating the fall of Soviet communism
WHATEVER future generations may say about Pope John Paul II, who died on
Saturday April 2nd, aged 84, they will look back with amazement on the
moment when, for the first time in 500 years, a Christian bishop was in the
vanguard of world history. That was in June 1979, barely nine months after
the Polish prelate’s surprise call to the Vatican, following the untimely
death of Pope John Paul I. On a return visit to his homeland, the new pope
was bathed in an outpouring of popular devotion that amazed almost
everybody, from Warsaw’s dissidents to an appalled Soviet Politburo.
Millions of Poles turned out to sing, weep and pray with the man they knew
as Karol Wojtyla, archbishop of the university town of Krakow. From then
on, the Soviet communists began losing their grip on their East European
vassals, and the end of the Iron Curtain was in sight. Stalin’s mocking
question??How many [military] divisions has the pope???had received its answer.
What John Paul managed then was to neutralise, at a stroke, the tyrant’s
most important weapon, fear. For the remaining quarter-century of his
papacy, he reaffirmed his message: ?Be not afraid?. But by the end of his
reign, the world had in many ways become an even more terrifying place, and
fewer people thought the Catholic church had all the answers. Frightening
as the cold war was, the next pope may be required to wrestle with an even
larger and more intractable army of demons: mass terrorism, the risk of a
?civilisational? conflict between Islam and the West, and the wars and
disease that have already ravaged Africa.
John Paul’s successor should, in theory, have the advantage of taking over
a relatively coherent and unitary organisation, after a quarter-century in
which Vatican authority over the world’s 400,000 or so Catholic priests,
and their combined flock of about one billion people, has steadily been
reasserted. The senior ranks of the Vatican bureaucracy include a broader
range of nationalities than ever but on John Paul II’s watch there was
little tolerance of dissent from his conservative views.
This reaffirmation of Roman power has come at a cost. It has not solved,
and may well have exacerbated, the problem posed by the utter diversity of
church life at the grass-roots, from wealthy Boston suburbs to African war
zones. A papacy which began by invoking ?people power? against tyranny
often seemed to be imposing, from a great height, a rigid set of principles
on believers whose everyday experience it barely understood. Partly for
that reason, the moral influence of the Catholic church slumped in some of
its old strongholds, from Malta to Poland.
In the slums of the developing world, from Mexico City to Lagos, the number
of Catholics continues, at least on paper, to grow. But in Latin America,
especially, the Roman church has been losing out to Protestant evangelicals
in recruiting the truly faithful?those who worship regularly and contribute
to the church coffers. Though the Brazilian Catholic church still asserts
its mission to tend to the poor, it is fast-growing evangelical groups like
the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God that have been the bravest in
dodging the drug gangs’ bullets and spreading the Word to the wretched
inhabitants of the lawless favelas.
A black or Latino pope? Or another Italian?
One obvious way to seek to reverse the Catholic church’s decline in the
developing world would be for the conclave of cardinals which appoints a
successor to choose one of their Latino or African brethren as the next
pope. If so, the leading contenders might include Cardinals Cláudio Hummes
of Brazil, Oscar Andrés RodrÃguez Maradiaga of Honduras or Francis Arinze
of Nigeria. Cardinals seeking to safeguard John Paul’s conservative
legacy?eg, the refusal to accept married, female or openly gay priests and
continued opposition to contraception?might support Joseph Ratzinger, the
stern Austrian cardinal who heads the Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog.
However, John Paul II was the first non-Italian pope in 455 years and there
is at least an even chance that the church will revert to tradition and
select one of Italy’s cardinals to succeed the Polish pontiff.
Front-runners include Angelo Sodano, who is already the ?deputy pope?, or
Vatican secretary of state; and Dionigi Tettamanzi, currently the
Archbishop of Milan. Campaigning for the papacy is strictly forbidden,
though there is bound to be much whispering in the cloisters about the
strengths, weaknesses and policies of the various candidates. Two things
seem certain: that this time, unlike on some past occasions, there is no
clear front-runner; and that the new pope would have to be an exceptionally
strong personality if he wanted to take the church in a new direction,
given the elderly and conservative cardinals that John Paul has bequeathed him.
For the next pope, relations with Islam, both in the developing world and
the European heartland of the Christian faith, will be high on the list of
concerns. Senior church figures are deeply worried about the welfare of
Christians in parts of the world where they coexist uneasily, and at times
violently, with Muslims: Nigeria, Sudan, Indonesia, even Iraq. The church
as a whole is desperate to avoid a generalised confrontation between Islam
and the Christian West. That has prompted the Vatican to distance itself
sharply from American policy in the Middle East, while reaching out where
possible to moderate Muslims. These delicate calculations are a long way
from the early days of John Paul’s papacy, when the Vatican and America
were aligned in defence of Polish freedom.
Whatever its diplomatic difficulties, the Catholic church remains a unique
global community. It is both a small sovereign state with an impressive
diplomatic service, and a transnational non-government organisation that
makes every other NGO seem puny. Yet ever since the triumph of democracy in
eastern Europe, the church has often appeared to the secular world to be
slipping behind the train of history. In a world where freedom of choice,
and therefore moral relativism, are very much in fashion, the Vatican’s
efforts to impose unity in its own ranks have seemed heavy-handed.
There may, perhaps, have been good doctrinal reasons why the church felt it
must bar controversial leftist theologians like Leonardo Boff of Brazil and
Sri Lanka’s Tissa Balasuriya from speaking in its name. But in a world
which expects to discover truth through open-ended discussion, the
treatment of these turbulent priests made them into popular heroes. And in
an era where sexual freedom and ?reproductive rights? are widely
acknowledged, the Vatican’s adherence to a rigid line over contraception,
homosexuality and the new challenges of bio-ethics has appeared
unimaginative and uncharitable.
Nowhere is this more shocking than in the church’s attitude towards the use
of condoms in the developing world. For years, its opposition to condoms
has pitched it against the sensible family-planning campaigns of the United
Nations and the World Health Organisation. More recently, its attempts to
deny that condoms help prevent the transmission of HIV/AIDS have
jeopardised the lives of some of its most devoted members, the
congregations of sub-Saharan Africa. Only very recently have a few senior
figures in the church conceded that condoms may have a role in fighting
disease.
As if this instance of moral blindness were not enough, the
English-speaking Catholic countries, in particular, have been shaken to the
core by allegations of child abuse by clergymen and cover-ups by their
bishops. The proportion of erring priests is far lower than the eager press
would have it. But both to victims of abuse and to people who observe
church affairs from outside, the spate of disclosures has mocked the
Vatican’s claim to be a fount of moral authority and have made it harder to
see why the church insists on restricting the priesthood to celibate males.
Faith as choice
These scandals probably accelerated one of the most important social
changes that occurred, paradoxically enough, during John Paul’s
high-profile papacy. There is no longer any industrial society?not even
Ireland, not even Poland?where attendance at a Catholic church is a
socially-imposed norm. These days, people who go to mass do so as a
conscious choice in a world that offers a bewildering variety of religious
and philosophical options.
Defenders of John Paul’s papacy would argue that he responded in the right
way to this inexorable trend: instead of watering down the faith, he upheld
the fundamentals of Christian teaching, in the belief that a significant
minority, at least, would be drawn to the light if it burned brightly. That
does appear to be true. There is no other frail octogenarian figure in the
world who could gather an enthusiastic crowd of more than 2m youngsters
from the world over, as John Paul did in 2000.
The fall and rise of the Roman faith’s appeal is well exemplified by the
Catholic community in England, a vigorous minority in one of Europe’s most
secular societies. Religious practice has fallen in traditionally Catholic
places, but there are countervailing trends. London’s churches are no
longer peopled by Irish immigrants, but they seem tolerably full of pious
merchant bankers, hotel workers from Croatia, and Filipina nurses.
In such a cosmopolitan world, those who still adhere to the Roman Catholic
faith have come to it from a bewildering variety of routes. Perhaps for
that reason, John Paul never managed?since the triumph of his campaign
against communism?to rally such a broad constituency for any of his
favoured causes. In part that is because his ideology was, from a secular
viewpoint, such an unusual mixture. He counselled western states against
the use of military power and denounced unbridled capitalism, but remained
profoundly conservative on all questions of morality and the family.
In America, the political right approved his opposition to abortion and
homosexuality, but squirmed or pretended not to notice when he condemned
the death penalty or the bombing of Belgrade and Baghdad. Among the
America-bashers of western Europe, the pope ought to have won a sympathetic
hearing when he called for a tempering of market forces?by stressing the
dignity of labour, the legitimacy of trade unions and the idea that
property ownership implies duties as well as rights. But few of Europe’s
believers in a gentler capitalism had much liking for John Paul’s social
conservatism. This may account for one of the Vatican’s more surprising
diplomatic setbacks: its failure to influence the social policy of the
European Union’s new constitution.
Seeking truth, or stating it?
In a shrinking planet, where religious faiths cannot remain hermetically
sealed from one another, John Paul certainly took bold steps to heal the
historic wounds between the Christian world and Islam and Judaism; but dark
skies over the Middle East limited his role as a peacemaker. By
establishing diplomatic ties with Israel and apologising for the church’s
record of anti-Semitism, he went a significant way?albeit not as far as
some critics would have liked?towards mending fences between Christians and
Jews.
But these are not easy times for inter-faith dialogue. Think of the
incident which marred the pope’s visit to Syria in 2001, where the pope
broke new ground by entering a mosque to pray at the tomb of John the
Baptist. President Bashar Assad used the papal visit to make comments that
were not merely anti-Israel but anti-Semitic. Jews then demanded to know
why the pontiff had listened politely.
If John Paul had ever hired an American political consultant, he might have
been told that the final years of his papacy were a period of lost or
fumbled opportunities. But this pope was not, or at least not primarily, a
political leader: he saw his mission in the light of eternity. For the pope
himself, his big legacies to the church lay in actions beyond the secular
media’s ken.
One was the publication of his encyclical, ?Veritatis Splendor???The
Splendour of the Truth??which voiced ideas about knowledge and reality that
were sharply at odds with modern fashion. As the title suggests, this
document is a rejection of the notion that truth is merely in the eye of
the (human) beholder: the greatest truths are eternal ones, and they are
discovered by a combination of God’s own revelation and the human mind’s
honest and free but, above all, prayerful inquiry. Old-fashioned as these
ideas might appear to others, they represent, in Catholic terms, a
softening of traditional doctrines, like Augustine’s pessimistic view of
human potential. Pope John Paul not only saw human nature as redeemable; he
also recognised as God-given and noble the thirst for wisdom.
Intellectuals and peasants
Apart from reasserting the church’s intellectual tradition, what else would
John Paul consider important about his legacy? On the face of things, the
other leitmotif of his papacy was quite different?he reaffirmed the
veneration of Mary, the mother of Jesus, which many people associate with
piety of the folksiest kind.
Biographers with a Freudian bent often attributed the pope’s love of Mary
to his own travails, including the early death of his mother. Whatever the
psychological background, it is clear that his re-emphasis on Mary was not
an intellectual impulse, but a personal one. When he escaped assassination
in 1981, he went to offer thanks at Fátima, the place in Portugal where
Mary is said to have appeared in 1917 to a group of children and made a
series of enigmatic prophecies. John Paul’s reverence for the Virgin of
Fátima, and the Marian shrine of Lourdes, which he visited last year, is
one example of his attachment to popular piety. Others include a wave of
canonisations: 482 people were recognised as saints during his papacy, more
than the total for the previous five centuries.
By reaching out simultaneously to intellectuals and peasants, John Paul
seemed to be struggling with the recurring challenge of all universal
religions: the need to balance the intellectual and mystical, the rational
and the intuitive. Both strands are powerful in his native Poland?and
stronger still in Russia, where, in tsarist times, intellectuals would
consult simple monastic sages. So, in theory at least, the pope’s penchant
for mixing the mystical with the cerebral should have brought him closer to
the eastern Orthodox world, which sees that synthesis as one of its
greatest gifts. The pope said the Christian world must breathe with two
lungs: the logic of the Latin west and the subtlety of the Greek east.
In practice, this remains difficult. The pope’s outreach to the Orthodox
world came at a time when the Christian east had become more defensive. The
Moscow Patriarchate reacted furiously to his appointment of Catholic
bishops with responsibility for Russian territory. The pope got a chilly
reception when he invited himself to Greece, despite enjoying warm personal
relations with the Orthodox world’s most senior prelate, Patriarch
Bartholomew.
The bully pulpit
Oddly enough, Cardinal Wojtyla was not seen as a conservative by the
cardinals who elected him. They were expecting him to implement the changes
in Catholic thinking and practice decreed by the second Vatican Council,
which assembled in 1962. These included a decision to embrace, rather than
shy away from, the modern world, including technology. Even more
revolutionary was the council’s desire to decentralise authority: instead
of stressing the pope’s infallibility, it said the ?body of the faithful?,
from bishops to believers, were guardians of the faith.
In these terms, how did John Paul fare? His papacy was, in a narrowly
defined sense, thoroughly modern: he exploited air travel and electronics
to become a global media star like no other religious leader. But there
were few signs of the decentralisation promised in the 1960s?and plenty of
moves in the opposite direction. Doctrinal discipline was imposed with
great firmness in Latin America. John Paul made clear from the start his
opposition to ?liberation theology? as proclaimed, for example, by the
political left in Nicaragua?a reading of the Christian message that placed
more emphasis on social justice and redistribution, and less on
spirituality in the traditional sense.
Could the pope have allowed greater freedom of thought and debate within
the church? There was, perhaps, a fundamental contradiction in the mandate
which he received in 1978. He could either fulfill the decisions of the
second Vatican Council and allow the church to become a looser and more
quarrelsome organisation; or he could impose ideological unity, at the risk
of seeming like a bully.
He veered towards the latter course, but in doing so may have undermined
the papacy’s authority in the eyes of the world. If, for example, the
Catholic church’s teaching on sexual behaviour had plainly been the outcome
of a deep reflection from its grass roots (female as well as male, in poor
countries as well as rich) it would have carried great moral power, even
among those who disagreed. But its views commanded less authority when they
seemed to originate from a small number of powerful (and unmarried) men.
On the other hand, Pope John Paul would not have been true to his own
deepest beliefs if he had been concerned, first and foremost, with how
things seemed in the eyes of the world. He regarded himself as accountable
to God; and how he fared by that measure is not something that any human
being, whether believer or atheist, may presume to judge.
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