Given his long list of triumphs, it is hard to imagine that Pope John Paul II left behind any unfinished business or unfulfilled dreams. But he did.
The pope’s greatest frustration was his inability to bring about a reconciliation between the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox churches, most importantly the Russian Orthodox Church. His biggest disappointment was the failure of his native Poland to lead a religious revitalization of Western Europe.
During his 26-year pontificate, John Paul II visited 129 countries, including the former Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, but he died without setting foot in Russia.
As the first Slavic pope, John Paul II saw it as his special destiny to heal the 11th Century schism between Rome and the Eastern churches. He spoke often of Christianity’s two main branches–East and West–as two great lungs that provided oxygen to a single body.
“Because of his Polish background, he felt the weight of the division in a way that most Westerners wouldn’t,” said Rev. John Wauck, a professor at Santa Croce Pontifical University in Rome. “This was a central driving force in his thinking.”
And having played such a decisive role in bringing religious freedom to the communist lands of Eastern Europe, it was not unreasonable for John Paul to expect some gratitude from the patriarchs of the Eastern churches.
But perhaps he expected a little too much.
In Pope John Paul II’s worldview, East and West may have represented the two lungs of Christianity, but there could be only one head, and it was in Rome.
“The Holy See’s first attempt to seize the opportunity presented by the Soviet government’s new attitude toward religious freedom was poorly managed,” wrote papal biographer George Weigel.
It also was poorly received by Russian Orthodox leaders. A Vatican undertaking in the early 1990s to establish dioceses for Latin-rite Catholics in Russia and Byzantine-rite Uniates, people who had remained faithful to the pope, was viewed with deep suspicion by Orthodox bishops, especially after the Vatican failed to notify them of its intentions.
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The Orthodox hierarchy, long worried about Catholic proselytizing, feared that this was yet another example of papal poaching on their territory. Patriarch Alexy II, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, snubbed all of Pope John Paul II’s subsequent overtures.
But the pope didn’t give up. In a 1995 papal letter, “Orientale Lumen”–“Eastern Light”–he wrote that the Roman Catholic Church saw the Orthodox as “a symbol of the Lord who comes again.”
“We cannot forget them,” the pope wrote, “not only because we love them as brothers and sisters redeemed by the same Lord, but also because a holy nostalgia for the centuries lived in the full communion of faith and charity urges us and reproaches us for our sins and mutual misunderstandings.”
It fell on deaf ears. According to a new book by Vatican scholar John Cornwell, the low point came in April 2001, when the pope visited Greece at the invitation of the country’s president. The Greek Orthodox Church opposed the visit and insisted that the pope apologize for “errors committed by Catholics.” The pope complied, but this did not prevent thousands of protesters in Athens from chanting “Out with the pope” and “No to the beast of the Apocalypse.”
John Paul II’s final attempt at a rapprochement came in 2003 when he offered to return a precious 16th Century icon stolen from a St. Petersburg cathedral in 1904. The icon, Our Lady of Kazan, had hung in the pope’s study for years, and he hoped his offer would prompt an invitation to Russia. The Orthodox Church dismissed the gesture, and art authorities now say the icon in the pope’s possession is most likely an 18th Century forgery.
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The pope’s death may have produced a slight thaw. Metropolitan Kirill, the Russian church’s second-ranking leader, is expected to attend Friday’s funeral.
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John Paul II’s second great disappointment was the failure of Poland to lead a religious revitalization in Western Europe after the Cold War.
The pope’s fervent hope was that the intense religiosity of Poland would lead the materialistic West back into the church’s bosom.
Instead, it was the other way around. After the collapse of communism, many Poles embraced Western-style attitudes toward birth control, abortion and divorce. Church attendance slipped.
In 1991, during the pope’s first visit to his homeland after the fall of communism, Poles expected a celebration. Instead, they got a tongue-lashing about the “civilization of desire and pleasure.”
Wauck said the shock of Poland’s sudden opening to the West has “produced a short-term decline in devotion, but this may not be the end of the story.”
Indeed, by almost any measure, Poland remains the “most Catholic” of Europe’s nations. Last year, its president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, a former communist, teamed up with the Vatican to lobby the European Union to include some mention of God and Christian traditions in the new EU constitution.
The move was defeated.