Pontificating

I didn't actually realise St Brad's had a college flagpole, but it does. It's right in front of the main building, in fact. At some point since term ended two and a half weeks ago, someone's even gone to the effort of digging out a flag with the college logo on it and run it up to half mast. This could be marking the passing of Saul Bellow, Andrea Dworkin or even Archbishop Iakovos, but given that St Brad's is a Catholic college I'm going to go out on a limb and guess it's for this chap.

I'm not, myself, a Catholic, and I've never given a great deal of credence to the authority of church hierarchies. Even so, it's odd to think that the Pope's dead. Even odder to think that, in a week or two's time, there'll be a completely different man swanning about the planet using the title.

John Paul II (or Karol Wojtyla as the papers are once again beginning to call him, perhaps in preparation for this other, more confusing, change of nomenclature) acceded to the papal throne in 1978. He was Pope before Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, and I can still remember the cognitive dissonance I felt when those two terms ceased to be interchangeable (even more than when the 1997 election results forced me to make a distinction between "the Tories" and "the Government"). I've always known in theory that other Popes are possible, but even so, it's likely to be years before John Paul's image stops popping up in my head whenever his successor gets mentioned.

As for his life... well. On the one hand, he was a moralising reactionary, opposing the movement for women's ordination and feminism in general, speaking out against homosexuality and abortion, and doing untold damage to world health through his implacable opposition to contraception. One tends to forget that, back in the 1980s when he was a younger and more dynamic figure, he was also a more inspiring one, particularly for those within the communist bloc countries and the Third World whose causes he advocated. He also managed Catholicism's relations with other faiths surprisingly well, a fairly important challenge for the first vicar of the global village, and, whatever one may feel about his stance on abortion and euthanasia, he was consistent enough in his respect for life to oppose the death penalty, and a number of major wars including our recent one.

On the whole, though, especially in recent years, he has seemed a malign presence, suffering his own pain as if it were some kind of justification for the victimisation, psychological and physical, of others.

It seems -- although there is still room for an inspired decision otherwise -- that his legacy to the Catholic Church will be an equally conservative pontiff whose views are almost indistinguishable from his own. For one thing, he stacked the college of Cardinals with just such people, and -- while the new Pope could, strictly speaking, be any male Roman Catholic -- these men comprise the electorate, and do have a tendency to pick on themselves as being the best candidates for the job.

More subtly, the enormous rate at which the late Pope rushed through canonisations in recent years (so that sainthood spread among dead Catholics almost as fast as HIV among living Africans), has created a culture where the recent dead are venerated more than ever before. Hence the movement to name him "John Paul the Great", an honorific which (while it lacks any actual meaning) has only been granted to three of his predecessors in two millennia, and is a fairly obvious precursor to sainthood. Sadly, it doesn't seem likely that any successor is going to oppose such a legacy.

A few weeks ago, before the papal demise but not before it was visibly on the cards, The Observer headed a news item, "Next Pope Is Set To Be Another Conservative".

If I'd been the subeditor, I would have added "Stop Press: May Also Be A Catholic".