A bit of earnestness I’m sure I’ll regret.
I am not a Catholic, I am a believer. I do not think that the pope is infallible, even when speaking ex cathedra. The Catholic Church, like every institution of the Christian faith, is not infallible and quite often has been significantly worse than that.
In the late 1970s Karol Wojtyla became John Paul II. He was also not a perfect or infallible man, and at times he could be rather worse than even that.
But this man proclaimed from the chair of St. Peter to millions of Central and Eastern Europeans that the inhuman and anti-moral system they lived under had lost all credibility and moreover, that they didn’t need to be afraid anymore. And while that may seem simple and trite, in the 1970s and 1980s fear was as much a part of that corner of God’s creation as castles and beer and dumplings and sour cream. Fear hung in the air, written in red, blown in from a leaden gray Moscow sky.
Millions of people decided to believe him and acted thus. Catholics and non-Catholics and atheists and Jews and within ten years the fear was gone, the Soviet barracks emptied and the castles and beer and sour cream and dumplings remained. No one had to shoot at anyone, no superpower intervened. Maybe it was God or maybe John Paul II or maybe neither. Maybe it was just people who looked for a reason to stop being afraid.
Today a friend with Slovak passport, Hungarian name, Jewish roots, and secular worldview— a sensitive and intelligent woman, a graduate of Columbia j-school, an award winning anti-corruption crusader— wrote that perhaps the selection of Leo XIV will serve as an “impulse to calm an agitated America or to return to basic values like care for your neighbor and empathy.”
Maybe so. It’s possible. Deus vult.