The West doesn't get it

Polish journalist Radek Sikorski believes the 'Pope has to tailor his message to where his customers are -- and the West is a shrinking market for his wares.'

The first thing to be said about those who criticize the Pope is that their remarks would be condemned as racist were the pontiff Nigerian.

One English academic mocked the Catholic writer Paul Johnson in The Spectator in London not long ago for "taking his orders from an elderly Pole." A British biographer of the Pope was left "fascinated and appalled" by the "brief Polish interlude" in the Church's history. "The Polish Pope does not like Western values," opined The Daily Telegraph.

The Nation has called him a "Polish authoritarian." The editor of The New Republic, fearing that the Pope's teaching might harm liberal society, writes: "If you doubt this, visit Poland."

The Pope's philosophy supposedly stems from his roots in a backward, patriarchal, authoritarian country with a reactionary Church hierarchy preserved by communism in a medieval time warp.

Personally -- I am of course absolutely impartial in this matter -- I think that the Polish perspective John Paul II has brought to the Vatican is the best thing about his pontificate. The Poland in which Karol Wojtyla ascended the steps of his ecclesiastical career was indeed ruled by authoritarian, even totalitarian regimes -- first Nazi Germany and then Soviet-imposed communism. Yet he was nurtured in opposition to them, which is why he makes such frequent and passionate pleas for respecting human rights. And while Wojtyla's Poland is still poor, it is not especially illiberal. Polish attitudes to contraception and abortion, as measured by public opinion polls, are very similar to attitudes expressed by Germans or Americans.

In fact, John Paul II's Polishness is reflected more subtly, in his emotional sense of history. His impassioned pronouncements on behalf of the peoples of ex-Yugoslavia are, for example, very Polish. Croatian Catholicism, with its tradition of holding the line against Islam and Orthodoxy, is similar to Polish Catholicism. Perhaps the Pope's sympathy for multiethnic Sarajevo, when it was besieged by the Orthodox Serbs, was also explained by historical memory going back 300 years: Any Pole knows that Orthodox Russia destroyed the multiethnic Polish Commonwealth in the 18th century.

On the other hand, would anyone other than a Slav Pope send 10 cardinals to celebrate the millennium of Kievan Rus's Christianity in 1988? Would any other have supported so steadfastly the underground Church in Lithuania or the Uniate Catholics in the Ukraine?

Having spent three decades battling a Communist regime, this Pope also knows the power of symbolic gestures. It took a Pole from Krakow on the Throne of St. Peter for a Pope to visit Auschwitz. In 1986, John Paul II became the first Pope to visit a synagogue. And if you don't have any divisions to send in, solidarity with the victims may be the best weapon. The candles that simultaneously burned in the window of his Vatican study and of Ronald Reagan's White House, to grieve for Solidarity's suppression in December 1981, carried a more powerful message to the Kremlin than dozens of new missile silos. The millions of dollars sent via Vatican accounts to Solidarity's underground cells shored up the freedom fighters' morale. It will not be possible to write a history of the collapse of the "evil empire" without mentioning this Pope.

Moreover, the Pope's Polish experience -- of rule by two godless ideologies, of war, genocide, poverty and revolution -- sits better with the experience of most of the world's Catholics. The majority do not, after all, live in the pampered and degenerate West. If you want to be crude, you might say that, like the chairman of a multinational, the Pope has to tailor his message to where his customers are -- and the West is a shrinking market for his wares.

It is John Paul II's experience of the transitory nature of regimes, power and wealth in his native land that reinforces his insistence on personal, rather than collective or state-directed, pursuit of goodness. After all, for most of this century, remaining personally decent while nasty regimes came and went was all that the average Pole could hope for.

His Polishness also strengthens the Pope's solidarity (a word that crops up very often in his speeches) with the world's underdogs. Hence his condemnation of apartheid, his visit to the leper colony in the Ivory Coast or his meal with the Vatican's tramps. Even his pronouncements on international relations -- his passionate belief that lasting peace can only be built on justice -- may stem from his perceptions of the history of Poland, repeatedly the victim of realpolitik played by more powerful neighbors.

"If you want peace, remember man," is one of his favorite maxims; thus his advocacy for the causes of the Bosnians, the "wandering Palestinians" and the Kurds.

Those elements of his pontificate that critics dislike can largely be ascribed not to his Polishness, but to the fact that John Paul II takes his religion, and his job, seriously.

To the generation shaped by the 1960s -- the generation that already dominates the media in the West and is taking over its politics -- the Pope's strict moral teachings sound like anachronisms. But what John Paul II will have achieved by his stance is to have cornered the market on strict morality, which is a wise long-term investment.

Eventually, the tide will turn. We are already tiring of the questionable morality of Hollywood or the philosophical depth of Hillary Clinton. With more and more genetic experiments, there eventually will be disasters, and then the Pope's cautions will sound like premonitions. With more and more families breaking up and crime increasing, his cult of the family is already finding receptive ears. With more and more welfare-spending on a larger and larger underclass yet tighter and tighter national budgets, the West might soon discover that it must develop such qualities as personal responsibility in order to stay prosperous, in order to compete with Confucian societies in the Far East.

History will be kinder to John Paul II than his noisy critics are today.

Radek Sikorski is the author of Full Circle, a book on Poland to be published next year by Simon & Schuster. He is a former deputy minister of defense in Poland, and is a journalist living in London.