One has been compared to a rock star, the other to a humble parish priest — a saintly odd couple representing rival factions of the Catholic church.
John Paul II and John XXIII will be united symbolically on April 27 when Pope Francis makes both of them saints. With tough battles ahead on issues like divorce and birth control, Francis can only hope the saintly unity is contagious.
It’s the first double canonization of popes in church history. Some Italian news reports predict more than a million Catholics will descend on Rome for the occasion.
“It will be a day of Catholic pride,” says church historian Massimo Faggioli.
To the faithful, the ritual is a consecration of what has long been obvious: both popes were the subject of strong calls for immediate sainthood at the time of their deaths — John in 1963 and John Paul in 2005. And both are widely venerated.
Perceived holiness, however, isn’t the church’s only consideration. As Faggioli writes in his new book, JohnXXIII: The Medicine of Mercy, “the canonization of a pope is an eminent act of church politics.”
By Faggioli’s count, 81 of the church’s popes have been made saints. Of those, 47 were among the first 48 to preside over a church that now claims more than a billion baptized Catholics as members. The practice eventually fell out of favour, and by the 1950s a pope hadn’t been canonized in some 200 years.
Then it got going again, to the point where if a pope is not beatified, the faithful might now wonder if he was a bad successor of Peter. Faggioli argues it has become common practice to “counterbalance” one pope’s sainthood — and the approval it bestows on his papacy — with the canonization of another.
When Argentina’s Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Pope Francis in 2013 — the first non-European pope in more than 1,000 years — he was told John Paul had met all conditions for canonization, including the attribution of two apparently verified miracles. The whole process had been fast-tracked by Francis’s predecessor, and John Paul’s long-time collaborator, the now retired Pope Benedict XVI.
It would have been easy — indeed, normal — for Francis to simply set a date for John Paul’s canonization. Instead, he waived the requirement of a second miracle for John XXIII and ordered that both popes be canonized at the same time.
The unusual move irked some conservative supporters of John Paul II. Their man would now share the spotlight with a pope firmly identified with the church’s reform wing.
Francis has described the double canonization as “a message for the church.” Close observers say he is trying to unite conservative and progressive factions while making clear that historic reforms of the Second Vatican Council are the way forward.
“He’s trying to reunite the church on the common ground he thinks we share,” says Faggioli, assistant professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn.
Francis is a big fan of Angelo Roncalli, who became Pope John XXIII in 1958 at the age of 75. The son of a sharecropper, he quickly became known as “Good Pope John.”
“He was very warm and friendly,” says British Columbia Bishop Remi De Roo, 90, who met him. “There was a benevolence about him. He was a smiling pope; everybody was his friend.”
Cardinals largely assumed they had elected a transitional pope who would change little. Roncalli instead unleashed a kind of revolution by challenging Roman Catholics to “throw open the windows of the church.”
In 1962, he inaugurated the Second Vatican Council, an extraordinary gathering in Rome of some 2,600 theologians, priests, bishops and cardinals. It redefined the church and its role in modern life.
It changed the language of the mass from Latin to the vernacular, defined the church as the whole “people of God,” rather than an institutional hierarchy, and enshrined the principle of “collegiality,” which decentralizes power.
The council also paved the way for better relations with other religions by implying that salvation can be found outside of the Roman Catholic Church, and by lifting the charge of deicide against the Jews.
Finally, it set the stage for a church more engaged in social justice, denouncing economic systems that benefit the few while leaving many in squalor. In Latin America, this gave birth to liberation theology, a social justice movement that resulted in some priests backing revolutionary struggles.
“Pope John really opened the church to the world,” says De Roo, who participated in all sessions of the council, which lasted three years.
John Paul II also participated in the council and often cited its reforms after becoming Pope in 1978. He fuelled its ecumenical thrust, becoming the first pope to visit a synagogue and a mosque. He helped unravel the Soviet Union by encouraging democratic movements in his native Poland, and he stood firmly against the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The most charismatic and widely travelled missionary the modern church has seen, John Paul achieved celebrity status with huge outdoor masses. But he is accused of turning a blind eye to sex abuse cases that occurred under his watch. One of the more outrageous examples is Mexican priest Marcial Maciel Degollado, a drug addict who sexually abused seminarians, fathered several children from different women, and ran the powerful Legion of Christ, a staunchly conservative movement that had John Paul’s firm backing.
Reformers in the church also criticize him for centralizing power in Rome, and for cracking down on high-profile dissenters who questioned church doctrine. They included proponents of liberation theology, a movement he rejected as communist-inspired.
On family related issues, John Paul was a staunch conservative, describing the practice of divorce and remarriage as “evil” and birth control as immoral. When he died of Parkinson’s disease after 27 years in office, he left a church deeply divided between reformers and conservatives, a split that grew larger under his successor, Pope Benedict.
Francis has made his support of the Second Vatican Council clear. He gave John XXIII an easier ride to sainthood and announced that next year he would also canonize Pope Paul VI, who finished the council after John’s death.
Francis especially wants to decentralize power to bishops. He has called them to an October synod on family-related issues in Rome, where they’ll discuss hot topics like the church’s ban on divorce and birth control – positions reformers see as out of touch with modernity, and the practices of most Catholics.
Most of the debate has so far focused on whether Catholics who divorce and remarry in civil ceremonies should be allowed to receive Communion. Conservatives have dug in their heels, seeing flexibility on that issue as the wedge that could bring down more vital components of the church’s moral edifice, like the ban on birth control.
Next Sunday, both sides come together to celebrate the saintly halo of their revered popes. Francis, and many Catholics, are hoping the truce somehow lasts.