David, welcome. As we think back about the pope's extraordinary life, one of the things I think that many of us feel strongest is the presence -- the power -- of his personality. You covered him. How did it feel to you?
DAVID GIBSON (Author, THE COMING CATHOLIC CHURCH): Yeah, he was just a remarkable person. You could not help but be charmed by the guy when you were in his presence -- whether you were one on one, as I was, lucky enough to travel with him and I worked at Vatican Radio for a few years -- or whether you were, like, in a sea of two million pilgrims someplace in the Philippines. I mean, he made that personal connection all the time. And I think, you know, in a way the story of the Catholic Church of the past generation -- these past 26 years -- has in many ways, as we saw, been the drama of one man: Pope John Paul II. Amazing life and an amazing personality that really overshadowed, in a way, almost everything else going on in the Church.KIM LAWTON (Managing Editor, RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY): And he used that personality, that charm, that force to spread his message, which was the message of the Church. And it was that moral force and charm that were behind so much of what he did and so much of the influence that he had in all of the areas where he touched so many lives.
ABERNETHY: And a lot of people, I think, saw this very modern, this vigorous man -- modern man, he seemed -- and found a great contradiction between what they imagined the pope stood for and this image that he projected. It was a traditional theology in a very up-to-date, modern body.
Mr. GIBSON: Yeah, I think TIME magazine had a cover -- it was just a year after he was elected, 1979. He had already gone to Poland, behind the Iron Curtain at that time. He'd come to the United States and it said, "John Paul: Superstar." I mean, this guy was, you know, he was like no other pope there had ever been. I mean, Catholics rallied around him like they rallied around John F. Kennedy, their first president. But you know, in making that connection and seeing this pope using the modern means of communication and the media, and making that personal connection, you also kind of thought, "Well, he's listening to me. He's going to do what I'm telling. Or, he's going to listen to it and implement reforms." But that wasn't always the case.ABERNETHY: I want to get back to this matter of apparent contradictions. A lot of us in the West, I think, saw him and felt that there were all these contradictions on the social teachings of the Church. Kim, talk about that a little bit.
Ms. LAWTON: Well, he didn't fit neatly into anybody's box. And so the categories of liberal and conservative just didn't work with him, because he was operating from the framework of his deeply held beliefs. And so people would take, you know, positions on abortion and contraception -- very traditional, very conservative Catholic beliefs -- and the other end of the spectrum, you know, debt relief, in favor of debt relief and against the death penalty. And he brought those together because they all came out of his faith. But it took people off guard because of his popularity. You know, they liked the singer, but they didn't always like the song. And that took people off guard sometimes.
ABERNETHY: But David, what was the thread that connected these positions, that seemed to many of us a contradiction between liberal in one way and very conservative in others?
Mr. GIBSON: The thread is his spirituality, his belief, his Catholic teaching. He used to like to say, I think the way Kim was saying it, "I can be understood from the inside, not from the outside." We all try and understand him, you know, from our political points of view -- from our standard political categories, left and right. As Kim said, he didn't fit into those boxes. You have to understand him. He [was] very consistent within his own moral and spiritual and religious framework. But that could seem very paradoxical. He could be chastising the Left -- the political Left,- for example, in this country -- on one hand, and supporting the Right. And the next day he could be again -- on the death penalty, the Iraq War. He went very strongly against, for example, the [Bush] administration.
ABERNETHY: I think the pope's personality was enormously effective, not only with Catholics and not only with people in many countries, but with a lot of Protestants in America who found in the pope's grounding in religious faith something that was very attractive to them. They might not have gone along so much with his positions on consumerism and materialism and all those things that the pope criticized. But the idea of a world leader speaking about everything from the point of view of a deep religious faith was very attractive.Mr. GIBSON: Look, he had, you know, in a postmodern world, he had what some would say was a premodern viewpoint. I would say it's simply a holistic framework. He, you know, he offered people a certainty. He said, "There are answers to all those questions that we all have and there are ways to behave and there's a certain moral and natural law that we can abide by."
And it's like you said, Bob. I think, you may not have agreed with it, but not only the certainty but the package that he brought that certainty in was very attractive to a lot of people, and not just Protestants.
Ms. LAWTON: Well, and that's just it. I think he related to so many different groups of people. Evangelicals liked his strong stand on abortion but also his spirituality and the way he talked about Jesus and used words like "evangelization of beliefs." And mainline Protestants appreciated some of his stands on some of the social issues and things of justice and concern for the poor. But Jews really, really liked this pope despite, you know, concerns about how some previous popes dealt with Holocaust issues and things like that. This pope went to a synagogue and opened real dialogue with them. He went to a mosque. He opened dialogue with Muslims. So he reached out to so many different groups beyond Catholics.
Ms. LAWTON: Yeah. That was a real poignant moment for me, to be on that trip and to see him in these places that meant so much to Christians, but meant so much to him personally as well. And he made those connections between the ancient beliefs and today.
ABERNETHY: And the Catholic Church is really Catholic; I mean, it represents people all over the world, a billion people in different countries, different cultures. David, does that suggest that there has to be more autonomy for different parts of the Church?
