I’ve been hearing an awful lot about how great he was, and all that he did, and how his successor will have so much to live up to. However, I’ve been out of the loop, so to speak, and I have no idea what these great accomplishments were. So any information would be appreciated.
So, you’ve been cut off from news sources for the past 26 years?
You do know this answer is quite subjective.
But I would say his primary accomplishment was making the Catholic Church much more visible throughout the world. Since John Paul II was not Italian, he made the Church more visible in Eastern Europe and then he spread out to other parts of the world. North America, South America, Asia. He reached out to Jews and Moslems.
It was by no means a complete success. There are lots of problems his successor will face and many of them are more than just being not as popular as his predecessor. There are severe shortages of priests, sexual abuse scandals in some countries, and competition for gaining new adherents to the religion in Third World countries from Mormons and Evangelicals.
Well, he wrote a lot of encyclicals, including Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason), which is often oversimplified into “The Church accepts evolution”. If you’ve got a philosophical bent and are willing to accept a certain theological background they make for interesting reading.
for a Pope it is ofetn more what they don’t do which is as important, e.g. not authorising or advocating contraception, homosexuality, abortion, women priests etc
I’m not downplaying his accomplishments by any means, and I’m aware that he didn’t have to make half the journeys he did, but it’s a simple fact that world travel was easier and safer during his tenure than it was for all but maybe three of his predecessors. Perhaps Pius X, for instance, would have liked to visit America, but there weren’t any planes then.
That said, his being the first Pope to visit not only the synagogue in Rome but also the Wailing Wall is nothing to sneeze at.
He recognized anti-semitism as a sin.
He apologized for Catholic inactivism in light of the holocaust.
He lent the weight of the Catholic Church behind the Solidarity movement in Soviet-era Poland, preceding the peaceful collapse of communism throughout Europe. By the Solidarity movement remaining peaceful, the soviets could react in a peaceful way. If Solidarity had been violent, the soviets would have simplyycrushed it militarily.
Yep - as an RC myself, I am puzzled as to why JP2 has been so universally lauded. He was just doing what the Pope is supposed to do.
When he started out in 1978, he wasn’t as geriatric as his predecessor-but-one Paul VI (who did a bit of travelling abroad and breaking down denominational barriers too, remember?) so he had the strength to take advantage of modern jets and tour the world.
Plus, as he was so relatively young when he started, he lasted so much longer and therefore - naturally - was able to do more that most Popes (e.g. issue more encyclicals, beatify more people, make more foreign trips, shake hands with more heads of state etc) by the mere accident of staying alive.
However, perhaps his greatest gift was in being Polish (accidentally, again), which enabled him to pave the way for Poland, and then many other European countries, to throw off the yoke of Communism. I rather think that an Italian Pope would not have even tried to do that.
On another board where people steeped in the minutiae of Catholicism, its theology and catechetics, are wont to discuss things from a conservative-Catholic perspective, the consensus is that his greatest achievement is what’s known as his Theology of the Body. His second greatest achievement in their eyes is the total reform of the Curia, converting it from a self-perpetuating Italian clique to a truly catholic administrative bureaucracy (in the neutral sense of that word).
As to what he actually did: He’s equivalent to the C.E.O. of a major corporation and the spiritual leader of a billion people. He named and appointed every bishop. He’s guided, reviewed, and given final approval to every bit of teaching to come out of the Vatican, which has been extensive. He took his episcopal duties, as opposed to his Papal duties, seriously; before his health failed, he might show up at a church in Rome to celebrate Mass or hear confessions. He traveled more than any other Pope, ever. Without downplaying Catholicism’s traditional stance that it is the Church, from which everyone else, from Eastern Orthodox to Assemblies of God, is in schism, he reached out to other Christian groups, to Jews, and to practitioners of other religions entirely.
One need not be enamored of every bit of teaching or decisionmaking that he did to be singularly impressed by a vital and committed man who singlehandedly reshaped the Papacy.
The OP might want to read the pope’s obituary from any major newspaper. For anyone prominent, the obituary is often a good overview of their life.
He made a lot of saints - over four hundred. More saints were recognized during John Paul’s tenure than in the combined tenures of the last forty popes that preceded him.
You can read this Wiki encyclopedia article for a long summary of his life written by internet users.
FWIW, he cannonized more saints than all other popes combined.
In my hometown, the marquee…the pool-table sized billboard listing the sermon…in front of a church lauded the late Holy Father’s life.
A Protestant church.
That’s something.
NPR was just mentioning that he got Pinochet to agree to actual elections, which P lost AND obeyed, which as a two-fer that no one had expected.
While John Paul was certainly busy with canonizations (432) and beatifications (1340), it wasn’t quite that high. Over 10,000 people have been canonized or beatified, so over 80% were done by previous Popes.
Humph.
I guess Fox News is wrong again.
:rolleyes: