It is a commonplace that the present Pope finds himself in a situation without parallel in the history of the Church. Many a Pope has confronted hostile secular authority, but none has hitherto emerged from a nation dominated by a government relentlessly dedicated to the wholesale extirpation of religious belief and practice from social life. Again, as a Pole, Pope John Paul II is heir to the experience first of Nazi, then of Communist totalitarianism—the two great enemies of the European cultural inheritance in our century. Pope John Paul II is also the representative to the world of the Polish Church, without which another unparalleled development could not have occurred—the transformation, for the first and so far only time, of a fully fledged Communist totalitarian state into an authoritarian despotism. Poland remains unique among Communist states in that its institutions of civil society— family, church, learned associations, trade unions—have successfully resisted incorporation into the totalitarian bureaucracy and have asserted themselves independently of the controlling institutions of the Party. It is not merely that Marxist ideology is dead in Poland—since it has long since perished as a spiritual force in all the major Communist states—but rather that, in Poland, even the attempt to legitimate the regime by means of this ideology has been openly abandoned. Standing then between the two power blocs, the present Pope has inherited a unique challenge, as he seeks to reaffirm the central content of Catholic social and political teaching against the background of a Communist dictatorship whose legitimacy his Church has effectively destroyed.
The novelty of his situation has led many Western commentators to neglect the profound traditionalism of Pope John Paul’s social and political thought. Given his formative experiences of National Socialist and Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism, many Western commentators—especially those with a conservative outlook—have been puzzled by pronouncements from him that suggest a moral equivalence between the institutions of democratic capitalism and those of totalitarian socialism. Such an interpretation of the Pope’s thought is clearly unjustified. It neglects the complex and difficult circumstance in which he must address constituencies within the Church that have radically divergent histories and outlooks. The Pope must address both Catholic believers who (like those in Poland) have had ample experience of the material poverty and spiritual emptiness of Marxian socialism and the Catholics of Western Europe and North and South America who, lacking such experience, are captivated by the hallucinatory visions of liberation theology.
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