A Tale of Two Johns
Jiayuguan, Gansu Province, China, May 1st, 2014
Salaroche

This past Sunday, April the 27th, saw four catholic popes gathered at the Vatican for a mega-publicized ceremony. Two of them were present in the form of relics and two of them were present in the living flesh. One of the living popes presided over the canonization of the deceased ones and the remaining fourth was there only in his condition as pope emeritus.

The event had an overwhelming attendance of hundreds of thousands of Catholics, some of whom had travelled distances as far as Chile to be there. In terms of PR, the spectacle was a total success, so much so that, among all living rock stars, maybe only Paul McCartney could have managed to gather a comparable large audience at his feet.

By some counts, there will now be 80 popes in the history of the church to have been elevated to sainthood, except that this was a unique event that saw two of them canonized simultaneously for the first time ever. In obtaining their sainthood diploma, the brand-new Saint Johns leaped-frogged over sixteen other popes who have been waiting in line for quite some time, some of them for longer than 300 years.

It doesn’t take much curiosity to wonder why a guy like John Paul II, who died in 2005 and was beatified six years later in 2011, was fast-tracked into sainthood in 2014, barely 9 years after his death. The unorthodox process to canonize John XXIII also makes some people wonder why he was granted sainthood based only on one single miracle while most other previous “saints” have been required to have a second “miracle” attributed to them after beatification.   

The absence of a second miracle casts some doubts upon John XXIII’s official sainthood, but from another perspective his case looks more in line with the church’s traditional canonization procedure than that of John Paul II. John XXIII died in 1963, was beatified close to 40 years later (2000), and was canonized 14 years after that (2014). His case resembles that of Pope Pius X, who died in 1914, was beatified 37 years later (1951) and was canonized shortly thereafter (1954). It also resembles that of Leo IX, who died in 1054 and was canonized in 1084, only 30 years later.

With its 9-year length, John Paul II’s canonization process is the second shortest in the history of the church. The third shortest would probably be that of Celestine V, who died in 1296 and was canonized in 1313, only 17 years later. According to some counts, the No. 1 shortest canonization process ever was that of Pope Gregory I, who was elevated to sainthood by popular acclamation immediately after his death.

All of the cases previously mentioned are samples of short canonization processes, but those of other popes have taken much longer. For example, Gregory VII, who died in 1085, was beatified 500 years later (1584) and was canonized 150 years after that (1728). On the non-papal side, it took the church 400 years to canonize Saint Joan of Arc.

The newly minted Saint Johns can now stake their own claim to exceptionality in the history of the church for having been canonized together on the same day, but John XXIII can also stake a second claim to uniqueness for having been promoted to sainthood with only one miracle under his belt, quite unlike Mother Teresa, who died in 1997 and was beatified in 2003, but is still waiting for a second miracle to be attributed to her before attaining official sainthood.

From a political perspective, the tale of two Johns canonized on the same day appears as just another instance of the pervasive leftwing-rightwing dichotomy existing in the ideological realm since forever, except that this time that duality has been elevated to the heavens, as if attempting to reconcile both sides in a saintly paradisiacal union. John Paul II ascended to sainthood stepping on a rightwing staircase while John XXIII did it stepping on a leftwing ladder.

John Paul II’s conservatism was widely known during his papacy. His anti-abortion stance was shared by John XXIII, but JP II’s admonitions to the Latinamerican church to stay out of politics and to toe the official line of his papacy, along with his thinly-veiled tolerance of the Pinochet regime in Chile, clearly spoke of a right-wing brand of laissez faire politics that ran in clear contraposition to the sociopolitical activism of the Liberation Theology promoted by John XXIII.

As we all know, different degrees of laissez-faire politics often correspond to different degrees of rightwing politics. Where there is no anti-elitist pro-labor activism in the social, economic, and political life of a country, there will always be an increasing dominance of conservatism over liberalism and of capital over labor. In other words, where there are no sociopolitical forces struggling to keep a certain balance in the general distribution of rights and wealth, there will always be a widening gap between the haves and the havenots. If such proposition were to disagree with your view on these matters, I would kindly suggest you take a peek at Thomas Picketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century” so that you may get a much more detailed exposition of the point in question.

In contrast, through the Second Vatican Council, John XXIII promoted the benign intervention of the church in the social, economic, and political affairs of the nations. He advocated the church’s activism towards an increased equity between the haves and the havenots, activism that was later decried as a “singular heresy” by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later to be known as Pope Benedict XVI, who was at the time John Paul II’s Doctrinal Czar.

John Paul II himself once condemned the idea of a revolutionary Christ as “something that does not tally with the church’s catechism” and in 1983 even admonished the Nicaraguan priest Ernesto Cardenal, who was a minister in the Sandinista government at the time, to “straighten up the situation of [his] church”.

The ideological dichotomy incarnated in the two Johns only comes to emphasize how prone we all are to suffer from different strands of the Rashomon effect, meaning, how one single event can be interpreted in as many different ways as the number of observers that witnessed it. Similarly, in his parables Jesus praised the virtues of the poor and the humble and basically closed all heavenly gates to those who possessed riches, but, just as almost everything else in this world, those parables have been subject to many dfferent interpretations so that everyone who reads or hears them, including myself, can come up with his or her own version of them.

John XXIII interpreted the message of Christ in a certain leftwing way, while John Paul II interpreted the same message in his own rightwing way. Still, many of us find it a bit baffling that many Christians, including John Paul II, dismiss outright the verse in King James (Mark 10:25) where Jesus declares in no uncertain terms that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”.

In the view of many of us, there is no room for any interpretation of that verse other than the literal one, yet many Christians would passionately argue against such view with their whole hearts and minds. Whatever the case, the interpretation of such statements is ultimately the responsibility of those who adhere to the Christian faith, not that of any of us outsiders, so I’ll just let our Christian brethren interpret whatever biblical passage they wish in whichever way they best see fit.

But as far as the differing doctrines espoused by the two Johns are concerned, it is obvious that Pope Francis shares more in the sociopolitical views of John XXIII than in those of John Paul II, which is the reason that many people see the canonization of John XXIII as a balancing political act from the part of Francis. If Francis had been guided only by cultus (popularity) in his decision to canonize any of the two Johns, John Paul II would have been the chosen one, but that would have given the church’s right wing some undesired ideological advantages, so Francis went ahead and fast-tracked John XXIII into sainthood as well.

We all use the means at our disposal to shape our own reality in the most convenient possible way to help ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities, and Pope Francis is no exception to that rule, except that in shaping his own reality the way he recently did he has also affected that of approximately 1.2 billion Catholics spread around the world.  

And so it is that now we have Johnny Rightwing and Johnny Leftwing happily walking hand in hand across the edenic gardens of a catholic paradise, showing off their shining brand-new halos to all the lesser saints and angels along their way, thanking Francis Superstar for his political savvy, and singing “it takes two, baby, it takes two” for the rest of their Catholic eternity. In other words, and as the good ol’ bard would have said: “all is well that ends well”.

Salaroche