After Wojtyla: A “Papal Revolution” for the Third Millennium

Here is an excerpt of Sandro Magister's most recent article from L'espresso

Memory is an essential language for an entity such as the Church. When pope Wojtyla presented himself to the world as the pastor called by God to usher the Church into the third millennium, the obligatory comparison was to what happened in Europe after the year 1000. In a book on the birth of the West, Philippe Nemo, one of the sharpest "nouveaux philosophes," calls it the "Papal Revolution."

Gregory VII, a monk and pope, was the most notable protagonist of the revolution unleashed in the eleventh century, but in reality it was a collective religious, cultural, and political endeavor that lasted for many decades.

It began with a purification and reorientation of the Church with a rigorist bent, similar to what Ratzinger called for in the meditations for the Stations of the Cross last Good Friday. It continued with a challenge to earthly rulers in the name of the principle of liberty. And it succeeded thanks to an ingenious recovery of Greek scientific philosophy and Roman law, and their grafting onto the body of Christian doctrine.

Modern Europe took its shape from that Papal Revolution, with its unprecedented synthesis of the heritage of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem.

It was also on account of that Revolution that Europe was able to endure its encounter with the other civilizations of the world - Islamic, Indian, Chinese - although it also suffered the schism with the Eastern Orthodox Churches, which could not bear the strengthened primacy of the Roman papacy.

Pope Wojtyla had intuited this: that the Church had to have its revolution at the beginning of the third millennium as well, and that the time was ripe for civilization to take another step forward, not just in the West but in the whole world, and with the Church of Rome in the lead.

He understood this intuitively and performed what he saw as prophetic gestures, flashes of lightning announcing a new Papal Revolution: his voyages to the farthest reaches of the world; his challenges to the modern political and cultural empires of evil; the interreligious gatherings in Assisi for peace; the "mea culpas" for the past sins of Christianity.

So then, if the conclave sees the success of the approach developed by Ratzinger, Ruini, and the other Church leaders on their side, the next pontificate will inherit John Paul II's deep intuition. But it will put this into practice in decisively new ways. Many of the gestures that distinguished Wojtyla's pontificate, even the most universally appreciated ones, will not be repeated.