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Jewish World Review April 5, 2005 / 25 Adar II, 5765 One man can change the course of history By Michael Barone
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
One man can make a difference: that is the lesson of the life of
Pope John Paul II. If someone had told you, 50 years ago, that the
three men who would do the most to advance human freedom in the next
half century were the parish priest of St. Florian's Church in
Krakow, the military cadet who was the grandson of the last king of
Spain and the star of the recent movie "Bedtime for Bonzo," you
would not have believed him. But so it has been. History takes
surprising turns. And it is often individual men and women, for good
and for evil, who do the steering.
They can steer in directions not widely anticipated. A half century
ago, it seemed the world was moving toward ever more collectivism
and centralization, toward ever greater secularism and skepticism:
This was modernity, and Marx and Freud were its prophets. Experts at
the top of hierarchical pyramids would determine the course of
events. Authoritarian and totalitarian regimes ruled most of the
world's people, and in an age of nuclear weapons, no one could hope
to change that. The best that could be wished for was a convergence
of systems.
Karol Wojtyla thought something different. He was 19 when Nazi
Germany overran his native Poland; through World War II he worked in
a quarry and acted in clandestine illegal plays. He sheltered Jews
and was once arrested by the Gestapo. Then, after the Red Army swept
into Poland and installed a Communist government, he attended
seminary and became a priest, a bishop and an archbishop. In the
pulpit and out he called for religious freedom and freedom of
conscience, implicitly rebuked a regime built on lies. Today, we can
read about the millions of people murdered by Hitler and Stalin.
Pope John Paul II lived under their rule, but kept his own mind and
conscience free.
In 1978, when he was 58, Karol Wojtyla was elected pope; he had
lived most of his life under totalitarian governance. This was the
same year in which Juan Carlos I, groomed to be King of Spain by the
dictator Franco, presided over free elections in Spain — a
transition to democracy that, as Michael Ledeen has written,
inspired similar transitions in other parts of southern Europe and
Latin America. And it was the same year that Ronald Reagan, past
retirement age, was writing radio commentaries and preparing to run
for the third time for president of the United States. This time he
would win, and would put in place policies that did much to end the
Soviet Union and the Communist regimes it supported.
The next year, the Pope returned to his native Poland and appeared
before crowds of 1 million in Warsaw and Gniezno and Czestochowa.
Thirteen million Poles — one-third of the nation's population —
saw the Polish Pope in person. He spoke words of hope and faith, and
without openly advocating the overthrow of the Communist regime made
it clear that it did not hold the people's allegiance. As his
biographer George Weigel wrote, "A revolution of the spirit had been
unleashed." For much of the 19th and early 20th centuries the
Catholic Church had looked askance at democracies and had seen
authoritarian regimes as upholders of the faith. Pope John Paul II
heartily embraced representative democracy and enunciated a
sophisticated appreciation of free markets and their limits. He
engaged in serious moral dialogue and presented a vision of
modernity different from that of the disciples of Marx and Freud.
Would the Solidarity movement that undermined the Communist regime
in Poland have emerged with the courage and hope it did without Pope
John Paul II? Would the Soviet Union have lost its Eastern European
satellites and its very existence without the Pope and Ronald
Reagan? Would Spain have made the transition to democracy and freedom
and set the example it did without King Juan Carlos I?
We cannot be certain of the answers to these counterfactual
questions. But it seems as certain as such things can be that
different leaders would have produced different, and less happy,
results. Juan Carlos lives today the routine life of a
constitutional monarch; Ronald Reagan withdrew from public view as
Alzheimer's clouded his vision; John Paul II, his body wracked with
Parkinson's, struggled to do his duty until the end. This man who
lived under Hitler and Stalin, like the American president and the
Spanish king, steered history in a surprising and felicitous
direction, a direction unforeseen a half century ago.
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