The Singular Weakness of St. John Paul II: Too Holy! Too Innocent! Too Wholesome!

Extravagance in goodness is not itself, of course, a deficit; but it can lead to some blindness in the practical order of sin in which we all live. Someone (Balthasar?) critiqued St. Therese of Lisieux as being so innocent, so personally unfamiliar with serious sin, that she was almost another "Immaculate Conception" and therefore lacking in what is for most of us a fundamental of the spiritual life: remorse, contrition, repentance. My suggestion here is that something similar occurred with St. John Paul: from early in his life he preserved an innocence, a freshness, a wholeness, a generosity and freedom of spirit that shielded him from the normal ravages of sin.

An analogy: when I sought to be promoted into supervision in UPS from my driver job I had lunch with a higher level manager who I thought to be my godfather. He was very direct with me: "You will not make a good supervisor. You are conscientious and industrious and so you have no idea of the psychology of the bad worker. You will not know how to deal with him. The best supervisors are often those who were themselves the troubled employee." I understood: it wasn't negative or positive, it just is what it is. My subsequent career verified his view: I was never a good disciplinarian. Years later I myself promoted two workers to part-time supervision: one was the hardest worker in the airport, the other was the laziest but smart. Guess which was the better supervisor? The lazy one!

And so John Paul was not the best disciplinarian either, because he didn't know, within himself, the compulsivity, shame, nastiness, guilt, impotence of sin. His personal experience of concupiscence was diminished because of his physical, emotional, moral and spiritual health and vigor. In our tradition, the two appetities are the concupisible (desire, longing, lust, gluttony) and the irasible (anger, rage, etc.). These are wounded and disordered by virtue of original sin, with Mary the exception. But it is an evident fact that some special people enjoy an unusual innocence, a effortless goodness, a gracious freedom. St. Therese and John Paul are probably the greatest of these.

Interestingly, John Paul engaged personally and intimately with the two great evils of the mid-20th-century, Nazism and Communism. Later he encountered the cultural liberalism of the West as well as the explosion of Jihadist violence. But these evils were exterior to him and seemed to evoke in him a deeper, more passionate and persistent surrender into the Mercy of Christ. This made him a Great Saint. But led to some defects in his governance and teaching in the world as we find it. This is evident in three areas.

Most significantly, his failure in regard to the priest sex scandal, especially his misplaced trust in Maciel, McCarrick and others. I suspect the fact of widespread abuse of teen boys by priests was incomprehensible to the Pope. He saw the best in everyone. And he saw the best in Maciel and McCarrick but seemed not to suspect the worst. But the worst was there. I believe his failure here was emblematic of the broader problem: many bishops, vicars, and decision makers are themselves relatively wholesome and naive and were easily conned by world-class predators. An important book for me was "The Sociopath Next Door" which described the widespread presence of such (4% of the population) and their invisibility to most of us, especially the more innocent and virtuous among us. We need more prosecutor-policeman-cynical types in our hierarchy.

Secondly, his catechesis on sexuality and nuptiality is breath-takingly, life-transformingly beautiful; but it shows little awareness of the ugly side...desperate erotic longing, addictions, shame, guilt, splitting of the personality, violence and degradation. Likewise, his inspiring view of married life is unbalanced by the monotony, annoyance, aggravation of the thing. He sees so clearly the good, not so clearly the ugly.

Lastly, his teaching on the death penalty and war moves dangerously close to pacifism, even as he is not so reckless as Pope Francis with his bumbling intrusion into the Catechism. He regards capital punishment as virtually unnecessary in contemporary conditions as there are alternate paths to protection, rehabilitation and deterence. But he specifically does not address retribution. Retribution is an act of justice whereby an evil done is "balanced" by a proportionate punishment. It is closely related to but distinct from protection/rehabilitation/deterence. It is required by the existence of poweful, objective evil. Practically, its exercise diminshes the dynamism of revenge, but it is entirely distinct. In itself it is a requirement of justice. For example, at the particular judgment we will ourselves demand the purification/punishment of purgatory, partially as a necessity of justice, it would be simply wrong to enter the glory of heaven without retribution for our wrong-doing. This view is entirely inconceivable to our contemporary consciousness: soft, demasculinized, indulgent, presumptuous, secular, bourgeois. To be sure John Paul was not this way, but his deep immersion into Mercy, a Mercy illuminated by Truth, but somewhat dim in its view of evil and the requirements of justice. Likewise, his horror of war, so widely shared today, seemed to dull a clear-minded vision of communism/jihadism and the need for military force to deter it.

John Paul was close to the pure, holy heart of our Blessed Mother Mary and so shared in her innocence and freshness. His body of teaching represents a significant enrichment of our Catholic legacy, but is not immune to criticism.