First published April 6, 2005, in the Chicago Free Press.
Catholics around the world are mourning the death of Pope John Paul II, the man who headed their church for more than a quarter of a century. But if we were reviewing John Paul's long reign as a performance on the world stage, we would have to give him "mixed" reviews.
The surprise election of a Polish pope and the quiet support the church hierarchy in Poland gave anti-communist dissidents helped overthrow the communist government there and then in the rest of Eastern Europe. And those eventually led to the evaporation of the Soviet Union itself. Although the pope's contribution was not paramount, his moral support was important at a time when the outcome was far from certain.
But those of us who are gay or lesbian can hardly join in mourning John Paul's death. Through his doctrinal statements, his public exhortations, his ecclesiastical appointments and his intrusion into political controversies John Paul did his utmost to retard and reverse the movement for gay and lesbian equality.
In a technical sense, John Paul was a reactionary pope, seeking to reassert with renewed vigor traditional Catholic doctrines and their social policy effluvia against all efforts to rethink or reformulate core church teachings.
His outlook was decisively shaped by having spent much of his adult, clerical life in Poland under the domination of communism, a system which he - like the communists themselves - seemed to view as the fullest expression of post-Renaissance, modern philosophy. His response was to set himself firmly against virtually every expression of the Enlightenment and push back against it at every moment.
He was less interested in bringing political and economic freedom to Eastern Europe than in restoring Catholic dominance. He rejected the autonomy of civil society and promoted the legal imposition of Catholic social doctrine. He did not believe free speech and press were basic human rights, but conditional "privileges" that must not be "abused" by attacking his church.
He rejected the separation of church and state: When governments threatened to reduce subsidies and privileges long granted to the church, he said the church was being persecuted. He rejected artificial birth control even to prevent HIV transmission: Better a woman and her baby become infected than block conception. While he managed to say - 400 years after the fact - that the persecution of Galileo was a mistake, he refused to say evolution was a fact, admitting only that it was "more than a theory."
He dismissed without argument the idea of female priests, apparently believing his God would transubstantiate only for male celebrants. He promoted a prominence for Mary unknown since the Middle Ages and came close to promulgating the novel doctrine that she was "co-redemptress of the human race." He was dissuaded at the last moment.
But it was in opposing legal and social equality for gays that the pope and the bishops he commanded showed the most zeal. Around the world the Catholic hierarchy regularly opposed the repeal of sodomy laws, opposed gay non-discrimination laws and opposed government recognition of gay civil marriage and civil unions.
In European and Latin American nations where civil unions have been proposed, Catholic prelates vigorously opposed them as a threat to the family and the social structure. When governments proposed non-discrimination laws or hate crimes laws, Catholic officials claimed their religious freedom was being threatened. When Spain's social democratic government proposed a gay marriage law, the Vatican summoned the Spanish ambassador to make clear the church's adamantine opposition.
In 1986 the pope authorized a formal Vatican statement declaring that homosexuality was not a "neutral" condition, but "a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder." Even more remarkably, the document went out of its way to observe that it was "understandable" if the advocacy of gay rights generated an increase in violence directed against gays.
When the international gay celebration World Pride 2000 was planned for Rome, the Vatican maneuvered furiously to prevent it, saying it was offensive to a city held sacred by the world's Christians. When the event was held anyway, the pope deplored its presence and repeated that homosexuality is "an objective disorder" and harmful to the family, the basis of society.
Although the Pope apologized, after a fashion, for the Catholic Church's millennia of persecution of Jews, and apologized to Africans for the role the church had in slavery, such as having owned some, the pope never apologized for or even acknowledged the persecution, torture and judicial murder of gays during the Inquisition as well as during other social purity crusades fostered by the church. It was as if those never happened.
John Paul II was the last medieval pope. Until the next one.