During an audience with the Pope in 1993, I saw him hugging, very gently, with striking intimacy, a diminutive nun. When he was involved in the theatre in his youth, and as a young priest, he loved the company of women, and there were even rumours of a love relationship in his student days. He used to say: "I am in love with love!" Yet John Paul's attitude towards women, sexuality and the body has been anything but easy and uncomplicated. He has proved himself the most puritanical pope in the modern period, with an obsessive horror of any form of sexuality that transgresses the narrow bounds of what he terms the "norms of sexology". His attitude towards women is medieval in its patriarchalism. Earlier this year he published an attack on feminism as if the women's movement had barely progressed since the bra-burning days of the 1960s.
In 1994, John Paul startlingly revealed, and not for the first time, a misogynistic side to his character when he met Dr Nafis Sadik, the Pakistani head of the UN Fund for Population Activities. The pontiff had invited her to the Vatican to talk about family planning. Dr Sadik, then in her early forties and dressed in a sari, attempted to make their meeting a discussion rather than a one-sided papal lecture.
"In many societies, and not just in the developing world, women don't have equal status with men," she told the Pope. "There's a lot of sexual violence within the family." Suddenly, as Sadik recalled, "John Paul burst out angrily, ÔDon't you think that the irresponsible behaviour of men is caused by women?'" This was long before his Parkinson's disease could explain such intemperance. In fact, Sadik thought he appeared "taut as a spring". She has said: "I found myself thinking: why is he so hard-hearted, so dogmatic, so lacking in kindness?"
As John Paul's health fails in the deep winter of his pontificate, one of the greatest challenges for a biographer is to explain his fiercely antagonistic attitude towards sexuality and women.
Outside unprotected sex within marriage he is an advocate of strict abstinence. In the case of HIV/Aids patients who are married, he has steadfastly refused to endorse the use of condoms. So it would seem that an HIV/Aids sufferer might sooner pass on the infection rather than practise safe sex. While Catholic Aids workers in Africa approach the pandemic in terms of disease and medicine, the Pope insists that the illness is a "pathology of the spirit". And this spring the Vatican went so far as to issue a statement declaring that condoms don't work.
Pope John Paul II has shown himself to be a man of rare depth of soul, an evangelist of tireless energy who travelled the world to spread the Christian gospel. We all sleep more safely because of his part in toppling communism. But there is a parallel verdict, rarely expressed in public, in deference to a taboo that forbids criticism of living, even dead, popes, and especially a sick one. When he came from Poland he evidently brought a bit of the Iron Curtain with him. John Paul has emerged as an intransigent authoritarian who is leaving his church in a far worse state than he found it in 26 years ago.
While the Catholic Church has been suffering from a catalogue of calamities, not least the paedophile-priests crisis, the defections of the young, the incursions of evangelical Protestantism in South America and the admixtures of native religions in Africa, he has focused, virtually exclusively, not only on abortion but on what he sees as the mortal sins of contraception, sex before marriage, couples living together outside marriage, divorce and remarriage, in vitro fertilisation, homosexuality and the use of condoms as a safe-sex strategy. Nobody expects the Pope to condone sexual permissiveness — but his unforgiving, excluding rigidity has driven away countless millions.
In Britain, there should now be 15m Catholics, if all the migrants from Ireland and their families had kept the faith. But there are just over 4m, and of those only 1m attend mass — half the number of the 1960s. In the US, the fourth largest Catholic population in the world, marriages by Catholics before a priest have halved since the 1960s. In 1958, three-quarters of all Catholics in North America attended church regularly; by the turn of the century, the figure had dropped to about a third, and ordinations to the priesthood have declined by more than two-thirds. In Europe, where the decline in practice is steepest, 30-50% of parishes have no resident priest. In France, a traditionally Catholic country, only 7% of under-17s ever go to church.
John Paul's refusal to identify a crisis in the priesthood, and his strongly centralising dynamic, is inseparable from the scandal of sexual abuse by Catholic priests. The systemic corruption of priestly paedophilia has revealed a paralysis and vacillation on the part of local bishops, who attempted to conceal and deny it while looking over their shoulders to Rome. The paralysis goes right up to John Paul himself. The details are horrific, involving altar boys being routinely lured into bed by priests, and children entrusted to the church's protection being forced to perform oral sex. John Paul, however, ignored the scandal until he was forced by world outrage to acknowledge it. According to a reputable report by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, of the City University of New York, 4,400 Catholic priests in the US have been credibly accused of sexually attacking some 11,000 minors between 1950 and 2002. That represents virtually half the period of John Paul II's papal watch. Multiple cases have been reported throughout the world. In the past six or seven years, 120 priests have been investigated in the UK, resulting in 21 convictions.
John Paul has doggedly presided over an ethical campaign that has resulted in a split between papal teaching and the actual practice of the faithful. It is estimated that 80% of Catholics practise birth control in the developed world, and that some 40% of Catholic marriages fail. This means that most Catholics in sexual relationships are living in sin, as far as John Paul is concerned.
At the same time, his denunciation of safe sex — even in the case of Aids victims — is so out of kilter with contemporary mores that he has lost credibility on leading moral issues on which his opinion could be effective, including embryonic stem-cell research, just-war debates and pleas for the alleviation of poverty. In the view of some Catholic social scientists, his own underlying fundamentalism has led to a disastrous loss of influence over the excesses of Islamic fundamentalism. John Paul might have been the pope to encourage the Muslim faithful towards acceptance of pluralist societies in which individuals and groups have a right to choose their own sets of values and beliefs. Despite the Christian contribution to the origins of democracy, John Paul won't have it. He insists certain actions — above all, contraception — are evil for everybody and in every circumstance, and that error has no rights. For this reason he has maintained deep reservations about democracy, free enterprise and western-style separation of church and state.
The question that will preoccupy future papal historians is what factors in John Paul's upbringing and inner psychology, and outward events, have shaped his ethical and political intransigence — particularly towards women.
