If you have not read it,
I would encourage you all to read this full transcript of the Pope’s interview on the plane from Cuba to America. It does not read like an interview with a faith leader, but with a politician. He is leaving a meeting with an explicitly anti-Christian Communist dictator, and he is being asked why he would glad-hand with a dying tyrant while ignoring the many dissidents who wanted to meet with him. He even suggests that those who accuse him of political idiocy are extremists who assess him on the basis of his shoes instead of his ideas. The interview reads like one of a cornered politician, defensive and old, not crafty enough to work around the not very clever questions from journalists. The part where he offers “Hey, maybe one of the wheelchair guys was a dissident?” reads like a line from Veep. They are the answers of somebody embarrassed by the real answer.
This is not always the way it was. Contrast with John Paul II, on 2 June 1979, in Warsaw. He was 59 to Francis’s 78, a young Pope, a Polish Pope, speaking less than a year after his selection. He was speaking in the heart of Soviet military power in Eastern Europe, an occupied capital, under the guns. Over a million people turn out to see him. It is perhaps the largest Mass in the history of the Catholic Church… until the following week in Krakow, when two million will turn out. He is standing in a city run by a government dedicated to atheistic Communism, to subservience to Soviet power, to the rejection of faith and the domination of every thought to the service of the collective.
And the crowd roared back:
We want God!
We want God!
We want God in the family!
We want God in books!
We want God in schools!
We want God in government!
The men with guns could only watch, and see in this spontaneous chant the beginning of the end of their tyrannical atheist empire.
The change did not happen overnight. It was a decade’s worth of work by Pope John Paul II that brought change, that brought down the wall, that ended tyranny in Europe and the subjugation of millions. In 1987, he went back to Poland, gave a speech at Gdansk, and made sure to use the word “solidarity” six or seven times in his sermon. Talks on power sharing opened soon after. And the world changed.
The Pope is one of the few prominent people in the world who can change the conversation simply by saying things that others cannot. This Pope, to me, says the things many others say, all the time and everywhere, in the pages of the New York Times. So it is odd that he is deployed so frequently by the media – not because he is saying anything interesting, but because he is saying what is familiar to them, what they recognize, what they see in themselves. They look at those remarks on the plane and find them useful and brave. I find them tedious and cowardly.
