Enlightenment of either the spiritual or intellectual variety has been equally rare in the blogosphere. I've come across two notable exceptions, that weren't simply stale rehashes of ancient debates seen through one predictable worldview or another. Taken together I found they implicitly challenge most of the narratives being imposed on the story of the Pope's death, and thereby challenge a number of assumptions, casually shared by many American and European commentators, about the political valence of religion in the culture of the "West" and in the rest of the world.
The first is a highly personal and entertaining tale by Kieran Healy of Crooked Timber on his family's excursion to see the Pope when he came to Ireland in 1979, and an extraordinary portion of the entire population of the country went to see him. Kieran follows with the unhappy story of what has happened to the Catholic Church in Ireland since the Pope's famous visit.
The Irish story contrasts sharply with Ed Kilgore's thoughtful assessment of John Paul II's significance for the Church in the Southern hemisphere, where the tensions perceived in the Northern hemisphere -- between the "liberal" and "conservative" Pope -- have certainly played out differently.
Yet nearly everything about the powerful and perhaps irreversible trajectory he set for the Church points South, to the Third World, and away from Europe and the United States. Many obituarists of this Pope have struggled to categorize him ideologically as "conservative" on faith and morals yet "liberal" or even "radical" on issues of globalization, poverty and war, even as they acknowledge the unity of his own thinking.
But these are Eurocentric ways of looking at his teachings, which may confuse and distress American Catholics and what's left of the faith in Europe, but make perfect sense to most Catholics in Africa, Latin America and Asia.
A deeply illiberal approach to issues involving sexuality and gender; a rejection of capitalism as a necessary counterpart to democracy; and an abiding hostility to U.S.-European political, military, economic and cultural hegemony: this is a consistent point of view with strong support in the global South, among Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Indeed, in many respects what John Paul II represented was a living link between the pre-modern traditions of European Catholicism and the post-modern realities of much of the rest of the world.
[...]
Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and irreligious, who are outdoing each other this week in viewing this pope's legacy through the lens of their own cultural and political obsessions. This pope's opposition to "American exceptionalism" invariably embraced opposition to the death penalty, to capitalist triumphalism, and to George W. Bush's unilateralist foreign policies, as well as to abortion or birth control or the removal of feeding tubes from the hopelessly dying.
Many conservatives accuse John Paul II's American flock of practicing a "Cafeteria Catholicism" of selective obedience to Rome. But the American Right, I would argue, is practicing "Cafeteria Conservatism"--an equally selective interpretation of this pope's teachings and legacy, which lead not Right or Left but South. [em. added]
To relate these observations to my most recent blog entry -- when those of us from developed liberal democracies embrace the prospect of promoting greater political freedoms and development across continents where genuine freedom is scarce and poverty is endemic, Kilgore's observations should remind us that that large portions of people in those worlds share the "mentality" of a Pope whose attitudes and core beliefs are often hard for us to integrate, reconcile or fully understand. That recognition should be reflected both in the actions we choose and in our expectations about the probable results of our actions.