The sporting Pope
Peter Nichols
Rome You have to be a sport to enjoy Christmas, with its good cheer and its forced bonhomie. This explains why Rome has never really grasped the spirit of Christmas, despite the efforts of two decades to make Romans buy Mutilated pine branches disguised as trees On which to hang tinsel and chocolate bells. It is all part of the plot of making Italians into imitation Germans in the interests of Western solidarity. Rome is a city of the south and not of sports. It is much better at celebrating Easter than Christmas, when the good months are around the corner, not the nastiest ones of the year. And at its best in high summer when people go away or remain to display a form of animal high Spirits while the nights are hot and the days long, and nobody is expected to work very hard.
Christmas this year will have a different stamp. Just as the city was entering the final stages of its annual asphyxiation with shopPers picking their way through the sacks of rubbish left uncollected by striking dustmen, the Pope received the Bologna football team. The Polish Pope, as everyone ttolv knows, is a real sport. He throws babies UP in the air and catches them in his great hands before they land on the cobbles of St Peter's Square. Before his election he sw, am, skied, canoed, cycled as part of the Character which even the satirical weekly 11 Male, a kind of pungent Private Eye, has summed up in terms of grudging admiration ,as 11 Papa maschio'. The unsporting Romans keep having Ii Male sequestrated either for offending religion or for obscenity 1,),ut it was early with this idea of a manly rope, an idea which has had its consequences.
Even the staid Corriere della Sera made ,,tiLse of its front page to discourage rumours "'tat the Pope was engaged as a young man le? a Polish girl who died tragically in the second World War. Presumably just being clish means that people insist on making rfou still more Polish than you really are, as the Warsaw Concerto must haunt any romantic-looking Pole even if he has s.tepped so high as to put on the shoes of the fisherman. And the Pope is undoubtedly romantic. He is able to give a sense of occasion to what might seem an unimP, (irtant event. He told the Bologna football !earn and their wives that he was grateful to have them with him because their presence a „vv,akened in his soul indelible memories of 'Ile years I spent by the side of sports-loving Young People with whom I lived moments f Illped with human and spiritual joy.' lart of the trouble presumably for the Itn Ian public is to know just how to treat the first non-Italian Pope for half a millennium. There could have been resentment but in fact there was not. There was more relief that sense of loss, which must be put to the credit of Italian good sense. They could after all have retained the Papacy if their own cardinals had not preferred the fine old Italian habit of letting personal differences predominate over the main issue. Having indulged themselves, the Italians had to face the reality of having lost their traditional preserve, which they are doing very satisfactorily. They nevertheless find a foreign Pope easier to take if they make him into something alien to the Italian mind, in this case a sort of Father Christmas; The Pope is responding very well. He is not just a sport. He is a a man who not only fills whatever post or role he has: he stretches it to the limits. Part of this no doubt is due to his immense physical energies which he cannot consume within the walls of the Vatican by canoeing or skiing or swimming. He could cycle around the Vatican gardens, which cover ode third of his tiny state, but even so he could scarcely get comfortable in the saddle without having to slow down, given that the total sovereign space he has at his disposal, including squares, buildings, roads and gardens, is a third of the size of Rainier's principality.
It is a tiny pedestal for an active man. And it is a very public one. A reverential haze is supposed to surround the lives of popes. In practice, not a great deal remains hidden because the pedestal is closely watched, especially when the incumbent is still new. And also, as is the case with the present Pope, when he is attempting something different.
The idea of the Pope as Father Christmas is only appropriate because it happens to be Christmas now and this Pope is extraordinarily able at taking advantage of any opportunity presented to him. Wherever he is present, the event becomes an occasion. The one point on which Rome can go to bed with every sense of security on Christmas ve is that the holiday will in some way be dominated by this vigorous man from harsher climates.
When the time comes to look back on his reign, it will probably be this Christmas period that will be seen as the point when he needed something more to keep his place at the top of the tree. The admiring truce seems now to be over. What would have been impossible a month ago has now begun to happen, and people are speaking badly of the Pope. The first to do so was the Rome newspaper La Repubblica which put the question in just those terms at the head of its leading article. 'Can we speak badly of the Pope?' And the answer was very much that we can.
He is criticised for having interfered in Italian domestic affairs with his re-assertion of the Church's right to offer welfare services. The object of his strictures was the law recently enacted making over the last responsibilities due to them to the regional administrations, which include welfare. The issue is controversial because of the various readings given to the law on the amount of space it leaves for the Church to carry on with this traditional field of activity. The Pope's sally was regarded as particularly out of place because of the delicacy of the negotiations now hopefully nearing completion between Italy and the Vatican on the new Concordat.
He is a Pope more open to attack for what he says and does in public than what he seeks to accomplish in private. There could be no accusation of two different measures in his treatment of ecclesiastical dissent of right and left. In the space of two days he received privately the leader of traditionalist opinion, the French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, and the very advanced Mexican, Monsignor Sergio Mendez Arceo, Bishop of Cuernavaca. They represent the two poles of Catholic dissent. The Pope made no comment on what transpired, but the two conversations must have touched on such problems as the Latin, liturgy, antiCommunism, priestly celibacy, and the fate of married priests who have defied the ban without asking to leave the priesthood.
That was sporting enough. His warmth and generally fairly conservative views probably equip him better to deal with the difficulties on the right than on the left, especially because the professional progressives are expressing disappointments of a different kind about him. The theologian Don Giovanni Gennari who lost his teaching post at the Lateran in 1974 for favouring freedom of conscience on the divorce referendum in Italy, says that the election of John Paul II was frustrating for progressive opinion; 'Dissenters called for an open, modern, non-Italian Pope. Suddenly and unexpectedly they found they had one.' Too much of a gift all at once is presumably as difficult as having no present at all.
Christmas nevertheless ,should be his moment. It is not a particularly controversial festival. His pronounced Marian sentiments ought not to obtrude given the fairy-tale element which makes this one of the more remote from reality of the great Christian feasts, never more than now in a Rome still uncomfortable with it. Rome travel agents say that they have never had such demand for holidays abroad as this year. He might even make those that remain understand what Christmas means in countries such as Poland where Christmas means a great deal. Then with the New Year he will need to give indications of what he intends to make of his Papacy. That so far is the heaviest criticism: that he does everything so well that no one knows exactly what, to him, is fundamental.
Previous page
