AND ANOTHER THING
The Pope wises up a dumbed-down world, but silence is golden too
PAUL JOHNSON
Now that I am in my seventies, I do not work as hard as I once did. I see from my diary that last week I wrote six articles and gave two interviews. But my work on my final big book, A History of Art, proceeds slowly. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak; or, rather, I am too easily tempted to wander into my studio and resume paint- ing, which I love more than anything on earth, and do not count as work. I am not inactive for a man of my age, but I nonethe- less feel guilty — the work ethic is strong in me. I feel particularly guilty after looking through a proof copy of George Weigel's enormous biography of Pope John Paul II, which goes into the life of that hyperactive man in painstaking detail. It reveals the crushing burden of his workload which con- tinues to this day, though he is far from well and heading for his eighties.
Karol Wojtyla celebrated his 20th anniversary as Pope last October, and by that date he had already served longer than all but ten of the 263 popes in history. Dur- ing those two decades he travelled 670,878 miles — 2.8 times the distance between the earth and the moon — in the course of 84 pilgrimages throughout the world, 134 pas- toral visits inside Italy, and more than 700 within his own diocese of Rome, where he visited 274 of its 325 parishes, besides hospi- tals, prisons, schools and religious institutes. The records of his theological teaching, bound volumes known as the Insegnamenti di Giovanni Paolo II, cover ten feet of shelf space, include 13 encyclicals, 45 apostolic letters and constitutions, 14 official epistles, nine exhortations and more than 600 addresses or speeches on formal occasions. He has also supervised and to some extent written the massive new Catechism of the Catholic Church, the first since the 16th cen- tury, which in my view is a masterpiece of doctrinal exposition. In addition he held 877 general audiences in Rome, attended by 13,833,000 people, plus group audiences given to 180,000 visitors, and 15,000 private audiences averaging five a working day. During these audiences, the Pope delivered many thousands of addresses.
The Pope also found time to canonise 280 new saints and beatify 798 brave, pious and holy men and women, who in due course will probably become saints also. This is the largest programme of sanctifica- tion ever carried out by a single pope. John Paul has created six new academies, insti- tutes and foundations, conducted intensive talks with the Protestant and Orthodox Christian Churches, representatives of the Jews and Muslims, and learned dignitaries from half a dozen Oriental religions. He has held 12 synods, seven consistories at which he created 159 new cardinals, and consecrated 2,650 bishops (out of a world total of around 4,200). In his travels, he has presided over meetings attended by hun- dreds of millions of people, to whom he delivered 3,078 homilies.
No man in history has spoken personally to such multitudes. And there is never any- thing routine about this endless programme of daily exposition. The Pope always fills an occasion with excitement and he seems to radiate his personality over considerable distances. I have never come across anyone who has been in his presence, even in a large congregation, who has not been ani- mated. All this is achieved without spin- doctoring or verbal magic, for the Pope is a philosopher who pays close attention to the exact meaning of words and is not interest- ed in their reverberations. You have to lis- ten intently to what he says, and read what he writes carefully, to grasp his meaning. He makes no concessions. This is not a dumbing-down but a wising-up pontificate.
Now this Herculean output of work, this heroic attempt to teach the entire world, is entirely proper for a pope; noble even. He believes, and so do a billion other people, that he is Christ's Vicar on earth, and what he is doing is his duty. I am not so sure that such a copious flow of instruction would be acceptable from anyone else. We all admire a good talker, up to a point. The very best, such as Dr Johnson, do not talk all the time — far from it. Dr Johnson would often be silent, or nearly so, throughout an entire evening; he had to be stimulated or pro- voked into speech. He regarded talk for the sake of talk as a French vice; by contrast, `An Englishman talks only when he has something to say,' and he observed this dis- tinction in his own talk. By contrast, Coleridge had no reticence. He poured forth the fruits of his study and imagination without pause, without regard for his audi- ence and, as a rule, without suffering inter- ruption. It was an inspired monologue, but a monologue nonetheless. It might last for hours. Some loved it; others had reserva- tions. It laid him open to the devastating description, pitying in its cruelty, which Carlyle has left of a typical Coleridge harangue in Highgate. Macaulay was not so self-centred as Coleridge. He permitted others to utter. But he knew so much, and conveyed it so eloquently, that he some- times ended by talking his company into exhaustion. He filled a house-party with sounding knowledge, as a great cataract fills a valley with the roar of its waters. And then, when he left, the other guests looked at each other in amazement: a great silence had descended, peace reigned, you could hear the ticking of the clock. They all laughed, like children let out of school.
The truth is, silence has its virtues too; is a virtue in itself. My little Russian Ortho- dox friend told me recently, 'A pious old lady went to church every day. She prayed constantly. Even when not in church she was seldom off her knees. But she was not happy. Things did not go well for her and her family so she prayed still more. But she was still uneasy. Eventually she went to a wise monk and complained. Why did her endless prayers seem to do no good? The monk replied, "You are bombarding God with your prayers night and day. It is like an artillery barrage. No one can hear anything else. You never give God a chance to say a word in reply. Why not be silent for a time and just listen? Then maybe God will tell you something." ' I have taken this story to heart. I now go to church in the morning not just to pray, but to listen. It is, I find, not an easy habit to acquire. But I am slowly getting the knack. And the habit of listening, rather than talking, is spreading to other activities. Sometimes now in company I never say a word. I encourage others to talk. No one stands more in need of contra-evangelism than I do. Leaving talk aside, I shudder to think of how many tens of millions of words I have published in the last half-century of incessant writing. So I regard this journey into silence as progress, for me anyway. But I still admire the Pope.
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