The Protestant Pope

While Pope John Paul II lies in Rome's Gemelli Hospital, Christianity - both Catholic and Protestant - is experiencing a turmoil he himself had helped trigger.
There is a link between his dogged effort to undo the perversions of Western thinking going back four centuries and the harsh admonition of the world's Anglican primates to their North American brethren to stay away from their Consultative Council meetings until the next Lambeth Conference in 2008.
The link is this: Nobody has been more effective in combating the glorification of man's autonomy - including in the churches - than this pope. And glorifying autonomy at the expense of Scripture was of course the offense that landed the Episcopal Church USA and the Anglican Church in Canada in trouble with its more traditionalist sister denominations around the globe: to wit, their anger over the consecration of an overtly homosexual priest as bishop of New Hampshire and the blessing of same-sex marriages before some altars in North America.
To be sure, the stunning ascent of faithful Anglican leaders such as Archbishop Peter Akinola of Abuja in Nigeria led to orthodoxy's victory at the four-day primate's conference in Newry, Northern Ireland.
But from an all-Christian perspective, the pivotal figure in the counter-cultural revolution engrossing the entire world is John Paul II. This shows in his newest book, "Memory and Identity," which has caused outrage among those who simply did not get its basic philosophical line of thought.
The pope has been accused of putting the Holocaust on the same plane with abortion. Even a cursory glance at this book shows that this was not at all the intention of this rigorous philosophical thinker who knows only too well that even the most evil acts are unconnected and therefore incomparable.
But they do have a common source, and to John Paul II this source was the Occident's general acceptance of the dictum by the French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650), "Cogito ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am), which confined philosophy to the prison of solipsism (in its original philosophical meaning: moral egoism).
In the philosophical ruminations of his new book, he calls this narrowing of Christian anthropology to one mental experiment - namely thinking (as opposed to understanding) -- the fundamental flaw of modernity.
It was "reduction of God to the contents of human conscience" that opened the floodgates to hell - in the shape of tyranny and the bloody playgrounds of ideologies.
And then, "evil is pervasive even in liberal political systems," explained Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, prefect of the Vatican's Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith, as he explained the pontiff's thoughts on the root courses of the Holocaust and abortion, the latter being, from the Christian point of view, an evil decided in a perfectly democratic manner by parliaments or courts.
Man's solipsism lies behind these lethal decisions, as it lies behind the disregard by North American Anglicans of the significance of God's law - the Mosaic Law and the natural law written upon man's heart - in Judeo-Christian anthropology.
To believing Jews and Christians, man is not just man because he discovers that he can think. What distinguishes the human being from the rest of creation is his or her knowledge, thanks to revelation, of being created in God's image.
In the 400 years since Descartes, this idea has become unfashionable, with bloody consequences. But it has not become unfashionable in the global South, where Christianity is thriving, and the pope's propagation of a Culture of Life seems to make it acceptable again in parts of the global North.
We don't know if the pontiff was given the news from the Anglican meeting in Newry, Northern Ireland. But if he was, it might just have made him smile.