The next big event in Rome is the beatification of Pope John Paul II. Like most Roman events nowadays, it has been preceded by excitement and controversy. The excitement has been most notable among Polish Catholics.
After Mary MacKillop's canonisation, Australians have a better idea of what it all means.
John Paul's reputation for holiness has been judged well-founded, and he may now have a place in public liturgy in some local churches. He is a man of his own time and place, a local tile in the mosaic of the people notable for their faith who compose the universal church.
Karol Wojtyla was a larger than life size figure closely identified with his time and place. He came from a nation whose particular form of faith distinguished it from its often hostile neighbours. The Polish church was disciplined and had a sense of embattlement. He himself was a man of deep faith and prayer, and a natural leader in his church.
From his early years as a seminarian he confronted ruling powers inspired by totalitarian ideologies hostile to Christian faith. They particularly attacked the Polish Catholic links through the Pope to the broader church. They tried constantly to exploit divisions among Catholics.
He learned the importance of a unified Catholic voice and strict discipline, particularly among bishops and clergy. He also saw clearly the moral wasteland the Communist regime had created, the strength of popular disaffection with it, and so the weakness that beset its apparently unshakable power.
When he was elected Pope he brought his Polish experience and history, together with his personal instinct for the dramatic gesture, to the universal church, His gift and moral force, shown in his indomitable recovery from the attempt on his life, eroded the legitimacy of the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe. His personal role in the fall of the Berlin wall and in the gaining of freedom from oppression and fear by the peoples and churches in Eastern Europe was significant.
No wonder his beatification has been so enthusiastically received in Poland and in much of Eastern Europe. He was a man of their times and place, as much a Polish Catholic as Mary MacKillop was an Australian. As they did with Mary MacKillop, Catholics in other parts of the world can join the Polish people and others in celebrating and thanking God for the gift of a faithful and brave person.
The controversy about the beatification of Pope John Paul II is not about his virtue or his historical significance. It asks about his legacy to the Catholic Church, and in particular whether a program that was right in Poland in hard times was, and will be, right for other places and for the situations that face other churches. Some have considered that the beatification of the Pope means that his program is now canonised as normative for the church of our day.
This is an open question. It is legitimate to ask whether the directions in which Pope John Paul II led the Catholic Church were beneficial to it or not.
Those who have reservations point to the increased centralisation of the Church under the Pope, withdrawal from the openness to change implicit in the governance of Popes John XXIII and Paul VI, and the appointment of compliant bishops to significant sees.
They argue this has made the engagement with Western societies and Asian elites, through ventures like the new evangelisation and popular gatherings like World Youth Day, bound to fail. Catholics are left to deal with a world they are not encouraged to understand except in polemical terms.
This, of course, is as one-sided an account of John Paul II's pontificate as are the hagiographical versions. Both accounts are less about the Pope than about the future of the Catholic Church.
We have now had time to survey the local attempts throughout the world to invigorate the Church along the strong lines proposed and embodied in John Paul II. In my view, they have had little success, and have tended to alienate the Church further from the culture in which it must commend the Gospel. The proclamation of the Gospel to our grandchildren's world will demand exploring the questions posed by modernity to which John Paul's legacy has left us too ready answers.
But whatever our views on these matters, the faith, courage and humanity of Karol Wojtyla, expressed in his distinctively Polish and combative form, can be celebrated by all people as one tessera in the mosaic that is the struggle for freedom. They can be celebrated by all Catholics as one tile in the mosaic that is a faithful church.
His beatification also encourages us to ask whether other tiles in the mosaic may prove to be more significant for the Christian proclamation of the Gospel today.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.