McSaints

I am no saint. Karol Wojtyla has just been beatified by the Roman Catholic Church as a saint-in-waiting. He is better known as Pope Paul II. Wojtyla was a saint-maker himself. He beatified and canonized more saints than all the popes in history combined. He streamlined (assembly-lined?) the saint-making process up to Detroit standards when he was on the golden throne of St. Peter, who won his sainthood by proselytizing in ancient Rome itself.

Karol Wojtyla, as Pope

Now, I am no theologian. I can think of more productive ways to utilize my time on a planet where children starve and the poor beg in front of glass insurance company towers. However, as someone who was indoctrinated by Catholics in my childhood, I do know that sainthood is a measure of human perfection in the light of Catholic dogma. Under that light, Wojtyla may qualify to be a new-wave McSaint of his own making. Granted.

The common popular view tends to accept that the celebrity Popes are representative of some form of pure objective morality. This is where I have a problem with Wojtyla's elevation in their eyes through the media as an exemplar of goodness in the Catholic all-good-all-bad paradigm. A morally perfect human being does not intentionally enable and shelter sadistic pedophiles, in my opinion. A morally perfect human being does not groom a man who is tainted by association with Nazis to succeed him as the head of an organization that publicly abandoned massacred Jews to save its own fortunes under Fascism. A morally perfect human being does not support the denial of the basic human rights of millions of homosexuals to the degree that his subordinates in the developing world encouraged physical persecution of gay men and lesbians. I could continue my litany of Wojtyla's imperfect morality from my Catholic-educated humanist perspective, but, as I said earlier, I can think of better uses of my time.

One of the greatest sins, according to the Biblical Jesus of Catholicism, is hypocrisy, yet Wojtyla's papacy was a study in personal and political hypocrisy. The man aspired to rock star celebrity. He offered  public support for democracy in Poland while encouraging the Polish Catholic Church to practice a form of back-door theocracy in that country. He supported those in developed countries on The Right, who sought to undermine socially progressive policies in favor of corporate control and privilege for the wealthy. He publicly bemoaned the plight of the poor while living a life of luxury and world travel for self-promotion in the eyes of those poor whom he exploited and dominated to maintain his own lifestyle. Perhaps the vilest example of his hypocrisy was securing the succession of the current Pope, who now is making good his promise to canonize Wojtyla, the ultimate vanity in the Catholic world of icons.

Golden arches, golden crosses. Fast food, fast-track sainthood. When the pageantry fades, the realities of the human condition remain. There is no magic to feeding all our brothers and sisters with healthy food and water. It does not require a jewel-encrusted crown and a white dress to be a wholly decent and caring human being. There is no fast-track to human integrity and human decency in each moment. There is only the attempt and the commitment to do so, to learn from mistakes and to continue to practice.