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Of those three standards for true repentance, Pope John Paul II, in his March 12 plea for divine forgiveness for sins committed by his church in the past 2,000 years, met only one. He was contrite.

On specific sins, the pope offered the incense of smoky generalities. Not included in John Paul's confession were the names of earlier sinner popes, most now remembered only by hagiographers, or Catholicism's public crimes that were sanctioned by churchmen or doctrine. Specifics were also absent from the 19,000 word document "Memory and Reconciliation: the Church and the Faults of the Past" that accompanied the papal self-pardoning. "Past faults" and "scandals of the past" cover a multitude of undefined sins.

The pope's vagueness raises a question -- not about past sins but about possible current ones.

For what sins of today's church might a pope in the year 4000 -- perhaps John Paul XXXIV -- be begging forgiveness? What policies of today's Vatican will be weepingly regretted 10 or 20 centuries from now?

Start with violence. At no time in John Paul's papacy has he renounced the church's just-war theory. He has never wavered from Catholic teaching that violence can be used to repel violence.

With some 35 wars or conflicts currently bloodying the Earth, and with as many as 40,000 deaths a month -- mostly the poor killing the poor with weapons made in rich nations -- where is any statement by the pope calling on Catholics to refuse to cooperate in any way with military violence? It is accepted as normal that Catholic colleges in the United States host ROTC programs, that Catholic priests serve as military chaplains, that Catholics pay federal taxes that guarantee the Department of Defense $700 million a day, that Catholics work for weapons companies, that Catholic pilots bomb people in Iraq or Kosovo.

Catholics who reject church teaching on the just war can expect no support from John Paul. In the early 1980s, Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle refused to pay that portion of his federal income taxes -- about 50 percent -- that went to the Pentagon. He received no personal or moral support from the Vatican.

The opposite message came through. Near the time of the Hunthausen war tax revolt -- which philosophically aligned him with many members of the three traditional peace churches, the Mennonites, Quakers and Church of the Brethren -- John Paul was appointing John O'Connor the archbishop of New York and, soon after, consecrating him a cardinal. O'Connor had been a Navy chaplain, rising to the rank of rear admiral, during the Vietnam War. Hawkish, he wrote a 1968 book stoutly supporting U.S. military policies in Southeast Asia. At the time of O'Connor's appointment to the nation's richest diocese, the pope was widely reported to have said, "I want a man just like me in New York."

During World War II, Catholic bishops in both France and Germany were claiming that their side was waging a just war. In June 1982, the pope visited Argentina, a nation then at war with Britain. The Argentine clergy supported their government's warmaking. On arriving at the Buenos Aires airport, they and the junta's generals piously surrounded John Paul, with banners in the background saying "Holy Father, bless our just war" and "May God defend our cause because we defend His."

Next page | What should the pope have said?