Marriage would have fortified JP’s Papacy

THE revelation of Pope John Paul’s intense and lifelong friendship with Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, a philosopher of aristocratic birth, has prompted calls for doing away with clerical celibacy. A treasure trove of letters between the Pope and his friend, both before and after his ordination, show them as intellectual bedfellows with a deep emotional attachment that was never consummated.

According to Edward Stourton, who discovered the letters, they were ‘more than friends and less than lovers’.

Stourton’s recent Panorama programme has pictures of the charismatic Pope in his civvies, relaxing during hiking and skiing holidays with friends including Anna-Teresa.

He glows with good health and vigour and as he smiles for the camera, he is the picture of a well-tended middle-aged man, totally at ease with the world.

In some pictures the rather petite AnnaTeresa looks girlishly thrilled to be in his lofty company but otherwise theirs was a relationship of equals.

He did not, thankfully, form a deep attachment to a servant or a single woman which would, as we know from the lives of Fr Michael Cleary and Bishop Eamon Casey, have stood a high chance of ending in pain and betrayal.

ANNA-TERESA was married to a Harvard economist and the couple had several children so she was as trapped by her marriage vows as he was by his vows of celibacy. Neither was available and their forbidden love must have been intoxicating because it remained a fantasy, never to be tested by everyday strains and disappointments.

But it must have been torture for the Pope, whose letters yearn for intimacy with her.

While Anna-Teresa had her husband he, particularly after becoming Pope, occupied possibly the most solitary and exalted role in the entire world.

He had armies of secretaries, nuns and priests to do his bidding but after he rose from his nightly prayers, despite his natural impulse for human companionship, he had not a living soul to call his own.

What harm could it have done to his work or his vocation had the Holy Father enjoyed the loving comfort of a soulmate?

A woman in his life might have encouraged him to address the scandal of clerical sex abuse, rather than have him besmirch his papacy and betray his flock, sweeping it under the carpet.

A woman in his life would have held his hand, particularly towards the end of his Papacy when he became so frail and debilitated by Parkinson’s that it seemed he was dying on his feet. She would have strengthened the papacy, not diluted it as the misogynist Church fears by her perpetual demands and feminine wiles.

Scrapping enforced celibacy rather than allowing it to be voluntary, as with Buddhist monks, is often suggested as a way of addressing the crisis in vocations, a shot in the arm for the Church whose influence is dying in the west.

Recruiting red-blooded men into the ranks rather than dry, scholarly thinkers may make the Church more empathetic to the problems Catholics experience, reconciling their beliefs with the struggles of daily life.

But perhaps the most potent argument is that celibacy is a man-made condition, imposed in the 11th century by Papal authority because managing priests’ families was becoming such a headache for the Church. It is not one of Christ’s commandments or a part of the gospels and the tide may now be turning.

Pope Francis, it is rumoured, is giving consideration to married priests. After all, he has a precedent for reversing centuries-old tradition, albeit from a very unlikely source – the ultra-conservative Pope Benedict who became one of the handful of Pontiffs to resign from the Holy See.

In its age-old struggle between tradition and modernity, modernity won, for once, and yet the heavens didn’t fall.