the opposite sex And the only Saint
If a married girl beloved Pope John Paul, was he flawed to continue the friendship? There are some shocking precedents
19 Feb 2016
Pope John Paul II had a 30-year friendship with a married woman. smartly, with more than one, however the woman in focal point this week was once Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, aged 50 after they first met, three years younger than Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, as he then was once.
in keeping with Edward Stourton, who made this week’s Panorama on their friendship and wrote about it in the Telegraph, she declared her love for Wojtyła in 1975, and he answered, now not by way of breaking off the friendship, however by inserting their friendship on a non secular level.
“there is not any evidence by any means that he broke his vow of celibacy,” Stourton wrote, “certainly, everything in the letters suggests he kept it.” this is vital, but i feel celibacy is a red herring. A priest of the Latin rite guarantees his bishop to be celibate, simply as he promises him obedience. but if Karol Wojtyła had not embraced celibacy, he still shouldn’t have been free to run off with another man’s spouse.
Nor can the Catholic Church abruptly declare that priests could marry. In jap churches (Orthodox or in communion with the Bishop of Rome), married males may be made clergymen, however monks won’t marry, even though their spouse dies.
more fascinating is the query of what John Paul II (declared a saint in 2014) concept he was doing in a close friendship with a girl of his own age.
He used to be curious about women’s lives. In Krakow as a university chaplain within the Fifties, he had made friends with girls in a technique that extra hidebound clergy might have feared. Married love was once his consistent theme in advising younger lecturers around him. He even wrote a play on the theme, The Jeweller’s store (1960).
Professor Tymieniecka used to be a thinker, leaning to phenomenology, and he or she worked with Wojtyła on his ebook The acting particular person. although Woytyła knew well sufficient that sex frequently acquired people into scorching water, he valued the fact that human individuals are of various sexes. His report as pope on the role of women, Mulieris Dignitatem (1988), considers the lady taken in adultery, in the Gospel in line with St John. “Jesus seems to claim to the accusers: just isn’t this lady, for all her sin, especially a affirmation of your individual transgressions, of your ‘male’ injustice?”
John Paul’s friendships with ladies like Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka and the bold Wanda Półtawska (nonetheless with us, aged ninety four), had an emotional element. Precedents abound amongst celibate clergy.
Take Cardinal Manning (1808-92). He seemed a dry previous skeleton, but he perpetually considered his spouse Caroline, who’d died when he was once 29. He kept her letters and her prayer e book, using it daily. From 1885 he met weekly the 22-yr-previous Virginia Crawford, who’d given proof, in a vastly scandalous Victorian divorce case, that she had committed adultery with Sir Charles Dilke, the flesh presser. Manning suggested Mrs Crawford in the faith, however did he not also take advantage of the friendship?
Manning’s successor, Cardinal Vaughan, had a lifelong friendship and correspondence with girl Herbert of Lea, widow (at 39) of Sidney Herbert (mentor of Florence Nightingale).
Pairs of saints of opposite sexes embody St Jane Frances de Chantal (a widow at 28) and St Francis de sales (4 years her senior), or in fact St Teresa of Avila and St John of the go – 25 when he met her. Teresa and John each reflected on the tune of Songs, a poem of sexual love expressing the soul’s relations with God.
Nothing mistaken, as they are saying, happened in these examples. on the contrary, friendships between folks of reverse sexes had been the making of saints.
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