While it is certainly the case that John Paul II’s pontificate included many achievements (his three social encyclicals, the renegotiation of the Lateran Pacts, his outreach to Jews, his interfaith gathering and prayer for peace at Assisi), its two major deficiencies were his grave mishandling of the sexual-abuse crisis in the priesthood and his appointment and promotion of exceedingly conservative bishops to, and within, the hierarchy.
Both deficiencies continue to define the Catholic Church in our time, and account for the severe demoralization that afflicts so many in the Church today.
They also explain why so many thousands of Catholics have left the Church in recent years, so many in fact that in the United States ex-Catholics would constitute the country’s second largest denomination if they constituted a church unto themselves.
Therefore, it is the case that, on Blessed John Paul II’s watch, the greatest crisis to hit the Catholic Church since the Reformation was allowed to grow and to fester, and the bishops appointed during his long reign were unable to offer the kind of pastorally effective leadership that the crisis required.
And he didn't wait for them to die before he made his criticisms which were widely printed in Catholic newspapers, many under the control of the local bishop and cardinals.
That said, here is what Fr. McBrien said in his massive, well respected textbook of Catholic theology, Catholicism, said about a Pope he had criticized repeatedly:
Pope John Paul II advanced Catholic social doctrine substantially with his three major social encyclicals, Laborem Exercens (1981), Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1988), and Centesimus Annus (1991). "One of the greatest injustices in the contemporary world," he wrote in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, "consists precisely in this: that the ones who possess much are relatively few and those who possess almost nothing are many. It is the injustice of the poor distribution of the goods and services originally intended for all" (n. 28). He applied this principle to the international order as well, pointing out that " the stronger and richer nations must have a sense of moral responsibility for the other nations: (n. 39; see also Centesimus Annus, n. 35).
But Pope John Paul II's most explicit statements about the role and responsibility of government are to be found in Centesimus Annus. Invoking the name and authority of Pope Leo XIII, whose pioneering social encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) John Paul's own encyclical was commemorating, he declared that "the more that individuals are defenseless within a given society, the more they require the care and concern of others, and in particular the intervention of governmental authority" (n. 10). He also appealed to Leo in criticizing the view that "completely excludes the economic sector from the state's range of interest and action" (n. 15; see also n. 48).
John Paul II spoke of the economic rights of workers that are to be guaranteed by the state: social security, pensions, health insurance and compensation in the case of accidents, unemployment insurance, a safe working environment, the right to form labor unions (nn. 15, 34). In a society which upholds "the absolute predominance of capital," justice demands that "the market be appropriately controlled by the forces of society and by the state so as to guarantee that the basic needs of the whole of society are satisfied" (n. 35). The state also has a specific right and duty to intervene to protect the common goods of all, especially the environment (n. 40).
He cited additional purposes for governmental intervention in the economic order: the sustaining of business activities to ensure job opportunities, the regulation of monopolies, exercising a "substitute function when social sectors or business systems are too weak or are just getting under way and are not equal to the task at hand" (n. 48). The range of such interventions in recent years, he pointed out, has acknowledged its positive and negative aspects, and invoked the principle of subsidiarity to help curb the latter (n. 48).
Love for others and "in the first place" love for the poor is "made concrete in the promotion of justice." For societies, for individual governments, and for the world political community it is "not merely a matter of "giving from one's surplus," but of helping entire peoples which are presently excluded or marginalized to enter into the sphere of economic and human development. For this to happen, it i not enough to draw on the surplus goods which in fact our world abundantly produces; it requires, above all else a change of lifestyles, of models of production and consumption, and for the established structures of power which today govern societies"
Many of these teachings have been recapitulated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992) in its discussion of the Seventh Commandment.
None of which you will expect the present government of the United States to follow or advance - any who tried would be attacked in the harshest terms by the American free press - all of which is a refutation of Milton Friedman's line of economics, the de-facto state religion of the United States, the media, much of academic economics, etc. Even this, in so many ways, reactionary Pope, far more conservative than Pope Francis, Pope John Paul I (of blessed memory), Pope Paul VI and certainly Good St. Pope John XXIII, was a glowing if not flaming radical in economics and social justice. And that's not to mention in things such as opposition to the death penalty, opposition to the invasion of Iraq, etc. Though, granted, on women's' rights and LGBT issues, he was hardly as progressive, though all of those people (WE People) would have been beneficiaries of his economics and social justice. Women and LGBT people have to make a living, eat and be cared for in their inability just like everyone else.
And the Catholic Papacy is, in some ways, often many ways, to the right of much of the mainline Protestant thought and action on such matters. Make that ACTION, doing what the words say in real life. That is when it becomes real in the real world which is, afterall, what it's all about. Lots of Catholic religious, nuns and brothers, Priests around the world are putting that into effect, as are many other Christians. I'm certainly more influenced by Brueggeman and Marilynne Robinson and Joshua Heschel than I am JPII. Though JPII did make some good points and arguments.
The pie-in-the-sky version of atheist-materialist liberalism is never going to get here, where it has been tried the results have been anything but that. The idea you're going to convert most people to atheism THEN things will get done is lunatic delusion. The more realistic option is to convert those who are already disposed to take The Law, the Prophets and the Gospels seriously. Especially if you think they're going to be converted by snobs insulting them and what they think.
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