Devangshu Datta: Wojtyla's mistake

WORM'S EYE VIEW

Pope John Paul II was a master chess-player, but saw politics, too, as monochrome.

Western classical musicians sometimes refer cryptically to "Paddy's mistake". "Paddy" was Ignacy Jan Paderewski (1860-1941), genius pianist-composer. He became the first prime minister of Poland when that nation was carved out of the carcasses of Czarist Russia and Kaiserliche Germany at the end of World War I.

Paddy was a great statesman who rallied the Polish resistance after Nazi occupation. But his political duties left little time for music. And musicians have often speculated wistfully about the body of wonderful work that he might have otherwise composed or performed.

Chessplayers have similar sentiments about Karol Wojtyla. By the time he entered holy orders, young Wojtyla had already carved out a reputation in Cracow as a razor-sharp, fearless tactician.

His name appears in footnotes in several obscure opening variations and he also composed decent problems, which were published in chess journals.

Unfortunately, he made "Paddy's mistake" and stopped fiddling around with wooden pieces. As he rose in the church hierarchy, he was inevitably playing more complex games involving live people. Rather than calculating variations that led to checkmate, he was pondering over a doctrine on the salvation of human souls.

Other priests have made a successful diversion out of chess "" Fr William Lombardy of New York and the Brazilian prodigy Henrique Mecking, who joined a holy order after miraculous recovery from an illness. Both live in places where wearing a collar the wrong way around is not an invitation to automatic harassment.

It was not easy for Wojtyla to minister to his flock in an officially godless country, even one where almost everybody privately practises Catholicism.

It meant repression. Warsaw Pact priests had to be prepared to do "time" and (in neighbouring Hungary more than Poland) "brain-washing" attempts by the secret police were not uncommon.

In his chess style, Wojtyla displayed an almost reckless courage. His life as a priest confirmed that character trait as it brought him into direct conflict with the state and its sponsor, the absolutely godless Soviet Union.

This conflict was as black and white as that on the chessboard. Chess is a zero-sum game; black only gains at the expense of white. So is this sort of politics, it leaves no room for doubt: abandon your faith or suffer for it.

Sophisticates in the Italian and French clergy could afford to split hairs and consider nuances in relating to the lifestyles of their rich, promiscuous and democratically-governed flocks. Not in Eastern Europe.

There was never any question of Wojtyla's courage or his intellectual abilities. He was as much a "Papa Eruditico" as his predecessor, John XXIII "" he spoke many languages, he wrote elegantly, he understood the theory of evolution (even if he chose to deny it).

Once elected, he was a poster-boy for the church "" a virile polymath from Eastern Europe. I was in school then, studying in a missionary institution run by the order that sometimes calls itself "the Pope's Light Cavalry".

The Jesuits promptly put on a special screening of The Shoes of the Fisherman, Morris West's 1960s parable of the Russian priest, Kiril, who emerges from a Siberian salt-mine to inherit St Peter's legacy. The parallel was clear "" yea, even unto the name!

Unfortunately, by the time he ascended to Papacy, the chess-player's predilection for seeing in monochrome had been reinforced by several decades of black versus white political conflict. Wojtyla's mind was set in certain inflexible ways.

During his reign, it was "abortion bad, contraception bad, sex-education bad, homosexuality bad, abstinence good". He never adjusted to a polychrome world, where stem-cell research saves lives and HIV rates are reduced by teaching kids to use condoms.

He never acknowledged the direct statistical link between broken vows of celibacy and widespread child-abuse. He canonised woman saints galore; he refused to give nuns equal status in Vatican hierarchy.

One wonders, if he hadn't made "Paddy's mistake", would grandmaster Karol Wojtyla have been an innovative player-composer? Probably not. Brave, certainly, and tactically brilliant. But not perhaps a great strategist or somebody who blazed new paths.