Short abstract
Did the display of the pope's suffering go too far?
No patient with Parkinson's disease has ever died such a public death as Pope John Paul II. In his final weeks, days, and hours, the progress of his disease was visible on the 84 year old's face and chronicled in clinical detail by Vatican bulletins, relayed around the world by every television network, radio, and newspaper.
On Good Friday giant screens set up around the Coliseum showed the slouched figure as he followed the proceedings of services from his private chapel. His face was not filmed, as he was breathing with the help of a respirator. While any other patient in such advanced stages of the disease would retreat and rest, the leader of the world's Catholics, who had lost 19 kg since his tracheotomy on 23 February, made two heart wrenching appearances at his window overlooking St Peter's Square, looking gaunt, in pain, and distressed as he tried and failed to utter a few words to the Easter crowds.
In his final days Italian newspapers ran headlines progressively marking the pope's “Calvary,” his “agony,” his “last hours,” and the moment he “switched himself off.” An unprecedented flow of Vatican bulletins informed journalists that the pope was being fed by a nasogastric tube, had had a urinary tract infection, which was followed by septic shock, had a high fever and low blood pressure, then kidney and heart failure, shallow breathing, and, finally, intermittent loss of consciousness. When the pope died, on the evening of Saturday 2 April, journalists were informed by text message and email within minutes.
Figure 1.
Pope John Paul II, media savvy to the end
Credit: FRANCO ORIGLIA/GETTY IMAGES
“The Holy Father died this evening at 21.37 in his private apartment,” said a message sent by Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro Valls in a Word document. The journalists knew of the pope's death before it was announced to the public, so they could catch the moment of the announcement on screen. And hours after his death the Vatican broke with tradition, laying the body in state for Vatican officials, Italian dignitaries—and cameramen and women—to visit. Images of the pope's body, surrounded by the full gold and red glory of the apostolic palace, were beamed around the world.
The media friendly way in which this pope died was in character with the way he lived. But in the final stages debate took place about the tastefulness or the usefulness of showing every stage of the pope's illness to the world. For many Catholics this was the pope's way of showing his faithful how not to shy away from human suffering and to face death with serenity. It was the ultimate message from a pope who had always shown his human side.
“He is showing us, right to the end, how not to be afraid,” Cardinal Ersilio Tonini told the conservative daily newspaper La Stampa.
The pope himself had written in a February letter that the church should not be shy of using the media, including the internet, to spread its message, saying the “mass media can and must promote justice and solidarity.”
But members of the Catholic church and outside observers alike argued that the display of Karol Wojtyla's pain had gone too far. “Putting the pontiff's illness on show is just turning it into a spectacle for the use and consumption of the world public opinion,” Father Vincenzo Marras, editor of the Italian magazine Jesus said in an interview in La Stampa. “Wojtyla's aides ought to be more restrained.”
“The line was crossed during the Easter ceremonies,” Father Marras said. “Showing him for a quarter of an hour helpless at his window to say just one word was terrible. I found those images deeply disturbing. The problem was not that this was live suffering on TV, but that an extremely private moment of illness was being turned, at all costs, into a spectacle.”
Italy's leading sociologist, Franco Ferrarotti, also expressed his concern, warning against “turning suffering into a show.”
John Paul II's death was perhaps one of the most public deaths of a world leader in history. The Vatican, one of the world's most notoriously secretive institutions, scored a media coup by feeding hungry journalists with more information than most had ever dreamt of about this much anticipated death. They had expected to be kept in the dark, remembering how the Vatican kept Pope John XXIII's inoperable stomach cancer secret until just a few days before he died in June 1963.
Although some have feared that the Vatican made cold blooded use of the pope's illness for media effect, others note that it should be praised for its transparency. Many remember the recent illness and death of another media friendly leader, Yasser Arafat, which was shrouded in secrecy, leading to conspiracy theories that continue to fill websites today.
Amid the tributes in the days after Karol Wojtyla's death, many noted that without the media this pope would not have touched the world in the way he did, even though he had travelled to more than 120 countries.
“Karol Wojtyla would not have become Pope Wojtyla without the media—something he was very much aware of,” said an editorial in Italy's Il Messaggero newspaper. “No one was as aware as he was of the importance of the media in our present time. Similarly no one knew how to exploit with such amiable ruthlessness its immense potential to the extent that he did.”