Pope John Paul II: saint or closet masochist?

Pope Benedict XVI has put John Paul II on the fast track to sainthood, waiving the customary five-year waiting period following John Paul II's death in April 2005. And as The First Post reported this week, Monsignor Slavomir Oder, the Vatican's chief promoter of his sainthood, has published a book, Why He Is a Saint: the Real John Paul II, which enumerates his various saintly practices. Self-mortification is high on the list.

Penitence is meant to bring the worshipper closer to God. For John Paul this took the form of sleeping on a hard floor instead of his bed, starving during Lent, and flagellating himself with a special belt that he kept in his closet amongst his vestments.

There is no doubt that John Paul regarded beating himself as a reminder of the suffering of Jesus on the cross. Oder explains: "It should be seen as part of his profound relationship with the Lord." Indeed, self-mortification is a necessary criterion for sainthood and has been a fundamental aspect of Christianity since its beginnings.

But where is the line drawn between saintliness and masochism ­ or are they flip sides of the same coin?

While Catholicism teaches that the human body is a gift from God, denial of basic needs and bodily comfort is also encouraged as a form of resistance to venal desires. This is, of course, not exclusive to Catholicism. Most religions promote some form of self-sacrifice. Sacrifice can help people endure deprivation on earth with the promise of rewards in heaven.

It is also true that the spiritual need to submit to a higher authority and to relinquish individual needs in order to gain a sense of communion with the world is something intrinsically human. In psychological terms it can be understood as our desire to return to the womb ­ to be completely at one with mother and to eradicate any conflict and loss brought about by separateness.

However, penitence goes a step further and entails not simply sacrifice but punishment as well. The more pain is inflicted, the greater love is shown to God and the more God loves his follower. Guilt is at the heart of penitence.

There is a striking parallel here to the way in which children who have had depressed parents or who have lost their parents through death or separation often respond by blaming themselves and seek punishment in the hope of restoring the lost object.

By assuming responsibility for the disasters that occur in the family, the child maintains some illusion of control in a world of chaos and unpredictability. The child is then in the grip of an unconscious guilt that can become persecuting and can have destructive consequences in later life.

In order to feel loved once again, the child tries to be especially 'good'. This often means that the child - and later the adult - punishes himself for having needs and desires that he attributes as being the root cause of the disaster. Selfishness is the sin that must be punished.

John Paul was careful to keep his self-mortification private. Although he often slept on the floor, he messed up his bed sheets to disguise the fact. His private acts of penitence can be seen as his attempt to expiate the sins of others, following Jesus. They may also suggest that he was searching for love and a release from guilt through his own self-inflicted suffering.

John Paul was a young adult during the Nazi occupation of Poland and must have witnessed overwhelming suffering, especially amongst the Jewish community with whom he had grown up in his home town of Wadowice.

He also experienced terrible losses within his own family. His older sister had died in infancy before his birth and it is certainly possible that he had to cope with a depressed mother in his early infancy.

After his mother died when he was eight he became close to his brother, 14 years older, who in his practice as a doctor contracted scarlet fever and subsequently died. His father, a non-commissioned army officer, later died of a heart attack. By the time he was 20, John Paul said, "I had already lost all the people I loved."

Beating himself may have been one way in which John Paul was able to keep his relationship with the members of his family alive and to fend off the losses that were beyond his control. On the spiritual side of the coin, John Paul was keeping alive his relationship with Jesus and with God.

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