The Australian writer Paul Collins is a typical product of the age of John Paul II: a dedicated, scholarly priest, driven out of the church, not through some gross moral turpitude – priests guilty of gross moral turpitude were systematically protected during John Paul’s reign – but because his writings challenged the increasingly authoritarian tendencies of those wielding power in the Vatican during the dotage of the late pope. Chief among these was John Paul’s theological watchdog, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now transformed into Pope Benedict XVI. This makes Collins an acute, well-informed but inevitably jaundiced observer of the recent history of the Catholic Church at its highest levels. John Paul’s prolonged physical decline gave Collins plenty of time to prepare a book to be published immediately after the Pope’s death. All that was needed was the identity of John Paul’s successor, and even that cannot have been too much of a surprise to those with good sources. The loyal cardinals knew that Ratzinger was the Pope’s favourite and the most likely continuer of his policies. They voted accordingly.

It didn’t have to be this way. Even in the 1950s Cardinal Angelo Roncalli understood that the church could not go on refusing to acknowledge that the world had changed since the Counter-Reformation. As Pope John XXIII, he convened the Second Vatican Council to drag the church, or most of it, into the twentieth century. Sadly, he died before this could be accomplished, and his successor, Paul VI, was too much of a compromiser to finish the job. The social and political upheavals of the 1970s terrified the church’s leadership, and on Paul’s death (after the brief interlude of John Paul I) they responded by finding someone who could lead them back to the safe anchorage of tradition. That man was Karol Cardinal Wojtyła, Archbishop of Kraków.

What made Wojtyła unique, and uniquely suitable to church conservatives, was that he had never lived in a society with any kind of religious or political pluralism. Persecution at the hands of the Polish communist régime had the effect of driving Polish Catholics into a ghetto, where their survival depended on unquestioning defensive loyalty to church leaders. Even more importantly, communist Poland’s isolation from the West had the ironic effect of sealing the Polish church in a time capsule, a small fragment of pre-Vatican II Catholicism. When Cardinal Wojtyła suddenly became John Paul II, he had to confront the Western world of the late twentieth century – and he didn’t like what he saw.

John Paul exploited his image of dashing modernity for profoundly anti-modernist ends. Although he had been present at Vatican II, he had clearly not accepted its fundamental premise: that the church had to adapt to the modern world or die, at least in those parts of the world where affluence, education and social change were undermining its traditional authority. For John Paul, it was not for the church to change – it was for the world to adapt to the church, which was offering eternal truths, and eternal life to those who would accept them.

As Collins reminds us, historically the pope did not rule the Catholic Church personally, or in a day-to-day sense. In the pre-modern world, it was too big, too far-flung, too diverse, to be controlled by one man. Modern technology gave John Paul the power to change all that, and he did. He took personal charge of the church, appointing those who thought as he did to key posts both in the Vatican and around the world. After a decade or so of this, John Paul achieved a semblance of unity and conformity in the church, because all the people he saw and heard had been appointed by him and agreed with him. Within the Vatican, a camarilla of Polish officials shielded him from unwelcome critical voices, and the faithful Ratzinger supervised the provinces with an eagle eye, weeding out dissident voices – such as Paul Collins’s – and stifling discussion of the church’s many festering problems.

The ironic outcome was that the Catholic Church of John Paul’s old age had come to resemble the communist Poland of his youth. Behind the chorus of adulation, the genuine power of the church, which rests on the willing allegiance of the faithful, not on fear and intimidation, was fading, and its basic institutions – the priesthood and the religious orders – were rotting away, just as the party and state rotted away in Poland in the 1970s. Countries such as Italy and Spain, once Catholic to the marrow, have the lowest birth rates in Europe, and Spain has legalised same-sex marriage. A decade of sexual scandals has destroyed the authority of the church in Ireland, the most Catholic country in Europe just thirty years ago. The church in Europe, North America and Australasia is losing priests and religious much faster than it can replace them.

The election of Benedict XVI as John Paul’s successor is a gesture of defiance of these trends. As Collins outlines in the section of his book dealing with Benedict’s pre-papal career, the new pope is as deeply hostile to the modern world as John Paul was. Collins knows what he is talking about here, since it was Ratzinger who arranged for him to be drummed out of the fold in 2001. Luckily for Collins, the church no longer has the power to treat dissidents as it once liked to do. Unluckily for Benedict XVI, Collins has survived his fall with his forensic skills intact.