President José López Portillo’s mother and sisters, all of them practicing Catholics, lived in a house within the presidential compound in Mexico City; one of the sisters was the president’s confidential secretary. Father Marcial Maciel, the Mexican founder of the Legionaries of Christ, a relatively new renewal movement of priests, encouraged these ladies to encourage the president to invite the Pope. Their intervention evidently succeeded. President López Portillo overrode the protests of his anti-clerical interior minister and issued the invitation, stipulating only that the Pope would not be received as a head of state and would have to have a visa like any other visitor. Whatever distress this may have caused among the Vatican diplomats, the arrangement was fine with John Paul II.
After Mass and an overnight stop in the Dominican Republic, John Paul II flew into Mexico City on an Alitalia jetliner on January 26, 1979. He knelt, kissed the ground, and rose to be greeted by the President of the Republic, who, sensing the growing public enthusiasm over the Pope’s visit, had decided to come to the airport for an “unofficial” greeting, during which he said to John Paul, “Welcome to your home.” The motorcade into Mexico City took an hour to cover a little less than five miles. A million Mexicans turned out along the route, throwing a cascade of flowers on the Pope’s car. Hundreds of priests and nuns defied a century-old ban, reinforced by the Mexican Constitution, on wearing religious habits in public.66 After celebrating Mass in the cathedral, the Pope addressed 300,000 Mexicans in Constitution Square. That afternoon, the Pope visited López Portillo at the presidential compound and met the president’s mother and sisters. John Paul chatted with the family for half an hour and blessed the small chapel they had built in their house.67
If the Pope struck some of those who saw him in Mexico City and Guadalupe on January 26 and 27 as pensive, even preoccupied, it was with good reason. In addressing the CELAM general assembly on January 28, he would be tackling the question of what kind of Church post–Vatican II Catholicism would be in Latin America—a question now focused through the intense debate over “liberation theology.” The resolution of that question would determine the future of one-half of world Catholicism.
The term “liberation theology” was itself a misnomer, for by the late 1970s a variety of liberation theologies had evolved. Though they differed in styles of analysis and points of prescription, they were animated by several common convictions. They belittled the reformism of Vatican II, which envisioned a gradual transformation of social, economic, and political structures under the impact of Christian humanism’s dialogue with modernity, in favor of a more revolutionary strategy that drew on Marxist categories of social and economic analysis. The “sinful social structures” of the established order were to be overthrown through class struggle. In this struggle, the Church, exercising a “preferential option for the poor,” would organize small Christian “base communities” where the poor would be taught to comprehend their own victimhood and, inspired by the image of Jesus the Liberator, would take up the task of re-creating society. If this involved violence, then this “second violence” of the poor should be judged as self-defense against the institutionalized “first violence” of the “dominant” social structures.68
Although typically understood as an indigenous Latin American phenomenon, the Latin American liberation theologies were, in the main, developed by theologians who had studied in Europe and had brought back to Latin America the “Marxist analysis” then prominent in European faculties. These theologians came from, and returned to, a situation in which the Church had traditionally been allied with social, economic, military, and political power. That model of the Church’s relationship to society had been rejected by the Second Vatican Council. The public implication of Dignitatis Humanae was that altar-and-junta alliances were not appropriate for the Church; Gaudium et Spes had committed Catholicism to activism on behalf of freedom, peace, and justice. The issue, post–Vatican II, was not whether the Church would be engaged with the injustices faced by the Latin American poor, but how.
The theologies of liberation openly advocated a “partisan Church.” The Church, in this view, was not so much a communion of believers in which men and women sought to understand one another, exchanged ideas on reconstructing society, and celebrated the sacraments as the pledge of a bond deeper than politics. Rather, the Church, by accepting the class struggle as the fundamental dynamic of history, had to be a partisan actor, “to decide for some people and against others,” as one prominent liberation theologian put it.69 If this meant setting the “people’s Church” over against the “hierarchical Church,” then that was what justice required. Liberation theologies thus illustrated what happened when Vatican II was pulled apart and politicized. When Gaudium et Spes was read through the interpretive filter of “Marxist analysis,” the net result was a narrower, less inclusive, more class-based Church—the mirror-image of the narrow, class-based Church the theologies of liberation rightly criticized.
The theologies of liberation had made some important points. The Church in Latin America had been historically deficient in empowering the poor. Too long allied with oligarchy and privilege, it had lost its prophetic edge in dealing with worldly power. Liberation theologies correctly understood that Catholic renewal would come from the bottom up, and that one effective way to animate that grassroots renewal was to restore the Bible to the people. Linking the Church’s liturgy and the celebration of the sacraments to people’s daily lives was a prominent theme in the theologies of liberation, as it had been in the classic liturgical movement of the pre-Council years and of Vatican II itself. The delicate task facing John Paul II was to distinguish what was insightful in the liberation theologies’ interpretation of Vatican II from what was inappropriate and even unorthodox. And the new Pope had to do this while facing, and he hoped, bridging, the divisions within the Latin American hierarchy.
Puebla, where the CELAM conference was being held, is some eighty miles from Mexico City. John Paul drove there through dramatic scenery, including the volcanoes Iztácihuatl and Popocátépetl, and saw the mountain pass Hernán Cortés had crossed en route to conquering the ancient Aztec capital. More than a million Mexicans came to see the Pope on his way from Mexico City to Puebla. Indians in native costume and parish delegations carrying crosses and portable altars had camped along the roadside during the night with their dogs, horses, and donkeys. The papal motorcade stopped briefly in San Martin, Texmelucan, and San Miguel Xoxtla, where the Pope gave brief, impromptu speeches in fluent Spanish.
Puebla greeted the Pope exuberantly, with balloons, fireworks, and Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” broadcast over the incredible scene by a small plane with a powerful loudspeaker. The streets of the city were filled to bursting with a crush of people waving Mexican, papal, and Polish flags. Small bands and the city’s tolling church bells added to the din. John Paul celebrated Mass on a raised platform built against the wall of the local seminary. The crowd outside chanted, “Puebla, Puebla, Puebla ama Papa!” [Puebla, Puebla, Puebla loves the Pope!].70
After Mass, John Paul II spoke to the Latin American bishops in a session closed to the public and the press. His lengthy talk, one of the most important of his pontificate, was the mature reflection of a man who had wrestled from young adulthood with the moral question of revolutionary violence as a response to social injustice. In a deeply personal and thoroughly ecclesial address, John Paul II developed the liberation theology implicit in his play Our God’s Brother, read through the Christian humanism of Vatican II.
He came to them, he began, “as a brother to very beloved brothers,” who admired what the bishops of Latin America had accomplished in their first two general assemblies, at Rio de Janeiro in 1958 and Medellín, Colombia, in 1968. Their great strength lay in the fact that they came to Puebla “not as a symposium of experts, not as a parliament of politicians, not as a congress of scientists or technologists, but as…pastors of the Church.” As pastors, their “principal duty” was to “b
e teachers of the truth,” for the truth was the foundation for all truly liberating human action.
The truth entrusted to bishops was “the truth concerning Jesus Christ,” which was the center of the “new evangelization” CELAM was considering at Puebla. The truth about Jesus Christ was not a theological abstraction, for from it would come “choices, values, attitudes, and ways of behavior” that could create “new people and…a new humanity” through a radically Christian life. The basic truth about Jesus Christ remained the truth confessed by Peter: “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” That was what the Church preached. That was “the one Gospel,” and “re-readings” of the Gospel through ideological lenses made an authentically Christian liberation impossible. Among those “re-readings” was one with which they had become familiar in recent years. It was the image of “Jesus as politically committed, as one who fought against Roman oppression and the authorities, and also as one involved in the class struggle. This idea of Christ as a political figure, a revolutionary, as the subversive Man from Nazareth, does not tally with the Church’s catechesis…The Gospels clearly show that…Jesus…does not accept the position of those who mixed the things of God with merely political attitudes (cf. Matthew22.21; Mark 12.17; John 18.26). He unequivocally rejects recourse to violence. He opens his message of conversion to everybody….”71
True liberation was found in the salvation offered by Christ, a messianic liberation wrought by “transforming, peacemaking, pardoning, and reconciling love.”72 That was the faith that had formed Latin America, its “religious practices and popular piety.” And that was the faith that must “go on animating, with every energy, the dynamism of [Latin America’s] future.”73 Any other “re-reading” of the Church emptied the Gospel of its power and the Church of its distinctive character. The “Kingdom of God” could not be reduced to “the mere changing of structures” in society, because a politicized, secularized Kingdom devalued the freedom that every person sought.74
Marxism could not do for Christian theology what Aristotle had done for Thomas Aquinas, because Marxism’s view of the human person was fundamentally flawed, and that “anthropological error” permeated Marxism’s politics and economics.75 Over against Marxism’s materialistic reduction of humanism, the Church proposed the truth that “man is God’s image and cannot be reduced to a mere portion of nature or a nameless element in the human city.” Christian humanism, “this complete truth about the human being,” was the foundation of the Church’s social doctrine, in which men and women were not the victims of impersonal historical or economic forces but the artisans of society, economy, and politics.76
The bishops’ task as pastors and teachers of the truth was to “defend human dignity [as] a Gospel value that cannot be despised without greatly offending the Creator.”77 In defending religious freedom, in protesting coercion and torture, in promoting the right of participation in public life, the Church “does not need to have recourse to ideological systems in order to love, defend, and collaborate in the liberation of man.” She only had to look to Christ. A comprehensive liberation of the human family was the Church’s cause, because it was the cause of Christ.78
The future, as always, was in God’s hands. But God had placed that future “with new evangelizing momentum” in the bishops’ hands, too. “‘Go, therefore,’” John Paul told his brothers, “‘and make disciples of all nations’ [Matthew 28.19].”
After returning to Mexico City on the night of January 28, the Pope took a call from Cardinal Sebastiano Baggio, Prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops, who was presiding over the CELAM conference. Baggio told John Paul that his address had been well-received by the bishops. The previously preoccupied and pensive Pope went upstairs to his bedroom humming and was in his usual good humor, joking with his entourage, throughout the rest of his Mexican pilgrimage.
The next day, January 29, he spoke in Cuilapan to more than half a million Indians from Oaxaca and Chiapas, many of whom had been camping near the ruins of an old colonial-era monastery for days. The Pope was helicoptered into the site, and the Indians, dressed in colorful native garb, brought him gifts, danced and sang, placed numerous brightly embroidered woolen stoles, one by one, on the Pope’s shoulders, and gave him a chief’s headdress. He was obviously moved, embracing and kissing those who presented him with gifts, taking time to speak with each one individually.
Against the backdrop of a dry plateau bereft of vegetation, John Paul II told the massive crowd that he wanted “to be your voice, the voice of those who cannot speak or who are silenced” in order to “make up for lost time which is often time of prolonged suffering and unsatisfied hopes.” Then, his voice rising and impassioned, he blasted the injustices that had warped the lives of the Latin American poor and lit into those responsible for the ongoing oppression of the powerless. “The depressed rural world, the worker who with his sweat waters also his affliction, cannot wait any longer for full and effective recognition of his dignity, which is not inferior to that of any other social sector,” John Paul insisted. “He has the right to be respected and not to be deprived, with maneuvers which are sometimes tantamount to real spoliation, of the little that he has…He has the right to real help—which is not charity or crumbs of justice—in order that he may have access to the development that his dignity as a man and as a son of God deserves…. It is necessary to carry out bold changes… [and] urgent reforms without waiting any longer.”79
Commentators immediately juxtaposed the Puebla and Cuilapan addresses, the first being the voice of John Paul the “theological conservative” and the second the voice of John Paul the “social and political liberal.” It was not hard to detect, beneath those clichés, a further juxtaposition between the “bad John Paul” of Puebla and the “good John Paul” of Cuilapan. The juxtaposition made little sense. Everything the Pope had said in his dramatic defense of the poor in Cuilapan was implicit in what he had said in Puebla about Christian liberation. And this view of Christian liberation was not a personal idiosyncrasy; it was based on Vatican II.80
John Paul II had important, critical, even radical things to say about social, economic, and political affairs because he was an evangelist who believed that the truth of the human condition had been revealed in Jesus Christ. Reading him from “outside” yielded a split-screen vision of the man and his message, a pattern first established in the wake of Puebla and Cuilapan that continued throughout the pontificate. The Puebla and Cuilapan addresses should have been the first indication that John Paul II and his pontificate could only be read accurately from the “inside.” The theology was always first, and politics, like culture and economics, was one of the arenas in which theological truths had implications. It was not an approach that commended itself readily to an international press corps trained to think of politics as the “real world” and theology as a matter of personal taste.81
A deeply tanned John Paul II returned to Rome late in the afternoon of February 1 and went straight to St. Peter’s to say a prayer of thanksgiving. Karol Wojtyła had long since decided that his destiny was not in his own hands, and once a decision had been made he was not one to fret over what might be. Yet in this first international test of his pontificate, he had to have been concerned about his own capacity to be the kind of public witness he thought a pope should be, and about the way he, a Pole, would be received. Then there was CELAM, for what was at stake at Puebla was nothing less than the legacy of Vatican II in Latin America. Now the answers were in. Many of the Latin American bishops had been grateful for what he had said. The popular response had been overwhelming. Taking off from Mexico City, the Pope had seen the entire city twinkling with flashes of light, as millions of Mexicans held mirrors up to the sun to reflect its rays in his direction. He had successfully tested the possibility of an evangelically and apostolically assertive papacy—a “living encyclical of word and action,” as Marek Skwarnicki described it—in very difficult circumstances.82
Now, in his
first encyclical letter, he would explain the Christian humanism that would be the program of his entire papacy.
PROGRAM NOTES FOR A PONTIFICATE
As the twenty-one epistles in the New Testament suggest, Christian leaders have used letters as teaching instruments from the very beginning of the Church. Scholars date the origins of the modern papal “encyclical,” a letter to a specific group of bishops or to the world episcopate, to Benedict XIV’s Ubi Primum in 1740, although it was Gregory XVI who, in the early nineteenth century, first used the term “encyclical” to refer to these documents. Before the First Vatican Council, encyclicals were largely admonitory, warning against this or that deviant teaching. After Vatican I, Leo XIII used the encyclical as a vehicle for addressing theological issues and the Church’s relationship to modern social, political, economic, and intellectual life, as did Popes Pius XI, Pius XII, John XXIII and Paul VI. Benedict XV used the device of an “inaugural encyclical” to declare a halt to the brawling over Modernism that had damaged Catholic theology and the communio of the Church. Paul VI’s “inaugural encyclical,” Ecclesiam Suam, signaled that ecclesiology—the Church’s self-understanding and mission—would be the theme of his pontificate.83
John Paul II has said that he began work on a letter addressed to the entire Church and to all men and women of good will “immediately” after his election. Like Paul VI, he wanted to announce and explain the great theme of his pontificate through a major teaching document with doctrinal authority, and Christian humanism, as he put it, “was a subject I had brought with me” to Rome.84 Five months after he arrived, he published the first encyclical ever devoted to Christian anthropology.
When it was released publicly on March 15, 1979, Redemptor Hominis [The Redeemer of Man] introduced his new global audience to an analysis of the contemporary human condition that Karol Wojtyła had been refining for thirty years.85 It was intended to be “a great hymn of joy for the fact that man has been redeemed through Christ—redeemed in spirit and in body.”86 That redemption was intimately linked, Wojtyła had long believed and taught, to the dignity of the human person. Thus Redemptor Hominis was meant to “unite the mission of the Church with service to man in his impenetrable mystery.”
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