Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  The encyclical begins on the millennial note that would intensify as the pontificate unfolded. Both the Church and the world are living a “new Advent,” a “season of expectation,” on the threshold of the year 2000. It would be an anniversary with global implications, for Christ had revealed both the face of God and the truth about the human condition: “Through the Incarnation,” John Paul writes, “God gave human life the dimension he had intended man to have from his first beginning.”87

  Here, as throughout his pontificate, the Pope is reminding the Church and the world that the Incarnation tells us something about God and something about ourselves. Satisfying “the fatherhood of God” and revealing the depths of God’s love, the Son of God’s birth as a man had also confirmed “the greatness, dignity, and value” of humanity, for “man cannot live without love. He remains…incomprehensible [to] himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it.” Love is greater than sin, than alienation, than every human frailty at every time and every place, because “God is love” (1 John 4.8). That is the amazing good news—the “Gospel”—that Christianity had to tell the world.

  God’s love, which gave birth to and sustained the world, could only be encountered in freedom. To be true to its mission, the Church has to be a “guardian” of human freedom. A truly human freedom seeks the truth and is bound by it.88 Love encountered in freedom, and freedom ordered to truth—this is the essence of Christian humanism. The redeeming, all-conquering love of God is the foundation and the inexhaustible message of the Church’s mission of genuine liberation.

  In the modern world, the Pope writes, this mission must confront the threat that humanity felt from its own accomplishments. Modern humanity “lives increasingly in fear,” and the greatest fear was that of “an unimaginable self-destruction, compared with which all the cataclysms and catastrophes of history known to us seem to fade away.” The modern world experienced a threatening lag between its material capacities and its moral character. Because of this, some had come to believe that life was inherently absurd. The Church’s response is that God had given humanity “kingship” and “dominion” over the created order. Humanity could master the artifacts it brought into being, if it is understood that true human development involved “being more” rather than “having more.”89

  The answer to humanity’s fear of itself lay in rediscovering that human nature is moral and spiritual, not simply material. John Paul gives this ancient theme a distinctively contemporary reading by suggesting that the most compelling evidence for humanity’s “soul” is the worldwide human rights movement. In the promotion and defense of human rights, the Church sees the answer to many of the threats that had turned the twentieth century into a time of fear and slaughter: warped ideologies, totalitarian state power, the dissolution of the family, terrorism.

  John Paul then defines the great human rights theme of his pontificate. Religious freedom, he insists, is the first of the human person’s “objective and inalienable rights.” This is not special pleading but a conclusion drawn from a disciplined reflection on human dignity, and it could be engaged publicly by every thoughtful person. Without naming names—without having to—John Paul II then challenges the world from which he had come, the world behind the iron curtain:

  [The] curtailment of the religious freedom of individuals and communities is not only a painful experience but is above all an attack on man’s very dignity… [It is] a radical injustice with regard to what is particularly deep in man, what is authentically human… [A]theism as a human phenomenon is understood only in relation to the phenomenon of religion and faith. It is therefore difficult…to accept a position that gives only atheism the right of citizenship in public and social life, while believers are…barely tolerated or are treated as second-class citizens or are even—and this has already happened—entirely deprived of the rights of citizenship.90

  John Paul concludes his inaugural encyclical by revisiting one of the most familiar sentences in St. Augustine’s Confessions—“You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” Here, he proposes, is the key to unlocking the mystery of modern restlessness, modern fear, and the “insatiability” built into modern materialism. Renewed by Vatican II, the Church has a proposal to make to the world. The restlessness of modern hearts could be calmed, the hungers that burdened our souls satisfied, and the fear that haunted the modern world dispelled, if men and women shared in the prophetic, priestly, and kingly missions of Christ—if they freely grasped the truth, freely worshiped in the truth, and freely served one another and the world in truth.91

  Redemptor Hominis offered the world a Church in love with humanity, and for the most weighty of reasons—because God had “so loved the world” ( John 3.16) that He had sent his only son as the redemptor hominis, the redeemer of man. Modernity took history very seriously. So did the Church. What the Church brought to this modern passion for history was the conviction that there is, in fact, only one human history—a history filled with God’s presence and redemptive promise. In that promise, John Paul proposed, the answer to the fear that haunted humanity at the end of the twentieth century could be discovered, and embraced, and lived in service to the entire world.

  “How Many Divisions Has the Pope?”

  Confronting an Empire of Lies

  JANUARY 24, 1979

  Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko calls on Pope John Paul II in the Vatican.

  MARCH 2, 1979

  The Pope moves to strengthen Czechoslovakian Catholicism through a letter on religious resistance to tyranny.

  MARCH 19, 1979

  A papal letter to Ukrainian Cardinal Iosyf Slipyi anticipates the 1988 millennium of Christianity in Kievan Rus’ and defends the principle of religious freedom for all.

  APRIL 30, 1979

  Archbishop Agostino Casaroli named Pro-Secretary of State of the Holy See.

  JUNE 2–10, 1979

  John Paul II’s first pilgrimage to Poland.

  AUGUST 14–31, 1980

  Gdańsk shipyard strike gives birth to Solidarity trade union and movement.

  In 1966, Poland’s communist rulers had been singularly unsuccessful in their efforts to co-opt the millennium of Polish Christianity. The regime hung signs in the streets: Tysiąclecie Państwa Polskiego [A Thousand Years of the Polish State]; every church in the country prominently displayed a banner reading Sacrum Poloniae Millennium 966–1966 [Poland’s Sacred Millennium 966–1966]. Other church banners read Deo et Patriae [For God and Country]; the regime could only muster a weak Socjalizm I Ojczyzna [Socialism and Fatherland]. The churches proclaimed Naród Z Kościo#322;em [The Nation Is with the Church]; the regime tried Partia z Narodem [The Party Is with the Nation]. To the Church’s proud boast, Polonia Semper Fidelis [Poland Ever-Faithful], came the sorry counter Socjalizm Gwarancja Pokoju I Granic [The Communist Regime Is the Guarantee of Peace and Frontiers].1

  The regime didn’t even try to keep pace with the Church symbolically during John Paul II’s return to his homeland in June 1979. Victory Square, scene of many of the Polish communist regime’s great public displays, had been transformed by government workers into an enormous liturgical stage for the papal Mass. From it, John Paul would address 1 million of his countrymen live, and tens of millions more on radio and television. The centerpiece of the altar platform was a fifty-foot-tall cross, draped with an enormous replica of a priest’s stole, reminding all present that they were witnessing a sacramental representation of Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary. Beneath the huge cross, where Mary had stood faithfully by, was a replica of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa.

  No hero in Polish history—not King Jan III Sobieski, not Tadeusz Kościuszko, not Józef Piłsudski—had ever entered Warsaw as John Paul II did on June 2, 1979.

  Rebuilt Warsaw was a grim, gray place, its skyline dominated by the Palac
e of Culture and Sciences, a garish communist-baroque confection given to the city by Stalin. The city’s grayness too often matched the people’s mood. Now, for the Pope, Warsaw had come alive, visually and spiritually. Thousands of pilgrims had been welcomed into the homes of strangers. Every church in the city had remained open overnight to give shelter to those who could not find places elsewhere. The entire route from Okecie Airport to the rebuilt Old City was lined with hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children, five and ten rows deep, waving small Polish and Vatican flags. There was no disorder, only jubilation, as the enormous crowds kept to the places assigned to their parishes by the Church’s efficient organizers.

  The city had been transformed by homemade decorations. The windows and porches of the drab apartment blocks along the roads John Paul would travel had been turned into shrines and altars bedecked with flowers, flags, and photographs of the Pope. As the papal motorcade moved slowly along the street, bouquets were thrown in the Pope’s path while the crowd broke out in songs, cheers, and, in some cases, uncontrollable tears. Many Poles knelt on the roadside as a beaming John Paul II scattered benedictions left and right from the converted truck on which he rode. On June 2, 1979, 3 million Poles, twice the city’s normal population, had come to see their countryman, Karol Wojtyła of Wadowice, Kraków, and Rome.

  Some 230,000 tickets had been issued for the Mass; 300,000 people had wedged themselves into Victory Square, with another three-quarters of a million or so overflowing into the surrounding streets. It was a brilliantly sunny, hot day. Accompanied by the strains of the papal anthem and the hymn “Gaude Mater Polonia” [Rejoice, Mother Poland], the Pope and Primate Wyszyński walked slowly toward the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in the square. A young couple gave the Pope a bouquet, which he laid on the tomb before kneeling in silent prayer. He kissed the grave, signed the book of remembrance (“To Poland’s Unknown Soldier—John Paul II”), and walked to a tent where he vested for Mass.

  Attended by the Warsaw diplomatic corps and by representatives of the Lutheran, Reformed, Orthodox, Methodist, and Baptist churches, the Mass began with a greeting from the Primate, who proclaimed that national unity—a constant theme of communist propaganda—had now, in fact, been achieved: “Holy Father, the capital is united today in prayer, led by the head of the Roman Catholic Church…Christ’s vicar on earth, apostle of Christ and His Gospel, messenger of truth and love, a son of Poland, chosen by God….”

  After the proclamation of the Gospel, a deep silence fell over the tremendous crowd. Polish Communist Party leader Edward Gierek watched nervously from a window in a hotel adjacent to the square. He, and millions of others, wondered: What would he say? What could he say?

  Karol Wojtyła looked out at a sea of expectant faces, paused—and then gave what may have been the greatest sermon of his life.

  Today, he began, he wanted to “sing a hymn of praise to divine Providence” which had enabled him to come home “as a pilgrim.” In doing so, he was fulfilling the wish of Pope Paul VI, who had so “ardently desired to set foot on the soil of Poland” that his desire reached “beyond the span of a pontificate.” On his election, this Polish Pope had “immediately understood” that he had been chosen in order to fulfill what Pope Paul had been prevented from doing during the millennium celebrations in 1966.

  His papal pilgrimage was a continuation of those celebrations, because he had come for the anniversary of St. Stanisław’s martyrdom, and that epic event in 1079 had been a fruit of Poland’s conversion in 966. St. Stanisław’s witness, his resistance to the tyranny of autocratic state power, had become “a special sign of the pilgrimage that we Poles are making down through the history of the Church.” He, Pope John Paul II, was a product of that national spiritual journey and the defense of religious freedom that was one of its hallmarks.

  Why had a Pole been called to the chair of St. Peter? Was it not because the Poland of today had become, through the terrible trials of the twentieth century, “the land of a particularly responsible witness”?

  The Poles, he insisted, had a right to think that, to think “with singular humility but also with conviction” that it was to Poland, today, that “one must come…to read again the witness of His cross and His resurrection.” This was no cause for boasting, however. “If we accept all that I have dared to affirm in this moment, how many great duties and obligations arise? Are we capable of them?”

  The crowd began a rhythmic chant, “We want God, we want God….”

  It was, John Paul continued, the Vigil of Pentecost, so let us return in our imaginations to the Upper Room in Jerusalem. There, the apostles and Mary waited for the Holy Spirit so that they could be the risen Christ’s witnesses to the ends of the earth. Pentecost, the feast of the descent of the Holy Spirit, was “the birthday of the faith and of the Church in our land of Poland, also.” Just as the apostles, filled with the Holy Spirit, had gone from the Upper Room and preached in foreign tongues, so, too, was Pentecost “the proclamation of the mighty works of God in our Polish language.” The mightiest of those works was the human person, redeemed by Christ: “Therefore Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe, at any longitude or latitude of geography. The exclusion of Christ from the history of man is an act against man. Without Christ it is impossible to understand the history of Poland, especially the history of the people who have passed or are passing through this land….” Even those who “appeared to be at a distance, outside the Church,” those who “doubted or opposed,” lived within the Christian context of Polish history and culture. Anyone who tried to deny this or to uproot it damaged the Polish nation. For Poland and its history—“from Stanisław in Skałka to Maximilian Kolbe at Oświęcim”—could not be understood without reference to Jesus Christ. That was why he had come to Poland: to reaffirm that “Christ does not cease to teach the great cause of man,” for Christ was “an ever-open book on man, his dignity, and his rights…” Today, in Victory Square, he and his countrymen were asking, in the supreme prayer of the Mass, “that Christ will not cease to be for us an open book of life for the future, for our Polish future.”

  The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier bore silent testimony to a truth for which countless Poles had died, that “there can be no just Europe without the independence of Poland marked on its map!” Polish soldiers had fallen on numerous battlefields “for our freedom and yours.” Was history thus absurd? No. For that spirit of sacrifice was emblematic of “every seed that falls into the earth and dies and thus bears fruit. It may be the seed of the blood of a soldier shed on the battlefield, or the sacrifice of martyrdom in concentration camps or in prisons. It may be the seed of hard daily toil…in the fields, the workshop, the mine, the foundries, and the factories. It may be the seed of the love of parents who do not refuse to give life to a new human being and undertake the whole task of bringing him up. It may be the seed of creative work in the universities, the higher institutes, the libraries and the places where the national culture is built. It may be the seed of prayer, of service of the sick, the suffering and abandoned—‘all of that of which Poland is made.’”

  All of that, he concluded, was in the hands of the Mother of God—“at the foot of the cross on Calvary and in the Upper Room of Pentecost.” All of Poland’s suffering and triumph; all of the history of the peoples who had lived on this land, “including those who died in their hundreds of thousands within the walls of the Warsaw ghetto” all that was what he—“a son of this land…who am also Pope John Paul II”—offered to God in this Eucharistic sacrifice.

  …And I cry from all the depths of this millennium, I cry on the vigil of

  Pentecost:

  “Let your Spirit descend.

  Let your Spirit descend,

  and renew the face of the earth,

  the face of this land.”

  Amen.2

  Throughout the Pope’s sermon, the crowd responded rhythmically: “We want God, we want God, we want God in the family, we
want God in the schools, we want God in books, we want God, we want God….”3 Seven hours after he had arrived, a crucial truth had been clarified by a million Poles’ response to John Paul’s evangelism. Poland was not a communist country; Poland was a Catholic nation saddled with a communist state.

  Poland’s “second baptism,” which would change the history of the twentieth century, had begun.4

  THE POST-CONSTANTINIAN POPE

  The modern diplomats of the Holy See are priests whose instinctive first question, on reaching any new assignment, is, “Where are we saying Mass tomorrow?” Yet these priest-diplomats also prided themselves on their realism. Their task, as they saw it, was to maneuver within the boundaries of the possible to defend the Church’s interests. Those interests were distinctive: the freedom of the Church to manage its internal affairs, in order to carry out its missions of evangelization, worship, and service. Still, Vatican diplomacy, reflecting the days when the Holy See was a worldly power, had become used to thinking of those distinctive interests much as nation-states thought of their economic or political “interests”—as the subjects of negotiation between sovereign powers, with the results codified in legally binding treaties.