Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  The problem was that, in bracketing the sections he thought the Pope could skip over in his verbal presentation, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli had eliminated virtually everything that could be considered a criticism of the Soviet Union and the world’s other communist powers—including some of the Pope’s references to human rights and religious freedom. Casaroli thought these were the sorts of things that should be dealt with quietly, diplomat-to-diplomat, rather than with public confrontations. Schotte, who had helped develop the papal address, disagreed. To his mind, the Pope’s defense of human rights and his moral challenge to totalitarianism were the heart of the matter. Cutting these references from the speaking text would eviscerate the address in the eyes of the world. But junior officials in the Secretariat of State did not normally challenge the judgment of the Cardinal Secretary of State, the Pope’s principal adviser.

  John Paul II was working in his private cabin during the flight. Schotte brought what he regarded as the now-bowdlerized UN address to him. The Belgian explained the situation, pointed out the Cardinal Secretary of State’s proposed cuts from the speaking text, and told the Pope why he thought accepting them would be a serious mistake. Schotte had marked the text, circling those parts that, in his judgment, simply had to be said from the rostrum because they were indispensable to conveying the Pope’s message. John Paul II studied the marked and twice-edited text, thought about it, and then agreed with Schotte. He would not accept Cardinal Casaroli’s proposed cuts, but would forthrightly discuss the moral foundation of peace—human rights—before the General Assembly.

  Custom dictated that the Pope’s personal secretary, Monsignor Stanisław Dziwisz, hand him his speaking text when he came to the rostrum—a small thing, but one of the privileges of Dziwisz’s office. While various formalities were being attended to at UN headquarters, Dziwisz drew Father Schotte aside and said, “The Holy Father wants you to hand him his papers.” Schotte was stunned. When, as ordered, he appeared at the rostrum to hand the Pope the text of his address, more than a few members of the papal traveling party took note. John Paul II had not only taken Father Schotte’s advice, but by this simple gesture of gratitude, he had sent a signal to the ever-sensitive antennae of the Roman Curia. Forthright counsel would be expected in this pontificate, in which there would be no trimming on issues of human rights and religious freedom.1

  RENOVATIONS

  In the weeks before his epic pilgrimage to Poland in June 1979, John Paul II continued to renovate the world’s oldest continuous institution, the papacy.

  On March 31, 1979, he addressed 10,000 boisterous young members of the Italian lay movement, Comunione e Liberazione [Communion and Liberation], which he had supported in Poland and which he hoped might become an instrument for the moral renewal of Italian politics, especially in the Christian Democratic Party.2 He praised the youngsters for their “generous enthusiasm” and for the “self-sacrifice” involved in living out their ideals. Their belief in Christ was the hope of the Church and the true hope of the world.3 After his talk, the youngsters wouldn’t let him go until he had sung songs and exchanged cheers with them.

  On April 8, John Paul wrote a letter to every priest in the world. The letter was dated on Holy Thursday, the day the Church commemorates the institution of the sacrament of Holy Orders at an annual diocesan “Chrism Mass,” at which priests renew their vows before their bishop and the holy oils for baptism, confirmation, and the anointing of the sick are blessed. The letter was another initiative in the Pope’s personal campaign to reinvigorate the commitment and restore the morale of priests throughout the world.

  Poland had been spared much of the turmoil that had shaken the Catholic priesthood after the Second Vatican Council. In his first six months as Pope, John Paul had had to confront the global crisis of the priesthood much more directly. Pope Paul VI had granted more than 32,000 requests from priests who had asked to be released from their vows and returned to lay status—the greatest exodus from the priesthood since the Reformation. Soon after his election, John Paul had stopped the routine granting of these “decrees of laicization.” With his Holy Thursday letter, he wanted to rekindle in his brother priests a sense of the religious drama of their vocation.

  The priesthood, John Paul insisted, is a vocation, not a career. The priesthood of Holy Orders existed to help others live out the priestly dimension of their Christian lives, to become living sacrifices, “holy and pleasing to God” (Romans 12.1). The priesthood was a gift of Christ to the Church and to the individual priest, who acted in persona Christi, “in the person of Christ,” the good shepherd. “Secularizing” the priestly vocation and way of life emptied it of its unique form of witness: the singular capacity of a priest to enter the drama of another’s life, helping direct a fellow human being to God.

  Being a man completely “for others,” and completely “for the Kingdom,” was also the rationale for celibacy, which John Paul described as a unique way of being a parent: “The priest, by renouncing [the] fatherhood proper to married men, seeks another fatherhood and, as it were, even another motherhood, recalling the words of the Apostle [Paul] about the children whom he begets in suffering. These are children of his spirit, people entrusted to his solicitude by the Good Shepherd [and are] more numerous than an ordinary human family can embrace.”4 Married couples, who had taken their own vows, had a right to expect fidelity to vocational vows from their priests. That faithfulness was another way that priests built up the Church.

  John Paul closed by asking all priests, and especially “those of you who are doubtful of the meaning of your vocation or of the value of your service,” to imagine priestless places:

  …think of the places where people anxiously await a priest, and where for many years, feeling the lack of such a priest, they do not cease to hope for his presence. And sometimes it happens that they meet in an abandoned shrine, and place on the altar a stole which they still keep, and recite all the prayers of the Eucharistic Liturgy; and then, at the moment that corresponds to the transubstantiation, a deep silence comes upon them, a silence sometimes broken by a sob…so ardently do they desire to hear the words that only the lips of a priest can efficaciously utter. So much do they desire Eucharistic Communion, in which they can share only through the ministry of a priest, just as they also so eagerly wait to hear the divine words of pardon: Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis. So if one of you doubts the meaning of his priesthood, if he thinks it is “socially” fruitless or useless, think on this!5

  On May 15, all the bishops of Italy gathered in Rome for their annual meeting, the first since the Polish Pope’s election. The occasion posed another set of delicate “transition” problems for John Paul II.

  As Bishop of Rome, John Paul held the ancient titles of “Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province” and “Primate of Italy.” For the first time in 455 years, those titles were in the possession of a non-Italian. As a Pole now resident in Rome, he had come from a land of vibrant Catholicism to a country whose Catholic practice, historically, had been much more casual. Since Italy’s unification in 1870, popes had kept a close grip on Italian Church affairs, internally and in relations with the Italian government. This was not John Paul’s understanding of ecclesiastical primacy or Church-state relations. The challenge was to demonstrate his concern for the local Church he now led while making it clear that he was not going to micromanage its internal affairs.

  He addressed these interlocking issues both theologically and practically, at a concelebrated Mass with the entire Italian episcopate in the Sistine Chapel on May 15. His homily began by reflecting on a paradox of Christian life—and then gently turned the paradox into a challenge to episcopal complacency. Although Christ had promised his followers his peace and urged them not to be troubled, for he would always be with them, Christ’s Church grew through trials, suffering, and the witness-unto-death of martyrdom. That was how it had been with the Church in Italy: it was Christ himself, the head of the Church, who had driven Peter a
nd Paul to Rome, where they had confirmed their preaching by the sacrifice of their lives. This was not simply ancient history; it explained why they were all in Rome. They were all players in the drama of salvation history, a script with a divine author.

  John Paul then made it clear that they were in charge of the Church in Italy. It was up to them to keep him informed of their “particular problems.” The Second Vatican Council had reminded the Church of its responsibility “for the history of human salvation,” which unfolded in real, concrete places. He proposed to share that responsibility “in the bond of collegial union” with them.6

  Three days later, on May 18, 1979, he made that commitment to collegial consultation concrete. The President of the Italian Bishops’ Conference [CEI], Cardinal Antonio Poma of Bologna, had filled that post for ten years and had asked Paul VI and John Paul I for permission to resign. After requesting that Poma stay on for the first months of the transition, John Paul II had agreed to let the cardinal resign the conference presidency, but this decision, he told his Italian confreres, put him “up against a problem.” The CEI’s statutes, which had been drawn up during the pontificate of Paul VI, provided that the Pope name the conference president. Demonstrating that he, too, could speak with classic Italian indirection when he had to, John Paul noted that this statute had laid a “difficult task” on him, since he did not “come from the circle of the Italian Episcopate”—all of whose members were acutely aware of that, and some of whom would have resented a president imposed on them by a Pole. At the same time, he wanted to “act in a way that was not contrary to this norm”—which would have seemed a criticism of Paul VI. The solution? He had taken counsel with the heads of the regional conferences of Italian bishops, and the majority had recommended Archbishop Anastasio Ballestrero of Turin as the new president of their national conference. The Pope now confirmed that choice according to the letter of the statute, even as he made clear that the diocesan bishops of Italy should not think of themselves as local franchise managers of a Roman corporation. The Primate of Italy intended to exercise his primacy as an evangelist, not as the chief executive officer of Italian Catholicism.7

  On June 30, John Paul II held his first ordinary consistory, creating fourteen new members of the College of Cardinals. Among them were the new Secretary of State, Agostino Casaroli; the former Sostituto, Giuseppe Caprio; the new President of the CEI, Anastasio Ballestrero; the successor to Albino Luciani as patriarch of Venice, Marco Cé and two Poles—Franciszek Macharski, John Paul’s successor in Kraków, and Władysław Rubin, who had been General Secretary of the Synod of Bishops. The archbishop of Hanoi, Joseph-Marie Trinh v?n-C?n, received the red biretta, as did the archbishop of Marseilles, Roger Etchegaray, who would come to Rome five years later as President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and become one of the Pope’s personal diplomatic troubleshooters. One cardinal was named secretly, or in pectore. (Twelve years later, at John Paul II’s fifth consistory, his name would be revealed: Ignatius Gong Pin-Mei, the bishop of Shanghai, who was then serving a life sentence in a communist prison.8)

  During his first summer in office, the new Pope continued to encourage activist Catholicism in Italy, meeting with the Sant’Egidio Community on July 22. Founded in 1968 by a group of Roman university students, the community, a lay initiative, had taken as its missions the reevangelization of the city and charitable service to the marginalized. The parish church of Sant’Egidio in Rome’s Trastevere district was its base of operations and the center of its active liturgical life. Sant’Egidio had helped arrange a meeting between John Paul and Roman students during the previous Lent, a practice the Pope adapted to Rome from Kraków. The community would later become heavily involved in mediating negotiated settlements to civil wars in the Third World. In an audience at the papal summer villa at Castel Gandolfo, John Paul told 600 members of the community that he had “heard that the Church of Sant’Egidio is becoming too small for you. I hope that by remaining faithful to your too-small church, you will arrive at the point where all of Rome becomes too small for you.”9

  His meetings with Comunione e Liberazione (conventionally identified with more conservative Italian politics) and the Sant’Egidio Community (just as conventionally identified with the Italian Catholic “left”) were indicators of a principle to which John Paul II held firm throughout his pontificate. If a lay movement was dedicated to a life of serious Christian commitment and “thinking with the Church” (as the classic phrase had it), its politics were its own business. At Vatican II, Karol Wojtyła had promoted the apostolate of lay activism “in the world.” As archbishop of Kraków, he had taught that there was no single political expression of the Church’s social doctrine, and that lay initiatives “in the world” was the laity’s business, not the clergy’s. He evidently saw no reason to alter his thinking on this after becoming Bishop of Rome.10

  Neither had he lost his touch for the unusual or unexpected. In April, he had met an expectant mother at an audience, who asked if the Pope would baptize her baby. He happily agreed, and did so at Castel Gandolfo on August 11. Later that month, he held an audience for competitors in the thirty-third water-skiing championship of Europe, Africa, and the Mediterranean, which was being held on Lake Albano, near his villa. The former-kayaker-turned-Pope, perhaps thinking wistfully about the annual trip he was missing with his Środowisko friends, told the athletes that “sports are a real school of true human virtue.”11

  As the first anniversary of his election approached, John Paul II, a man who habitually looked forward, could have looked back on a year in which he had revitalized the papacy stylistically and substantively. He had held firmly to his determination to remain himself in office. During his first summer at Castel Gandolfo, he had invited old lay friends to visit, including Jerzy Janik and his family. The Janiks had driven down from Kraków at the Pope’s invitation, expecting, as Professor Janik later said, that they might get a chance to see John Paul briefly: “the optimists in our family thought we’d be received twice, once in the beginning and once to say good-bye; the pessimists thought we’d be received once.” On arriving at the small town in the hills outside Rome, Professor Janik presented himself to the Swiss Guard manning the castello’s gate, and when asked his business, simply replied, “We have come to meet the Pope.” The guard sent for a nun, who showed them to an apartment a few hundred yards from the gate and told them to wait there for “orders.” Two hours later, the Pope called: “Jurek, I was in the garden when you came. Come right over with Jasią and the girls so we can talk.” The Janiks went, and got a papal guided tour of the villa: “Now I’ll show you where I live. Here’s my bedroom, this is the same bed in which Paul VI died. Here’s the chapel….” After the tour, John Paul said, “Now, tell me your plans; how can we arrange your stay?” Janik, thinking of the Pope’s schedule, replied that, now that they’d seen their old friend, there probably wouldn’t be many more occasions to be together. So they planned to see something of Rome and go home. John Paul was having none of it: “No, you can do that some other time. Now you stay here, and we’ll have all our meals together and talk.”*

  A few months before the Janiks arrived, John Paul had started construction of a swimming pool on the grounds of the papal villa. Someone asked about the cost. The Pope replied that he had to get some exercise, and in any event, the pool was less expensive than holding another conclave.13

  However much it disconcerted the traditional managers of popes, the new papal style was wildly popular. The Rome Tourist Council calculated that John Paul II had attracted more than 5 million tourists in the first six months of the pontificate. When the weather permitted moving his weekly general audiences out into St. Peter’s Square in the spring of 1979, there were massive traffic jams as 800 tourist buses jockeyed to discharge their passengers.14 It was unlikely that this was simply a matter of the new Pope’s personal style. John Paul was touching what seems to have been a widespread and deeply felt need for religious leadership, b
y reenergizing a papal office that some had thought incapable of being a center of spiritual force any longer.

  In his first year in office, John Paul II had also made dramatic changes in the time-honored way in which the papacy related to the world of politics and worldly power. Astute observers, not all of them friendly, knew that his triumphant tour of Poland had presaged the emergence of a new, unpredictable, and yet very powerful force on the world stage. Still, it can be argued that nothing John Paul II did in the first year of his pontificate would have a greater impact on the Church and the world in the twenty-first century than the series of weekly catechetical addresses he began at his Wednesday general audience in Rome on September 5, 1979.

  BODY LANGUAGE AND GOD-TALK

  When Italy completed its unification by capturing Rome in 1870, Pope Pius IX declared himself the “Prisoner of the Vatican” and refused to travel outside the Leonine Wall surrounding the papal properties near St. Peter’s Basilica. To maintain contact with the people among whom he had once traveled freely in his carriage, Pius began the custom of the “general audience,” at which the pope met and spoke with a large group of pilgrims—in distinction from the “private audiences” popes granted to individual visitors, diplomats, high-ranking clergy, and so forth. In this respect, general audiences were a first effort at papal public relations in an age when public opinion was beginning to carry weight.