Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  Fourteen minutes of boisterous applause, cheers, and singing followed, and stopped only when a priest pleaded for quiet so that Mass could continue.

  At Knock, the Pope visited with 3,000 sick, blessed the cornerstones for thirty-four new churches throughout the country, and celebrated Mass for a half-million Irish. He spoke of the Marian apparition (in which, according to local legend, Mary, accompanied by St. Joseph and St. John the Evangelist, appeared to a group of obscure villagers) in particularly poignant terms:

  There is something unique and especially Irish in the Marian apparition at Knock…. The Virgin appeared not just to a child or children, but to a group of people representing all ages…. In a land where all the ancient shrines were in ruins or in the hands of the Irish [Anglican] Church, she asked for no new shrine. In a land where the people had known unbelievable hardship and oppression…she asked for no penance. In a land where devotion was constant and everywhere, she asked for no processions, no pilgrimages. In fact, she asked for nothing at all. In a land known far and wide as a place for talk, she astonishingly said nothing at all. But she came…. When it seemed that everyone else was leaving for Australiaor Boston or New York, the mother of Jesus came. And being the proper lady that she was, in a land that held women and marriage and the priesthood in high regard, she brought with her her husband, St. Joseph, and St. John the Evangelist garbed as a prelate. And they also remained silent. Appropriately enough, they came in the rain.54

  After meeting with the Irish bishops and with seminarians, priests, and nuns at the national seminary at Maynooth, John Paul celebrated the last public Mass of this Irish pilgrimage at the Greenpark Racecourse in Limerick, where a quarter of a million people had gathered on the morning of October 1. He then flew out of nearby Shannon Airport on an Aer Lingus 747 for Boston, where he arrived late that day. The Pope was welcomed at the airport by the president’s wife, Rosalynn Carter, and by national security adviser Zbigniew Brzeziński, perhaps thinking back on his spur-of-the-moment decision to attend a Harvard lecture by a visiting Polish cardinal in the summer of 1976. The weather was not kind, but a driving rainstorm failed to prevent a crowd of 2 million from gathering for the papal Mass on Boston Common. With hundreds of thousands of non-Catholics estimated to be present, it was arguably the largest ecumenical service in Christian history. As the Pope approached the altar, thousands of red-and-white balloons were released, Irish Boston’s tribute to its Polish guest.55

  Prior to the Mass on Boston Common, John Paul had met with several thousand priests and nuns at Boston’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross. As he was leaving, he spotted the only wheelchair in the church and went to see twenty-six-year-old Jane De Martino, who had been paralyzed in an accident. The Pope held her hand, leaned over and whispered to her, kissed her, and left her with a small box containing a white-and-gold rosary. A Boston policeman who had been standing nearby began to cry. “I’ve got to get back to church,” he said, and walked away.56

  Speaking Truth to Power

  The next morning, John Paul flew to New York. After some mild banter at the airport with Mayor Edward Koch—The mayor: “Your Holiness, I am the mayor.” The Pope: “I shall try to be a good citizen.”—he was driven in a motor-cade to UN headquarters on the East River, where he was greeted by Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim. John Paul II walked into the Secretariat building as if this were something he did every day, projecting vigor, energy, and the quiet strength of a man comfortable in whatever situation he happened to find himself. Smiling and polite, he also conveyed a sense of power—physical power, but also the power of a discerning mind. This was a gracious man unimpressed by diplomatic niceties or flattery. When it came time for him to speak, he was completely at home at the rostrum, animatedly addressing the delegates, guests, and press as if he were back lecturing at Lublin, shifting his position from time to time, now leaning on an arm as if to ponder a point more slowly, then looking up and gesturing as if to say, “Now, listen to this.…”

  John Paul came to the United Nations at a time of increasing anxiety and political agitation about the nuclear arms competition between East and West. The SALT II arms control negotiations were stalled. Anti-nuclear protests were common in the United States and Western Europe, and the “nuclear freeze” movement was just beginning to have an impact on the American public debate. Both diplomatic negotiators and street protesters seemed to share the conviction that nuclear weapons could, somehow, be factored out of the political struggle between NATO and the Warsaw Pact—that sufficient application of will could resolve the weapons dilemma and bring peace, even if the ideological competition remained unresolved. War was caused by weapons, peace was the absence of war, and war could be prevented by arms control. However differently they worked on the issue, diplomats and protesters alike were tacitly agreed on this “realist” reading of the arms race.

  John Paul II had a very different idea of how the world politics of the late twentieth century worked, as he was about to make unmistakably clear.

  His hour-long UN address opened with the usual Vatican statement on the UN’s importance and the Holy See’s distinctive role in world affairs. Then the Pope got down to cases, reminding his listeners that, when Christ had appeared before the Roman judge Pontius Pilate, he had said that his mission was “to bear witness to the truth” (John 18.37). That was what he, the Vicar of Christ, proposed to do as well. He was addressing them not as another diplomat speaking the language of power according to the club rules, but as a witness to the truth about “man in his wholeness, in all the fullness and manifold riches of his spiritual and material existence.”57

  Politics, he reminded them, was about human beings. Their welfare, and nothing else, was the reason for politics, “whether national or international,” because any legitimate politics always “comes from man, is exercised by man, and is for man.” Any politics that did not hold itself to this humanistic criterion had lost much of its reason to exist; it was a politics that could “come to contradict humanity itself.”58

  Human progress had to be measured by a criterion worthy of human beings, and this meant measuring progress not only by science and technology, but “also and chiefly by the primacy given to spiritual values and by the progress of the moral life.” The realm of conscience was where the human world showed itself to be most human. When the claims of conscience and moral truth were denied, science and technology had been used to make the world a slaughterhouse. That was why the “fundamental document” of the United Nations, the document that gave it its moral raison d’être, was not the UN Charter but the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “a milestone on the long and difficult path of the human race.” The cause of peace could only advance “through the definition and recognition of, and respect for, the inalienable rights of individuals and of the communities of peoples.”59

  Respect for human rights meant respect for the dignity and worth of every human being. Thus peace was threatened whenever a politics characterized by the “thirst for power regardless of the needs of others” held sway. This was true among, as well as within, nations. If national “interest” was the sole criterion in international politics and if the concept of “interest” was stripped of moral components, then diplomacy was not an honorable business. Peace required thinking about obligations and duties, not just interests.60

  Discussing the arms race, John Paul rejected the notion that the danger of nuclear war could somehow be detached from the conflict between communism and its challengers. The threat of war in the modern world did not come from weapons per se. It came from forms of injustice, sometimes deliberately imposed by governments, that attacked human rights, destroyed societies, and thereby threatened the entire international order.61

  The world was working to define “at least some of the inalienable rights of man,” and John Paul wanted to contribute to that discussion by listing those rights he thought it most important to recognize internationally. At the center was “the right to freedom of thought,
conscience, and religion, and the right to manifest one’s religion either individually or in community, in public or in private.” This was central because “the values of the [human] spirit” were the driving force behind the “development of civilization” and the pursuit of peace. Peace required “enabling man to have full access to truth, to moral development, and to the complete possibility of enjoying the goods of culture which he has inherited, and of increasing them by his own creativity.”62

  Injustices in the economic order and in the spiritual order constituted the gravest threat to peace in the world, and a “humanistic criterion” was essential in evaluating social, economic, and political systems. The elimination of exploitation and free participation in economic and political life were the standards by which systems should be judged.63 Economic, political, and social arrangements that systematically violated this “humanistic criterion” were by their nature threats to peace. So were those spiritual injustices that “wounded the human person in his inner relationship with truth, in his conscience, in his most personal belief, in his view of the world, in his religious faith, and in the sphere of what are known as civil liberties.” Civilization had a centuries-long trajectory toward political communities “in which there can be fully safeguarded the objective rights of the spirit, of human conscience and of human creativity, including man’s relationship with God,” and today’s political leaders had to attend to that historical dynamic.64

  Then, as if to make sure that there was no misunderstanding about who some of the principal perpetrators of “injustice in the field of the spirit” were, John Paul identified as threats to peace those systems that, although signing international human rights agreements, nonetheless created forms of “social life…in which the practical exercise of these freedoms condemns man…to become a second-class or third-class citizen, to see compromised…his professional career or his access to certain posts of responsibility, and to lose even the possibility of educating his children freely.”65 He was speaking to the world from the rostrum of the UN General Assembly as the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church. But he was still Karol Wojtyła of Kraków, and he was determined to bear witness to what Jacek Woźniakowski, Stanisław and Danuta Rybicki, Henryk Górecki, Stanisław Rodziński, and countless others had suffered in their professional lives for the sake of conscience.

  Moving toward his peroration, John Paul turned once again to religious freedom as essential to the cause of peace. As Vatican II had taught, denying anyone the freedom to search for the truth and to adhere to it dehumanized that person, for the search for truth was of the essence of our humanity. Religious people, agnostics, and even atheists should be able to agree on this as a matter of common humanistic conviction.66 No one could reasonably suggest that religious freedom was a sectarian matter.

  John Paul II’s 1979 UN address was historic in several respects. It contained a powerful diagnosis of the crisis of late modernity, which was far deeper than the conflicts between East and West, between capitalism and socialism, between rich and poor. It was a crisis in the very soul of humanity, and the core of the struggle was spiritual and moral.

  Without once mentioning the words “communism” or “Marxism-Leninism,” the address was a bold challenge to the Soviet system, and it was understood as such. As former U.S. ambassador to the UN Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was present, noted, “I can attest from having watched that the Eastern European and Soviet delegates knew exactly what he was talking about, and for once in that chamber, looked fearful rather than bored.”67 But, in the name of humanism, the address also challenged the idea of politics as mere technique—an idea with influential adherents in the West.

  The address also marked the point at which the Catholic Church unambiguously committed itself to the cause of human freedom and the defense of basic human rights as the primary goals of its engagement with world politics. That commitment had been implicit in John XXIII’s 1963 encyclical Pacem in Terris and in the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom. John Paul II had now made it explicit, and his actions in Mexico and Poland, in January and June 1979, had made it clear that the commitment would have public edge. For the Church would defend those rights on the basis of a humanism whose claims could be assessed by every man and woman of good will.

  The address also challenged conventional ways of thinking about peace. At the UN, John Paul argued that avoiding war was neither a matter of cutting back on weapons (desirable as that might be) nor a matter of personal peacefulness and charity (as embodied by Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize later that month). Rather, peace was the product of a moral commitment to human freedom, embodied in just political structures, nationally and internationally. Peace and human rights were indivisible. The Church, from John Paul’s point of view, made its most effective contribution to peace when it relentlessly defended and promoted human rights, of which religious freedom was the centerpiece.

  The delegates to the General Assembly had listened to John Paul’s address in silence. No one had wandered about the floor of the General Assembly, as often happened during normal business. However they construed its meaning, the representatives of the worlds of power knew that they had been listening to a force to be reckoned with.

  Woo-hoo-woo

  The five-day tour of the United States in October 1979 by the man Time magazine dubbed “John Paul, Superstar” was a kaleidoscope of events that left powerful memories and a fixed media interpretation of the Pope in its wake.

  On the night of his UN address, John Paul celebrated Mass for 75,000 in Yankee Stadium and asked Americans, proud of their open society, to think of openness more comprehensively: “Christ demands an openness that is more than benign attention, more than token actions or halfhearted efforts that leave the poor as destitute as before or even more so.” En route to the Stadium, John Paul had stopped briefly at St. Charles Borromeo parish in Harlem and had addressed a small crowd standing on a vacant lot in the South Bronx: “Do not,” he begged them, “give in to despair…. And do not forget that God has your lives in his care, goes with you, calls you to better things, calls you to overcome.”68

  Tens of thousands of teenagers were waiting for John Paul at Madison Square Garden on the morning of October 3. The scene that followed was unprecedented in the history of the papacy. As the Popemobile (a converted Ford Bronco) drove slowly around the inside of the arena, a band from St. Francis Preparatory School in Brooklyn played the themes from Rocky and Battlestar Galactica while the Pope reached out to touch the extended hands of exultant teens leaning over the front-row railings. At one point, John Paul started imitating a drummer and then gave a “thumbs up” to the crowd. The young people gave him blue jeans, a T-shirt (“Big Apple Welcomes John Paul II”), and a guitar. The noise was incredible; no Knicks or Rangers crowd at the historic Garden had ever caused such a din. At one point, when the youngsters had temporarily exhausted the names of Catholic youth organizations or local schools to cheer, they started rocking the roof with the rhythmic chant, “John Paul II, we love you!” The Pope, shaking with laughter, took the microphone and started his own chant: “Woo-hoo-woo; John Paul II, he loves you!”

  The message, when things finally settled down, was a call to maturity. Each of them, he said, was “approaching that stage in your life when you must take personal responsibility for your own destiny.” In making those decisions, he urged, “look to Christ. When you wonder about the mystery of yourself, look to Christ who gives you the meaning of life. When you wonder what it means to be a mature person, look to Christ who is the fullness of humanity.” And then, as always with the young, he made an act of faith: “The Church needs you. The world needs you, because it needs Christ and you belong to Christ….”69

  The next day, at a Mass attended by more than a million in Philadelphia’s Logan Circle, John Paul took his homiletic cue from Independence Hall’s Liberty Bell and urged Americans to deepen their understanding of freedom. Freedom
was ennobled when the free human person chose wisely. Freedom linked to truth, freedom aimed at human flourishing, were inseparable in public life and in personal relationships, including sexual relationships. That was the purpose of the moral norms for living chastity in married life—they enabled the truthful use of freedom for the human flourishing of a marriage.70

  After reminding the chairmen of the priests’ councils from all the dioceses of the United States that “priesthood is not merely a task… [but] a vocation, a call to be heard again and again,” John Paul flew to Iowa and the American heartland.71 Des Moines had not been on the original papal schedule, but the Pope had received a handwritten letter from a farmer, Joe Hays, inviting him to visit the country’s agricultural center. John Paul agreed, and a frantic five weeks of preparation began. A ten-foot-square banner, in burnt-orange, blue, green, and red, formed the backdrop to the altar platform and had been crafted by fifteen volunteers during a two-week long quilting bee. Speaking under the open Midwestern sky to the largest crowd in the history of Iowa, John Paul took the bounty of the earth as the starting point for the most moving homily of his American pilgrimage, a reflection on the bounty of Christ, satisfying the hungers of humanity in the Eucharist: