Many German theologians were not persuaded, but some secular dissenters were a bit shaken. The president of the Bavarian “Voltaire Club” told a Radio Free Europe correspondent that John Paul was complicating the imagery of dissent: “I wish that this Pope might be less lovable and noble as a person. His charisma makes our dialogue more difficult.” Others were less polite. A Dutchman walked around dressed as Satan, carrying a sign asking why the Pope, who was working sixteen-hour days, didn’t take up manual labor. A young girl, dressed up like Joan of Arc with a noose around her neck, told one and all that she was a feminist and that “the Church, the enemy of women, would like to burn us all at the stake.” A dissident priest in Osnabrück kept roaring through a bullhorn, “Pretty words, medals, and rosaries are not enough!” Yet in terrible weather the crowds kept building throughout the pilgrimage. No one, least of all John Paul II, thought that he was resolving the crisis of Catholicism in Germany or the crisis of German culture. But he was touching something in the German soul.
In 110 hours, John Paul II traveled almost 1,800 miles inside West Germany, celebrated seven Masses, gave twenty-four major addresses, spoke to millions live and millions more on television. Perhaps the most memorable moment for the Polish Pope on German soil came outside the Schloss Augustusburg in Brühl. After meeting with public officials, John Paul was escorted to the torch-lit courtyard by President Karl Carstens and Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. A military band dressed in greatcoats and the distinctive German military helmet—familiar sights to Poles of John Paul’s generation—stood along a red carpet punctuated by vases of yellow chrysanthemums. After playing various French, Italian, and English marching tunes, they launched into the “Dąbrowski Mazurka,” the Polish national anthem, which begins with the words, “Poland is not yet lost….”
John Paul II, walking down the carpet to his Mercedes-built Popemobile, paused briefly and with a catch in his voice, said quietly to his companions, in Polish, “What a moment. It is not lost! Indeed not!”1
PETER AND THE APOSTLES
Two years into his pontificate, in addition to redefining the papacy’s role in the world of political power, John Paul II was clarifying how it is that the Pope is Peter among the bishops of the Church.
The 1979 Annuario Pontificio, the thick, red-bound Vatican yearbook, had described October 22, 1978, as the “solemn inauguration” of John Paul’s “ministry as universal pastor of the Church.” Some critics chafed at the title—did it suggest that the Church had only one pastor, the Pope, and that the bishops of the Church were deputy pastors or local branch managers? John Paul II’s first years in office demonstrated that he read the responsibility of being “universal Pastor” through the lens of Luke 22.32, Christ’s charge to Peter to “strengthen your brethren.” In John Paul II’s judgment, that charge had to be interpreted evangelically and literally. The Pope had a duty before Christ to be present to the people of the Church wherever they were. That, in the late twentieth century, was what the traditional papal sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum, the Pope’s “care for all the Churches,” meant. What was most certainly not meant by that “care” was that the Pope was Chief Executive Officer of Roman Catholic Church, Inc., and the local bishops were simply managers of the branch offices.
There really is no appropriate organizational analogy for the relationship between the Bishop of Rome and the College of Bishops throughout the world. The American governmental model—an executive (Pope) with a legislature (College, or Synod, of Bishops)—does not fit. Neither does the Westminster model: a prime minister (Pope) with a parliament (the College of Bishops, or the Synod of Bishops, or an Ecumenical Council held on a regular basis). The corporate model—CEO (Pope) plus junior executives (the bishops)—is clearly impossible. So is the collective leadership model favored by some authoritarian regimes: the first-among-equals (Pope) who cannot act without authorization from the rest of the politburo or junta (the bishops). None of these analogies sheds much light on the subtle, complex teaching of Vatican II about the relationship between papal primacy and the collegial responsibility of the bishops for the governance of the Church—both of which, according to the Council, Christ willed for his Church, together.
The Council had taught that the Pope and the bishops in communion with him share responsibility for the whole Church, although the College of Bishops cannot exercise this authority without its head, the Bishop of Rome. The Pope, precisely as Bishop of Rome, has to exercise a “care for all the Churches.” The bishops, precisely because they are in communion with the Bishop of Rome, must exercise a care for the universal Church, beyond the boundaries of their local jurisdiction. Because the Church is not a political community, primacy and collegiality are not a zero-sum game in which primacy diminishes as collegiality increases. Moreover, the meaning of primacy, collegiality, and their relationship is an area where tensions and adjustments will mark the Church’s life until the end of time.
The theological term the Council used to characterize the essence of the Church was communio, which somewhat inadequately comes into English as “communion.” The Church has many other characteristics: it has executive functions, it can legislate, it can conduct judicial proceedings. In its essence, though, the Church is a communio—a communion of brothers and sisters in Christ whose relationship to one another is different from any other relationship in their lives, because it is founded on Christ, the Son of God and redeemer of the world, and lived through the sacraments. Husbands and wives, parents and children, pastors and people, consecrated religious and their communities all live this communio of the Church in distinct ways.
The way in which the Pope and the bishops were to live it in their relationship to each other was called “collegiality.” The theory, at least, was reasonably clear. The bishops, successors of the apostles, formed a “college or permanent assembly” with Peter as their head. Christ willed both the college and the headship as components of the unchangeable structure of the Church.2 Both had responsibility, in different ways, for “all the Churches.” The question was, how should collegiality actually work?
Unlike many other bishops at Vatican II, the Polish hierarchy had lived a real experience of collegiality since World War II. It was a singular experience, given the political realities and the unchallenged authority of the Primate, Cardinal Wyszyński. But it was also genuinely collegial. The Polish bishops had an episcopal conference that met annually, a coordinating committee that could take decisions between meetings of the whole episcopate, and a staff secretariat at a time when such things were not even dreamed of by bishops in other countries. Within the conference, there was real delegation of authority over specific areas of pastoral concern (youth work, student ministry, family ministry, and so forth); there was real sharing of experiences; and there were real debates. When the debates, which were always conducted behind closed doors, were finished, there was also real unity.
This was the experience of collegiality Karol Wojtyła brought to the papacy. Brother bishops worked together, argued issues and strategies, made decisions—and then, when decisions had been made, supported one another. It was a collegiality that strengthened the bishops, the Primate, and the communio of the entire local Church. One of his duties as “universal pastor,” as John Paul understood it, was to foster that kind of collegiality within other national episcopates, and between the world episcopate and the Holy See.
He would work at it relentlessly for more than twenty years. The results were mixed, but not for lack of will or effort on his part.
COLLEGIALITY AND CRISIS MANAGEMENT
In January 1980, John Paul tried to facilitate a collegial solution to the problems of one of the most contentious local Churches in post-conciliar Catholicism, the Church in the Netherlands.
Dutch Catholicism prior to the Second World War was one of the most vital in the world. The experience of the Nazi Occupation had forced long-antagonistic Dutch Catholics and Protestants to think of each other as unhyphenated Dutchmen, which broke d
own many old barriers of prejudice. On some accounts, though, it also weakened Dutch Catholics’ sense of identification with the institutional Church.
Then came Vatican II. The Dutch bishops participated vigorously in the Council’s debates and were eager to promote conciliar reforms when they returned home in 1965. But the Dutch experience of implementing the Council was the opposite of what Karol Wojtyła had fostered in Kraków. Decision-making assemblies were immediately introduced at all levels of the Church, and decisions on implementing the Council were frequently made by people who, for all their good will, simply had not had the opportunity to assimilate the teachings of Vatican II as a whole. Moreover, this virtually instant implementation took place during the mid- and late-sixties, a period of cultural upheaval that hit the Netherlands with particular force.
Consequently, some of the world’s most radical liturgical experimentation began in the formerly staid Netherlands. A new “Dutch Catechism” was deemed inadequate by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith [CDF] in Rome. In late 1970 and early 1972, the appointment of two new bishops critical of the prevailing liberalizing trends had caused further rifts in a thoroughly polarized local Church, and between Dutch Catholic leaders and Rome. Radicalization and polarization had gone hand-in-hand with a rapid emptying of Dutch churches during the post-conciliar battles. Yet religious issues remained of great interest to many Dutch, who passionately debated them in the press.
In 1975, Cardinal Johannes Willebrands, President of the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, became Primate of the Netherlands at Paul VI’s request, in an attempt to heal the breaches between the factions and between Dutch Catholicism and Rome. Commuting between his Vatican responsibilities and the primatial See in Utrecht, Willebrands failed to make much headway. By the death of Pope Paul, the Dutch Church was deeply, even bitterly divided, and so was its episcopate. Some even feared schism—a formal break with Rome.
In the early fall of 1979, John Paul II was living in the Torre Giovanni, a ninth-century tower and guest house in the Vatican gardens, while the papal apartment in the Apostolic Palace was being renovated. One evening he called a meeting there to talk over the situation in the Netherlands. Those invited included Cardinal Casaroli, Cardinal Willebrands, Archbishop Martínez Somalo, Bishop Jozef Tomko (a Slovak and former official of CDF and the Congregation for Bishops, who had been named General Secretary of the Synod of Bishops in July 1979), and Father Jan Schotte. After the question of what might be done to help the Church in the Netherlands was thrashed around for some time, the Pope suggested, “Why not have a Synod?”
In drawing up the legislation for the Synod of Bishops, Paul VI had made provision for “special assemblies,” but this possibility had never been applied to the situation of a local Church. Still, the group decided that this could be precisely the kind of instrument they were looking for: a collegial process of discussion including all the Dutch bishops and the relevant officials of the Curia, presided over by the Pope, in which decisions on matters dividing the Dutch episcopate could be taken without being imposed unilaterally by Rome. John Paul II, who is quite convinced that the Holy Spirit works through the Synod process, may also have been anticipating that this kind of collegial experience would begin to heal the personal rifts between the Dutch bishops and get them functioning more as a team again.3
What came to be known technically as the “Particular Synod for Holland” met at the Vatican from January 14 through January 31, 1980. The issues on the agenda were among the most controversial and divisive within the Dutch Church and among the Dutch bishops: liturgy, religious education, seminaries and the priesthood, lay leadership, and ecumenism. The Synod itself was a linguistic nightmare. There were seven Dutch bishops, who had no international language in common; there were seven curial officials, none of whom spoke Dutch and one of whom, Cardinal James Knox, didn’t even speak Italian. Father Schotte had to translate everything for everybody. (At one point in the lengthy proceedings, John Paul II leaned over and whispered, “Sometimes your translation is clearer than what the guy actually said….”)4
After more than two intense weeks of discussion, prayer, and Masses together, the Synod closed with a concelebrated Mass in the Sistine Chapel, during which each of the Dutch bishops signed the document listing the Synod’s forty-six conclusions. Something had happened among them. In the sacristy after the Mass, two Dutch bishops, in tears, came up to Father Schotte and said, “Why couldn’t we have done this before?”5 The bishops also agreed to form a special “Synod Council” that would meet annually with the General Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops in Rome, so that the bishops could continue to assess the pastoral situation together and discuss the implementation of the Dutch Synod’s resolutions. That Council continued to meet throughout the pontificate of John Paul II.
The Synod established a mechanism for getting the Dutch bishops to function as a conference in facing their pastoral problems. To say that it accomplished more would be to claim too much. Implementation of the Synod’s resolutions took place at different rates when the bishops went home. Sharply different visions of the Church and its relationship to modern society continued; so did diverse patterns of seminary education in different dioceses. Yet bishops who had barely been on speaking terms with each other had had to take their own collegiality seriously. Under the circumstances, collegiality-as-crisis-management could claim a modest accomplishment.
Another local Church in crisis, the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine, presented John Paul II with an entirely different set of problems.
To avoid complications with the papal pilgrimage to Poland in June 1979, the Pope’s March 19, 1979, letter to Ukrainian Cardinal Iosyf Slipyi was not publicly released until John Paul had returned to the Vatican. The letter’s defense of the 1596 Union of Brest (in which the Ukrainians had declared their allegiance to Rome while retaining their Eastern-rite liturgy), his praise for the millions “who [had] endured sorrows and injustices for Christ” and “demonstrated fidelity toward the Cross and the Church,” and his invocation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to challenge Soviet attempts to crush the Greek Catholic Church had caused consternation in both the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow, then very much under the Soviet thumb. Those at the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity who wanted to avoid anything that might agitate the Russian Orthodox leadership also thought it a mistake. The Patriarchate signaled its displeasure (and, presumably, the Kremlin’s) by canceling a Roman Catholic–Russian Orthodox theological colloquium that was to have been held in Odessa. Its “foreign affairs spokesman,” Metropolitan Juvenaly, also wrote Cardinal Willebrands, President of the Christian Unity secretariat, demanding an explanation of the “exact meaning” of the Pope’s letter and threatening “public criticism” if he and his colleagues were not satisfied with the response.6
The Pope, however, was determined to defend the Ukrainians’ religious freedom. He knew they had felt betrayed by Paul VI’s Ostpolitik and his ecumenical outreach to Russian Orthodoxy, and while not endorsing that analysis, he wanted to make clear that he would not downplay religious freedom for the sake of an ecumenical dialogue that was vastly complicated by the Patriarchate of Moscow’s entanglement with Kremlin politics. John Paul’s March 1979 letter to Cardinal Slipyi was one indication of his concern. So was the Synod of Greek Catholic bishops from throughout the world Ukrainian diaspora he convened at the Vatican on March 24, 1980. Since Slipyi was in his late eighties, provisions had to be made for a successor to maintain the continuity of the Ukrainian Church’s leadership—even if most of that leadership would continue to live in exile (primarily in North America and Australia) for the foreseeable future. There were also issues to be discussed: the ongoing Ukrainian effort to have the Major-Archbishop of L’viv named “Patriarch” the controversy over ordaining married men to the priesthood in the Ukrainian diaspora;7 support for the hard-pressed underground Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine itself; the ecumenical
imperative.
The Synod lasted for four days. At its conclusion John Paul II confirmed the Synod’s choice of Myroslav Ivan Lubachivsky, whom the Pope had appointed the previous September as Ukrainian archbishop of Philadelphia, as coadjutor to Cardinal Slipyi with the right to succeed him as Major-Archbishop of L’viv on Slipyi’s death. The historic continuity of the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine had been provided for, but none of the other issues was definitively resolved. Determined to defend the persecuted, John Paul II was equally determined to do what he could to advance ecumenism with Russian Orthodoxy, the largest Orthodox Church in the world. Holding those two imperatives together—a task made even more difficult by Ukrainian passions and indiscretions, on the one hand, and by the curial tendency toward accommodation of the Russian Orthodox, on the other—became one of the most delicate and controversial balancing acts of the pontificate.
Two months later, on May 29, 1980, John Paul met for the second time with the Italian Bishops’ Conference at its annual meeting. In the seventeen months since he had become Pope, he had made twenty-nine pastoral visitations to Roman parishes and had gone to more Italian cities—Assisi, Monte Cassino, Canale d’Agordo and Belluno, Treviso, Nettuno, Loreto, Ancona, Pomezia, Pompei, Naples, Norcia, and Turin—than his Italian predecessors John XXIII and Paul VI. He was now in a better position to analyze the Church’s situation and to make some recommendations.
Italian Catholic practice may have declined; Italy’s high culture may have remained enamored of Marxism; the country’s politics may have been corrupted by criminals and paralyzed by urban terrorism; and in the midst of all this, Italian Catholics and their leaders may have internalized a sense of their own marginalization. If so, John Paul had a different view of the matter. The Italians, he insisted to their bishops, were a people “whose religious soul, whose deep Catholic mold, has inspired and left its mark, unquestionably, on the manifestations of everyday life, the forms of piety, family, and civil society, the springing up of charitable institutions, as well as the highest expressions of religious architecture, figurative art, and also literature.”
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