That was what he had seen in his Italian journeys, and that was why he wanted his bishops to get the reevangelization of their country under way. “You…are responsible,” he told them, “for the Church which is in Italy, independently of the fact whether the Pope is of Italian origin or not….” John Paul specifically discussed Catholic social action, religious education, family life ministry, and youth ministry as urgent pastoral priorities. It was an exceptionally forthright talk in an ecclesiastical environment noted for the widespread use of the subjunctive—and another example of John Paul’s determination to move a group of bishops toward a more evangelically assertive understanding of their role.8
Two weeks later, on June 13, John Paul sent the Italian Church an apostolic letter, Amantissima Providentia [The Most Loving Providence of God], for the sixth centenary of the death of one of Italy’s co-patrons, St. Catherine of Siena—a woman noted for her determination to get bishops to do their duty.9 In August and September he went on pastoral journeys to the Abruzzi region, to Velletri and Frascati, to Siena, to Cassino, Otranto, and Campo Verano. In late November, when a devastating earthquake hit the southern part of the country, the Pope went to express his solidarity with the worst hit areas, including the village of Balvano, where an entire congregation of Sunday worshipers, including many children, had been buried in the ruins of the church.10 The Primate of Italy who had challenged his brother bishops to reevangelize their country by word and deed fully intended to contribute his part to that effort, even to the point of meeting on June 16 with the Italian Union of Hairdressers.11
In his homeland, John Paul continued to build on the momentum created by his June 1979 pilgrimage. On April 5, 1980, a Polish monthly edition of L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, was launched under the editorship of Father Adam Boniecki, a Marian priest. It was another instrument in the struggle to keep his countrymen informed of his activities and views, as the monthly edition (like the weekly editions in English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese) would be filled with papal audience addresses and sermons and Church documents.
The Poles were already an assertive force. The Hungarian Church, however, was a different matter. Since the fiercely anti-communist Cardinal Mindszenty had left Budapest as part of the Ostpolitik of Paul VI, the Catholic leadership had increasingly accommodated itself to the regime, and the results had been disastrous. While some sixty percent of the country’s population was baptized Catholic, only a quarter of those Catholics, at best, were active members of the Church, and only one-third of those “active members” attended Mass regularly. The state/party apparatus managed the appointment of pastors, severely regulated religious education, and controlled Church publishing. In 1976, the average age of Catholic priests was sixty-seven and some dioceses had not ordained a new priest for years.12
In December 1978, shortly after his election, John Paul had tried to light a fire under the Hungarian bishops with a personal letter. Four months later, he had met in Rome with the Hungarian Primate, Cardinal László Lékai, the leader of the party of accommodation, during the 400th anniversary celebrations of Rome’s Hungarian College. Other Hungarian bishops had visited the Vatican since, and John Paul had been able to nominate bishops for four vacant Hungarian sees. Now, he thought it his “duty” to send another letter, this time to the entire Church in Hungary, on the imperative of religious education. Dated May 1, 1980, the letter began with a reminder that “everyone needs to be catechized,” and urged both bishops and priests to take seriously their people’s “right to catechesis.”13 It was an attempt to rally the Hungarian Church so that it did not drift into further marginalization, but new energies required local leadership. As John Paul was reported to have said when asked about a possible papal visit to Hungary, “The Pope will visit Hungary when the cardinal has learned to bang his fist on the table.”14
YOUNG CHURCHES
At the same time as he was working with or attempting to reinvigorate the Dutch, Ukrainian, Italian, and Hungarian bishops, John Paul’s eyes were turning south, toward Africa, and his first pastoral pilgrimage to that continent.
No world leader in the last two decades of the twentieth century paid such sustained attention to Africa as John Paul II. After the enthusiasms of decolonization and the controversy over apartheid, Africa became the forgotten continent. The only world institution that insisted that a continent of 450 million people could not be allowed to fall off the edge of history was the Roman Catholic Church.
African Church leaders had been enthusiastic about John Paul’s election, which confirmed the Church’s universality, and thereby confirmed the place of newcomers like themselves within it. As Nigerian Cardinal Francis Arinze put it later, “Because Africans are new Christians, apart from Egypt and Ethiopia, that feeling of belonging, and not just as second-class citizens, is very important: because in world politics Africa doesn’t even rank as second-class, but third-class.” John Paul II came to Africa, Arinze believed, to “help people understand that it’s not when you become a Christian that counts; [what is important is] that all are in the Father’s house.”15 The Pope’s image quickly became known throughout the continent; Poles going into the bush found themselves greeted as nduyu yd Papa, “brother of the Pope.”16
John Paul’s first African pilgrimage began on May 2 when his Alitalia DC–10 landed at Ndjili Airport near Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire, after a seven-hour flight from Rome.
The Pope was greeted by longtime Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seku. The day before, Mobutu had married his longtime consort so that she could greet John Paul in the legal status of a presidential wife. Mobutu had given his people two days’ holiday for the papal visit, and the road into Kinshasa was flooded with hundreds of thousands of Africans waving small white-and-yellow papal flags. After kissing the soil of Africa, John Paul announced himself in simple, evangelical terms: “I come to you as a pastor, a servant of Jesus Christ, and the successor of St. Peter. I come as a man of faith, a messenger of peace and hope.”
At the cathedral of Kinshasa, he was welcomed by Cardinal Joseph Malula, who had told Time magazine before the second conclave in 1978, “All the imperial paraphernalia, all that isolation of the Pope, all that medieval remoteness and inheritance that makes Europeans think the Church is only Western—all [that] makes them fail to understand that young countries like mine want something different. We want simplicity. We want Jesus Christ. All that, all that must change.”17 Now, he heard the Pope he had helped elect tell him and his brother African bishops that Peter had come to Africa for an exchange of testimonies, a sharing of acts of faith. That evening, John Paul met with President Mobutu and other members of the government, stressing the importance of religious freedom for social development. Then he sent both his hosts and the men in the Kremlin a message: “If the problems of Africa find solutions free from any outside interference, that positive achievement will surely have a beneficial effect on the solution of similar problems in other continents.” At the Vatican embassy in Kinshasa, the Pope met late that same night with the six archbishops of Zaire and finally paused for his first meal in Africa—bass, shrimp, and local fruit, prepared by the only Italian restaurateur in the city.18
The Pope’s Mass at the aptly named St. Peter’s Church in Kinshasa the next morning was typical of the exuberant liturgies that followed. The Mass was celebrated in French with hymns in Swahili and other local languages and the Lord’s Prayer in Latin. In his homily, the Pope argued that monogamy, an issue in a culture accustomed to polygamy, was “not of western…origin” but was a basic humanistic concept “of divine inspiration,” applicable to all cultures and circumstances. At the same time he praised the African traditions of permanence in marriage, respect for mothers and children, social solidarity, and reverence for ancestors as important for the flourishing of families, and urged the bishops to make marriage preparation a centerpiece of pastoral work in Africa. After meeting with the Zairean episcopate and visiting a cloistered Carmelite conve
nt, John Paul went to the Kinshasa hospital for lepers, where he laid his hands in blessing on each of the patients.19
A million Zaireans and Africans from throughout the continent flooded the square in front of Kinshasa’s People’s Palace on Sunday morning, May 4, as John Paul ordained eight new African bishops—four from Zaire, one from Djibouti, two Burundians, and a Sudanese. After the morning-long ceremony, the Pope met with Zairean students and African intellectuals, but canceled the “evening of culture” that had been arranged for him, in solidarity with the nine persons who had been trampled to death and the eighty others injured in the crush to enter the square—a tragedy of which he had been unaware until informed by President Mobutu in the early evening.20
Meeting with Polish missionaries in Zaire, John Paul remarked that he found the process of a new nation’s birth, this “sense of a beginning” to be “most fascinating.” He then had something to say, if indirectly, to his critics back in Rome: “Some people think that the Pope should not travel so much. He should stay in Rome, as before. I often hear such advice, or read it in newspapers. But the local people here say, ‘Thank God you came here, for you can only learn about us by coming. How could you be our pastor without knowing us? Without knowing who we are, how we live, what is the historical moment we are going through?’ This confirms me in the belief that it is time for the Bishops of Rome…to become successors not only of Peter but also of St. Paul, who, as we know, could never sit still and was constantly on the move.”21
He left them an image of Our Lady of Częstochowa, “so that you could have in this black continent a likeness of our Black Madonna. It’s not the same black as the African one, but still black. And I think that because of that your faithful, your black parishioners, will easily find an understanding of that black Mother of Christ.”22
After spending the better part of four days in Kinshasa, John Paul II’s African pilgrimage continued at an accelerated pace. Brazzaville, the capital of Congo, was given half a day on the schedule for May 5. The officially Marxist government gave everyone a holiday and permitted an open-air Mass, celebrated in temperatures over 100° Fahrenheit.23 As the Pope drove through Brazzaville, en route to praying at the tomb of the assassinated Cardinal Emile Biayenda, virtually the entire population was in the streets to greet him.24 The Pope then flew back to northeast Zaire, to Kisangani, to repay the visit that its archbishop, Augustin Fataki Alueke, had paid him in Kraków in 1978. He stayed in a mission house overnight, and celebrated Mass the next morning for hundreds of thousands of Zaireans, paying tribute to the religious and lay missionaries, men and women, who had been murdered in Kisangani and elsewhere in 1964.25
Flying to East Africa that noon, John Paul arrived in Nairobi at 4 P.M., where he responded to President Daniel arap Moi’s welcome in English and a few words of Swahili. He concluded with the words of the Kenyan national anthem, “May the God of all creation bless our country and nation,” and when he repeated the phrase in Swahili, the enormous crowd erupted in cheers. The next day, May 7, produced the most striking visual image of the pilgrimage and the Pope’s most memorable statement. Mass at Uhuru Park drew more than a million Kenyans. During the ceremonies, John Paul was given numerous presents, among them a live goat that, as readers of Tygodnik Powszechny were later informed, “made itself heard during the service.” The unforgettable image was of the Pope, wearing a splendid headdress of ostrich feathers, with a shield in one hand and a spear in the other, seated on a leopard-skin-covered drum. The statement was a simple one, but it expressed the heart of John Paul’s Christ-centered humanism: “Christ is not only God, but also a man. As a human being, he is also an African.” The vast congregation exploded in applause, at which John Paul added a line: “On my next visit to Kenya I will surely preach my homily in Swahili.”26
The Pope flew across the continent the next day, landing in Accra, the capital of Ghana. The departure scene in Nairobi, where the crowd had gathered before the Pope’s 8 A.M. departure, was another astonishment. The exultant crowd, which had been singing and dancing for hours, knelt in silence as the papal jet climbed into the sky. Half an hour after the plane had disappeared, the crowd, urged by police to leave, remained, still silent in prayer.27
John Paul II insisted on an ecumenical meeting in each of his pilgrimages. The meeting in Accra had an international quality, since the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, was in Ghana at the same time. The Bishop of Rome and the head of the Anglican Communion met in the Vatican embassy and later issued a communiqué stating that “time is too short and the need too pressing to waste Christian energies on pursuing old rivalries”—a statement with particular relevance in the African mission fields.28 After Ghana, John Paul visited Upper Volta (later Burkina Faso) and Ivory Coast (where he had his first major meeting with a large Muslim population) before returning to Rome the night of May 12.
He had delivered fifty major addresses in ten days and had left his traveling party and the reporters covering him gasping in his wake. Halfway through the pilgrimage, the correspondent of the West German Deutsche Presse Agentur sent home a dispatch with the title, “The Pope Holds Out.” Some of the prelates in the papal entourage seemed to be “at the end of their tether” after five days in Africa, and the journalists were miserable in the tropical heat. “The Pope is the only one not to show any signs of fatigue. When he left the plane in Kisangani, in the midst of the green hell of the jungle in northern Zaire, he looked just as fresh as when he left Rome.”
The observant German correspondent thought he had detected the secret of papal resilience in one of John Paul’s characteristic personal habits. He could tune out the maelstrom around him, even during prolonged ceremonies, and refresh himself from what could only be described as a kind of inner well: “His eyes are then focused in the distance, as if into another world from which he derives his inexhaustible energy.”29 Believers often talk about the “power of prayer.” John Paul, in those moments when he did seem somewhere else, was in fact praying—and recharging his personal batteries for the next encounter, speech, or Mass.
He had enjoyed himself enormously in Africa and was moved and invigorated by the unselfconscious joy of these new Christians.30 John Paul wasn’t above teasing those who were falling behind his ferocious pace. At one point he waved to a German TV crew and said, “How about you guys, are you still alive?” As for his exhausted curial colleagues, he told them, “Don’t worry, we’ll spend Christmas in the snow for a change, in Terminillo”—a popular ski resort in the Abruzzi. The prelates, accustomed to the traditional pace of the Vatican, were not entirely comforted.31
MARS HILL REVISITED
The evangelical freedom lived so spontaneously by Africa’s Christians stood in marked contrast to the mood of those Western European Catholics who had become convinced of their irrelevance to modern life. Two and a half weeks after he flew out of Abidjan, John Paul tried to do something about the depressed condition of Catholicism in France.
The occasion for his first pastoral visit to the “eldest daughter of the Church” was an invitation to address the Executive Council of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, headquartered in Paris. It was an opportunity to speak before a world audience on what had quickly become one of the dominant public themes of his pontificate—the priority of culture in shaping the human future. At the same time, a papal address to UNESCO had to be set in the proper pastoral context, and John Paul was eager to challenge a country whose culture he had long admired to retrieve its Catholic roots. The UNESCO address thus took place in between a pastoral visit to Paris and a pilgrimage to Lisieux and the Carmelite convent of the “Little Flower,” St. Thérèse, perhaps the most popular of modern Catholic saints.
In a radio and television broadcast to the French nation three days before he arrived, the Pope said he hoped that the “special situation” of French Catholicism since Vatican II was “a question of what are called ‘growing pains.’”32 That hypothe
sis was tested in four days even more crammed with activities than Africa had been. John Paul arrived in Paris on a Friday morning, May 30, 1980, and by the time he left from Lisieux the following Monday evening, he had given twenty-eight addresses to virtually every sector of French Catholicism. In addition, he met with the Chief Rabbi of Paris and leaders of the French Jewish community, with Muslim leaders, and with public officials including President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, Prime Minister Raymond Barre, and Jacques Chirac, the mayor of Paris.
John Paul returned time and again to the theme that French Catholics should throw off their sense of marginality, recognize their dignity, and be proud of their Christian heritage, which had done so much to shape what he called “the French genius.” His response to President Giscard’s welcoming speech on May 30 defined his mission. He had come, he said, to deliver a message of faith: “Of faith in God, of course, but also…of faith in man, of faith in the marvelous possibilities that have been given to him, in order that he may use them wisely and for the sake of the common good, for the glory of the Creator.”33
The French bishops got the same message, forcefully, on June 1. There was to be no retreat into a bunker of solipsism, licking the wounds of recent centuries. Of course there was despair in modern society. But were the bishops not the bearers of “the Gospel and of holiness, which is a special heritage of the Church of France? Does not Christianity belong immanently to the ‘genius of your nation’? Is not France still ‘the eldest daughter of the Church’?”34 At the papal Mass at Le Bourget Airport earlier that day, the Pope had been ever more blunt, asking the 350,000 present and the rest of French Catholicism about their fidelity: “Allow me…to question you: ‘France, eldest daughter of the Church, are you faithful to the promises of your baptism?’ Allow me to ask you: ‘France, daughter of the Church and educator of peoples, are you faithful, for the good of man, to the covenant with eternal wisdom?’”35
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