Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  Four days of papal exhortation could not reverse trends more than two centuries old, nor could it heal the divisions between left and right in French Catholicism. Eight months after his French pilgrimage, convinced that a new kind of leadership was imperative in the French Church, John Paul would make a daring episcopal appointment in an effort to change the course of modern French Catholic history.

  The Pope regarded his UNESCO speech on June 2 as one of the most important addresses of his life. It was very much the product of Karol Wojtyła, philosopher of culture, and included several excursions into technical philosophical language that must have puzzled the delegates who were not simply lost. At one point, John Paul, speaking in French, described the human person as “the only ontic subject of culture” and observed that, because we judge culture a posteriori, by its products, a culture “contains in itself the possibility of going back, in the opposite direction, to ontic-causal dependencies.” Within the dense prose, though, John Paul offered a passionate defense of the human spirit and its creativity, on what he described as the “Areopagus,” the Mars Hill of the modern world.

  As St. Paul had done on the Areopagus of Athens (see Acts 17.16–34), John Paul began with a diagnosis of his audience’s situation. A growing lack of confidence about humanity’s prospects was draining modern life of the “affirmation and joy” essential to human creativity. The answer to this crisis, he proposed, could only be found in the realm of the human spirit, the world of culture, for culture included all those products of human creativity that make us more fully human and that contribute, not simply to our having more, but to our being more. Culture had a spiritual core, and could not be understood, as Marxists understood it, as a by-product of various economic forces. So he had come to UNESCO to “proclaim my admiration before the creative riches of the human spirit, before its incessant efforts to know and strengthen the identity of man.”

  The defense of human persons who must be loved, not for their utility but for the grandeur of their “particular dignity,” linked the message of Christ and his Church and the modern quest for human dignity and freedom. It was not true, John Paul argued, that religious faith reduced human beings to a condition of immature dependency. The evidence that the religious impulse was of the essence of the “whole man” was right before their eyes: wherever religious institutions had been suppressed and believers had been made second-class citizens, religious ideas and works of art had reemerged time and again. The truth about the “whole man” demanded to be expressed.

  The same was true of national cultures. Try as oppressors might, the “sovereignty of society which is manifested in the culture of a nation” could not be completely suppressed, because it was through that cultural sovereignty that the human person “is supremely sovereign.”

  The challenge before UNESCO was to guard the fundamental spiritual sovereignty of the human person, which expressed itself through the creativity of individuals and the cultures of nations. The delegates should oppose any “colonialism” by which a materially stronger political force tried to subjugate the spiritual sovereignty of a culture. Being able to speak to the leadership of UNESCO, he concluded, fulfilled “one of the deepest desires of my heart.” Thus he wanted to leave them with a “cry…from the inmost depths of my soul: Yes! The future of man depends on culture! Yes! The peace of the world depends on the primacy of the spirit! Yes! The peaceful future of mankind depends on love….”36

  The Bishop of Orléans, Jean-Marie Lustiger, listening to John Paul at UNESCO, thought to himself, “Communism is finished.” Somebody had finally said that economics did not rule the world, and that culture was the real engine of history.37

  HARD CASES: BRAZIL AND WEST GERMANY

  On June 27, 1980, John Paul II made further changes in the Curia, one of which would have a marked impact on Catholic life in the United States. Cardinal Sergio Pignedoli, whose widely bruited papal candidacy in 1978 turned out to have been a journalistic fantasy, had died. To succeed him as President of the Vatican’s Secretariat for Non-Christians, John Paul named Archbishop Jean Jadot, a Belgian who had been apostolic delegate in the United States since 1973. Jadot was replaced in Washington by Archbishop Pio Laghi, who as nuncio in Argentina had helped facilitate the Holy See’s mediation of the Beagle Channel dispute.38 At Laghi’s departure audience, John Paul “ticked off on four fingers” his concerns about the Church in the United States to his new Washington representative: the effective proclamation of the Gospel, including the celebration of the sacraments and religious education; the appointment of bishops; the state of religious life in monasteries and convents; and the formation of priests in seminaries.39 At the same time, Cardinal Władysław Rubin was named Prefect of the Congregation for Oriental [Eastern-rite] Churches; Cardinal Pietro Palazzini, a man with a reputation for getting things done in the languid Roman bureaucracy, was named Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, which John Paul wanted to rein-vigorate; Bishop Paul Poupard, rector of Paris’s Institut Catholique, was called to Rome to head the Secretariat for Non-Believers; and Father Jan Schotte, who had won the Pope’s confidence in the first year of the pontificate, was named Secretary of the Pontifical Commission “Justice and Peace.”

  The next day, John Paul received Orthodox Archbishop Meliton of Chalcedon and a delegation from the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople, who had come to Rome for the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul. Then, on June 30, John Paul took off for an eleven-hour flight to Brasilia, the modernistic capital of the world’s largest Catholic country, where he spent twelve days developing further the meaning of the title “universal pastor.”

  “John of God”

  It was a pilgrimage fraught with difficulties. The Brazilian government, many of whose senior officials were Catholics, and the Church leadership were in conflict over the slow pace of democratization, the continued jailing of political prisoners, and the country’s vast disparities in wealth. The government complained to the nuncio that Church leaders failed to condemn the violent left; the bishops responded that the government was doing virtually nothing on behalf of the poor. The Brazilian bishops were unhappy about the way their activities and ideas were reported to the Vatican; some in Rome thought the Brazilian bishops had gone off the theological and political deep end. There were even quarrels about where the pilgrimage would begin. The Brazilians proposed Fortaleza, in the poorest part of the country, where the Pope could inaugurate a national Eucharistic Congress; the Vatican Secretariat of State insisted on Brasilia, lest the government be offended.

  None of this augured another papal triumph. Yet somehow, over twelve days, John Paul, who had learned Portuguese in the months prior to his departure for Brasilia and used it throughout Brazil, managed to create a measure of unity in a divided Church and a divided society. Twenty million people saw the Pope in person and tens of millions more saw him on television. Balance, with evangelical edge, was the watchword of the entire pilgrimage.

  On the first day, the Pope met with President João Batista Figueiredo, attended an official reception for 2,000 invited guests from the elite of Brazilian society, and then spent a half-hour at the local jail, talking with prisoners. At a Mass for a half-million youngsters in Belo Horizonte—from the altar platform, the Pope could barely see the end of the vast congregation, which extended down into a valley—John Paul gave Holy Communion to a blind boy, a paralytic girl, two lepers, a Polish nun, two university students, several workers, and a couple marking their sixty-eighth wedding anniversary. There, the youngsters started a chant, “John of God! Our king!” that was soon picked up by others around the vast country—until the Pope met with 150,000 workers in São Paulo, who altered the chant to “John of God is our brother!” There, the Pope denounced “the chasm” between the wealthy and “the majority living in poverty” while preaching that “the class struggle advocated by material ideologies cannot give anyone happiness—it can only be achieved through Christian social justice.” John Paul accepted a memo
randum on the repression of workers presented by a delegation of Christian trade unionists and addressed to “Our comrade in labor, John Paul II, Christ’s worker and our colleague.”40

  In Rio de Janeiro, as the Pope walked through a favela teeming with poverty, the people greeted him with a specially composed samba. John Paul took the ring from his finger and gave it to the local parish; it was the ring Pope Paul VI had given him when naming him a cardinal.41 At São Salvador da Bahia in the poverty-stricken northeast, he urged all those who had influence in Brazilian society—professionals, entrepreneurs, politicians, labor leaders, teachers—to build a “social order based on justice” and a society that recognized the primacy of ethics over technology and the priority of people over things. Deep in the Amazon jungle, where he took part in a waterborne procession of thousands of small craft, the Pope met with local Indian leaders, who charged the government with a policy of virtual genocide. The local authorities had wanted the Indians to perform a dance, but the native peoples had refused, insisting that they were not actors and this was not entertainment. John Paul asked the chiefs for documentation of their plight, which they provided.

  In Recife, John Paul publicly embraced the most controversial Brazilian prelate, Archbishop Helder Camara. But the Brazilian bishops had to be reminded of their unique mission as well as encouraged, and so the Pope’s four-hour, closed-door address to the episcopal conference was an extensive reflection on the Church’s distinct character as a religious community, on Catholic social doctrine, and on the imperative of strengthening Catholic unity. An engaged Church, but not a partisan Church; a Church with a special care for the poor, but not a Church espousing class struggle; a Church of and for the people, but a Church with a doctrine and an ordained leadership; a clergy passionate about social justice, but not clerical politicians or revolutionaries; a Church, to put it simply, of Vatican II in its fullness—that was the Church John Paul urged his bishops to help build in Brazil. Predictably, the address was described by some as “conservative.” The more accurate term would have been “evangelical.”42

  In the Land of Luther

  Catholicism in West Germany was another hard case for John Paul II, whose first pastoral pilgrimage there took place from November 15 to November 19, 1980.

  German theological scholarship had deeply influenced the Second Vatican Council, sometimes described as the Council at which the Rhine flowed into the Tiber. Yet German theology had divided in the post-conciliar years and former allies had become foes, often amid intense acrimony. The country, meanwhile, remained thoroughly secular. Very few West German Catholics attended Mass regularly. Yet theirs was arguably the wealthiest Church in the world, at least in terms of liquid assets. A “church tax” automatically collected by the state for the Church’s use had given West German Catholicism vast financial resources. This, in turn, gave the German Catholic development agencies, Adveniat and Misereor, great influence in the Third World, where many bishops depended on German subsidies for their pastoral programs. For all its intellectual accomplishments, though, German Catholicism continued to struggle with a deep-set, if almost never-conceded, cultural inferiority complex. The scars from Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, which had tried to enforce the notion that a good German was a good German Protestant, had not entirely healed. Since the Second World War, there was the new challenge of an aggressive secularism allied with philosophy, literature, and the arts, and the war itself had left behind a burden of conscience.43

  Many expected John Paul’s five days in West Germany to be something of a disaster. They were not. They even became something of a personal triumph, as previously skeptical or hostile Germans found themselves glued to their televisions, seemingly mesmerized by the personality of a Polish Pope who could say, on his arrival, that he wanted his pilgrimage to “honor the great German nation.” Ecumenists were pleased that John Paul went out of his way to mention the 450th anniversary of the Augsburg Confession, the central doctrinal statement of the Lutheran Reformation, as an occasion to intensify efforts toward fulfilling Christ’s prayer, “that they may all be one” (John 17.21).44

  The Pope’s defense of marriage and the Church’s sexual ethic was humanistic rather than authoritarian: just as there was no “trial” life and no “trial” death,” there was no “trial” love or “trial” marriage, “for one cannot love only on trial, accept a person only on trial and for a limited time.”45 His address to 6,000 German professors and students at Cologne was a paean to Christian scholarship and the mutual enrichment of faith and reason.46 He urged the German bishops to strengthen the Church’s unity by helping those usually labeled “progressives” to overcome the false dichotomy often posed between an authoritative religious tradition and human freedom, and by helping those alienated by change to understand that “the Church of Vatican II and that of Vatican I and of the Council of Trent and of the first Councils, is one and the same Church.”47

  His old friend and editor, Jerzy Turowicz, reporting on the pilgrimage for Kraków’s Tygodnik Powszechny, wrote that “the Pope’s presence wiped out worn stereotypes [and] changed the image of the papacy and the Catholic Church.”48 It was an understandable exaggeration from a man deeply committed to German-Polish reconciliation and eager to see John Paul’s image as an ogre shattered. That, at least, had happened. The people of West Germany saw for themselves a man of transparent faith who had demonstrated his ability to be a “universal pastor” in the midst of painful historical memories. John Paul’s first pilgrimage to West Germany did not dramatically change the Church’s situation in the Federal Republic, though, nor did it succeed in lowering the level of tension between many German Catholic intellectuals and Rome. As the pontificate unfolded, those tensions would wax and wane. They would never be satisfactorily resolved, and the German-speaking Catholic world (in Austria and Switzerland as well as in Germany) would prove singularly resistant to the teaching of John Paul II.

  THE COMMUNITY OF THE FAMILY

  The Church’s responsibility toward families and family life was the theme of the first General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops held under John Paul II’s leadership. Before the Synod opened on September 26, 1980, the Pope made another intervention into world politics on behalf of human rights.

  The Priority of Religious Freedom

  The occasion was the meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe [CSCE] being held in Madrid. The Helsinki Final Act, signed in 1975, provided for periodic review conferences to monitor compliance, and the Madrid review conference of 1980–1981 became an international forum for holding the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact satellites accountable to the human rights guarantees they had signed at Helsinki five years earlier.49 The human rights situation in the European communist world had not improved since the Final Act was concluded. In fact, it had arguably gotten worse.

  On September 1, 1980, the Pope sent a personal letter to the heads of state of the thirty-five Helsinki Final Act signatory nations, soon to meet in Madrid. There was little of the usual diplomatic indirection at the beginning of the document. John Paul got straight to the point: human rights were increasingly recognized around the world as a crucial component of the pursuit of peace, and the Madrid meeting ought to undertake a “serious examination of the present situation” of freedom in Europe, with special reference to religious freedom.

  The Pope’s letter offered a checklist by which the Madrid review conference could measure whether religious freedom was being honored in practice. Were individuals free to believe and to join a believing community? Could they pray individually and collectively and have places of worship? Were parents free to educate their children in their faith, and to choose religious schools for their children without penalty? Could chaplains and other ministers offer religious assistance in public facilities—hospitals, the military, prisons? Were men and women free to believe without suffering social, political, or professional penalties? Could religious institutions choose their own leadership, manage their
own affairs, and educate their own clergy? Was the ministry exercised freely? Were religious communities free to communicate their faith, through the spoken and written word? Could they publish and receive publications and use the mass media? Were they free to perform charitable works in society? Could they freely maintain contact with co-religionists and religious authorities in other countries? No communist country even came close to satisfying these concrete criteria of respect for religious freedom.

  John Paul II’s letter to the Madrid CSCE review conference was another unmistakable challenge to the Yalta system and to the ideology that, in Soviet eyes, justified it. That it was dated the day after the Polish government had agreed, at Gdańsk, to permit free trade unions only made matters worse from the Soviet point of view. A week later, John Paul gave the screw another twist by announcing the theme of his annual message for the January 1 World Day of Peace: “To serve peace, respect freedom.” The Soviet claim that peace could be pursued without reference to human rights and other controverted moral issues—which Andrei Gromyko had so blandly proposed to John Paul in January 1979—was under assault on several fronts.

  Synod on the Family