Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  When it was issued, Laborem Exercens was taken to be the Pope’s philosophical defense of the Solidarity movement. It was that, and more. Its enduring value lies in adding a richly textured analysis of the dignity of work to John Paul’s comprehensive project of revitalizing humanism for the twenty-first century.

  THE AGCA MYSTERY

  Mehmet Ali Agca was quickly apprehended in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981. Since the assassination attempt, he had been in Rome’s Rebibbia prison under interrogation. His trial opened on July 20 at the Palace of Justice, before Judge Severino Santiapichi and a six-man jury. The trial began with a reading of what had been learned during the interrogation. By his own description, Agca was an international terrorist allied with other such terrorists, making no distinction between terrorism of the political left or right. He had said that, although he and he alone had decided to attack the Pope, he hadn’t meant to kill him. If he had, he would have expended all his ammunition rather than firing twice with the pistol he admitted acquiring in Bulgaria. Agca’s testimony to his interrogators was full of inconsistencies and holes, which the report to the trial did not attempt to sort out. The question before this court was whether Agca had deliberately shot the Pope.

  The jurisdiction of the Italian court was challenged by the defense attorney appointed to represent Agca on the grounds that the shooting had taken place on Vatican territory. The court dismissed the challenge, citing the 1929 Lateran Treaty between the Holy See and Italy, which covered just such an eventuality. At this juncture, Agca got up, dismissed his lawyer, and made a brief speech in which he “absolutely” rejected the Italian court’s jurisdiction, claiming that he had been “within the Vatican State…when I shot the head of the Vatican State.” Agca then claimed that he had been tortured during his interrogation, dared the Vatican to act as the independent state it claimed to be, and shouted that he would refuse to cooperate with the trial. When Judge Santiapichi asked whether he would answer questions in court, he said, “I will not answer. I do not recognize this court. This trial is finished, thank you.”

  Why Agca took this line was not clear. He may have been playing for time. He may have been confused because a planned escape from St. Peter’s Square had not worked and he was anticipating an effort to extricate him from Rebibbia prison. He may simply have been recalcitrant. Whatever he may have thought he was doing, Agca’s refusal to cooperate, and what amounted to a confession of guilt, simplified the court’s task. Agca was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment on July 22. At Rebibbia the next day, he told a lawyer that he did not want his right to appeal exercised. Why was another mystery.

  The formal written verdict that concludes an Italian trial on a grave crime was handed down by Judge Santiapichi on September 25. The judge concluded from the evidence that had accumulated since May that Agca had not acted alone: “The threatening figure of Mehmet Ali Agca suddenly appeared among the crowd to execute, with almost bureaucratic coolness, a task entrusted to him by others in a plot obscured by hatred.” Still, the judge conceded, the “evidence…has not permitted us to uncover the identity or the motives of the conspirators…” With Agca presumably safe in Rebibbia, inaccessible to those who might want to silence him forever to preserve the secret of their own complicity, the investigation could go forward.100

  Who was Mehmet Ali Agca? The initial rush to judgment in the Western press had it that Agca was a religious fanatic who had tried to kill the Pope out of sectarian zealotry.101 A variant on this described Agca as a veteran “Grey Wolf,” a member of an ultra-nationalist band of Turkish fanatics with fascist political views who, in the words of columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, “hates the West and Christianity and sought the most effective way to attack them.”102 Still others declared Agca simply mad. None of these initial explanations stood up under closer examination. If Agca was a religious fanatic, why was there no history of piety or serious Islamic religious practice in his background? If he was a dedicated fascist or rightist, why did a note left in his room at the Pensione Isa—evidently meant to be found—say that he had shot the Pope to foster freedom in Afghanistan and El Salvador? Agca’s association with groups that could be labeled “fascist” or “rightist” could have been cover for an entirely different ideological sponsor. If he was a madman, how did he manage to travel so extensively and purposefully, and why was he capable of behaving in a perfectly rational manner when he chose to do so?

  The question of Agca’s identity was clearly connected to the question of why he had shot John Paul.

  Virtually every Pole sympathetic to the Pope, and perhaps many who were not, assumed that Agca had been acting on behalf of the Soviet Union, either directly or through a third party. A Soviet connection was the most plausible answer to the obvious question, who benefited? The threat that John Paul posed, not only to the Warsaw Pact but to the internal order of the USSR, had already been made unmistakably clear. The Soviet media, a useful barometer of Kremlin thinking, had turned against the Pope in an increasingly nasty way in early 1981. In March, a Byelorussian journal described John Paul as a “cunning and dangerous ideological enemy” who had been part of a Nazi-Vatican plot to exterminate the Polish people during World War II, and a “malicious, lowly, perfidious, and backward toady of the American militarists” singing to the tune of his “new boss in the White House.” This vitriol was explicitly linked to the Ukrainian Synod of 1980. That same month, the journal of the Ukrainian Communist Party Central Committee described the Greek Catholic bishops as a “coven of political corpses…who had collaborated with the German occupiers.”103 Agca’s connections to Bulgarians in Rome and elsewhere confirmed Soviet involvement for many Poles. No one with any experience of a Warsaw Pact country believed for an instant that any Bulgarian would have acted independently of Moscow.

  Inside the Vatican, a similar view was widespread, if never even hinted at publicly. Some imagined a kind of Canterbury scenario, in which Leonid Brezhnev (in the role of Henry II) asks whether no one will rid him of this meddlesome priest, and his agents rush to do his bidding, arranging an assassination attempt on John Paul (in the role of Thomas à Becket). A more sophisticated analysis, aware of the degree to which Brezhnev had deteriorated under the ravages of disease, drink, and drugs, looked to Yuri Andropov and the KGB as the initiators of the plot, which Brezhnev (and perhaps the Politburo) then approved. In this scenario, the Soviet Union would have been the prime contractor, through the KGB. The Bulgarian intelligence service would have been the secondary (or even tertiary) contractor, running Agca and then arranging his escape or, far more likely, his elimination.104

  There is some evidence indicating that an abortive assassination plot, with Agca as triggerman and Lech Wałęsa as the target, was afoot in Rome during the Solidarity leader’s January 1981 visit to John Paul II.105 Although Wałęsa made a plausible target from the Soviet point of view, he was a different kind of figure, the head of an organization with a number of vigorous and outspoken leaders, one of whom would certainly have replaced him. John Paul II was a target of another order of magnitude. When word of Cardinal Wyszyński’s fatal illness became known in Moscow, as it surely was by late March 1981, the possibility of a double blow to the Polish threat emerged. If John Paul were assassinated and if Wyszyński died within a brief time frame, the shock might crush Poland’s spirit, containing the threat to the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet internal empire.

  As these speculations were being bruited by Poles, Vatican officials, and others, Leonid Brezhnev sent the recuperating Pope a terse message, saying, “I am deeply indignant at the attempt on your life. I wish you a rapid and complete recovery.”106 The Soviet press occupied itself with blaming the entire affair on the United States. John Paul, it charged, was an obstacle to U.S. policy in the Middle East and El Salvador.107

  There remain any number of loose ends in the papal assassination drama, and the full truth about Agca’s sponsorship and the plot that led to his act of attempted murder on May 13, 1981, ma
y never be known with certainty. That Agca acted alone because of religious fanaticism is simply not a credible hypothesis, given what is already known about his finances, his travels, his contacts, his weapon, and his prior personal history. The relevant Russian archives remain closed to researchers, and even if they were opened, one imagines that this would not be the sort of thing that made it into the files. The principals in any Soviet plot, if one existed, are all long dead. Barring an unforeseen documentary breakthrough, the debate over why and at whose behest Mehmet Ali Agca shot the Pope will continue. The simplest, most compelling answer to the question, Who benefited? will keep alive the intuition that the Soviet Union was not an innocent in this business.108

  Agca’s target has no interest in a documented answer. The night before he was shot, John Paul II read a brief passage from the New Testament as part of Compline, the Church’s nighttime prayer: “Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1 Peter 5.8). That brief text was all the answer John Paul required to the question of why he was shot. There is evil in the world, its name is legion, and it acts through human agents. No further explanation was necessary, and none, in fact, would be more interesting or enlightening.

  THE JESUIT INTERVENTION

  Shortly after returning to the Vatican from his autumn post-operative convalescence at Castel Gandolfo, John Paul II intervened in the internal governance of the Church’s most prestigious male religious community, the Society of Jesus. On October 5, 1981, he appointed Father Paolo Dezza, SJ, as his “personal delegate” to govern the Jesuits, with Father Giuseppe Pittau, SJ, as his deputy. This unprecedented act was the culmination of years of tension between the Vatican and the Society and a papal challenge to the Jesuits to renew their distinctive vocation in its fullness.

  In accepting Ignatius Loyola’s sixteenth-century proposal to form an elite religious community characterized by spiritual fervor, high intellectual capacity, bravery, esprit de corps, self-denying discipline, and fierce loyalty to the papacy, the Catholic Church was taking a considerable risk. Elites cause difficulties in any complex organization—jealousy, factionalism, intrigues, and power struggles. But these difficulties were hardly unknown in the pre–Counter-Reformation Church. The gamble taken on the Jesuits was of a different order: that a self-governing, self-perpetuating, and self-consciously elite corps of clergy would not spin off into a different doctrinal and disciplinary orbit, because it would remain tethered to the teaching authority of the Church by a distinctive vow of obedience to the Bishop of Rome. If that tether ever loosened or was broken, an elite that ennobled the rest of the Church could become a freelancing clique, nominally linked to the Church’s authority but convinced that its own superior intelligence and moral rectitude allowed it to carve out its own path.

  Every great religious charism in the history of Catholicism carries within it a distinctive temptation. The Franciscan temptation, the inversion of St. Francis of Assisi’s loving embrace of creation, is to a saccharine spirituality. The Dominican temptation is to an arid intellectualism, the corruption of St. Dominic’s goal of creating an intellectually vigorous company of preachers. Benedictines, following the Rule laid down by St. Benedict in the sixth century, take a vow of stability, which binds them to a monastery for life; the Benedictine temptation is to let stability decay into complacency. The Jesuit temptation is to become a self-authenticating elite that, imagining itself more enlightened than the Church’s authoritative leadership, no longer holds itself truly accountable to that authority.

  Had this happened to the Society of Jesus in the years since the Second Vatican Council? The international leadership of the Society flatly denied it, but some Jesuits were deeply concerned about the course of their community. They pointed to drastic changes in the formation of young Jesuits since the Council, which they believed had dulled the Society’s intellectual edge, substituted laxity in discipline and a suffocating psychologism for the sometimes excessive rigors of pre-conciliar Jesuit life, and condoned lifestyles that were hard to distinguish as those of vowed religious, when they did not fall off the edge into corruptions of various sorts.109 The Jesuits worried about the Society’s post-conciliar direction were committed to the Church’s social doctrine, and some of them were among its most able exponents. But they believed that Fernando Cardenal, SJ, had jeopardized his priestly vocation and shown dubious judgment by becoming the head of the Nicaraguan literacy program in the employ of a self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist regime. They deplored the pro-abortion voting record of Robert Drinan, SJ, a member of the United States House of Representatives from Massachusetts. And they wondered why the Society’s leadership did not address this new form of political clericalism.110 Some of the Jesuit faculties of theology throughout the world, once known for the most rigorous doctrinal orthodoxy, were now pushing the frontiers of theological speculation in a way that was sharply criticized by some of their peers, including fellow Jesuits. Leading Jesuit intellectuals had become accustomed to publicly challenging the teaching of the Church or the wisdom of its official teachers.111

  Numbers do not tell the entire story of a community, but the change in Jesuit demographics was another cause for concern. There were 36,000 Jesuits in 1965, at the close of Vatican II. Slow recruitment and resignations from the ministry had cut that figure to 29,000 in 1975. The figure would continue to fall worldwide throughout the decade and into the 1980s, even though recruitment accelerated in countries like India. Yet the Jesuits remained a major influence among Roman Catholic religious communities, of both men and women. Historically, they had been leaders, and the direction they had taken since the Council seemed to many others the way to the future. That direction had, after all, been confirmed and enthusiastically endorsed by the Society’s 32nd General Congregation in 1974.

  On December 11, 1978, the Father General of the Society, Pedro Arrupe, a charismatic Basque who had led the Jesuits since 1965, had his first audience with John Paul II, to pledge the Society’s obedience to the new Pope. Ten months later, at the September 1979 meeting of the Jesuit Conference presidents, who met annually to undertake an international review of the Society, John Paul addressed the group at Father Arrupe’s invitation. The message was blunt and the reaction was shock. Given the brief time they had together, John Paul said, he could not review all the positive things the Society was doing. What he did say was to the point: “I want to tell you that you were a matter of concern to my predecessors and you are to the Pope who is talking to you.” In addition to this unambiguous challenge, the Pope sent Father Arrupe a critical talk John Paul I had intended to give to the Jesuit leadership before his death, saying he agreed with everything in it.112

  In June 1979, Father Arrupe had begun speaking confidentially to the Society’s four general assistants, his most senior advisers, about the possibility of his retirement. He had been elected ad vitalitatem, he told them, not ad vitam (for as long as he had vitality, not for life), and he felt his energies waning. The assistants discussed the matter among themselves and with the Father General. Six months later, on January 3, 1980, Arrupe met again with the Pope to arrange another meeting, to which he would bring his general assistants to present their thinking about the future of the Society and determine how that fit in with his goals for the pontificate. John Paul agreed, but the meeting was not scheduled.

  Father Arrupe continued to ponder resignation. In February 1980, he told his four general assistants that he was at peace with his decision to resign. In the first week of March, he requested a consultative vote on his resignation from the assistants, citing age as the sufficiently grave reason required by the Jesuit constitutions. After a week-long formal discernment, the assistants agreed that Arrupe had sufficient reason for resignation. Their judgment was conveyed to him by the senior assistant, an American, Father Vincent O’Keefe, SJ. According to the established procedures, the eighty-five Jesuit provincials throughout the world were then consulted about the
possible resignation, to which they overwhelmingly agreed.

  According to the Jesuit constitutions, Father Arrupe was obliged to summon a General Congregation, the supreme legislative organ of the Society, which was the only body that could accept or decline his resignation. Arrupe explained this to John Paul at a private audience on April 18, 1980. Father O’Keefe had been accustomed to accompanying the Father General to papal audiences, but in this instance he was left outside the room while the Pope and the General met. (This made the assistant nervous; Arrupe, O’Keefe later said, while normally an “articulate man,” became “like a kid” in the Pope’s presence, a phenomenon O’Keefe referred to as Arrupe getting “spaghetti legs.”113) John Paul expressed surprise that the discussion of resignation had proceeded so far and asked Arrupe where, if anywhere, the Pope fit into this. In the Jesuit constitutions, he didn’t, Arrupe explained, although the practice had always been to inform the Pope of plans for a General Congregation and discuss them with him. John Paul then asked Arrupe what he would do if John Paul said he should not resign. Arrupe replied that the Pope was his superior. John Paul concluded the audience by saying that he’d think about the problem and would write Arrupe a letter.114