John Paul II appointed two special judges to consider the question from the theological and historical points of view. Their reports were then submitted to a special advisory commission. The majority of the commission concluded that Blessed Maximilian Kolbe’s self-sacrifice did not satisfy the traditional criteria for martyrdom, heroic as it undoubtedly was. On the day of his canonization, it was unclear whether Kolbe would be given the accolade of a martyr, as many Poles, Germans, and others wished.
October 10, 1982, a magnificent autumn morning, found a quarter of a million people in St. Peter’s Square, where they saw a great banner, a portrait of Father Kolbe, draped from the central loggia. Still, the question hung in the air: Would Kolbe be recognized as a martyr? The answer came when John Paul II processed out of the basilica and into the square wearing red vestments, the liturgical color of martyrs. He had overridden the counsel of his advisory commission, and in his homily he declared that “in virtue of my apostolic authority, I have decreed that Maximilian Mary Kolbe, who following his beatification was venerated as a confessor, will henceforth be venerated also as a martyr!”26
John Paul II was making an important theological point in deciding that St. Maximilian Kolbe was indeed a martyr—systematic hatred for the human person (systematic odium hominis, so to speak) was a contemporary equivalent of the traditional criterion for martyrdom, odium fidei. Because Christian faith affirmed the truth about the inalienable dignity of the human person, anyone who hated that truth hated, implicitly, the Christian faith. Modern totalitarianism was an implicit form of odium fidei, because it reduced persons to things.27
Three months after Kolbe’s canonization, John Paul II issued another apostolic constitution, Divinus Perfectionis Magister [The Master of Divine Perfection]. Dated January 25, 1983, it radically revised the process by which the Church recognized one of its sons or daughters as a saint.
The idea of officially recognized “saints” may seem in conflict with the idea of a universal vocation to holiness in the Church. If everyone is called to be a saint—if, in fact, everyone must become a saint, recognized or not, in order to enter heaven—what is the point of singling out particular men and women for devotion? The two ideas in fact complement each other. Every Christian has a vocation. Sometimes this vocation is entirely singular, embodying some previously unexplored or underappreciated aspect of God’s design for the Church; the great founders of new religious orders, for example, are examples of saints as God’s “prime numbers.”28 At other times, sanctity emerges more organically, as when a mother, father, priest, religious sister, bishop, pope, artist, or scholar lives his or her vocation in an exemplary, but not necessarily path-breaking, way. In both cases, the Church’s public recognition of a saint serves the universal call to holiness. God’s “prime numbers” are a reminder that there are always new aspects of God’s call to holiness to be discerned and lived out. Saintly exemplars of traditional vocations are models of how Christians less fiercely touched by the divine will can achieve sanctity through grace.
Since Pope Urban VIII’s reforms in 1625 and 1634, the Church had determined whether someone was a saintly prime number or a saintly exemplar through an adversarial legal process. The burden of proof fell entirely on those promoting the “cause” of the potential saint. Proponents of the cause made their case. An official known as the Promoter of the Faith (more popularly, the “Devil’s Advocate”) then did everything in his power to question the sanctity of the candidate, who was, so to speak, assumed guilty until proven innocent.29 The candidate’s lawyers replied in turn, in what amounted to a posthumous religious trial.
Divinus Perfectionis Magister changed all this, dramatically. The legal process was replaced by an academic-historical procedure, the Devil’s Advocate was jettisoned, and so was the adversarial joust between the Promoter of the Faith and the candidate’s defense attorneys. Theological consultors replaced lawyers as the principal figures in the process and a new group, the “college of relators,” was given responsibility for determining the truth about a candidate’s life by supervising the production of a critical, documented biography (the positio). There would still be witnesses to give testimony about a candidate, but the paradigm guiding the whole process would now be a postdoctoral seminar of historians, not a criminal court. The “relator” of a cause had taken the place of both the defense attorney and the Devil’s Advocate; scholarship had replaced legal advocacy.30
The new procedures were aimed at making the process swifter, less expensive, more scholarly, more collegial (local bishops now had the entire responsibility for assembling all the relevant data on a candidate), and better geared to producing results. The juridical process was not without merit; it protected the Church against transient enthusiasms and false claims of miracles (which are required for all canonizations, and for the beatification of non-martyrs). The new procedures, though, were more attuned to identifying what was distinctive about a life, and trusted the skills of historical scholarship to ensure that what was distinctive was also authentically Christian. The new procedures also took far more seriously Vatican II’s vision of the plurality of forms of sanctity in the Church. The legal procedures had risked imposing a kind of abstract uniformity on the universal call to holiness.31
The new procedures also reflected something of the Pope’s dramatic sensibility, his sense that history is a stage on which God’s freedom and human freedom are both in play, in a drama with nothing less than salvation at issue. Karol Wojtyła’s pastoral experience had taught him that saints were all around us, and he thought the Church ought to lift more of them up as evidence of life’s richly, even fearsomely, dramatic texture. Viewed from one angle, Divinus Perfectionis Magister was a radical act of bureaucratic reconstruction. Viewed from inside John Paul II’s pastoral intention, it was another papal reminder that our lives are fraught with more consequence than we often imagine.
A “Personal Prelature” for Opus Dei
John Paul’s reform of the beatification and canonization process was widely applauded. Far more controversy swirled around another innovation—the establishment of a “personal prelature” to govern the movement known as “Opus Dei,” “The Work of God,” or, as its members prefer, simply “The Work.”
Founded in Spain in 1928 by Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, a priest who died in 1975, the movement counts some 80,000 lay members and 2,000 priests worldwide. Opus Dei members include celibate “numeraries,” lay men and women who live in Opus Dei centers while working in the world; “oblates,” celibates who live outside the centers; and “supernumeraries,” married men and women who pursue their own careers and live in their own homes. The Work sponsors universities in Rome, Spain, and Latin America. Its priests provide spiritual direction to Opus Dei members, conduct chaplaincies on or near college and university campuses, and staff other Opus Dei centers, where evangelization of the unchurched is a priority.
Opus Dei’s critics charge it with having been a bulwark of the Franco regime in Spain. Few of those critics acknowledge that Opus Dei members took part in the first public demonstrations against Franco and played crucial roles in Spain’s transition to democracy.32 The critics depict the Work as a preconciliar and reactionary movement. Members of Opus Dei constantly under-score the movement’s emphasis on the lay vocation in the world, a key theme of Vatican II. Even those sympathetic to Opus Dei can find its basic text, a collection of Monsignor Escrivá’s maxims known as The Way, which has sold over four million copies, less than scintillating; those same critically sympathetic observers also note that Opus Dei has provided spiritual help and encouragement to some exceptionally sophisticated men and women. Some of the criticism of Opus Dei is undoubtedly motivated by jealousy of the movement’s élan and its prodigious success at fund-raising for its works, which include several training centers for the disadvantaged. It also seems likely that the defensiveness of some Opus Dei members contributes to charges that the movement has a secretiveness about it that does not becom
e an ecclesial organization. The historically minded recognize that many of the things said about Opus Dei in the twentieth century, especially the charges of being an elitist fifth column in the Church, were said about the early Jesuits in Counter-Reformation Europe.
Cardinal Karol Wojtyła had long been sympathetic to the Work and had spoken to one of its student centers in Rome during the 1970s. Opus Dei’s stress on sanctifying the workplace through apostolically committed professional men and women paralleled his own understanding of one of the key themes of Vatican II. Thus it was not surprising that, as Pope, John Paul II was sympathetic to Opus Dei’s request that it be recognized as a “personal prelature,” a jurisdictional innovation in the Church’s governance envisioned by Vatican II.33 In the case of Opus Dei, granting the movement’s request for this status meant recognizing it as, in effect, a worldwide, nonterritorial diocese. The movement’s leadership argued that this admittedly innovative arrangement would allow the “prelate” who led it to promote the movement’s distinctive spirituality and more effectively deploy its priests across national and diocesan boundaries.
There was resistance to the idea of personal prelatures in the Roman Curia and among some bishops. Opus Dei’s critics were fiercely opposed to granting the movement this unprecedented status, which would effectively remove it from the juridical authority of local bishops. The Pope was not persuaded by the critics’ arguments, and, after appropriate consultation, he issued an apostolic constitution on November 28, 1982, that transformed Opus Dei into the Church’s first personal prelature, naming Monsignor Escrivá’s closest associate and successor, Alvaro del Portillo, as its Prelate.34
For John Paul, it was another way to underscore his commitment to fostering the universal vocation to holiness.35 Opus Dei would, however, remain a subject of controversy throughout the pontificate.*
CONFRONTATION IN NICARAGUA
To become a saint is the path of authentic human liberation. Other concepts of “liberation” are always current, however, as was evident in the ongoing controversy over the future of the Church in Latin America. In the early 1980s, John Paul II thought that Latin American Catholicism was caught at the intersection of three sets of problems.
First, there was a theological problem: many of the doctrinally unacceptable ideas promoted by liberation theologians were still shaping lives and destinies throughout the continent, and particularly in Central America. These false theological ideas had led in turn to the second set of problems involving the Church’s own life as a religious community. In Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, a “Popular Church” was self-consciously trying to supplant what it dismissed as the “institutional Church.” In Nicaragua, this “Popular Church” was overtly supported by the Sandinista government, which included priests who remained in public office in defiance of orders from their religious superiors. The government was also putting serious pressure on the Church’s bishops and pastors. When the revolution led to the scandalous situation of priests supporting a regime that was harassing the Church, the corruption had obviously become acute. Finally, there was the longstanding and frequently brutal persecution in Cuba, where the Castro regime had a rope around the Church’s neck.37
John Paul’s 1979 Puebla address should have made clear what he thought was the right path to a truly Christian liberation of Central America: an engaged Church that was not a partisan Church; a Church that tried to build communio out of fragmented and violent Central American societies; a Church that refused to identify the Gospel with the program of any political party; a Church that did not substitute worldly utopias for the Kingdom of God; and, as always, a Church that vigorously defended religious freedom against persecutors of any ideological stripe. That was emphatically not the kind of unified, engaged Church to be found in Central America in the early 1980s.
El Salvador had been caught in a bloody civil war between a military-dominated government and the guerrillas of the Faribundo Marti National Liberation Front [FMLN] since the late 1970s. With virtual legal impunity, the government and the Salvadoran military committed gross human rights violations in their attempt to crush the Marxist-inspired guerrilla movement. The guerrillas were committed to the violent overthrow of the regime and were no strangers to the abuse of persons. A nonviolent “third way,” centered on the Christian Democratic Party and its leader, José Napoleon Duarte, himself a onetime victim of the military, struggled to survive. The Salvadoran Church had become polarized and divided in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as the archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, became an increasingly vocal critic of the regime’s human rights abuses. Romero, in turn, had been deeply influenced by Jesuit liberation theologians Jon Sobrino and Ignacio Ellacuría.38
As the country descended more deeply into a spiral of violence, Archbishop Romero was murdered at the altar on March 24, 1980, by members of a reactionary death squad acting with at least tacit support from the government. In a telegram to the President of the Salvadoran Bishops’ Conference, John Paul II bluntly condemned the “sacrilegious assassination” with his “deepest reprobation.”39 Romero’s successor, Archbishop Arturo Rivera Damas, had tried to get a grip on the deteriorating situation. He was outspoken in his criticism of human rights abuses from whatever quarter, but he could not agree with those who, however brave and dedicated in their resistance to rightist violence, ignored the atrocities of the FMLN. He quietly moved the archdiocesan Justice and Peace Commission, which he believed had turned a blind eye to FMLN crimes, out of the archbishop’s residence. In doing so, the archbishop reduced the suspicion in which some anti-FMLN political forces held the Church and strengthened his moral authority as a voice against human rights abuses whatever their origin.40 In a situation essentially out of control in the early 1980s, Archbishop Rivera tried to strengthen the Christian Democratic alternative to both the bloody-minded militarist right and the guerrillas of the FMLN. It would be more than a decade before the guerrillas were defeated and the military brought under effective civilian authority.
For all the horror of El Salvador, though, Nicaragua was the key to the dilemma of authentic Christian liberation in Central America. More than any other place in Latin America, Nicaragua under the Sandinista regime was a laboratory for the various liberation theologies’ claims. The Church situation was even more conflicted than in El Salvador. Two priests were actively involved in the government: Miguel D’Escoto, the foreign minister, and Ernesto Cardenal, the minister of culture; a third priest, Father Cardenal’s brother, Fernando, a Jesuit, directed the Sandinista literacy program. The archbishop of Managua, Miguel Obando Bravo, a stocky man of peasant background who had originally supported the revolution against the Somoza family dictatorship, had become the Sandinistas’ most visible and effective critic after the new rulers failed to deliver on their guarantees of civil rights and political freedoms. The Sandinistas, in turn, actively fomented the “Popular Church” in opposition to the archbishop.41
The apostolic nuncio in Managua, Archbishop Andrea Cordero Lanza di Montezemolo, a gray-haired Italian nobleman whose father, an anti-fascist leader in Mussolini’s Italy, had been murdered by the Nazis, was one of the most respected figures in the Holy See’s diplomatic service. His posting to Nicaragua was an indication of how serious the situation there was thought to be. Montezemolo’s initial encounters with the Sandinista leadership, who habitually called him “Comrade Nuncio,” verged on the comic, although it was comedy with an ugly edge. Daniel Ortega, head of the Sandinista front and leader of the government, once careened up to the nunciature driving a red sports car, followed by several jeeps full of Sandinista troops armed to the teeth. Archbishop Montezemolo met this curious delegation at the gate and told Commandante Ortega that he was welcome, but that the soldiers and their guns had to stay outside: “This is an embassy.”42
Now, the nuncio had to negotiate John Paul’s visit to Nicaragua, part of a papal pilgrimage to Central America in March 1983. Archbishop Obando and the bishops of Nicaragua had
invited the Pope because, as Obando later put it, “we were convinced that the presence of the Holy Father would work to the advantage of the Church and the good of our people.”43 As Archbishop Montezemolo later recalled, the Sandinistas were not in a cooperative frame of mind.
Their first gambit involved the archbishop of Managua. Commandante Ortega told Montezemolo that “We don’t want the Pope to be seen alone with Archbishop Obando.” Montezemolo replied that this was hardly possible: “He’s the archbishop of the capital city and the president of the episcopal conference.” The eventual agreement was that the Pope would always be accompanied publicly by all the bishops of Nicaragua, but this created its own problem. They all couldn’t fit into the Popemobile. The nuncio started looking for a bus, but none could be found in Nicaragua. Then Montezemolo heard about a Mexican political candidate who had been campaigning in a bus with the roof cut off. The nuncio made inquiries, and the Mexican government flew it to Managua.
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