The Holy Year of the Redemption began on March 25, 1983. On a rainy, chilly afternoon, John Paul II led a procession from the tiny church of St. Stephen of the Abyssinians in the Vatican, through St. Peter’s Square, to the narthex of the basilica. There, wielding the golden hammer used by Pius XI in 1933, he knocked three times on the holy door of St. Peter’s, which was then opened. John Paul kissed the door jamb and went to the papal altar where Mass was celebrated. In his homily, the Pope stressed that, in entering the holy door of St. Peter’s, those present were also symbolically entering “all the Christian communities, whatever their nature and wherever they are in the world, especially in the catacombs of the modern world. The special Jubilee of the Redemption is the Holy Year of the whole Church.”109
During the Holy Year John Paul II baptized twenty-seven adult converts (mostly from Asia), and celebrated the marriages of thirty-eight couples. He beatified ninety-nine martyrs of the French Revolution and two martyrs of the Chinese revolution of the 1930s. In July, he recognized the public veneration of the fifteenth-century painter Fra Angelico, making official what had long been his popular title: “Blessed Fra Angelico.”110
The Holy Year had a pronounced ecumenical dimension. On October 31, John Paul wrote a letter to Cardinal Johannes Willebrands, President of the Secretariat for Christian Unity, to mark the 500th anniversary of the birth of Martin Luther. The letter noted Luther’s “deep religious feeling,” which had shaped a personality “driven with burning passion by the question of eternal salvation.” Healing the breach of the sixteenth century between Roman Catholicism and the Lutheran Reformation would require continued historical scholarship, “without preconceived ideas,” in order to “arrive at a true image of the reformer, of the whole period of the Reformation, and of the persons involved in it. Fault, where it exists, must be recognized, wherever it may lie.” With “a shared interpretation of the past,” Lutherans and Catholics would have a “new point of departure” for their theological dialogue. Beginning with what Lutherans and Catholics held in common—“in the Word of Scripture, in the Confessions of faith, and in the Councils of the ancient Church”—that dialogue should continue in a spirit of “penitence and a readiness to learn from listening.”111
On the Third Sunday of Advent, John Paul visited the Christuskirche of Rome’s Lutheran community, where he participated in and preached at an ecumenical Liturgy of the Word.112 The Lutheran parish had sent out invitations to an “Advent Service with the Bishop of Rome.” Standing in the Christuskirche pulpit wearing a plain red stole over his white papal cassock, John Paul said that the Luther quincentenary was “the daybreak of the advent of the rebuilding of our unity and community.” That unity, he proposed, “is also the best preparation for the advent of God in our time….” The service closed with Roman Catholics and Lutherans reciting the Apostles’ Creed together.113
Ecumenical outreach to eastern Christianity also figured prominently in the Holy Year. On April 16, 1983, John Paul II received Karekin Sarkissian, the Armenian Catholicos of Cilicia. A month later, on May 13, Ignatius IV Hazim became the first Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch to pay a formal ecumenical visit to Rome. On June 6, Moran Mar Basileius Marthoma Matheos I, the Catolicos of the Syrian Orthodox Church of India, came to the Vatican and was received by the Pope. On June 30, John Paul met with Metropolitan Meliton of Chalcedon, the representative of Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios at the Roman celebration of the solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul.
A special Holy Year celebration for children was held in the Paul VI Audience Hall on January 8, 1984. John Paul told 8,000 children that they were “a crown for the Child Jesus,” and admitted to “something you already know well: you are the Pope’s favorites.”114 Later that month, on January 22, John Paul made the first papal visit to a Gypsy community, at Rome’s St. Rita parish.115
Penance and Reconciliation
The Sixth Ordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops met during the Holy Year, from September 29 to October 29, 1983, to consider “Penance and Reconciliation in the Mission of the Church Today.” New forms of religious education and pastoral practice since the Second Vatican Council had helped displace a certain mechanical understanding of sin, confession, and penance from Catholic life, but the post-conciliar period had also seen an unexpected, dramatic, and unwelcome decline in Catholic penitential practice. The long lines of penitents waiting outside confessionals in Catholic churches in the Western world on Saturday afternoons were now a thing of the past. Some pastors had instituted liturgical penance services with “general absolution” granted to the entire congregation, without individual confessions. The decline in penitential practice was linked to the question of what actually constituted a sin. What was the nature of personal moral responsibility, given all that we know of human psychology? Was sin primarily personal or social? Could one sin in such a way as to jeopardize, even cut off, one’s relationship with God?
The 221 Synod Fathers discussed these issues for a month. Bishops influenced by liberation theology urged an even greater emphasis on “social sin” and work for justice as the essence of the Church’s ministry of reconciliation. Others suggested that something serious had been drained from Catholic life since the Council and called for a renewal of traditional penitential practice. In Reconciliatio et Paenitentia [Reconciliation and Penance], the apostolic exhortation that completed the work of the Synod, John Paul II refocused these disputed issues in terms of the personal drama of human freedom.116
The wellspring of reconciliation, John Paul writes, is the cross of Christ. Its vertical beam symbolizes the human need for reconciliation with God, and its horizontal crossbeam represents the need for reconciliation within the human family.117 Because the Church is the Body of Christ, its “central task” is “reconciling people: with God, with themselves, with neighbor, with the whole of creation.”118 One of the ways the Church lives out that ministry of reconciliation is to remind the world of the reality of sin. For reconciliation is impossible without naming the evil that had caused division and rupture in the first place.
A true humanism must recognize that sin is “an integral part of the truth about man” because human beings are moral actors. Men and women can, and do, commit evil acts, and those acts open up a double wound: in the sinner, and in the sinner’s relationships with family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, even strangers.119 To take sin seriously is to take human freedom seriously, John Paul suggests, and that is why the personal character of sin can never be diminished. Psychological, cultural, and social factors condition the way people make their moral choices. Those factors, if strong enough, can constrain freedom and limit moral responsibility. But these facts of life could not be understood in ways that erode a deeper truth—that sin is a result of an act of personal freedom, which is a crucial dimension of human dignity.120
Freedom and dignity also set the context in which John Paul discusses the traditional distinction between “venial sin” (an expression of ordinary human weakness that does not involve a grave moral disorder) and “mortal sin” (which severs one’s relationship with God until that relationship is repaired by repentance, confession, absolution, and penance). Some post-conciliar theologians had argued that mortal sin was virtually impossible. Reconciliatio et Paenitentia teaches that this theory empties the moral life of its inherent drama and denies individual moral acts their seriousness.121 If we cannot sin greatly because we have no real moral capacity for doing serious evil, how is it that we can live nobly? Isn’t the same lack of capacity implied? John Paul asks.
That is why the practice of individual confession is so important, and why Catholics have “an inviolable and inalienable right” to it. The confessional is the arena in which the personal, dramatic quality of the moral life is fully recognized. Confessor and penitent, in “one of the most awe-inspiring innovations of the Gospel,” live out the drama of freedom and responsibility in an intensely personal way that cannot be replicated in general confession and absolution.
122 That is why the practice of general confession and absolution should be limited to “cases of grave necessity,” as when there are insufficient confessors to hear individual confessions.123 John Paul’s stress on the imperative of individual confession was not a mulish insistence on a traditional practice simply because it was traditional. It was a recognition that the traditional practice embodied deep truths about the nature of the moral life and about human freedom.
On December 27, 1983, John Paul II gave a personal witness to the imperative of reconciliation by celebrating Mass at Rebibbia prison and visiting his would-be assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca, in his cell. Photos of their encounter showed the two men sitting on black plastic chairs, with Agca, dressed in blue jeans and running shoes, listening intensely to John Paul, whose left hand was open and slightly raised in a characteristic gesture of explanation or instruction. Speculation immediately surfaced that Agca had made some sort of confession. What in fact had happened was that the superstitious Turk had told John Paul of his fears that Our Lady of Fatima was going to wreak vengeance on him. The assassination attempt and Agca’s escape had been planned so perfectly that Agca was astounded to find himself in prison and had come to attribute the Pope’s survival and his imprisonment to a supernatural power. He had read in prison that the assassination attempt had taken place on the anniversary of the apparition at Fatima, and had concluded that the “goddess of Fatima” who had saved the Pope was now going to do away with him. John Paul patiently explained that Mary, whom many Muslims venerated, was the Mother of God, that she loved all people, and that Agca shouldn’t be afraid.124
Redemptive Suffering
Six weeks after meeting with Agca, John Paul published a moving apostolic letter on the meaning of suffering, Salvifici Doloris [Salvific Suffering]. It was an appropriate topic during the Holy Year, because humanity had been redeemed by Christ’s suffering. It was an important topic at any time, John Paul wrote, because suffering “seems to be particularly essential to the nature of man.” Contrary to some contemporary conceptions, suffering was not accidental or avoidable. Suffering is “one of those points in which man is in a certain sense ‘destined’ to go beyond himself….”125
There was suffering in the world because there was evil in the world.126 Yet Christianity affirmed the essential goodness of creation. Because evil was “a certain lack, limitation, or distortion of good,” suffering was enmeshed with both good and evil, and caught up in the mystery of human freedom. Suffering, in the biblical view, is sometimes a form of punishment, but that punishment is an opportunity for “rebuilding goodness in the subject who suffers,” not a form of divine retribution.127 No merely descriptive account of suffering could adequately address the profound human mystery involved in it. Nor could reason alone tell us that “love is…the fullest source of the answer to the question of the meaning of suffering.” That required a demonstration, which God had “given…in the cross of Jesus Christ,” whose suffering as man and as the only begotten Son of God had an “incomparable depth and intensity.”128
The greatest suffering is death, and death is what Christ conquered by his “obedience unto death,” which was then overcome in the resurrection.129 Suffering in the world continues, but the suffering Christian can now identify his or her pain with Christ’s suffering on the cross and enter more deeply into the mystery of redemption, which is the mystery of human liberation.130 In the encounter with that liberation, the suffering individual discovers new dimensions to life as a vocation.131
Salvifici Doloris concludes with a meditation on Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan. Everyone who “stops beside the suffering of another person” is in the position of the Good Samaritan, whose “stopping does not mean curiosity, but availability.” Suffering exists “to unleash love in the human person, that unselfish gift of one’s ‘I’ on behalf of other people, especially those who suffer.” “The world of human suffering” summons forth “the world of human love.” The dynamics of solidarity in suffering are another confirmation of the Law of the Gift written into the human heart.
The World and the Church
The Holy Year did not involve a respite from affairs of state or from the administration of the Church. On January 10, 1984, full diplomatic relations between the United States and the Holy See were announced—an important development after decades of controversy during which presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter had been reluctant to exchange ambassadors with the Holy See for fear of Protestant backlash.132 On January 14, the annual papal address to the diplomatic corps discussed the attributes of sovereignty, and described regional or economic alliances, freely entered into, as a form of solidarity. Sovereignty, the Pope proposed, is an expression of a nation’s right to the integrity of its culture.133 The Argentine and Chilean foreign ministers signed a joint declaration about the Beagle Channel dispute at the Vatican on January 23. John Paul met the two diplomats and told them he would visit their countries when the agreement was finalized.134 Three weeks later, on February 13, the Pope appointed Dr. Jerome Lejeune, who had lunched with him hours before the assassination attempt in May 1981, as his representative at the state funeral of Yuri Andropov, the former KGB director who had succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and de facto leader of the USSR. In mid-February 1984, a new concordat between the Holy See and the Republic of Italy, revising the Lateran Treaty of 1929 and reflecting the Church-state teaching of the Second Vatican Council, was completed. Roman Catholicism was no longer considered the official religion of the Italian state, religious education in state schools became optional, and clergy subsidies from the state were to end by 1990. Four days later, the Pope established the John Paul II Foundation for the Sahel, to provide development assistance to drought-stricken sub-Saharan Africa.135 On Good Friday, 1984, two days before the close of the Holy Year, John Paul wrote an apostolic letter, Redemptionis Anno [In the Year of the Redemption], to Catholics living in Jerusalem, describing himself as a pilgrim in spirit to “that land where our reconciliation with God was brought about” and proposing a “special Statute internationally guaranteed” to preserve “the unique and sacred character of the City.”136
In Poland, the “state of war” was completely lifted on July 21, 1983. A week later, over Church protests, the Sejm tightened the Polish government’s grip on public life and expanded the reach of the state security services. Police and demonstrators clashed in Nowa Huta on August 31, Solidarity’s anniversary. Six weeks later, on October 5, Lech Wałęsa was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace, but the government refused him permission to receive it personally. John Paul’s telegram of “heartfelt congratulations” suggested that, in honoring the Solidarity leader, the Nobel committee was honoring “the will and the efforts undertaken to resolve the difficult problems of the world of work and of Polish society through the peaceful way of sincere dialogue and the mutual cooperation of everyone.”137 Six weeks later, on November 21, the Sejm created a military “National Defense Committee” with broad “emergency powers.” Two days later, the Soviet Union discontinued negotiations for an intermediate-range nuclear arms control treaty after U.S. Cruise and Pershing–2 missiles had arrived in the United Kingdom and West Germany to counter Soviet SS–20s. Weeks after Yuri Andropov’s February 1984 funeral, Polish students began demonstrating to demand the restoration of crucifixes in their classrooms; a month later, on April 6, the government agreed. A Church-run foundation began distributing $2 billion in Western aid to private farmers, which had been held in abeyance until the controversy over classroom iconography was resolved.
Eleven days before the end of the Holy Year, Czechoslovakia’s eighty-five-year-old Cardinal František Tomášek, continuing to grow older and bolder with John Paul’s support, formally invited the Pope to visit Velehrad in Moravia in 1985, for the 1,100th anniversary of the death of St. Methodius. Students who demonstrated in favor of a papal visit were beaten by state security. The government would eventually refuse
permission for John Paul II to participate in the anniversary, but the celebration in Moravia signaled the beginning of a new level of resistance in the Czechoslovak Church.
Two weeks before the Holy Year officially concluded on Easter Sunday, April 22, 1984, John Paul announced a major redeployment of personnel at the senior levels of the Roman Curia. Cardinal Bernardin Gantin, formerly President of the Pontifical Justice and Peace Commission, became Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops. Cardinal Roger Etchegaray was taken from his archdiocese of Marseilles and appointed Gantin’s successor at Justice and Peace. Cardinal Eduardo Pironio was moved to the Pontifical Council for the Laity from the Congregation for Religious, where he was succeeded by Archbishop Jerome Hamer, formerly Cardinal Ratzinger’s deputy at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith; newly appointed Archbishop Alberto Bovone succeeded Hamer as Secretary of CDF. Archbishop Francis Arinze was brought from Nigeria to take over the Secretariat for Non-Christians. Archbishop Andrzej Deskur, the Pope’s old friend, who had continued to suffer from the effects of his October 1978 stroke, became President emeritus of the Pontifical Commission for Social Communications, and was succeeded by an American, newly appointed Archbishop John Foley, longtime editor of the Philadelphia archdiocesan newspaper. The appointment of Cardinal Gantin to one of the Church’s most powerful posts was both a sign of John Paul II’s personal confidence and, like the appointment of Archbishop Arinze, a strong signal of support for the young Churches of Africa. Gantin fully shared the Pope’s vision of the Church and the world and would see it applied to the crucial process of nominating bishops, for which his Congregation was responsible, and to the preparation of the ad limina visits that every head of a diocese makes to Rome every five years.138
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