His presence in the Synagogue of Rome, he said, marked an end and a beginning. The period of reflection on Jewish-Catholic relations that had begun with John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council had accomplished many important things. “Legitimate plurality” in society had been clearly affirmed. The Church had condemned anti-Semitism “by anyone”—“I repeat: ‘by anyone.’” The Council had declared that “no ancestral or collective blame can be imputed to the Jews as a people for ‘what happened in Christ’s passion.’” The Church insisted that there was no theological justification for discrimination against Jews, and taught that the Jews had been called by God “with an irrevocable calling.” The Church had also learned that Catholics could not think about Catholicism without thinking about Judaism. “The Jewish religion,” John Paul said, “is not ‘extrinsic’ to us, but in a certain sense is ‘intrinsic’ to our own religion. With Judaism, therefore, we have a relationship which we do not have with any other religion. You are our dearly beloved brothers and, in a certain way, it could be said that you are our elder brothers.”
To have moved this far in less than three decades was heartening, but it was only prologue. Jews and Catholics were at the beginning of a new road, John Paul proposed. Their “common heritage drawn from the Law and the Prophets” required a “collaboration in favor of man,” in defense of human dignity and human life, in defense of freedom and in work for peace. Above all, Jews and Catholics should ponder together the mystery of divine election and Providence that had brought them together as they had not been together in centuries. Jews and Catholics were on the threshold of a conversation that had been interrupted for more than 1,900 years. On that striking note, which challenged Jews and Catholics alike, John Paul closed with prayer—the 118th Psalm, which he recited in Hebrew:
O give thanks to the Lord for He is good,
His steadfast love endures forever!
Let Israel say,
“His steadfast love endures forever.”
Let those who fear the Lord say,
“His steadfast love endures forever.”
Amen.2
VATICAN II REVISITED
The dramatic transformation of Jewish-Catholic relations was one aspect of Vatican II’s legacy coming to fruition. On January 25, 1985, John Paul II announced an Extraordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Council’s completion and to consider its heritage as a whole. The Extraordinary Synod, which would meet from November 24 to December 8, 1985, was intended to re-create the experience of Vatican II for the bishops who were its legatees and to assess how the Council had been received in the Church throughout the world. The adjective “extraordinary” was curial jargon for a Synod Assembly that took place outside the cycle of Ordinary Assemblies. As things turned out, the event and one of its products would justify the use of the term “extraordinary” in other ways as well.
Among the Incas
The day after announcing the Extraordinary Synod, the Pope flew to Caracas at the beginning of his twenty-fifth pastoral pilgrimage outside Italy and his sixth to Latin America. The journey to Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, and the Caribbean island state of Trinidad and Tobago produced two of the most remarkable scenes of John Paul’s pontificate. The first was the papal motorcade into Quito, the capital of Ecuador, on January 29.
The pattern of these Latin American papal welcomes had become well-established—the Pope would be greeted by huge, boisterous crowds lining the highways, waving national and papal flags, throwing flowers in the Pope-mobile’s path. Things were dramatically different this time. According to local custom, respected guests were honored with silence. The Pope drove into Quito along roads lined with hundreds of thousands of Ecuadorans, holding up crosses or religious statues, who were absolutely quiet. What could have seemed eerie was in fact, one reporter remembered, “totally moving.”3
Five days later, John Paul was in Peru near Cuzco, the ancient Inca capital, to celebrate a Liturgy of the Word, crown the statue of the Blessed Virgin of Carmelo di Paucartambo, and address the native peoples at the Inca fortress of Sacsahuamán. It was bitterly cold with freezing rain. Some of the journalists in the papal party had gotten altitude sickness. The platform for the biblically based prayer service and the Pope’s address was set on the ramparts of the Inca fortress. Across a small valley and covering several nearby hills were thousands of impoverished Incas, descendants of one of the great empires of pre-Columbian America. They had come from all over the region to see John Paul; many had camped overnight in harsh conditions. Now they stood silently, looking up at him on the promontory of their ancestors’ fortress, in the pouring rain. High among the cloud-covered Andes, it was perhaps the most remote venue John Paul would visit in twenty years, yet the message was similar to what he had told the diplomats of UNESCO in 1980.
He had come, he said, to affirm the people and their ancient culture and to propose how their lives might be more fully human and Christian. The scriptural text chosen for the day was the story of Ruth and Boaz from the Hebrew Bible. It was a story of hospitality and a “lesson of solidarity,” which he proposed as the Christian answer to the violent madness of the neo-Maoist Shining Path guerrillas of Peru. Solidarity was at “the other extreme” from ideologies that divided human beings into groups of irreconcilable enemies and that sought the “extermination of the adversary,” he said. In contrast to the “radical egotism” of the guerrillas, the Church preached a more radical revolution of faith and conscience that struck egotism at its roots and paved the way for a more just society. Any truly human revolution had to change hearts and souls as well as material conditions.
On the way from Cuzco to Sacsahuamán, he had thought about the Incas’ ancestors, who had worshiped the sun as the source of life. The descendants of those great builders now stood before him, their ancestral culture transformed by the light of Christ. So today, they had come together, the Indians and the Pope, along a quite different shining path, in the light of the true “sun of justice and love, Christ our Savior,” who was not only the source of life in this world but of “the life which is stronger than death, the life which never ends, eternal life.”4
The Council After Twenty Years
The Incas had not come to Sacsahuamán to debate the correct interpretation of the Second Vatican Council. But those who were Catholics, and many who were not, had been touched by the Council, however remotely situated they were on the Andean altiplano. The way they worshiped, the language in which they prayed, the religious education their children received, the relationship of their clergy to the public authorities, the training their priests and nuns received, their relations with non-Catholic and nonbelieving neighbors—all of these had been shaped during the past twenty years by the most important event in Catholic history since the Reformation. Yet for all its indisputable impact on Catholic life, from St. Peter’s Basilica to the smallest hut church outside Cuzco, what Vatican II meant was still hotly disputed throughout the Catholic world.
Twenty years after it had closed on December 8, 1965, the Second Vatican Council—the event itself and the documents it produced—was already in a kind of historical twilight. A “progressive” party in the Church, thinking Vatican II rather old hat, was busy imagining a Vatican III that would complete the rout of traditional Catholicism which it somehow thought to be John XXIII’s intention in summoning the Council. Another party (usually termed “traditionalists”) believed that Vatican II and its ill-advised “opening” to the modern world was responsible for the crisis of Catholic life since 1965. Neither party seemed terribly concerned with the historical continuity of the Church as the embodiment of a living tradition. The “progressives” set Vatican II and their imaginary Vatican III against the Counter-Reformation Council of Trent and Vatican I. The “traditionalists” (sometimes called “restorationists”) set Trent and Vatican I against Vatican II.
John XXIII had summoned the Second Vatican Council in the hope that a new experience of the
Holy Spirit, a new Pentecost, would create a deeper unity in the Church. One result of the Council had been intense acrimony, to the point where Pope Paul VI had wondered aloud whether the Church had not gone from healthy self-criticism to pathological self-destruction. “Satan’s smoke,” he suggested, “had made its way into the temple of God through some crack.”5
How was Vatican II’s impact to be measured and judged?
World Catholicism had grown since the Council, from fewer than 600 million in 1965 to more than 830 million in 1985. The largest growth had been in Latin America and Africa. Roman Catholicism had become a majority Third World communion since the Council and would be even more so by the turn of the millennium. In addition, the leadership of Third World Catholicism had become largely indigenous since 1965. Missionary bishops no longer ruled much of Latin America and virtually all of Africa. In Africa, among some of the most vibrant Catholic communities in the world, first-generation Christians, the sons of pagans, now wore the cardinal’s red hat.
The Third World’s new prominence in international Catholic demographics was not simply the result of growth in the South; it was also due to decline in the North. The continued collapse of Catholic practice in Western Europe, the part of the world Church that was primarily responsible for Vatican II and that might have been expected to have benefited the most from it, was the most striking example of this. On the other side of the iron curtain, by way of contrast, some of the most intensely Catholic communities in the world were to be found—above ground in Poland, underground in Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, and Ukraine. In at least some cases, persecution had strengthened the Church and prosperity had weakened it.6
Lay people in unprecedented numbers were now involved in the Church’s worship, educational institutions, and administration, but some 100,000 “religious professionals”—priests and nuns—had left their ministries since Vatican II. In the free world, the clergy was becoming grayer and nuns were disappearing. In eastern Europe and Africa, vocations to the priesthood and religious life were at all-time highs. Although the Council had challenged Catholics to convert modern culture from within, even the most enthusiastic proponents of the Council would be hard-put to make the argument that Catholic influence in the cultural and political life of the West was greater in 1985 than it had been in 1965. The institution of the Church was in the greatest turmoil since the Reformation. At the same time new, primarily lay, renewal movements were flourishing as they had not in centuries.
New Ground
When Christianity engaged modernity, certain problems were inevitable. They appeared first among intellectuals—theologians, primarily—and then worked their way through the Church’s structures to its worship, educational life, and social ministry. The “crisis” of Catholicism in 1965–1985 thus reprised many of the difficulties of the Churches of the Reformation in the two generations after World War II—which was not reassuring to those who knew that those difficulties had presaged a virtual disintegration of mainline Protestantism in Western Europe and North America.
The “gamble” of Vatican II was not simply that the Council had provided no authoritative “keys” to its interpretation, as previous Councils had done with dogmatic definitions, canons, or condemnations. The gamble was that opening the Church’s windows to the modern world would result in an enriched Catholicism and a converted modernity. For the gamble to succeed, the conversation between Catholicism and modern ways of thinking had to be a genuine dialogue. The questions were whether Catholicism was up to the task and whether modernity was even interested.
Ten years after the Council and a decade before the Extraordinary Synod, an ecumenical group of American Christian theologians, meeting in Hartford, Connecticut, signed the “Hartford Appeal for Theological Affirmation,” a series of propositions illustrating how the dialogue between Christianity and the modern world had become a monologue, with Christian doctrine dissolving under the impact of its encounter with modernity. The Appeal’s purpose was not to abandon Christianity’s conversation with modernity but to restore a genuine dialogue, in which the historic creeds of Christianity were partners in conversation, not candidates for derision, deconstruction, and dismissal. The Hartford Appeal, an informal ecumenical initiative, anticipated many of the issues of faith and culture with which John Paul’s Extraordinary Synod would have to wrestle:
Modernity insisted on the superiority of its understanding of the human condition to anything achieved in the past. Catholicism was, by name and conviction, “catholic” or universal. It could not preemptively privilege any one historical period’s way of understanding the world, its people, and their destiny.
Modernity insisted that God-talk was, at best, metaphorical and at worst, irrational. Catholicism taught that the Creed it professed every Sunday was the truth of the world and its history.
Modernity insisted that Jesus Christ could only be understood through contemporary models of human maturity. Catholicism taught that Jesus Christ was the man for all times, and that no one age’s self-understanding could exhaust the full meaning of humanity and divinity that Christ revealed.
Modernity insisted that all religions were equally valid. Catholicism honored other faiths, but taught that God had revealed himself and his purposes definitively in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, changing the world’s history and restoring it to its proper trajectory.
Modernity imagined that salvation was a matter of achieving one’s human potential. Catholicism taught that salvation was communion with God, in which our human potential is realized in an unsurpassable way.
Modernity conceived worship as the self-affirmation of a community and the self-realization of individual worshipers. Catholicism taught that worship was first and foremost a matter of adoring God, who was worshiped because he ought to be worshiped.
Modernity insisted that hope beyond death was irrelevant to human liberation in this world. Catholicism taught that hope beyond death liberated men and women in the most radical way, and thus made a genuinely liberating transformation of the world possible.7
The signatories of the Hartford Appeal, like John Paul II, knew there was no alternative to a Church engaged with modernity. Humanity had gone through an irreversible gate from which there was no return.8 Religious beliefs could be deeply and firmly held, but those who held them would always be aware of the fact that they had chosen these beliefs, rather than inheriting them as givens of existence. In the cultural circumstances of the late twentieth century, a “Catholic restoration” that denied this was a fantasy. For John Paul and the Hartford signatories, though, the experience of relativity and choice—the experience of being modern—did not mean relativism. A world of relativism was a world without windows or doors, incapable of hearing the signals of transcendence in modern life.9 John Paul and the Hartford signatories wanted a world with windows and doors, a modernity open to the possibility that humanity was in fact greater than modernity had imagined. Modern men and women, for all their experience of choice, could still know what was true and good, and could choose truth and goodness. Recognizing that should not be impossible for Christians. That, after all, was what “conversion” meant.
The challenge the Second Vatican Council had put before the Church was a challenge of transition, from an authoritarian religious institution to an authoritative religious community. This was not “middle ground” between traditionalists or restorationists, who wanted to reject modernity root and branch, and progressives, whose embrace of modernity had led them to a radical relativism in which the authoritative was inevitably authoritarian. It was new ground.
It was, John Paul believed, what Vatican II had had in mind all along. Exploring that proposition would be the business of the Extraordinary Synod.
THE CONCILIAR POPE
In the months immediately prior to the Extraordinary Synod, John Paul took several initiatives that illustrated the vision of Vatican II and the revitalized Catholicism he hoped the Synod participants would embrac
e.
Communicating the Message
After more than five years’ experience, not all of it happy, with what senior curial officials call “the way we do things here,” John Paul seized control of the Vatican press operation and brought it into the communications age. The key decision was his appointment of the first layman, Joaquín Navarro-Valls, as papal spokesman and director of the Holy See Press Office, the Sala Stampa. A sophisticated Spaniard in his late forties and a member of Opus Dei, Navarro had been trained as a psychiatrist, a profession he sometimes jokingly described as good preparation for his new duties. After a period of medical practice, Navarro had become a journalist and chief foreign correspondent for the Madrid daily ABC. He was the paper’s Rome correspondent and President of the Foreign Press Association of Italy when he was appointed to head the Sala Stampa on December 4, 1984.
In addition to bringing to the Vatican press room an understanding of the Western media that had eluded his clerical predecessors, Navarro quickly established himself in the confidence of the Pope, to whom he had more access than anyone except Monsignor Dziwisz, John Paul’s longtime secretary. As a Spaniard, a professional journalist, and a layman, Navarro was another “outsider” chosen by the outsider Pope to help get his message heard by changing (when possible) or circumventing (when necessary) the encrusted institutional filters of the Vatican. Like any gatekeeper, Navarro had his critics, and his access to John Paul made him an object of envy within the Curia. He brought an acute understanding of the Pope’s mind and agenda to his work, and by Roman standards, he revolutionized the functioning of the Holy See Press Office.
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