Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  His clerical predecessors and their curial superiors, including Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, had been initially aghast at John Paul’s impromptu in-flight press conferences on his travels, worried that the Pope might make a mistake and that ambassadors would start calling for explanations. Navarro, for his part, encouraged these exercises as ways for the Pope to get feedback and to communicate his message directly. The traditional Vatican approach to information sharing was, essentially, that the less said about anything, the better. Navarro and John Paul disagreed. They thought the world beyond the Leonine Wall should have access to a news briefing about events in the Vatican. The on-line Vatican Information Service was created and began transmitting daily bulletins in January 1991. Politicians use the media as a way to garner votes. John Paul saw what Navarro called the “dialectic with public opinion,” available through the media, as an instrument for reformation in the Church and a tool for shaping the world.10

  As Navarro saw it, this openness reflected a new vision of the Church and the papacy. It came into focus for the papal spokesman at the airport in Bogotá, Colombia, in early July 1986. A ten-year-old boy had somehow burst through the barriers and run up to John Paul. “I know you; you’re the Pope,” he said. “You’re the same one I saw on television.” A new presentation of the papacy was essential, Navarro thought, and John Paul had accomplished it through the media. And he had done it not as another ephemeral celebrity, but as a man emerging into a ministry of global presence from the Church and from the priesthood. The Colombian boy had first known this man from television, to be sure. But he had known him from TV as the Pope, and John Paul II, in person, was indeed “the same one.”11

  Catholic/Jewish Relations

  Nostra Aetate, Vatican II’s Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, had opened a new chapter in Catholic/Jewish relations. John Paul II was determined to secure that accomplishment and advance beyond it. Several pre-Synod events illustrated this distinctive dimension of the pontificate and its relationship to the Council.

  On February 15, 1985, the Pope received an American Jewish Committee delegation that had come to Rome to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Nostra Aetate. In his address, John Paul emphasized that Nostra Aetate was not only “something fitting” in human terms, but ought to be understood “as an expression of the faith, as an inspiration of the Holy Spirit, as a word of Divine Wisdom.”12

  Four days later, on February 19, the Pope received Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who invited him to visit Israel.

  On April 19, John Paul met with the participants in a colloquium on the twentieth anniversary of Nostra Aetate, held at his Roman alma mater, the Angelicum. Once again, he suggested that the Jewish/Catholic dialogue was far more than a matter of civic good manners and tolerance. “Jewish-Christian relations,” he emphasized, “are never an academic exercise. They are, on the contrary, part of the very fabric of our religious commitments and our respective vocations as Christians and as Jews,” who lived in a kind of providentially mandated and unavoidable entanglement.13

  On June 24, the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, the Vatican office responsible for the dialogue, issued a document with the lengthy title Notes on the Correct Way to Present the Jews and Judaism in Preaching and Catechesis in the Roman Catholic Church. The document, intended to guide sermons, the Church’s Holy Week liturgy, and Catholic religious education at all levels, stressed that “Jesus was and always remained a Jew…fully a man of his environment.” To present this accurately “cannot but underline both the reality of the Incarnation and the very meaning of the history of salvation, as it has been revealed in the Bible.” Notes stressed the importance of teaching Catholics the continuing spiritual mission of the Jewish people, who remain a chosen people and whose contemporary faith and religious life can help Catholics better understand aspects of their own faith and practice. Religious education programs, Notes taught, should also help Catholics in “understanding the meaning for the Jews of the extermination during the years 1939–1945, and its consequences.”14

  On October 28, 1985, John Paul II received the International Catholic-Jewish Liaison Committee, the official dialogue body. The Pope reiterated that the “spiritual link” between Catholics and “Abraham’s stock” established “a relation which could well be called a real ‘parentage’ and which [Catholics] have with that religious community [i.e., the Jewish people] alone.” John Paul praised the Notes issued in June, which would “help promote respect, appreciation, and indeed love for one and the other, as they are both in the unfathomable design of God, who ‘does not reject his people’ (Psalm 94.14; Romans 11.1). By the same token, anti-Semitism in its ugly and sometimes violent manifestations should be completely eradicated. Better still, a positive view of each of our religions, with due respect for the identity of each, will surely emerge….”15

  Youth and the Future

  In the months before the Extraordinary Synod, John Paul took the occasion of the United Nations’ International Youth Year to launch one of the signature initiatives of his pontificate—the World Youth Days that would draw millions of young people on pilgrimage to Europe, Latin America, North America, and Asia.

  The idea of World Youth Day, the Pope remembered, could be traced back to his young friends in Środowisko and their exploration of the personal and vocational dynamics of adolescence and young adulthood.16 His early papal pilgrimages, in Italy and abroad, had convinced him that a pastoral strategy of “accompaniment” with young people was as valid for a pope as it had been for a fledgling priest.

  He had been impressed by the interest of French youth, supposedly tone-deaf to Christianity, in the Parc des Princes during his first pilgrimage to Paris in 1980. During the Holy Year youth meeting in Rome on Palm Sunday, 1984, the idea of a World Youth Day began to germinate, and John Paul invited the youth of the world back to Rome for Palm Sunday, 1985.17 Some 250,000 enthusiastic youngsters accepted. It was then decided to mark Palm Sunday, 1986, as the first “official” World Youth Day, and to celebrate it in the different dioceses around the world. Beginning in 1987, and continuing biennially, World Youth Day was celebrated with the Pope at an international venue to which the youth of the world would be invited—Buenos Aires in 1987, Santiago de Compostela in 1989, Częstochowa in 1991, Denver in 1993, Manila in 1995, and Paris in 1997, where the Pope announced that the next World Youth Day would be in Rome in 2000. On the even-numbered “off ” years, World Youth Day is celebrated in the dioceses.18

  John Paul marked the UN’s International Youth Year and his Palm Sunday, 1985, meeting with young people in Rome with an apostolic letter, To the Youth of the World, which mixed reminiscence, exhortation, and the Pope’s phenomenological approach to anything human in fairly equal proportions.

  Youth is a special moment in life, he wrote, because it is the time when an identity and a vocation form, when the first serious personal decisions are made. In the unfolding of those decisions, young people discover themselves as moral actors and face the question of their destiny. Like the rich young man in the Gospel story, young people want to know “what must I do to have eternal life?” Thus youth is also a special time of encounter with the mystery of God.

  The “fundamental question of youth,” John Paul continued, is the question of conscience and its authenticity. Conscience, the measure of human dignity, is, in a sense, the history of the world: “For history is written not only by the events which in a certain sense happen ‘from outside’ it is written first of all ‘from inside’: it is the history of human consciences, of moral victories and defeats.” To develop one’s conscience authentically is the true measure of a human personality’s development.

  Youth is also a special time to discern a personal future, a vocation, in which young people try to “read the eternal thought which God the Creator and Father has in their regard.” Discovering one’s unique person and task is “a fascinating interior undertaking [in which] your humani
ty develops and grows, while your young personality acquires ever greater inner maturity. You become rooted in that which each of you is, in order to become that which you must become: for yourself—for other people—for God.”

  And, of course, he wrote to them of sexuality. That God created human beings male and female is a reality that “is necessarily inscribed in the personal ‘I’ of each of you.” The encounter with this reality brings onto “the horizon of a young heart a new experience…the experience of love.” Do not, the Pope urged, “allow this treasure to be taken away from you!” If preserving the treasure meant being countercultural and resisting the reduction of love to transient pleasure, then be countercultural. “Do not be afraid of the love that places clear demands on people. These demands…are precisely capable of making your love a true love.”19

  John Paul II’s remarkable rapport with young people began in the “John Paul, Superstar” phase of his pontificate; the “woo-hoo-woo” encounter in Madison Square Garden in October 1979 was a prime example. As the pontificate unfolded, it was no longer possible to view this simply as a variant on the adulation lavished on pop celebrities. Age, Agca’s bullet, and the effects of illness made it necessary to think of the Pope as something more than a rock star in a white cassock. Why did this rapport with the young continue, even intensify? Several reasons suggested themselves. The Pope took young people seriously as persons, paying them the compliment of seeing them as people struggling with the meaning of life. When speaking with the young, he did not take the edge off a Christian message he clearly lived himself. Perhaps most importantly, he did not pander to young people, challenging them to settle for nothing less than moral grandeur. At a time in Western history when virtually no other world figure was calling young people to bear burdens and make sacrifices, John Paul touched the youthful thirst for the heroic and related it to the human search for God. It made for a potent style of evangelization.

  Ecumenism

  From April 22 through April 27, 1985, the ecumenical commissions of sixty-three national bishops’ conferences met in Rome to review the quest for Christian unity twenty years after the Council. The goal of ecumenism, John Paul stressed in his address to them on April 27, remained nothing less than “the full communion of Christians in one apostolic faith and in one eucharistic fellowship at the service of a truly common witness,” which was an expression of the communion of persons between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.20

  Two months later, on June 28, John Paul gave a major address to the Roman Curia on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity. There had been concern in some ecumenical circles about the future of Catholicism’s ecumenical commitment, most recently because of curial criticism of Unity of the Churches: An Actual Possibility, a book by the German theologians Karl Rahner and Heinrich Fries. The authors described Unity of the Churches as a proposal for breaking what they perceived as an ecumenical logjam. Its critics argued that its proposed bracketing of certain theological issues in order to declare the Churches united reduced ecumenism to a matter of negotiation between voluntary organizations.21 John Paul’s anniversary address concluded with the unambiguous affirmation that “the Catholic Church is committed to the ecumenical movement with an irrevocable decision, and it desires to contribute to it with all its possibilities.” That, he said, was “one of the pastoral priorities” of the Bishop of Rome.22 The primary aim of his address was to clarify the theological foundations of Catholic ecumenism.

  God the Holy Spirit, not human endeavor, is the source of Christian unity, he proposed.23 Although that Spirit-given unity had never been revoked by God, it had been damaged by human error and willfulness.24 That was why ecumenism, the effort to rebuild Christian unity, could not be understood like the negotiation of a treaty or a contract. The unity of the Church was given to the Church, once for all, at Pentecost. The ecumenical task was to “recompose” this already given unity in visible form.25

  Disregarding the questions that still divided Christians in their profession of faith, or “acting as if they were resolved,” could not be called ecumenical progress. Being able to say together “this is true” was the way Christian unity was most basically demonstrated. That common confession of conviction made the common celebration of the Eucharist possible. Whatever their good intentions, efforts to evade or bracket difficult questions of doctrine and to celebrate prematurely a Eucharistic unity that was not founded on unity of belief demeaned the ecumenical task.26

  A common confession of the truth of Christian faith “has to be sought in love; Christian truth cannot be assimilated without charity.” That required a “reciprocal humility, inspired by love and the cultivation of truth,” so that the wounds of centuries were overcome and a full, deep unity was recomposed in doctrine, worship, and service to the world.27 Every Catholic, John Paul proposed, had a responsibility to help bring about the unity willed by Christ and given to the Church by the Holy Spirit.”28

  It had been twenty-five years since John XXIII had stunned the Christian world by declaring the Roman Catholic Church fully committed to ecumenism. There would be more surprises to come, as the Pope who had come to his office with little ecumenical experience continued to press this cause in unexpected, even radical, ways.

  Dissidents

  In the months before the Synod, unity within the Catholic Church was also a major issue for John Paul II.

  On March 11, 1985, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith [CDF] issued a “notification” that Leonardo Boff’s book, Church: Charism and Power, was doctrinally deficient. Boff, a Brazilian Franciscan and former doctoral student of Professor Joseph Ratzinger, had applied “Marxist analysis” to the Church and concluded that an ordained hierarchy was a sinful social structure of which the Church should rid itself. This was, obviously, not Catholic theology, and it was hardly surprising that CDF noted that fact. In the context of the Extraordinary Synod, it was also important to note that Boff’s vision of the Church was a critique of the communio ecclesiology of Vatican II. CDF asked Father Boff to maintain a year of public silence on the questions dealt with in his book in order to reflect upon them more deeply. Boff had been publishing and lecturing widely, and Cardinal Ratzinger, who retained an affection for his former student, hoped that giving his thought a chance to mature, away from the media spotlight, would help Boff grow as a theologian. Boff agreed to what the German press immediately dubbed his “penitential silencing.” His views did not change materially, and he eventually left not only the Franciscan order, but the Church.29

  Rebuilding unity in the face of widespread dissent was on John Paul II’s agenda for his first pilgrimage to the Netherlands in May 1985, one of the most difficult pastoral visits of the pontificate.

  Whatever its modest accomplishments in attempting to heal the rifts among the Dutch bishops, the 1980 “Particular Synod for Holland” had not successfully restored unity to the Church in the Netherlands, where deep doctrinal, liturgical, and catechetical divisions over doctrine, worship, and religious education remained. The Dutch prime minister himself said that “the word ‘Rome’ makes some people nervous if not downright suspicious.”30 John Paul’s mission was to break through a massive barrier of suspicion and hostility in order to reopen a dialogue between the Bishop of Rome and the Dutch Church.

  He could not do it. Three days before the Pope arrived, a mass meeting in the Hague was organized to protest the papal visit; it was not the best augury for what was about to unfold. John Paul’s addresses had been prepared in consultation with the Dutch bishops, some of whom wanted him to say things they were unwilling or incapable of saying themselves—a sure prescription for having the Pope instantly labeled an authoritarian.31 Archbishop Edward Cassidy, the papal nuncio, had helped arrange a meeting between John Paul and representatives of the Church’s work in education, the missions, and social action. Grievances were aired, but during the session one speaker departed from her prepared text to attack the Pope personally for a
n alleged abuse of authority. Afterward, he received her warmly.32

  In Utrecht, smoke bombs and eggs were thrown at the Popemobile. Posters were displayed offering a bounty on John Paul’s life, whose value was set at approximately $6,000.33 Turnouts were minimal; the weather was awful. A somewhat brighter future seemed possible, however, when an unexpectedly large crowd of young people met with the Pope at Amersfoort on John Paul’s last day in Holland, May 15. The coming generation, raised with little or no religious education, seemed to be searching for a message of hope while their elders continued to live out the passions of the sixties.34 Two years later, a new seminary was opened in the diocese of s’Hertogenbosch, which would produce sixty new priests during the next decade.35

  After a day in Luxembourg John Paul moved on to Belgium, where things were calmer. At Beauraing, the country’s principal Marian shrine, the Pope celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday, his cake decorated with a model of St. Peter’s and the towers of the cathedral at Malines.36 On May 20, at Brussels, John Paul addressed representatives of the European Council of Ministers, the European Parliament, and the European Commission and sketched themes he would develop extensively in the future: the essential unity of Europe, east and west of the Yalta dividing line; the source of that unity in a common European culture; and the Christian foundations of that culture. In pursuing its vocation to unity, Europe would rediscover the dynamism that decades of bloodshed and ideological division had drained from it. Four and a half years before the Yalta division of Europe was resolved by the nonviolent Revolution of 1989, it was a remarkably prescient, even visionary, speech.37