Radio Veritas was a crucial instrument for the resistance, directing the massive human traffic and maintaining a steady emphasis on nonviolence. When Marcos-loyal troops blew up its transmitter on the morning of February 23, new broadcast facilities were found. Nuns sat on the steps leading to the studios, praying the rosary and shielding the transmitters and the radio staff from Marcos’s troops. Cardinal Sin and his associates deftly managed what could have been an explosively violent situation, always stressing on the radio that the revolution on EDSA had to be nonviolent. At 6:45 P.M. on February 24, Enrile and Ramos, both Protestants, held a press conference while standing in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary, and declared that Corazon Aquino had been cheated out of the presidency by governmental election fraud.
Tension continued to mount as Marcos considered his options and the cardinal continued to encourage his nonviolent resisters. EDSA drew more and more people. Crosses were erected at strategic points to divert tanks and armored personnel carriers. Posters and banners with religious mottoes were everywhere, as were the ubiquitous rosaries the crowd pressed on the tank crews. When the United States government made clear that it would not support Marcos any longer, the regime crumbled. Marcos-loyal troops withdrew from the approaches to Camps Aguinaldo and Crame, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos flew off to a Hawaiian exile, and Corazon Aquino was sworn in as President of the Republic of the Philippines.66
Cardinal Sin later wrote that he had been “deeply inspired by the workers’ Solidarność and by the way the Church, especially [the] Pope, supported this movement [for] the good of Poland and, ultimately, [for] the good of Europe and humanity.”67 Notwithstanding the extreme caution shown by Archbishop Torpigliani and the criticism Sin received in the Secretariat of State during the months leading up to the People Power revolution, the cardinal felt supported and encouraged by John Paul II. “He understood,” the cardinal recalled later, and “he always encouraged me to carry on.”68
John Paul understood, because what Sin and his associates were championing was the kind of Christian liberation John Paul had been urging since his election. It differed from various Latin American liberation theologies in seven key respects.
The People Power revolution was a broad-based resistance movement against a mendacious, violent, corrupt regime, not an exercise in class struggle. Cardinal Sin and his associates insisted on nonviolence, as did the personal embodiment of the revolution, Corazon Aquino. There was not a hint in the Philippines of a legitimate “second violence” against the “first violence” of “sinful social structures.” The EDSA movement, like Polish Solidarity, was a religiously inspired movement of social reform, not a political party, and its appeal, like that of Cardinal Sin and the Philippine bishops, was explicitly religious and moral, not ideological and political. Pastors, not intellectuals, were in command of the situation, and prudent pastoral responsibility, not the testing of theories, drove the revolution on EDSA. The revolution was supported by Catholic renewal movements that were united to the hierarchy and did not imagine themselves to be an alternative “People’s Church” over against the “institutional Church.”
Cardinal Sin insists that he was acting as a pastor, not a politician, and that his partisanship was moral, not political in the narrow sense of the term.69 The distinction is important, although it is not always easy to maintain. During the fraudulent election campaign of 1985–1986, Cardinal Sin told a Rotary Club meeting, in response to government charges of untoward political activity by priests, that he was “reminded…of the wise man who said that war was much too important a business to be left exclusively in the hands of generals. Might not the same be said of government, that government is much too important a business to be left in the hands of politicians and political scientists?”70 In situations like Poland or the Philippines, pastors had a moral obligation to defend human dignity against the depredations of evil governments. This defense had public implications, indeed political implications, but it was not partisan in the sense of posing the Church as an alternative contestant within the same power game. It was partisanship in favor of a changed game.
The revolution on EDSA may have looked like a carnival to Western observers, but it was serious business to the people involved. As a former Wall Street Journal correspondent and active participant in these events, Araceli Lorayes, put it, “One had only to reflect on how desperate the situation of the mutineers was, on how utterly powerless we all were—both the opposition who were in hiding and the crowd at EDSA—to realize that ultimately we were all in the hands of God.” The secular mind of many reporters couldn’t grasp that the Philippine revolution’s “inner life, its motivating force, was prayer.” Lorayes did not claim that the People Power revolution of 1986 was a miracle in the strict sense of the term, an event caused by God’s suspension of the laws of nature. But the power of the Holy Spirit, working through very fallible human beings (some of whom, like Defense Minister Enrile, had mixed motivations), had “brought about the deliverance of the Filipino nation from almost certain disaster.”71
As John Paul II, Cardinal Sin, and hundreds of thousands of Filipinos saw it, their revolution had not only done something good for the Philippines, it had demonstrated something important about the human condition. The depth dimension of history, which was accessible to the eyes of faith, made sense of what was happening on the surface.
THE ENCOUNTER WITH WORLD RELIGIONS
If cautious diplomats in the Secretariat of State were concerned that the Pope and the archbishop of Manila were violating the canons of prudence in the Philippines, curial officials and some bishops around the world wondered whether John Paul was not veering dangerously close to the heresy of syncretism with one of the most innovative initiatives of his pontificate—a World Day of Prayer for Peace, involving non-Catholic and non-Christian religious leaders from all over the globe, which the Pope planned to convene in Assisi in October 1986.
The Pope announced the initiative on January 25, 1986, and the negative reactions were almost instantaneous. Wouldn’t bringing world religious leaders together in one setting suggest that the Catholic Church considered all religious traditions equally valid? How could the Pope pray with men and women who venerated a different God, or many gods? The questions involved serious theological issues. Beneath the surface, though, something like the Curialist’s complaint that John Paul II was turning the Vatican into “Campo de’Fiori” could be sensed: Why didn’t John Paul understand that this kind of thing was simply inappropriate?
It was, in fact, the Pope’s idea. His predecessors, pondering such a step, might have circulated a memo asking for reactions from the Vatican bureaucracy, where the idea would have died the death of a thousand cuts. John Paul trusted his intuitions. He discussed the possibility with Cardinal Francis Arinze of the Secretariat for Non-Christians and Cardinal Roger Etchegaray. In those conversations, it was decided that Etchegaray’s Pontifical Justice and Peace Commission would take responsibility for arranging “the who, what, when, where, and how.”72 The Pope’s point, as Etchegaray explained to his colleagues, was that the world’s religious traditions had “deep resources” for addressing international world conflict. Their commitment to prayer was one of them.
John Paul understood that this could not mean a universal praying together, which would indeed be syncretism and therefore impossible, for others as well as for him. “Being together to pray” was something different. The task laid on Etchegaray and his colleagues was to “find a formula by which each one could pray in his own way, and then come together with the others.” The Justice and Peace Commission staff thought there should be fasting as well as prayer. Archbishop Virgilio Noë, the former papal master of ceremonies then serving as Secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship, suggested that the event should involve movement in order to convey the idea of a pilgrimage. Putting all this together, John Paul then decided that the World Day of Prayer for Peace would be held in Assisi, where he, too, would be a pilgrim.73
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The formula was finally hammered out. John Paul would receive the other religious leaders at the Portiuncula, the small chapel located on the plain below the town of Assisi that was St. Francis’s favorite church. Each leader would go to a separate site in the town to pray for ninety minutes with those of his followers who were present. Everyone would then walk to the great piazza in front of the basilica of Assisi where a podium would be erected. There, each religious leader would offer a prayer according to his tradition. The Pope would give a closing speech, and afterward the religious leaders would break their fast together.74
Meanwhile, as curial muttering about the preparations for Assisi continued, John Paul took off on January 31 for a ten-day pilgrimage to, of all places, India—a country marked by unparalleled interreligious encounters.
In the Land of the Untouchables
The Pope jetted back and forth across the vast subcontinent, beginning in Delhi and visiting Calcutta, Ranchi, Shillong, Madras, Goa, Mangalore, Trichur, Cochin, Ernakulam, Verapoly, Kottayam, Trivandrum, Vasai, Puna, Goregaon, and Bombay. On the day he arrived, he visited the site where Mohandas Gandhi had been cremated in 1948 and preached on the Beatitudes.75 He went to the State of Assam in the far northeast, which was usually closed to foreigners, and said Mass in a field as the local peasants were herded into wooden pens for crowd control.76 In Madras, he prayed at the traditional site of the tomb of the apostle Thomas.
Christian service to the poor and abandoned was a constant theme of John Paul’s addresses in Shillong, Madras, Goa, Mangalore, and, of course, Calcutta. There, he met with the living icon of Christian service in India, Mother Teresa, who over the years had brought some 50,000 of the Indian sick out of the gutters and into her “House of the Pure Heart.” The friendship between the Polish Pope and the tiny, Albanian-born nun was deep and intuitive; they understood each other “without a lot of words,” as one of John Paul’s associates once put it. For the Pope, Mother Teresa was a “person-message” for the twentieth century and a living confirmation that the Law of the Gift graven in human nature could be lived in a way that led to the most profound happiness. No one was happier than Mother Teresa, who lived a life of almost unimaginable asceticism surrounded by suffering. Whenever they met (which was usually in Rome), the nun wanted to talk about how her community, the Missionaries of Charity, was expanding: “I have started a house in Russia,” or “I have started a house in China.” That this community of women religious, living the toughest kind of commitment, was flourishing while other communities were dying made an impression. Even more impressive was the daily witness of the Missionaries of Charity, the serenity with which they lived lives of hardship. John Paul decided that Rome could use some of that witness. As he later recalled, he came back from India determined to establish a hospice run by Mother Teresa’s sisters inside the Vatican.77
That Mother Teresa’s community did its work in India, where Christians were a pronounced minority, gave the Church a position in Indian society that even the most nationalist Hindu had to respect. The reality of Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity in the slums of Calcutta also illustrated a truth about particulars and universals that had applications far beyond India. Mother Teresa was not a particularly winsome expression of a generic human decency. She was a universal role model precisely because she was a radically committed Christian. She and her sisters embodied two universal goods—compassion, and a profound respect for the human dignity of the poorest of the poor—through the “particular” of Catholicism. She was a living refutation of the claim, widespread in the modern world, that a particular commitment narrowed one’s horizons.
In Assisi
Arrangements for the World Day of Prayer for Peace were being completed as the summer of 1986 gave way to the autumn. Two renewal groups, the Sant’Egidio Community and the Focolare movement, took responsibility for hospitality and getting things organized in Assisi. The Pope’s Angelicum classmate, Bishop Jorge Mejía, then Cardinal Etchegaray’s deputy at the Pontifical Justice and Peace Commission, was asked to write an article for the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, giving the rationale for the event, which was still causing a lot of grumbling. Mejía’s lengthy article patiently explained once again that while “it is difficult to see how we, as Christians, can insert ourselves into the prayer of others” who did not share our faith in the God of Abraham, it remained the case that “being present when another prays, or when many come together to pray, cannot but enrich our own proper experience of prayer.” He also added a tart reminder of the kind of world in which those complaining about the papal initiative were living: “In a world where there is too little prayer,” he wrote, “the unheard of fact that believers of the different religions find themselves together to pray acquires an exceptional value…What better response can we make to widespread secularism, if not this journey, this mutual encounter, for no other reason than to speak to God, each in his or her own way?…”78
In Mejía’s mind, the whole initiative was an example of the “great, great audacity” of his old Angelicum classmate, the man with the faith “to dare to do this.”79 Whether they agreed or not, senior curial officials eventually got the message. The event was going to happen, with or without their approval, and they decided that they had to be there, taking their accustomed positions as members of the Cappella Papale, the “Papal Chapel,” in the front of the assembly. Cardinal Etchegaray said that they would, of course, be welcome, but that he couldn’t seat them according to the usual arrangements, as it would be bad form to have the first three rows in the piazza filled with cardinals during the closing session. “They were not happy,” Mejía recalled.80
The World Day of Prayer itself, October 27, 1986, went off with only one hitch. Cardinal Arinze had urged that African animists be included among the religious leaders. One of those who came was very old, and was dressed traditionally, which is to say scantily, in unseasonably cold weather. He fainted, but was revived in time to meet with John Paul during the meal that followed the closing service.
At the meal, John Paul didn’t get a chance to eat. He had had commemorative engravings printed for the other religious leaders, which were distributed when the entire group met to break their common fast. Virtually all of the leaders decided that they had to have the Pope autograph their personal copies.81
REOPENING AN ANCIENT CONVERSATION
As bold as John Paul’s initiatives with world religions were, there has never been any doubt of the singular place the Pope assigns to the Church’s encounter with living Judaism. In the months following the Assisi meeting he pressed even further the proposal he set out during his April 1986 visit to the Synagogue of Rome.
One can detect a steady progression in the Pope’s thinking about Jews, Judaism, and Jewish-Catholic relations over twenty years. At his very first meeting with representatives of Roman Jewish organizations, on March 12, 1979, John Paul noted that “our two religious communities are connected and closely related at the very level of their respective religious identities.” JewishCatholic dialogue, from a Catholic perspective, was a religious obligation, and thus all the more demanding.82 Five years later, in a 1984 address to an audience for representatives of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith [ADL], John Paul took the question a step further: “The encounter between Catholics and Jews is not a meeting of two ancient religions each going its own way.” Rather, there was a “mysterious spiritual link…which brings us close together, in Abraham and through Abraham, in God who chose Israel and brought forth the Church from Israel.”83
A year later, addressing an ADL colloquium on the twentieth anniversary of Nostra Aetatae, John Paul suggested that the Jewish-Catholic dialogue, to be true to its own distinctiveness, had to become more explicitly theological. As Christians pondered more deeply the Jewish roots of Christianity, and as Jews reflected on the ways that the Church, since the days of Peter and Paul, had read the Hebrew Bible and received its Jewish heritage, the Jewish-Catholic
dialogue must turn toward “common theological studies.”84
Seven months after his April 1986 visit to the Synagogue of Rome, John Paul addressed another ADL-sponsored colloquium and suggested that the “mystery of universal redemption” was a kind of common border between Judaism and Christianity. Jewish-Christian dialogue had to address God’s saving action in history now.85
What John Paul II was proposing in these and numerous other texts was nothing less than reconvening the theological conversation between Christians and Jews that had been broken off at the “parting of the ways” in the late first century A.D.
This was a bold vision. It challenged Jewish interlocutors who instinctively thought “theological dialogue” between Catholics and Jews was code for Catholic proselytization of Jews. It challenged Catholics who had never rid themselves of the last vestiges of the belief that God’s redemptive action in Christ had superseded, indeed abrogated, the covenant with Abraham. John Paul insisted that the covenant with “Abraham’s stock” was irrevocable, and that that was why a renewed theological conversation with Jews and Catholics was religiously essential.
This was easier for Catholics than Jews to acknowledge, theologically. Christian orthodoxy has always affirmed its debt to Judaism, however much Christians may have defaulted in their obligations to the Jewish people. Judaism has no similar or parallel “place” for Christianity in its mainstream self-understanding. Yet some of the twentieth century’s greatest Jewish thinkers—among them, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Abraham Joshua Heschel—had explored the question of how Jews should differentiate their understanding of Christians from their understanding of all the other “others.”86 Some vigorously observant Jewish philosophers and theologians had even begun to ask whether Jews did not have a religious obligation to engage in a theological dialogue with Christians.87
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