Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  General Jaruzelski was not pleased with all this. He demanded an unscheduled fifty-five-minute meeting with the Pope before John Paul’s departure, and gave an impromptu talk afterward denouncing Western journalistic misrepresentations of the visit. He also took a sideswipe at John Paul, saying to the departing Pope that, after his farewell, “You will take with you, in your heart, its image, but you will not take with you the homeland’s real problems.” Surely, Jaruzelski went on, the well-traveled Pope “will have noticed how many social ills and misery, injustice and contempt for human rights still exist” around the world. Maybe the Pope should say something about all of that: “May the word ‘solidarity’ flow from our Polish soil [to] those people who still suffer from racism and neocolonialism, exploitation and unemployment, persecutions and intolerance.”53

  It was an amazing performance, but the recitation of the communist litany of world grievances rang hollow. Jaruzelski could fret about whether the papal pilgrimage would “add to the authority of Poland.”54 It certainly did not add to his authority—which, in John Paul’s addresses, was treated as vestigial. Perhaps the general believed in some form of “national compromise” that would, as he put it, improve work and “everyday morality.”55 As John Paul had made clear since June 1979, though, there was no strategic compromise possible with a system built on a radically defective concept of the human person. Things might be improved on the margins. There had been some easing of repression, and Jaruzelski had dangled the possibility of formal diplomatic relations between the Polish People’s Republic and the Holy See during the visit.56 In the endgame, though, this remained what it always had been, a confrontation in which there would be a winner and a loser.

  The June 1987 papal pilgrimage to Poland was built on the assumption that the identity of the loser was already clear.

  APOSTLES TO “THE WORLD”

  In the three months between his third Polish pilgrimage and the opening of a Synod of Bishops to discuss the vocation of the laity, John Paul found himself caught in an unexpected controversy with world Jewish leaders, made his second pastoral pilgrimage to the United States, and took another step toward the reconciliation of religion and science.

  The Waldheim Controversy

  The controversy involved the President of Austria, Kurt Waldheim, whom John Paul II received in audience in June 25, 1987, nine days after his return from Poland. Waldheim, former Secretary-General of the United Nations, was the democratically elected head of state of a Catholic country with which the Holy See had full diplomatic relations. Not to receive him was a diplomatic impossibility. Waldheim had also been an officer of the army of the Third Reich, and had neither acknowledged nor publicly expressed regret for his role in wartime human rights violations.57

  For more than eight years, John Paul II’s actions had demonstrated his convictions about his international responsibilities. As Bishop of Rome and universal pastor of the Church, he was, by definition, in conversation with everyone, including those whose politics he might locate on a spectrum ranging from unacceptable to reprehensible. To talk with Andrei Gromyko, for example, was neither edifying nor productive, but it was imperative, notwithstanding Gromyko’s role in the Gulag system. Given these realities and the great care that John Paul had taken to reach out to Jewish communities around the world, sympathetic observers might well have regarded Waldheim’s state visit to the Holy See as an inevitability—regrettable, but given the Austrian president’s determination, unavoidable. Yet the Waldheim visit caused a crisis in Catholic-Jewish relations that threatened to disrupt the Pope’s impending September visit to the United States and the future of the Jewish-Catholic dialogue John Paul had worked so hard to nurture.

  The immediate problem was the Pope’s scheduled meeting with American Jewish leaders in Miami during his second U.S. pilgrimage. In the wake of the Waldheim controversy, Jewish leaders threatened to boycott the meeting. Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, in New York on a personal visit, changed his schedule to meet privately with the angry Jewish leaders and see what could be worked out. On his return to Rome, Casaroli recommended that the Pope meet with a representative delegation from American Jewry in an attempt to salvage the Miami meeting and repair relations. John Paul agreed, and meetings were arranged on August 31 and September 1.

  Representatives of the Holy See’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews met with members of the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations in Rome to discuss the Holocaust, contemporary anti-Semitism, the Church’s teaching on Jews and Judaism, and relations between the Holy See and the State of Israel.58 During the discussion on the moral implications of the Holocaust, the Jewish representatives expressed what a later communiqué discreetly called the “dismay and concern over the moral problems raised for the Jewish people by the audience” for President Waldheim. With equal discretion, the communiqué reported that “the Catholic delegation acknowledged the seriousness of and the Church’s sensitivity to those Jewish concerns, and set forth the serious reasons behind the judgment of the Holy See.” The conferees also met with Cardinal Casaroli and were received by the Pope at Castel Gandolfo on Tuesday afternoon, September 1, where what diplomats call a “full and frank exchange of views” was had.

  While saving the papal meeting with American Jewish leaders in Miami and getting the Catholic-Jewish dialogue back on track, the Rome/Castel Gandolfo emergency session was also the occasion for two new initiatives. The first was a Vatican commitment to prepare an official document on the Shoah and its relationship to the history of anti-Semitism. The second was that Vatican representatives made it clear, in the course of the discussion over the Holy See and the State of Israel, that “serious and unresolved” practical problems, not theological objections to the Jewish State, were the obstacle to full diplomatic relations—an important clarification, given the view to the contrary in some Jewish circles.59

  “Ordered Freedom”

  The sixty-seven-year-old Pope took an athlete’s holiday in July, spending six days hiking in the Dolomites in northern Italy, saluting startled fellow hikers with his walking stick and staying in a small house owned by the Diocese of Treviso at Lorenzago di Cadore. Low-key Italian security forces helped keep the paparazzi, eager for photos of the Pontiff in distinctly unpapal hiking attire, at bay.

  After the brief respite, John Paul went on his second pastoral pilgrimage to the United States, which took him primarily to the South and Southwest. He landed in Miami on September 10, where he was greeted by President Ronald Reagan and met with representatives of priests’ councils from across the country. On September 11, he met with Jewish leaders, and later celebrated Mass at Tamiami Park before flying to Columbia, South Carolina. There, he participated in an interfaith prayer service at the University of South Carolina stadium with evangelical Protestants whose grandparents had unblushingly referred to the Pope as the “Whore of Babylon.” After a day in New Orleans and meetings with African-American Catholic leaders and Catholic educators, John Paul went to San Antonio for encounters with Catholic Charities workers, seminarians and religious novices, and the Hispanic-American Catholic community. In Phoenix, on September 14, he met with health-care workers and Native Americans before celebrating Mass in the Arizona State University stadium.

  A meeting with what were termed “communications specialists” in Los Angeles the next day was an opportunity for the Pope to challenge Hollywood to attend with greater care to the moral health of American popular culture. The challenge did not meet with notable success. John Paul also met in the City of Angels with the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and with representatives of world religions, before celebrating Mass in Dodger Stadium. In Monterey and San Francisco, the Pope visited old Franciscan missions and held encounters with members of men’s and women’s religious orders and with lay representatives. After a one-day stop in Detroit to meet Polish-Americans and permanent deacons and their wives, the Pope flew to Fort Simpson in Canada, keeping his promise to meet
with the native peoples of Canada’s northwestern territories. He was back in Rome on September 21, having covered more than 18,000 miles in twelve days.

  The pilgrimage organizers at the National Conference of Catholic Bishops were determined that this visit would be more of a “dialogue” between the Pope and the Church in the United States than 1979 had been, but the formula they adopted seemed artificial. While John Paul’s journeys always involved meetings with members of different vocational groups in the Church, the 1987 American program seemed almost a parody of affirmative action, dividing the Church into interest groups—clergy, religious, Hispanics, African-Americans, social workers, health-care workers—who were to express their particular concerns to the Pope and hear his response. The assumption that concerns could be put into such neat group categories was misleading and patronizing, and the device of a “representative” reading a carefully prepared address to the Pope, who then “responded” with his own prepared text, seemed, in a word, contrived. It certainly did not make for a real dialogue, and it reinforced the stereotype that John Paul was more interested in instructing wayward Americans than in listening to their distinctive experience of faith.

  In fact the Pope had a great interest in and affection for America, as he had demonstrated in the most memorable statement of his 1987 pilgrimage, a paean to “ordered freedom” that impressed some by its feel for the American political experiment:

  From the beginning of America, freedom was directed to forming a well-ordered society and to promoting its peaceful life. Freedom was channeled to the fullness of human life, to the preservation of human dignity and to the safeguarding of all human rights. An experience of ordered freedom is truly a cherished part of the history of this land.

  This is the freedom that America is called to live and guard and to transmit. She is called to exercise it in such a way that it will also benefit the cause of freedom in other nations and among other peoples. The only true freedom, the only freedom that can truly satisfy is… the freedom to live the truth of what we are and who we are before God, the truth of our identity as children of God, as brothers and sisters in a common humanity….

  At a difficult moment in the history of this country, a great American, Abraham Lincoln, spoke of a special need at that time: “that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom.” A new birth of freedom is repeatedly necessary: freedom to exercise responsibility and generosity; freedom to meet the challenge of serving humanity, the freedom to fulfill human destiny, the freedom to live by truth, to defend it against whatever distorts and manipulates it, the freedom to observe God’s law—which is the supreme standard of human liberty—the freedom to live as children of God, secure and happy: the freedom to be America in that constitutional democracy which was conceived to be “One Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”60

  Newton’s Anniversary

  On returning from the United States, John Paul prepared for an international research conference he had called on the current relations among the sciences, philosophy, and theology. It was held at the Vatican Observatory at Castel Gandolfo from September 21 to 26, 1987, to mark the 300th anniversary of Newton’s Principia Mathematica. For five days, scholars from around the world debated the broad question of science and religion with special reference to physics: Could current scientific views of time, space, causality, and matter be “exported” to theology in a way that was honest to the canons of science and consistent with Christian orthodoxy? Could philosophy, a discipline in its own turmoil, usefully “mediate” between physics and theology?

  When the conference papers were published nine months later, they included a letter from the Pope to Father George Coyne, SJ, director of the Vatican Observatory. John Paul compared the new dialogue between theology and science to the ecumenical movement. What was thought impossible decades ago was now deemed imperative. Science and theology “have begun to talk to one another on deeper levels than before, and with greater openness toward one another’s perspectives…” The new dialogue, the Pope suggested, should take advantage of the contemporary scientific interest in unifying knowledge, as when physicists tried to devise a “unified theory” of the four basic physical forces. The new dialogue also had to avoid an imposed and artificial “disciplinary unity,” which had led both science and theology astray in the past. A definition of common ground that respected the integrity of both dialogue partners was essential, for science could not become theology, nor theology science.

  This long-delayed dialogue about basic issues was essential, John Paul concluded, in revitalizing a humanism capable of shaping a truly humane future: “Our knowledge of each other can lead us to be more authentically ourselves. No one can read the history of the past century and not realize that crisis is upon us both. The uses of science have on more than one occasion proven massively destructive, and the reflections on religion have too often been sterile. We need each other to be what we must be, what we are called to be.”61

  The Synod on the Laity

  Scientists were not the only laypeople John Paul was calling to rethink their vocation. The Pope’s steady emphasis on the universal call to holiness was aimed at getting all the people of the Church to think of themselves in something other than monarchical terms, in order to live in the world as the Body of Christ should live. In the monarchical model that shaped the Catholic imagination for centuries before Vatican II, the Pope is king, the bishops are nobles, the clergy and consecrated religious are gentry, and the laity are peasants. The last have no responsibilities other than obedience and tithes, and when they are not praying, paying, or obeying (as an old saw has it), they are not being the Church in any significant way. That concept, in John Paul’s long-settled view, was a serious impediment to implementing the Council’s teaching that the Church is a communio, a communion of believers, who together form the Body of Christ in the world and who all share, by baptism, in Christ’s triple mission to evangelize, sanctify, and serve.

  The Council’s understanding of the Church as communio was largely lost in the agitations over authority and sexual morality that followed Vatican II. The Extraordinary Synod of 1985 tried to recover that distinctive way of thinking about the Church—that “ecclesiology,” in theological terms. Beginning in 1987, John Paul II convened three Ordinary Assemblies of the Synod of Bishops to work out the implications of this communio ecclesiology for three “states of life” in the Church: the laity, the priesthood, and the consecrated religious life of those who take perpetual vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. In addition to helping establish an authoritative interpretation of Vatican II, the Synods on the laity (1987), the formation of priests (1990), and the consecrated religious life (1994) all aimed at renewing the Council’s call to sanctity through the three distinct ways that Catholics live that call.62

  The most far-reaching of the three in its implications for the Catholic future was the Synod on the Laity, which was held from October 1 through October 30, 1987, and completed by the post-synodal apostolic exhortation Christifideles Laici [Christ’s Faithful Lay People], issued by John Paul II on December 30, 1988.

  The Synod itself included 232 bishop-participants and sixty lay “auditors,” who addressed the Synod’s general assemblies and participated in its language-based small discussion groups. In addition, a layman (Jean-Loup Dherse of France) and a laywoman (Maria da Graça Guedes Sales Henriques of Portugal) were appointed adjunct special secretaries of the Synod.63 As was his habit, the Pope attended every general session, listening to almost 300 speeches. The Synod celebrated, as well as discussed, holiness among lay Christians. On October 4, John Paul beatified Marcel Callo, a French lay activist in the Young Catholic Worker movement who had been martyred in the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1945, and two Italian women, Antonia Messina and Pierina Morosini, both of whom had been martyred while resisting rape. On October 18, the Pope canonized Blessed Lorenzo Ruiz and fifteen other martyrs of Japan; Ruiz was the Filipino lay missio
nary John Paul had beatified in Manila in 1981. And on October 25, the Pope canonized Blessed Giuseppe Moscati, an Italian physician who had died in Naples in 1927.

  The Synod eventually agreed on fifty-four “propositions.” Together with themes from the speeches and small group discussions and the materials prepared by the Synod secretariat before the meeting, these propositions were used by John Paul II to formulate the post-synodal document he issued fourteen months later.

  Christifideles Laici laid out a dramatic, even radical, vision of a laity fully living its mission to society and culture as an expression of its full membership in the Body of Christ. Written by a Pope who had once expected to spend his Christian life as a layman, the lengthy document reflects Karol Wojtyła’s extensive experience fostering the lay vocation in the world. John Paul’s approach to the laity is reminiscent of John Henry Newman. The great nineteenth-century English theologian, asked by his bishop what the clergy should think of the laity, is said to have responded that “we would look rather silly without them.” Newman’s sharp wit had been papally confirmed by Pius XII’s statement that “the laity are the Church,” but few in pre–Vatican II Catholicism took that very seriously. One exception was Karol Wojtyła, whose pastoral strategy of “accompaniment” was an expression of his conviction that every Christian was part of the Church’s evangelical mission. As he put it in Christifideles Laici, “It is not permissible for anyone to remain idle.” 64