There was a special “urgency” about this on the edge of a new millennium, however. The practical atheism of modernity had made clear that the yearning for God in the human heart could never be extinguished. The degradation of the human person had led to a widespread reassertion of human rights. A century of violent conflict had led to a new determination to pursue peace. Modernity badly needed the Gospel message and, precisely because of its contemporary crisis, was open to it.65
Every Christian, the Pope insists, is called to a life of holiness in baptism, and for the laity, the call to holiness is “intimately connected to mission.”66 The responsibility given to lay Christians is nothing less than to continue Christ’s saving mission in “the world,” which is “the place and the means for the lay faithful to fulfill their Christian vocation.” The sanctification of “the world”—society, culture, the workplace—is the distinctively “secular” vocation of the laity.67 The temptation to clericalize the laity by folding their distinctive vocation into that of the ordained priesthood must be resisted, for the sake of the lay vocation’s integrity and dignity. It is rank clericalism, the Pope suggests, to propose that the laity can exercise their mission only by becoming priests manqué. The laity have the right and obligation to mission by reason of their baptism. Any suggestion that they can only exercise this mission by imitating the clergy demeans the grace of baptism and falsifies the Church as communio.68 In this context, John Paul also stresses the importance of the local parish, which is not a coincidental aggregation of Christians who happen to live in the same neighborhood, but “the Church living in the midst of the homes of her sons and daughters.”69 The parish should be the “place” where believers gather to strengthen their commitment to their mission in the world, “a house of welcome to all and a place of service to all.”70
“Being the Church” is not something that the laity do on Sunday mornings only, and it is not something that should happen only in a church building. “Being the Church” is something that the laity do in the world all the time, and in every venue of life.71 Business, the professions, the creative arts, the media, and politics are, for the Pope, all venues in which Christians live the universal call to holiness.72
Although he would introduce the term “new evangelization” later, the basic concept, central to the pontificate of John Paul II, is launched in Christifideles Laici. The “new evangelization” of the twenty-first century demands a Church that has transcended clericalism. The Church cannot preach the Gospel or witness to the truth about the human person in the modern world if the people and leaders of the Church think of “the Church” as a clerical preserve in which lay men and women occasionally participate. Being a Christian is a full-time occupation. The only reason for the Church’s hierarchical structure is to serve that mission and foster the holiness of those called to mission—which is everybody.
Like John Paul’s Theology of the Body, Christifideles Laici would seem to be a document well in advance of current Catholic thinking. There is a sense in which Catholic clergy and laity alike are unprepared for the kind of Church John Paul II envisions in this bold proposal. If and when the life of the Church catches up with Christifideles Laici, that fact will alter the face of world Catholicism, by reviving dimensions of New Testament Christianity among evangelically assertive Catholics who are far more passionate about service than about ecclesiastical power.
HERE AND NOW
Even as he scouted the unexplored terrain of twenty-first-century Catholicism in Christifideles Laici, John Paul continued to deal with the Church’s mission here and now: its ecumenical commitment, its social doctrine, its defense of human rights, its post-conciliar divisions, its internal structure, and its bishops.
Andrew Visits Peter
Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I of Constantinople came to Rome on a five-day pilgrimage in December 1987 that marked a public high point in John Paul II’s attempts to reconcile the millennium-long division of Christianity into East and West. After his arrival on December 3, Dimitrios addressed the Roman Curia and the Lateran University on December 4, and spoke to young Catholics at the Basilica of S. Maria in Trastevere on December 6. The possibility of a Church breathing again with its two lungs, the Pope’s favorite metaphor, was powerfully embodied in two liturgical services, a solemn celebration of Vespers at the Basilica of St. Mary Major on the evening of December 4, and a Mass at St. Peter’s the following day, the Second Sunday of Advent in the liturgical calendar.
According to the official announcement, the Vespers service was celebrated “with the participation of Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I.” Both the Pope and the Patriarch preached. Similar language was used to describe the Mass at St. Peter’s: the Mass was “celebrated by Pope John Paul II with the participation of Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I.” John Paul met the Ecumenical Patriarch in the atrium of St. Peter’s. The two leaders processed into the basilica side by side, preceded by an Orthodox deacon and a Latin deacon, each liturgically vested and carrying the Book of the Gospels. Pope and Patriarch kissed the altar together and, after the Pope had incensed it, were seated together in front of the papal altar for the first half of the Mass, the Liturgy of the Word. It was not a concelebration, so John Paul was liturgically vested while Dimitrios wore his choir robe, the mandyas. But it was as close to concelebration as the two “sister Churches” could come at the present moment. The two deacons proclaimed the Gospel in Greek and Latin, the Greek deacon receiving the Pope’s blessing before chanting the reading and the Latin deacon receiving the Patriarch’s. Pope and Patriarch then kissed each other’s lectionaries and blessed the congregation with them. Both men then preached.
The Ecumenical Patriarch referred to the sad fact that “on this propitious day…we gather near the Table of the Lord but are not yet able to serve there together,” and closed by praying that “the Lord grant that the Church may see his day (cf. Acts 2.20), the day of reconciliation, peace, fraternity, and unity.” That seemed to put off the restoration of full communion until the Second Coming of Christ. John Paul, in his homily, had a different timeline in mind. He repeated Vatican II’s declaration that full communion could be achieved on the basis of the relationship that had existed between Rome and the East before 1054: the traditions of the Eastern Churches would be fully respected in a return to the situation that had obtained before the separation. The fact that the two men could not drink from the same chalice was “a source of bitter suffering,” the Pope said. John Paul concluded with the prayer that Christ might “transform our suffering into an incentive to work tirelessly to restore full communion among us soon, and to prepare together, in the midst of men on this earth, a ‘highway for our God’ (Isaiah 40.3)!”73
After the homilies, John Paul and Dimitrios recited the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed together in the original Greek. During the General Intercessions, prayers were offered for both men. At the end of the Liturgy of the Word, Patriarch Dimitrios left the altar for a special place of honor nearby, at the tribune of St. Andrew. As the Patriarch moved away, John Paul embraced him spontaneously. At the kiss of peace, prior to the reception of Communion, John Paul left the altar and went to the Patriarch for the exchange of Christ’s peace and another fraternal embrace. After the post-Communion prayer, Dimitrios once again joined John Paul on the altar, where the two men blessed the congregation, John Paul in Latin and Dimitrios in Greek. They then went to pray together at Peter’s tomb beneath the altar before processing out of the basilica together and going up to the loggia, where they both addressed the crowd outside.74
On December 7, John Paul and Dimitrios signed a joint declaration, which affirmed the ongoing theological dialogue between Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy as an effort “to re-establish full communion between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church,” and promised cooperation on work for justice and peace throughout the world. Together, they wrote, “we await the day willed by God when refound unity will be celebrated and when full communion will be established
by a concelebration of the Lord’s Eucharist.”75
The colorful and emotionally charged liturgical celebrations were a foretaste of what that refound unity would be like. At the end, though, there remained a divergent sense of possibility between the Pope and the Ecumenical Patriarch. John Paul II seemed determined to press for full communion by the end of the second millennium of Christian history—to end a millennium of division by a return to the unity of the first millennium, which he believed essential to the Christian mission in the third. The Ecumenical Patriarch lived in a different circumstance than the Pope. As first among equal Orthodox patriarchs, he could not press any further than the consensus among his patriarchal brethren in Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, Moscow, Athens, Belgrade, Bucharest, and elsewhere allowed. Dimitrios’s evocation of the “day of the Lord” as the moment when the Church’s unity would be restored seemed not only to reflect his different ecclesiastical circumstances, though, but a different sense of urgency, and perhaps even a different sense of history.
Social Concern
During these months, a second social encyclical was gestating. John Paul II tried to accomplish three things with Sollicitudo Rei Socialis [On Social Concern], issued on February 19, 1988. He wanted to mark the twentieth anniversary of Paul VI’s social encyclical, Populorum Progressio [The Progress of Peoples], and to update the Church’s social doctrine in light of the accelerating quest for freedom throughout the world and the new, Third World–dominated demographics of world Catholicism. The third aim was bureaucratic: to get the Roman Curia to accept his post-Constantinian view of the Church’s role in the world as an authentic development of Vatican II. The first goal was easily accomplished. Sollicitudo’s forty citations from Populorum Progressio ensured that Pope Paul’s encyclical was duly commemorated. But the second and third goals were not easily combined. The result was an encyclical that read like a committee document, some sections of which deflected attention from the originality of the Pope’s own analysis and the principal public themes of his pontificate.
That popes have assistance in writing encyclicals is hardly news. Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, later Pius XII, is generally thought to have drafted Pius XI’s stinging 1937 condemnation of Nazism, Mit Brennender Sorge. Pietro Pavan (created a cardinal by John Paul II) drafted Pacem in Terris for John XXIII, who kept sending the Italian theologian back to his desk with orders to simplify the text until he, the Pope, could understand it. Drafting assistance does not compromise the teaching authority of a papal document, which receives its authoritative “form” from the Pope’s signature, an act that completes the project in a definitive way and without which any draft is just that: a draft.76
John Paul II’s first six encyclicals, on the other hand, read like the statements of a single author who may have sought expert advice (as from the historians consulted in the writing of Slavorum Apostoli) but whom one could also imagine sitting at his desk, pen in hand. That Sollicitudo Rei Socialis read so differently was the first stylistic clue that a different process had produced this document.
While Sollicitudo is John Paul II’s encyclical and carries his papal authority, the document was the result of elaborate consultations and discussions within the Roman Curia. John Paul had had a unique experience of the world Church in the first nine years of his pontificate, sensing momentous shifts in the offing where others perceived business more or less as usual. His culturally driven view of the dynamics of social change had given him a different view of the way the Church should relate to the world of politics and economics, a vision that challenged traditional curialism and the new politicization advocated by liberation theology. Perhaps the drafting of a social encyclical in broad consultation with the Curia would help “teach” this new vision of “the Church in the modern world” to the Roman bureaucracy.
An initial draft of the encyclical was prepared by the Pontifical Justice and Peace Commission. John Paul had told Cardinal Roger Etchegaray and Bishop Jorge Mejía, the commission’s two senior officials, that he wanted to commemorate Populorum Progressio and “go further,” taking into account what had happened over the past twenty years. The commission had “multiple meetings,” out of which, according to Mejía, a “synthesis” was prepared and sent to the Pope.77 John Paul then prepared a schema of major points he wanted to make in a new social encyclical; the Secretariat of State distributed this to other offices in the Curia. The Justice and Peace Commission solicited comments on economic development issues from the world’s bishops’ conferences. The results of this survey were given to the Pope, as the process of drafting, circulating drafts for comments, and redrafting continued throughout the fall of 1987.78 The deadline for the twentieth anniversary of Populorum Progressio, March 26, had long since passed. Work on what was becoming Sollicitudo Rei Socialis continued through the first weeks of January 1988, although the encyclical was formally dated December 30, 1987, to meet the anniversary-year goal. Reporters wondered what was going on. The Pope hadn’t traveled abroad since his U.S. visit in September, and no travels were scheduled until a May 1988 pilgrimage to Latin America. Joaquín Navarro-Valls explained to the curious press that “the Pope is on a trip to the Curia.”79
The encyclical was finally released on February 19, 1988. After acknowledging Populorum Progressio, John Paul surveyed the contemporary world sociopolitical-economic scene, explored the moral core of “authentic human development,” analyzed the moral obstacles to economic and political development, laid down moral guidelines for political and economic reform, and traced the relationship between development and Christian liberation. In addition, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis made several striking innovations in the Church’s social doctrine, reflecting the desire to “go further” that John Paul had expressed to Etchegaray and Mejía.
Populorum Progressio had been widely interpreted as favoring state-centered approaches to Third World economic development. Sollicitudo defines a personal “right of economic initiative,” crucial for both the individual and the common good, and argued that personal initiatives could not be suppressed in the name of “an alleged ‘equality’ of everyone in society.”80 Populorum Progressio had been virtually silent on the relationship between different political systems and the prospects for economic development in poor countries. Sollicitudo is resolutely anti-totalitarian and specifically anti-communist, rejecting the claim of a “social group, for example, a political party…to usurp the role of sole leader.”81
Populorum Progressio treated development economics as an independent variable in the life of a society. Sollicitudo follows John Paul’s “culture-first” approach to social change by arguing that civil society is essential to development. This was spelled out further in a section on human rights and development, a topic that was not prominent in Populorum Progressio. Here, John Paul argues that underdevelopment is a function of insecure civil liberties as well as defective economics.82
Populorum Progressio stressed the obligations of the developed to the developing world. While forcefully reiterating that moral claim, John Paul II argues that the deterioration of Third World conditions since Populorum Progressio is also due to “undoubtedly grave instances of omissions on the part of the developing nations themselves, and especially on the part of those holding economic and political power.”83 Integral human development requires that Third World countries “reform certain unjust structures, and in particular their political institutions, in order to replace corrupt, dictatorial, and authoritarian forms of government by democratic and participatory ones.”84
These themes were wholly consistent with John Paul’s teaching over nine years. The Sollicitudo controversy involved the encyclical’s description of the world situation, which resembled the attitudes prevalent in many Church social justice agencies. Both “liberal capitalism” and “Marxist collectivism,” the ideologies responsible for “the tension between East and West,” were “imperfect and in need of radical correction.” Moreover, “each of the two blocs harbors in its own way a tenden
cy toward imperialism…or toward forms of neocolonialism: an easy temptation to which they frequently succumb, as history, including recent history, teaches.” The clash between East and West, transferred to the Third World, was a “direct obstacle to the real transformation of the conditions of underdevelopment in the developing and less advanced countries,” and was the result of an “exaggerated concern for security, which deadens the impulse towards united cooperation by all for the common good of the human race.”85
A. M. Rosenthal, former editor of the New York Times, wrote in a column that “All good journalists would put the same headline on the story: ‘Pope Condemns Marxism and Capitalism Equally; Says Both Are Imperialistic and Sin Against Poor.’”86 William F. Buckley, Jr., was less restrained, characterizing the Pope’s view of the world as “this Tweedledum-Tweedledee view of the crystallized division between the visions of Marx, Lenin, Mao Tse-tung, and Pol Pot over against those of Locke, Jefferson, Lincoln and Churchill.”87 On the other side of the ideological spectrum, the liberal anti-communist New Republic editorialized that John Paul had “become an apostle of moral equivalence” who had failed “to tell the whole truth” because of “political considerations.”88
These condemnations, as well as the welcome the encyclical received from Catholic economic and political progressives, were exaggerated.89 No one could seriously argue that John Paul II was unaware of the difference between, say, NATO and the Warsaw Pact; but the encyclical’s reference to “two blocs,” invited misunderstanding.90 It is also true that, from the point of view of many Third World Catholics (a vantage point on history that John Paul was trying to get his Curia to understand), both capitalism and communism, or, more broadly, “the East” and “the West,” could seem in need of “radical correction.” Even so, this failed to address the question of whether what was called “capitalism” in Latin America was another and very old-fashioned form of state management of the economy. Some of the American criticism of Sollicitudo was parochial. John Paul wrote as the universal pastor of a worldwide Church, quite aware that his teaching on economic initiative, his rejection of statist development schemes, and his affirmation of democracy was going to be read as a frontal challenge in Moscow, Havana, and Managua, however much it seemed business-as-usual in New York and Washington—a fact that his Western readers might have acknowledged.
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