Still, it cannot be denied that Sollicitudo showed the influence of those Catholic intellectuals and activists who did believe in “moral equivalence” between “the blocs,” and the enduring influence in the Curia of Paul VI’s Ostpolitik and its “evenhandedness” between East and West. That these ideas found their way into an encyclical whose most original elements were far more congruent with John Paul II’s thinking was, according to informed observers, the result of the Pope’s attempt to use the preparation of Sollicitudo Rei Socialis as a means for getting the Curia to think differently about the Church in the modern world. But curial thinking may have had more influence on the encyclical than the encyclical’s original ideas had on the Curia.
Confrontation in Paraguay
Although it had been only thirteen months since his last visit to Latin America, John Paul thought another was imperative. In May 1988, the Pope’s thirty-seventh pastoral pilgrimage took him to Uruguay, Bolivia, Peru, and Paraguay. The pilgrimage graphically illustrated the concern for the relationship between political corruption and poverty he had written about in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis.
General Alfredo Stroessner had been “reelected” to his eighth term as President of Paraguay on February 18, 1988. He had been in complete control of the country since seizing power in 1954, in a coup supported by the now-dominant Colorado Party and the army. The democratic movement that was changing the political landscape of Latin America had reached Paraguay, but Stroessner had shown no willingness to recognize the nascent democratic opposition and no inclination to submit himself and his party to a real electoral contest.
A meeting with an opposition group, the “Builders of Society,” had been arranged as part of the Pope’s Paraguayan itinerary. On May 11, when John Paul was in Oruro, an extremely poor area of Bolivia, papal spokesman Joaquín Navarro-Valls was told by a journalist that General Stroessner, in a letter to the papal nuncio, Archbishop Giorgio Zur, had just canceled the meeting with the Builders. The Pope returned to Cochabamba to celebrate Mass at 11 A.M. Afterward, John Paul met with Secretary of State Casaroli; Archbishop Martínez Somalo, the Sostituto; and spokesman Navarro. The Pope’s message was blunt. If the report from Asunción were true, “We’re not going to Paraguay.” John Paul went on with his schedule, while the others tried to get in touch with Archbishop Zur through Rome, where Archbishop Silvestrini, the “foreign minister,” was in charge in the absence of Casaroli and Martínez Somalo.
The next day, May 12, Navarro decided to try applying public pressure on Stroessner with a simple press release: “For now, I must express my amazement at a provocation without precedent, bearing on the pastoral activity of the Holy Father.” The press wanted more, but Navarro replied that the statement spoke for itself. At 7:30 A.M. on May 13—the feast of Our Lady of Fatima and the seventh anniversary of Agca’s assassination attempt—the chief of Paraguayan protocol, Ambassador Papalardo, tracked Navarro down in the convent that was headquarters for the papal party in Cochabamba. He said he had read the stories based on Navarro’s press release in the morning papers. He then went on a tirade. The Builders of Society were communists who didn’t have anywhere near the support of the Colorado Party. Archbishop Rolón (the President of the Paraguayan Bishops’ Conference) was an opportunist who wanted to be remembered in history as the liberator of Paraguay. Navarro absorbed all this, replied calmly that this was an unprecedented problem, and suggested that Papalardo meet with the nuncio and Archbishop Rolón to discuss things. The protocol chief could then call Navarro back after lunch to tell the papal spokesman that the situation had been resolved. At 4 P.M., Ambassador Papalardo called to say that everything had been settled and thanked Navarro for his suggestion.
Navarro told Cardinal Casaroli, who told the Pope, who laughed: “So, they’re going to let the Pope come to Paraguay….”91
It was a masterful use of public pressure through the media to achieve the Pope’s ends. John Paul took advantage of his opportunities as soon as he arrived in Paraguay, calling for the “moral cleansing” of the country and declaring, in terms reminiscent of Sollicitudo, that “liberty, justice, and participation” were essential in building an “authentic democracy”—presumably a reference to the eighty-nine percent of the vote that General Stroessner had received in February. Stroessner replied in his own sinister way, arresting political opponents before John Paul had left the country and tightening the repression on the Church and human rights activists afterward. But the general’s days were numbered. He was overthrown in a military coup less than nine months after the Pope’s visit. The coup leader, General Andrés Rodriguéz, called general elections for May 1, 1989, and was elected in what the opposition agreed was a ballot without systematic or widespread vote fraud. Rodriguéz pledged to serve out Stroessner’s term, but did not run for reelection. Paraguay enjoyed its first closely contested election in 1993. Throughout the 1990s, the Paraguayan bishops remained champions of democracy under difficult economic and political circumstances.92
The Lefebvre Schism
During his pastoral visits, his preparation of encyclicals, and his hundreds of meetings with the world’s bishops, another danger weighed upon John Paul II: the possibility of schism within the Catholic Church.
The Pope and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had worked hard to reconcile Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the dissident Frenchman, without abandoning their commitment to Vatican II. John Paul had met Lefebvre shortly after his election. The Frenchman had told journalists afterward, “He didn’t seem like a Pope to me; he had no character.”93 The Pope, who welcomed the Council’s liturgical renewal, believed that there should be a place in the Church for those who wanted to use the pre-conciliar rite, as long as they accepted the Missal of Paul VI as the Church’s official liturgy.94 In October 1984, an indult (a canonical permission) had allowed more widespread use of the pre–Vatican II Tridentine rite contained in the 1962 Roman Missal, a decision, it was hoped, that would help reconcile Archbishop Lefebvre and his followers. But Lefebvre’s disdain for the revised Roman rite had never been the core of his dissent from Vatican II, which was theological, not simply liturgical.
John Paul II considered Dignitatis Humanae, the Declaration on Religious Freedom, to be an interpretive key to the entire Council. Archbishop Lefebvre thought that Dignitatis Humanae was heresy, and believed that an established Church in an officially Catholic state was the will of Christ. John Paul II had been one of the intellectual architects of Gaudium et Spes. The Pope recalled that Lefebvre, whose “theology was quite different,” had an entirely different “vision of the Church.”95 Lefebvre’s refusal to be placated by the 1984 indult made unmistakably clear his conviction that Vatican II had been a colossal act of irresponsibility and infidelity, of which liturgical change was only the most obvious manifestation.
The French archbishop’s dissent became a full-blown crisis on June 15, 1988, when he publicly announced his intention to ordain four new bishops to carry on his work. According to the Church’s theology, Lefebvre possessed the sacramental power to ordain bishops, but he had no mandate from the Pope to carry out these ordinations. According to both doctrine and canon law, Lefebvre’s ordinations to the episcopate, while canonically illegal, would be sacramentally valid. The result would be a self-perpetuating schismatic Church. Since this was the worst imaginable outcome, Cardinal Ratzinger made every effort to forestall it—despite the fact that, on May 6, Lefebvre had reneged on a formula of reconciliation he had signed the day before and had thrown down the gauntlet, telling Ratzinger privately that he would ordain bishops on June 30. Ratzinger would not compromise on the fact that Lefebvre had to accept Vatican II and the post-conciliar teaching of the Church’s magisterium. What could be done, given that acceptance, was to create room within the Church for a reconciled traditionalist movement. That was what John Paul had proposed to Lefebvre at their first meeting, and what Lefebvre had agreed to on May 5.
After a fruitless meeting with Ratzinger on May 24, Lefebvre wrote
the Pope on June 2, saying that he was going to proceed with the ordination of bishops because it was “absolutely necessary” for his movement to have “ecclesiastical authorities who share our concerns and [who will] help protect us against the spirit of Vatican II and the spirit of Assisi”—which Lefebvre regarded as interreligious syncretism, pure and simple. Since the purpose of reconciliation was not viewed the same way by the Vatican and his movement, he and his followers believed it “preferable to wait for a more propitious time for Rome’s return to the Tradition.” He would go ahead with the episcopal ordinations on June 30, while praying that “the Rome of today, infested by Modernism, will again become Catholic Rome.” John Paul responded to this extraordinary letter on June 9, urging Lefebvre to return to the path of reconciliation.96 Lefebvre’s response to the Pope’s request was to announce publicly his intention to ordain bishops on June 30. On June 29, Cardinal Ratzinger sent a telegram to the archbishop:
For the love of Christ and of his Church the Holy Father paternally and firmly asks you to come to Rome today without proceeding to the episcopal ordinations on June 30 which you have announced. He prays to the holy Apostles Peter and Paul to inspire you not to betray the episcopate whose charge you have received, nor the oath you have taken to remain faithful to the Pope, the Successor of Peter. He asks God to save you from leading astray and scattering those whom Jesus Christ came to gather together in unity.
He entrusts you to the intercession of the Most Holy Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church.97
Archbishop Lefebvre ordained the bishops on June 30. On July 1, Cardinal Bernardin Gantin, Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, signed a decree stating that Lefebvre had committed a “schismatic act.” Therefore, he, the four bishops he ordained, and the retired bishop who had taken part in the ordination ceremony had automatically incurred excommunication. Any Catholic supporting the Lefebvrist schism would incur excommunication as well.98
On July 2, John Paul II issued the apostolic letter Ecclesia Dei [The Church of God], which created a commission to reconcile those members of the Lefebvrist movement who did not wish to follow the archbishop into schism and to provide for their pastoral care. These reconciled dissidents were assured that they could practice their faith “while preserving their spiritual and liturgical traditions,” according to the agreement that had been reached between Cardinal Ratzinger and Archbishop Lefebvre on May 5, and which Lefebvre had renounced the next day.99
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre was, according to Ratzinger, a “very difficult man.”100 In the end, however, it was not his personality but his ideas that drove him into schism. He embodied the most extreme version of the French Catholicism that insisted on being a “Church of power” aligned with a Catholic state. In that sense, Lefebvre was a twentieth-century victim of the French Revolution. When the final choice had to be made, he hated modernity more than he loved Rome.
Reforming the Curia
While he was on his “trip to the Curia,” preparing Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, John Paul II was completing a reorganization of the Church’s central bureaucracy, which he promulgated on June 28, 1988, with the apostolic constitution Pastor Bonus [The Good Shepherd].
John Paul’s reorganization completed the curial reform begun by Paul VI in 1967. There was only so much change that could be accomplished then, given personalities and interests. What Pastor Bonus did, essentially, was to rationalize the curial organization chart now that human circumstances permitted. The “dicasteries” or departments of the Curia were divided into three types— Congregations (which exercise jurisdiction), Councils (which do not exercise jurisdiction but promote certain pastoral activities), and Tribunals (the Church’s courts). Nomenclature was simplified (the “Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith” became the “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith”) or changed (the “second section” or “foreign ministry” of the Secretariat of State was renamed the Section for Relations with States; the Secretariat for Non-Christians was renamed the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue). Administrative sorting out was not the kind of thing that John Paul relished, but he intervened in the reorganization process at two points, both of which reflected his pastoral priorities.
Curial officials had proposed merging the office for Christian ecumenical dialogue with the office for dialogue with non-Christians and the office for dialogue with nonbelievers, effectively lumping all “non-Catholics” into one dicastery. According to participants in the process, John Paul said “absolutely no” to this, and insisted on maintaining distinct offices for each type of dialogue. It was a concrete demonstration of the centrality of ecumenism in his pastoral strategy. When he put his foot down about the merger proposal, he told the curial planners that “this [ecumenism] is the will of the Church,” and that was that. Maintaining three separate dicasteries for these dialogues was also a sign of the Pope’s respect for other world religions and other worldviews, which had their own integrity and should not be tossed into one undifferentiated mass of “non-Catholics.”101
Then there was the question of where the laity fit into the organization chart. Some wanted to create a Congregation for the Laity. But that would seem to place the laity under the jurisdiction of the Holy See—like bishops, priests, theologians, educational institutions, and religious men and women—which John Paul thought violated the theology of Vatican II. So it was decided to create a Pontifical Council for the Laity, as a center for promoting the lay mission “in the world.”102 This office was also assigned responsibility for coordinating the World Youth Days, which quickly began to absorb considerable energies in the Council.
Pastor Bonus was issued at John Paul’s fourth consistory, at which he created twenty-four new cardinals. The nomination of a Lithuanian, Vincentas Sladkevičius, and the fact that he was permitted to come to Rome to be invested as a cardinal, was another indicator of change in the Soviet Union, as well as a papal salute to one of the most valiant local churches in Catholicism. A cardinalate for John Baptist Wu Cheng-chung of Hong Kong was another kind of appeal to a different kind of communist power, and a step toward shoring up the Hong Kong hierarchy in light of the city’s uncertain political future. Lucas Moreira Neves, the Brazilian Dominican and former curial official who had been named archbishop of São Salvador da Bahia the previous July, received the red hat, as did Washington’s James Hickey and Detroit’s Edmund Szoka, who would be brought to Rome in 1990 to try to get the Vatican’s finances under control. Mozambique and Cameroun received their first cardinals, the Franciscan Alexandre José Maria dos Santos in Maputo and Christian Wiyghan Tumi in Douala. In Mitteleuropa, László Paskai, OFM, of Hungary and Hans Hermann Groër, a former Benedictine abbot appointed archbishop of Vienna in 1986 on the resignation of Cardinal Franz König, were named to the College; the shadow of scandal would descend over the Austrian in due course.
Curial personnel changes were also reflected in the nominations. Cardinal Casaroli’s two deputies, Archbishops Eduardo Martínez Somalo and Achille Silvestrini (who had been, respectively, Sostituto and “foreign minister” for nine years) were named cardinals, with Martínez Somalo becoming Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and Silvestrini the Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, the Church’s appellate court. Archbishop Edward Cassidy, the former nuncio in Holland, replaced Martínez Somalo as Sostituto and Archbishop Angelo Sodano, the former nuncio in Chile, took over from Silvestrini as Secretary of the newly renamed Section for Relations with States.
One cardinal whom John Paul intended to appoint died two days before the public consistory: Hans Urs von Balthasar, the great Swiss theologian who was an important influence on John Paul’s thinking and arguably the most creative Catholic theological mind of the century. At his funeral, Cardinal Ratzinger recalled Henri de Lubac’s description of Balthasar as the most cultured man in the contemporary world. Few thought the claim an exaggeration.103
A month before the consistory, John Paul completed another Vatican “reform” that
was quite likely closer to his heart than the business dealt with in Pastor Bonus. On his return from Calcutta in 1986, the Pope had moved quickly to establish a “house of mercy” in the Vatican, run by Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. The managers of popes had said that this was impossible. How could you introduce the poor and vagrants into the Vatican? What about security? John Paul kept pressing and a solution was finally found—to take over and renovate a building on the edge of Vatican City State, beside the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith but still within the Vatican walls. The Pope blessed the cornerstone of the Casa di Accoglienza per i Più Poveri “Dono di Maria” [the “Gift of Mary” House of Welcome for the Poorest] on June 17, 1987, and the facility was opened two days after John Paul’s sixty-eighth birthday, on May 20, 1988. It includes dormitories for men and women, and can accommodate seventy persons overnight. Two dining rooms and a kitchen feed one hundred homeless people daily.
Ad Limina Apostolorum
On October 24, 1988, John Paul II received the bishops of Michigan and Ohio on their quinquennial ad limina visit to Rome. He had now completed some 300 of these meetings with bishops from all over the world in his decade-old pontificate.
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