Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  In those ten years, he had traveled 360,000 miles and delivered 1,424 addresses in seventy-four countries. During that same period he had also made seventy-eight pastoral visits to cities and towns within Italy and more than 300 pastoral visits to Roman parishes.104 He had canonized hundreds of new saints and beatified 309 candidates for sainthood.105 Seven encyclicals, seven apostolic constitutions, more than thirty apostolic letters, and three post-synodal apostolic exhortations had been written. Ambassadors, heads of state, and international organization officials had been received by the hundreds, as had innumerable pilgrims. Amid all this activity, John Paul had invested as much, and perhaps more, sustained personal energy in his ad limina meetings with bishops as in any other facet of the Office of Peter.

  According to ancient custom and Church law, every bishop who heads a diocese must come to Rome every five years to make a pilgrimage ad limina apostolorum: “to the thresholds of the apostles.”106 In modern times, bishops make their ad limina visits in national groups or, in the case of larger countries, regional groups, to simplify scheduling and allow more concentrated discussion of local problems. During the pontificate of Paul VI, a bishop’s ad limina visit involved a brief personal meeting with the Pope and a series of meetings with curial officials. John Paul changed the standard ad limina program to give himself more time with the bishops and to give them more time with him, individually and as regional or national groups.

  Under John Paul II, every ad limina continued to include a personal, one-on-one meeting with each bishop. These sessions lasted from fifteen minutes to a half-hour or more, and sometimes began with the Pope pointing to an atlas on his desk and asking, “And where is your diocese?” The meetings took place without translators (John Paul rarely needed one), and the Pope, an energetic listener, usually did more asking than answering. His hunger for knowledge about the situation of local Churches was insatiable. Though the circumstances of the Church’s 2,400 dioceses varied enormously, bishops often had the impression that John Paul, a veteran diocesan bishop in his own right, “knew what you were talking about,” one bishop said, when a problem of personnel, finance, or program was brought up.107 The one-on-one meeting, Pope and bishop, was more intense with John Paul than with Paul VI and more open. Given the privacy of the encounter, this was the opportunity for bishops to tell the Pope precisely what was on their minds, perhaps unburdening themselves of concerns they could share with no one else.108

  John Paul made three innovations in the ad limina program, so that each bishop now had four occasions to be with the pope, instead of just one. John Paul invited each group of visiting bishops to concelebrate morning Mass with him in the private chapel of the papal apartment. He also invited each group to a meal, usually lunch or dinner, at which the region’s or country’s problems were discussed with only the Pope and his secretaries present. John Paul also began the practice of holding a group meeting with the visiting bishops at which he would give an address. These ad limina discourses became another teaching instrument of the papacy and offered an insight into what the Pope thought about the situation of particular local Churches.109

  John Paul II’s expansion of the ad limina visit was more than a gesture of courtesy to fellow bishops. It was an unparalleled way for him to get to know the world episcopate. His amazing memory for names and places surprised more than one of the thousands of diocesan leaders he kept meeting every five years. So did his sense of humor. One bishop, who had put on weight since he had last seen the Pope, was asked by John Paul, “Is your diocese growing?” The bishop replied, yes, parishes were expanding. “So is the bishop,” said the Pope. The ad limina visit was also a way to stay closely informed about the state of the Church throughout the world. In a typical span running from mid-January through late April 1988, John Paul met with bishops from the Netherlands, two regions of West Germany, the Sudan, Kenya, England and Wales, the American Midwest, Benin, Congo, Mali, New Zealand, Mozambique, the American Southwest, Lithuania, Zaire, and Ontario. The Pope received regular reports from the Holy See’s nunciatures and apostolic delegations abroad, but the nuncio or apostolic delegate was rarely a native of the country to which he was assigned. Conversations over lunch or dinner with local Church leaders gave John Paul a sense of the nuances of situations and personalities that could not be so easily conveyed in diplomatic dispatches from the field.

  The ad limina process worked in both directions. Bishops from young Churches in particular were encouraged by the extended attention they received from John Paul. The Africans, for example, believed that no Pope in history had been better informed about their situation, or the world situation, than John Paul II.110 The feedback system worked particularly well when the cycle of ad limina visits from a country coincided with the preparations for a papal pilgrimage to that country. The Nigerian bishops, for example, had been in Rome for an ad limina on January 21, 1982. When the Pope arrived in Lagos on February 8, he was thoroughly briefed, and his addresses reflected his intense listening to the Nigerian bishops, two and a half weeks before.111

  Under John Paul II, the ad limina visit was changed from a canonical formality into a genuine exercise of the Pope’s sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum, the traditional papal “care for all the Churches.” The ad limina was also another example of John Paul’s determination to take Luke 22.32 quite literally and to be Peter strengthening his brethren—in this case, bishops who, for all the honor of their office, were often lonely men carrying a large weight of responsibility.112

  ALL THE RUSSIAS

  For some Poles, “Asia begins at Przemyśl,” a city on the far eastern border of today’s Poland. The phrase is a not-too-subtle suggestion that, whatever else it might be, Russia is not “Europe.” In either czarist or communist dress, the ancient persecutor of Poles was “other” in a way that the historic oppressor to the west, the Germans, was never quite thought to be. Religiously, politically, ethnically, and culturally, Russia and Russians, whether Sovietized or not, were “other” in a way that made it very difficult for many Poles to think of them as fellow Europeans.

  Karol Wojtyła was an exception. His interest in the taproots of Slavic language and culture had prepared him to think of the eastern Slavs—Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians—as cousins of western Slavs like the Poles, despite their different alphabet. Wojtyła’s culturally driven understanding of history also led him to think of Russia as “Europe.” Before the eleventh-century division between Rome and the East, Russia had belonged to one of the two lungs with which the Christian culture of Europe had breathed. If Europe was to advance beyond the political and psychological division that Yalta had created, it had to breathe with both lungs again. And this meant, among other things, that Russia had to be part of Europe.

  As Pope, Karol Wojtyła nurtured his interest in Russia and the Russians through numerous channels. He read deeply in the writings of Vladimir Soloviev, the late nineteenth-century Russian philosopher and theologian, a prophet of the reconciliation of Eastern and Western Christianity with a marked millennial strain in his thought.113 John Paul also became familiar with the work of Russian religious thinkers, once convinced Marxists, who had abandoned Marxism between the 1905 and 1917 revolutions while warning both the government and the Russian Orthodox Church about the impending catastrophe: Nicolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, and Simon Frank.114 These thinkers, and the work of theologians like Pavel Florensky and Georges Florovsky, whom he read in French or Polish translations, familiarized the Pope with the religious core of Russian culture and convinced him that Russia had much to give the world.115 Their interest in Christian unity also confirmed John Paul in his ecumenical instincts eastward, even as they helped him move beyond a Polish-centered view of Russia.116

  John Paul nurtured personal as well as intellectual contacts with Russians. Meetings with Andrei Gromyko and other Soviet functionaries were one sort of encounter, but the Pope was interested in the kind of exchange that was impossible in the formal, state-to-state discussion
s favored by Cardinal Casaroli and others of his diplomats. Thus John Paul began to pursue back-channel conversations with knowledgeable Russians, which eventually led him into the heart of the human rights resistance to Soviet communist rule—not as a politician, but as a pastor.

  John Paul II and Andrei Sakharov

  In 1983, a Polish friend named Maria Winowska had arranged for Irina Ilovayskaya Alberti to be in the front row at one of John Paul’s Wednesday general audiences. The daughter of Russian émigré parents, Irina had been raised in Yugoslavia between the world wars. There, she met an Italian diplomat whom she married in 1946. The Albertis were posted to Prague, where Irina got her first direct exposure to communist brutality during the 1948 takeover of Czechoslovakia. This ugly experience rekindled her interest in Russian affairs, and when contacts with new émigrés and Soviet citizens became possible in the later 1950s and 1960s, she pursued them, not knowing quite where they would lead. After her husband’s death in 1975, Irina Alberti was asked by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, then living in Switzerland, to accompany the Nobel laureate and his family to their new home-in-exile in Vermont as a personal and family assistant. Mrs. Alberti agreed and spent almost four years with the Solzhenitsyns, becoming deeply versed in internal Soviet politics and the varieties of anti-Soviet resistance, émigré and internal, in the process.

  Having completed her work with the Solzhenitsyns and having moved back to Paris, she had come to Rome and was going to meet the Pope. It was a brief encounter, but Mrs. Alberti remembers being impressed and deeply moved by this Pole’s love for Russia. Moreover, his interest in Russia and the Russians was not simply the interest of a very bright man, a scholar. He was interested “in a human and spiritual way.”117

  The next meeting between the Polish Pope and the daughter of Russian émigrés came a year or so later. Andrei Sakharov, the brilliant Soviet physicist turned human rights campaigner, was on a hunger strike in Gorki, where he had lived in forced internal exile after his 1980 protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.118 His wife, Elena Bonner, another veteran human rights activist, was being denied a passport to leave the USSR for a heart operation necessary to save her life. Bonner was an old friend of Irina Alberti’s. When Bonner’s children came to Rome as part of their worldwide campaign to get their mother released from exile in Gorki, Mrs. Alberti, who knew of John Paul’s admiration for Sakharov, arranged for them to see the Pope. It was all done very discreetly. The Vatican Secretariat of State was nervous about a public confrontation with the Soviet regime, but when Mrs. Alberti got word to John Paul that the Bonner children wanted to see him, he immediately responded affirmatively. The meeting was held in a private room off the main floor of the Paul VI Audience Hall, for ten minutes before a general audience. With Mrs. Alberti translating, John Paul told the children that he was aware of their mother’s and stepfather’s situation, and that he was raising the issue with the Soviet government through diplomatic channels and private contacts. As the Pope was being whisked away by aides, he said to Mrs. Alberti, “Come and see me when you’re next in Rome.” “How?” she asked. “Talk to my secretary,” the Pope said on his way out the door.

  This seemed strange, the idea that one could simply ring up the Vatican, ask for Monsignor Dziwisz, and make an appointment with the Pope. But a French Jesuit friend assured Mrs. Alberti that that was exactly what she should do the next time she was in Rome. So having left the audience with the Bonner children convinced that there had been an as-yet-undetermined but “radical” change in her life, Irina Alberti called the Pope’s secretary when she came back to Rome in the summer of 1985. This time she was invited to the papal summer villa at Castel Gandolfo, where she and John Paul spent several hours talking about conditions in the USSR, its government, and the real situation of the Churches there. At the end of this session, John Paul invited her to meet again on her next Roman visit.

  As a result of international pressure, Sakharov’s hunger strike, and Mikhail Gorbachev’s accession to power, Elena Bonner was finally given a passport to leave the USSR and seek medical treatment in the United States. She stopped in Rome in December 1985, and Irina Alberti arranged for her to meet with the Pope. It was an “absolutely secret and private meeting,” she recalled, as the conditions of Bonner’s passport included a prohibition against meeting with public figures, and Sakharov, back in the USSR, was a hostage to Bonner’s good behavior. Mrs. Alberti arranged a subterfuge to fool the reporters who were following Bonner everywhere. They were tricked into trailing the Bonner children while Irina Alberti and Elena Bonner drove into the Vatican in a tiny car.

  Elena Bonner’s meeting with the Pope lasted two hours, and involved an extensive discussion of what life was like in the Soviet Union, based on her experience and Sakharov’s. John Paul listened intensely, but also sympathetically, even pastorally. Elena Bonner, a very tough woman, came out of their meeting crying, and said to Irina Alberti, “He’s the most remarkable man I’ve ever met. He is all light. He is a source of light….”119

  In February 1989, when Sakharov and Bonner were in Rome together, they met privately with the Pope, who fought off interruptions so he could talk with them for another two hours. Sakharov, whom a poll that year would determine to be the most revered man in Soviet history, was being wooed by Mikhail Gorbachev. The General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party was urging him to run for the Congress of People’s Deputies and become a real actor in politics.120 But Sakharov didn’t want any formal participation in politics to be construed as his giving blanket approval to Gorbachev, whom he regarded as a reform communist, or endorsing the Soviet system, which he thought irreformable. The dilemma had been eating at him.121

  During the meeting with John Paul, Elena Bonner said to her husband, “This may be the only place in the world where you can ask the question that’s tormenting you.” Sakharov, whom Irina Alberti described as a “theist unsure about his relationship to God,” thought a moment, explained the position he was in—and then asked the question that was plaguing him: “By getting into this game, am I directing it onto a better course, or will I be compromised?” It was the first time Andrei Sakharov had gone to confession, so to speak, in his long, difficult, and heroic life.

  John Paul thought about it for a while, saying nothing, just listening and reflecting. Then this veteran confessor said to Sakharov, “You have a clear and strong conscience. You can be sure you won’t make a mistake…I think you can be of use.” Sakharov, relieved of the fear that he would be used, went back to the Soviet Union and was elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies, where he quickly became the conscience of the reform movement.122

  The Millennium of Christianity in Rus’

  The millennium of the baptism of the eastern Slavs, due to be celebrated in June 1988, presented John Paul II with a complex problem in which his commitments to religious freedom and ecumenism were in tension.

  Although Russian Orthodoxy viewed the millennium as its own, the Greek Catholic Church of Ukraine had at least as strong a historical claim to being an heir to the 988 baptism of Prince Vladimir and Princess Olga of Kievan Rus’, the proto-state out of which modern Russia and Ukraine eventually emerged. Both Ukrainians and Russians were right, if in different senses, but neither could admit the other’s claim. Indeed, Russian Orthodoxy continued to insist that the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine did not formally exist.

  The Pope’s dilemma would have become acute if John Paul had been invited to Moscow for the millennium celebrations in June 1988 without the assurance of access to the Ukrainian Catholics and their underground leadership. Patriarch Pimen of Moscow solved the Pope’s problem by making it clear that John Paul would not be welcome in Moscow. This brusquely negative reaction was a harbinger of even greater difficulties. The Pope was not to be deterred from marking the millennium and expressing his respect for Russian Christianity, however. On January 25, 1988, he issued an apostolic letter, Euntes in Mundum Universum [Going Out into the Whole World], thanking
God for the gift of the baptism of Kievan Rus’. That same day, at a service at the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls to mark the end of the Christian Unity Octave, he extended the kiss of peace to “the sister Church of the Patriarchate of Moscow, which has assumed a great share of the Christian inheritance of the land of Rus’.”123

  The Pope did more for the millennium celebration than issue documents and fraternal salutes. The Gorbachev regime had understood that allowing the Orthodox to celebrate the millennium would win favor in the West. The Soviet government would have preferred a celebration in which there would be one or two large public events for elites, with no effect on the general population. By trumpeting all over the world that the Roman Catholic Church was preparing to mark this great moment in Christian and Russian history, John Paul II effectively took that option away from the Soviets. The Pope who was not welcome in Moscow helped make the celebration of the millennium of Christianity a major public, international, and media event, requiring the Soviet government to acknowledge it as a defining reality of Russian history.124

  Euntes in Mundum was signed on January 25, but not released publicly until March. In the interim, John Paul signed another letter, Magnum Baptismi Donum [The Great Gift of Baptism], addressed to Cardinal Myroslav Lubachivsky and all the Catholics of Ukraine, thanking them for their heroic witness to the millennial faith and looking forward to the day when the Greek Catholics of Ukraine could practice their faith publicly. Magnum Baptismi Donum was released in mid-April.

  The Holy See’s delegation to the millennium celebrations in Moscow was led by Cardinal Casaroli and included Cardinals Willebrands (of Christian Unity), Etchegaray (of Justice and Peace), and three experts. A second “Delegation of the Catholic Episcopate” from around the world included the cardinal archbishops of Vienna, Hanoi, Milan, Warsaw, Munich, and New York, as well as Cardinal Vaivods of Latvia, Archbishop Paskai of Hungary (soon to be created cardinal), Bishop Dario Castrillon Hoyos (President of the Latin American bishops’ council), and Bishop Gabriel Ganaka (President of the African bishops’ council). Cardinal Casaroli spoke at the public celebration for Russian Orthodox leaders, representatives of international organizations, and members of the Soviet government held in the Bolshoi Theater on June10. Casaroli diplomatically addressed what he described as the “delicate and sensitive” subject of legal protection for religious freedom, preceding this with an appeal to “the realism of the statesman” to recognize that “the religious ‘fact,’ and that of Christianity in particular, remains an incontestable actuality…and cannot be overlooked by anyone whose responsibility it is to confront reality.” After appealing to “the realism of the statesman,” the cardinal added what John Paul would likely have put first: “Respect for man demands it.”125