Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  In exploring Christ’s relationships with women, John Paul stresses their countercultural quality. He seems particularly taken with the story of the woman caught in adultery, who is left alone by a male world of judges ready to stone her until Jesus intervenes (see John 8.3–11). The Pope suggests that the story has a familiar, contemporary ring. When Christ proposes that the man without sin cast the first stone at the woman, “Jesus seems to say to the accusers: Is not this woman, for all her sin, above all a confirmation of your own transgressions, of your ‘male’ injustice, your misdeeds?” It was, the Pope suggested, a scenario that had repeated itself throughout history: “A woman is left alone, exposed to public opinion with her ‘sin,’ while behind ‘her’ sin there lurks a man—a sinner, guilty ‘of the other’s sin,’ indeed equally responsible for it. And yet his sin escapes notice, it is passed over in silence…. How often is she abandoned with her pregnancy when the man, the child’s father, is unwilling to accept responsibility for it?…”144

  The Christian Gospel, John Paul insists, is a “consistent protest against whatever offends the dignity of women.” The truth that Christ preaches about self-giving love was experienced by the women he encountered as a liberating truth. That is one reason they were faithful to him throughout his ministry and were with him on Calvary when almost all of his male disciples had fled. Their fidelity confirms the fact that men and women are radically equal in their capability “of receiving the outpouring of divine truth and love in the Holy Spirit.”145

  Picking up a theme from Redemptoris Mater, John Paul writes that motherhood is not just a biological reality, but a moral and personal reality with a dramatic religious meaning. For it is through motherhood that humanity was given its savior. “Each and every time that motherhood is repeated in human history, it is always related to the Covenant which God established with the human race through the motherhood of the Mother of God.”146

  As for the contemporary debate over the vocation to marriage and the relationship of men and women within marriage, John Paul writes that, for Christians, marriage can only be understood on the analogy of Christ the Bridegroom and the Church, his Bride. In this complex symbolism, we find what the Pope terms a “Gospel innovation.” For it is in the context of Christ’s love for the Church, his Bride for whom he gave up his life, that St. Paul locates the injunctions that wives should be subject to their husbands and that husbands must love their wives. (See Ephesians 5.31, 22–23.) There is no contradiction here, John Paul writes, because the counsel to “be subject” was “to be understood and carried out in a new way: as a ‘mutual subjection out of reverence for Christ’ (cf. Ephesians 5.21).” Previous generations, the Pope believes, had abused the notion of wives being subject to their husbands, but in light of the redemption won for all by Christ, this subjection cannot be understood as “unilateral.”147 Rather, “mutual subjection” to Christ, John Paul is convinced, creates the distinctively Christian context for exercising authority within marriage.148

  St. Paul had taught that the “more excellent way” and the greatest of the theological virtues was love (1 Cor. 12.31b–13.13). John Paul suggests that what he terms the “feminine genius” is the “place” of this more excellent way in the world and the Church. “In God’s eternal plan,” he writes, “woman is the one in whom the order of love in the created world of persons first takes root.” Because love is the inner dynamic of the life of God, women’s experience has a unique dignity, and that dignity is to be measured not by the dominating and male order of power, but “by the order of love, which is essentially the order of justice and charity.” That dignity gives rise to a vocation to love, which can be discerned in the fact that “the human being is entrusted by God to women in a particular way.”149 Here was a basic issue with untold, profound implications for humanity.

  Mulieris Dignitatem was John Paul’s most developed effort to address the claim from some feminists that Christianity in general, and Catholicism specifically, is inherently misogynist. For all its eloquence, indeed passion, it clearly did not satisfy everyone. Some have a different concept of the “feminine genius.” Others may believe that this man, or any man, cannot comprehend the dignity and difficulties of being a woman. For those open to the possibility, though, it is hard to imagine a more imaginative or demanding conception of Christian discipleship for both women and men than that proposed by Mulieris Dignitatem and its vision of the Marian Church.

  16

  After the Empire of Lies

  Miracles and the Mandates of Justice

  OCTOBER 11, 1988

  Pope John Paul II addresses European Parliament in Strasbourg.

  FEBRUARY–APRIL 1989

  Polish roundtable negotiations result in partially-free elections on June 4, which are swept by Solidarity.

  MARCH 8–11, 1989

  Special consultation between the archbishops of the United States and Vatican officials.

  JUNE 1–10, 1989

  History’s first papal pilgrimage to Scandinavia.

  JULY 17, 1989

  Full diplomatic relations established between the Holy See and Poland.

  AUGUST 20, 1989

  John Paul preaches at closing Mass for second international World Youth Day at Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

  SEPTEMBER 12, 1989

  Tadeusz Mazowiecki becomes post-war Poland’s first non-communist prime minister.

  OCTOBER 6–16, 1989

  John Paul’s fifth Asian pilgrimage includes a broadcast request for a new opening to China.

  NOVEMBER 12, 1989

  Pope John Paul II canonizes Saints Albert Chmielowski and Agnes of Bohemia.

  NOVEMBER 24, 1989

  Open letter from Cardinal František Tomášek firmly aligns the Catholic Church with Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution.”

  DECEMBER 1, 1989

  John Paul II receives Mikhail Gorbachev at the Vatican.

  JANUARY 12–17, 1990

  Roman Catholic/Russian Orthodox consultation in Moscow fails to resolve the situation of the renascent Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine.

  MARCH 1, 1990

  The Holy See establishes diplomatic relations with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

  APRIL 21–22, 1990

  Papal pilgrimage to Czechoslovakia.

  AUGUST 26, 1990

  John Paul’s Sunday Angelus address sets the framework for the Holy See’s response to the Persian Gulf crisis.

  SEPTEMBER 25, 1990

  Public presentation of apostolic constitution, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, on strengthening the Catholic identity of Catholic universities.

  SEPTEMBER 30-OCTOBER 28, 1990

  Synod of bishops meets to consider training of priests; Synod’s work completed by apostolic exhortation, Pastores Dabo Vobis, on March 25, 1992.

  JANUARY 15, 1991

  John Paul sends letters to presidents Saddam Hussein and George Bush, urging a negotiated settlement to the Gulf crisis.

  MARCH 4–5, 1991

  Special Vatican consultation with bishops of countries involved in Gulf War examines the Church’s future in the region.

  MAY 1, 1991

  Centesimus Annus, John Paul’s third social encyclical.

  Strasbourg had not missed much of European history since its pre-Christian beginnings as a Celtic village. The Franks took it from the Romans in the fifth century and renamed it Strateburgum. The ninth-century alliance between Charles II of the West Franks and Louis I of the East Franks, the Serment de Strasbourg, is the oldest extant document written in Old French. Church-state issues, including rows between the local bishops and the local freemen, roiled medieval Strasbourg. The Alsatian capital witnessed the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, the Franco-Prussian War (during which the city endured a fifty-day siege), and two world wars. Between 1870 and 1945, Strasbourg symbolized the struggle for European hegemony between the West Franks and the East Franks, the French and the Germans, as Strasbourg became Strassburg and then Strasbourg
again.

  Strasbourg symbolized something else in 1988. After eighty years of Franco-German conflict had culminated in a catastrophic Second World War and a Western Europe threatened by Soviet power, men of vision began to imagine a different kind of Europe. Beginning with raw materials and basic industries, they wove together a European economic community as the foundation for a new form of European political community. In 1979, the first elections had been held to a European Parliament elected by general suffrage. Although the Euro-Parliament had limited powers, it represented another step toward the political integration of the continent—or at least its western part. Fittingly, the new European Parliament was located in Strasbourg. The crossroads of conflict had become one of the continent’s premier political meeting places.

  Large questions remained, however. What kind of Europe was being built out of the Common Market, the Council of Europe, the European Parliament, the European Court of Human Rights, and a welter of other transnational institutions, courts, and regulatory agencies? What was the “freedom” these institutions were to serve? How should Europeans live their new prosperity? Who, in fact, was included in “Europe”?

  On October 11, 1988, John Paul II came to Strasbourg’s Palace of Europe to address the European Parliament. For more than forty years, he had refused to concede that “Europe” was an inherently divided continent and that the iron curtain represented a natural division. Now he had come to Strasbourg to talk with the Euro-parliamentarians about the kind of future he imagined for a Europe no longer divided by a massively defended ideological fault line.

  It was time, the Pope proposed, to shed the Stalinist mentality of “eastern Europe” and “western Europe” so that “Europe” would “one day reach the full dimensions that geography and, even more, history have given it.” That history included Christianity, the “faith which has so profoundly marked the history of all the peoples of Europe, Greek and Latin, Germanic and Slavic.” Beneath their differences, Europeans east and west of the Cold War divide could recognize each other as Europeans, because much of their culture had been formed by Christian values and the humanism that had grown from those values. “Europe” had to “search more intensely for its soul,” for the sources of its commitment to unity-amid-diversity, which meant “the equal right of all to enrich others with their difference.”

  All cultures, he suggested, were efforts to wrestle with the mystery of human life and human destiny—which inevitably raised the question of God. On the threshold of a third millennium, could one really imagine a new Europe “devoid of this transcendental dimension”? Those who thought that “Europe” could be built out of economic, legal, and political mechanisms alone were deluding themselves. Culture remained fundamental, and the new Europe had to decide between two humanisms that were contending for Europe’s soul as the Cold War receded into the past.

  In one humanism, “obedience to God” was the “source of true freedom,” which was always a “freedom for truth and good.” In the second, the human condition lacked a transcendent dimension, religion was a “system of alienation,” and freedom was conceived as radical, individual autonomy. The secularists claimed credit for democracy, but the deeper historical roots of the modern democratic possibility, the Pope argued, lay in Europe’s Christian history. Christ’s distinction between the things that are Caesar’s and the things that are God’s (see Matthew 22.21) had helped make limited government possible. By making clear that there was a sanctuary of conscience in every human soul where state power must not tread, Christianity had freed politics from the burden of omniscience. A Christianity living out Christ’s distinction between the things of Caesar’s and the things of God’s was thus a powerful safeguard against the “political messianism [that] most often leads to the worst tyrannies.”

  For its part, the new Europe of democracies had to recognize that “things of God’s,” things of the transcendent order, were involved in free societies. Europe had almost been destroyed in the twentieth century, John Paul concluded, not from “inside” its Christian cultural heritage, but “from outside”—when “ideologies [had] absolutized society itself or some dominant group, in contempt of the human person and his freedom.”

  The new, unifying, “integrated Europe of tomorrow,” open to the European Slavic world, had great tasks ahead of it, if it was to reclaim its role as “a beacon in world civilization.” It had to reconcile humanity with nature, and peoples with one another. Most of all, it had to reconcile the human person with himself. It had to resist “cultures of suspicion and dehumanization.” It had to build a vision of the human future “in which science, technological ability, and art do not exclude, but elicit, faith in God.” The humanism born of biblical faith was Europe’s historical heritage, and the “best safeguard” of its “identity, liberty, and progress” in the future.1

  Critics have sometimes said that John Paul II is a man living in another century. They are right, of course. Three hundred ninety-five days before the Berlin Wall was breached and twelve years before the talismanic year 2000, John Paul II was already living in the twenty-first century.

  HISTORY ON FAST-FORWARD

  What had seemed immutable since World War II—Soviet hegemony over the world’s last great political empire, and the rule of communists within the vassal states of that empire—began to change with striking rapidity in April 1988. Consider the events that followed, one after another, almost, it seemed, without pause:

  On April 8, the Soviet Union’s last imperial adventure was abandoned, as the USSR announced its withdrawal from Afghanistan.

  On April 29, Mikhail Gorbachev met with the leaders of Russian Orthodoxy, acknowledged Christianity’s role in Russia’s history, and pledged that a new law on freedom of conscience would take account of believers’ concerns in an officially atheist state.

  On June 30, Andrei Gromyko, who had nominated Gorbachev for the post of party General Secretary, was publicly humiliated at a party conference as his erstwhile candidate proposed modest political reforms. Gorbachev stopped short of endorsing competitive political parties in the USSR or revisions of Soviet republican borders. The Soviet inner empire and the “leading role” of the Communist Party were to remain inviolate.

  On August 23, demonstrations in the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia protested the 1940 annexation of these once-independent states by the USSR. Less than three months later, on November 16, the Estonian Supreme Soviet declared the primacy of its own laws over Moscow’s—the first step toward reclaiming the independence of the Baltic republics.

  On December 7, Mikhail Gorbachev announced major cuts in the Soviet military.

  Meanwhile, the transformation of east central Europe and the Soviet outer empire accelerated.

  On April 25, 1988, a workers’ strike in Bydgoszcz signaled that Poland was beginning to come to a boil again. Throughout April and May, workers struck in Nowa Huta and at the Gdańsk shipyards. Their strike demands included Solidarity’s legal restoration. Demonstrations followed in Warsaw, Kraków, Lublin, and ?ód?, with young workers and students chanting a theme reminiscent of the Pope’s 1987 pilgrimage: “There’s no freedom without Solidarity.” Uppercase or lowercase “s,” the papal message had been received.

  On May 22, János Kádár, who had ruled Hungary since Soviet tank treads had crushed the anti-communist revolution of 1956, was replaced as head of the Hungarian Communist Party by Károly Grósz, a reformer of a new generation. By reason of necessity, if not of profound democratic conviction, Grósz and his colleagues were prepared to consider the political reconstruction of the country.

  On August 16, miners struck in Upper Silesia, and sympathy strikes spread throughout Poland. With nowhere else to turn, the government sought Lech Wałęsa’s help to bring things under control. Wałęsa proposed an end to the strikes, and most strikers were back at work by September 3.

  On October 10, a major shake-up took place in the Czechoslovakian party leadership.

  On Nov
ember 23, the governmental leadership was reshuffled in Hungary.

  Less than two months later, on January 11, 1989, the Hungarian regime announced that opposition political parties would be allowed.

  A week after that, on January 18, General Wojciech Jaruzelski announced that Solidarity would be legally recognized once again as an independent, self-governing trade union. The regime had previously tried to entice the Church into being “society’s” representative in negotiations to determine new political and economic arrangements in Poland, but the Polish Church refused to play the role the regime imagined for it. That broke the logjam, and Solidarity was once again recognized as the government’s interlocutor, seven years after the regime thought it had consigned the trade union/political opposition to oblivion.

  On February 6, 1989, the Polish Roundtable negotiations began. The result, two months later, was an agreement to hold semi-free elections. Thirty-five percent of the seats in the parliament would be openly contested, along with the membership of an entirely new upper house, the Senate. The agreement was signed on April 5, with elections to be held on June 4. Solidarity nominated 261 parliamentary candidates. Each of their campaign posters depicted the candidate shaking hands with Lech Wałęsa (who was not running). Underneath the photos, in the Gdańsk electrician’s handwriting, was a simple sentence: “We must win.”