Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  It was a theme that John Paul had been developing for almost thirteen years, but the last word stung. Surely, critics said, the Pope was not suggesting that the countries which had successfully defended freedom from two twentieth-century totalitarianisms now risked emulating the evil systems that had been defeated or had collapsed?

  That was precisely what he was suggesting, but with a crucial difference. A new form of tyranny, all the more dangerous for not recognizing itself as such, was encoded in those secularist ideologies that sought to banish transcendent moral standards from public life. The danger was not all that difficult to imagine. If a democracy did not recognize such a transcendent moral standard, the only way to resolve conflict within it was the exercise of raw force by one faction (imposing its will through legislation or by more violent means) over another. The aggrieved faction, in turn, would regard the imposition of a solution as a violation of its basic rights. The net result would be the dissolution of the democratic political community.

  This was, or used to be, a matter of basic democratic theory. The grim experience of Weimar Germany—a splendidly constructed democratic edifice resting on a wholly inadequate moral-cultural foundation—was thought to have illustrated it. John Paul seemed to think that the point was being forgotten, particularly in the West.

  The 1990s would vindicate that judgment, and he would return to the theme of truth-and-democracy in two other major teaching documents.

  A Statement of Faith and Hope

  Throughout the pontificate, Laborem Exercens remained John Paul’s personal favorite among his three social encyclicals. But Centesimus Annus is destined to be the most debated of the three well into the twenty-first century. The breadth of issues it addressed, its personalist reading of economics, and its distinctive cultural approach to history combine to assure it a considerable audience—even as its readers continue to differ on its implications for specific public policy issues. The encyclical was a bitter disappointment to Catholic socialists and to advocates of a “Catholic third way,” some of whom invested considerable energy in the 1990s trying to explain that the encyclical did not say what it plainly said. Those curious interpretations notwithstanding, Centesimus Annus set a course that no future social encyclical can ignore. In that sense, it redirected the trajectory of Catholic social doctrine even as it commemorated its origins.

  Beyond the quarrels of theologians and commentators, Centesimus Annus was well-received because it was an extraordinary statement of faith and hope. At the end of a century in which humanity had become afraid of what it might be capable of doing, John Paul spoke a word of faith in freedom, and in the human capacity to order public life in decency and justice. His proposal was all the more compelling because it was not the product of optimism but of a transcendent hope, born of faith in God, and in the human person God had created with intelligence and free will—a moral agent capable of building a truly free and virtuous society.

  WAR IN THE GULF

  The Pope’s anticipation of an extended post–Cold War period of rationality, dialogue, solidarity, and the peaceful settlement of international disputes was badly jarred, and the Holy See’s capacity to act in the new world disorder severely tested, when Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, commenced a reign of terror, and attempted to annex the oil-rich desert sheikhdom as Iraq’s nineteenth province.

  According to one senior Vatican diplomat, the Holy See’s “framework-setting response” to the Persian Gulf crisis was John Paul II’s Sunday Angelus address of August 26, 1990.113 The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the Pope said, involved “a serious violation of international rights and of the United Nations’ Charter, as well as of principles of ethics which must govern life among peoples.” Because of it, trust was eroding among nations, the “international order, built up at the cost of painstaking effort and the sacrifice of many human lives” was threatened, and the probable economic consequences on poor countries were severe. John Paul prayed that political leaders might find a “just solution to the current problems” while at the same time trying to bring peace to the peoples of the whole Middle East.114 From that point on, as one of its architects later said, the Holy See’s “diplomatic action was aimed at resuming international order through peaceful means,” while underlining “other cases of international illegality” in the region, including “Lebanon and the Holy Land,” on the principle that longstanding problems should not be forgotten in the attempt to resolve this crisis.115

  Throughout the fall, as a United States–led coalition of Western and Arab states built up its forces in the Gulf, the Pope made more than a dozen public and private appeals for a peaceful resolution of the conflict. Perhaps the most dramatic was his Urbi et Orbi address “to the city and the world” on Christmas Day, 1990. Written in a kind of blank verse, one part of the message struck an almost apocalyptic note:

  The Light of Christ is with the tormented Nations of the Middle East.

  For the area of the Gulf, we await with trepidation for the threat of conflict to disappear.

  May leaders be convinced that war is an adventure with no return! 116

  Soon after New Year’s Day, 1991, as the UN-set deadline for an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait approached and Saddam Hussein continued to dig in his forces, the Pope and the Holy See realized, in the words of Vatican “foreign minister” Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, that “the international community was going to reinstitute order through war.”117 In light of that appraisal, John Paul took three more initiatives. On January 4, he wrote a letter to the foreign ministers of Europe, meeting in Luxembourg, urging another effort at a negotiated settlement; the apocalyptic tone was, once again, prominent in the Pope’s letter, which referred to “the imminence of an armed confrontation with unforeseeable but certainly disastrous consequences,” and argued that “dialogue and negotiation prevail over the recourse to instruments of devastating and terrifying death.”118 On January 11, the Pope sent a message to UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuellar, supporting the Secretary-General’s last-minute mission to Baghdad to find a negotiated settlement, and expressing the hope that “ultimately dialogue, reason, and law may prevail and thus choices with disastrous, unforeseeable consequences may be avoided.”119

  Finally, on January 15, John Paul sent appeals to Presidents Saddam Hussein and George Bush through the Iraqi and American ambassadors to the Holy See.120 His message to Saddam asked the Iraqi president to make a peace initiative, which “cannot fail to bring you honor before your beloved country, the region, and the whole world.” The message to President Bush repeated the Pope’s “firm belief that war is not likely to bring an adequate solution to international problems and that, even though an unjust situation might be momentarily met, the consequences that would possibly derive from war would be devastating and tragic. We cannot pretend that the use of arms, and especially of today’s highly sophisticated weaponry, would not give rise, in addition to suffering and destruction, to new and perhaps worse injustices.” John Paul acknowledged that the American president had “clearly weighed all these factors,” but reiterated his “hope that, through a last-minute effort at dialogue, sovereignty may be restored to the people of Kuwait and that international order which is the basis for a co-existence between people truly worthy of mankind may be reestablished in the Gulf area and in the entire Middle East.”121 At 7 o’clock that night, Archbishop Tauran received the U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, Thomas P. Melady. The two men discussed Rwanda and Burundi, in which they both had longstanding interests. The Gulf situation was not mentioned.122

  The next day, January 16, John Paul II telephoned President Bush to say that, while he was still praying for a peaceful resolution of the conflict, he hoped the Allies would win and that there would be few casualties if it came to war.123 With combat imminent, John Paul seemed to be making a plea for restraint in the conduct of the war, while underlining that the Holy See recognized that a gross violation of justice and international law ha
d taken place in the invasion of Kuwait. Evidently, there was some concern that this point was getting lost in the Pope’s insistent appeals for a negotiated settlement.

  At 1:10 A.M. on January 17, Archbishop Tauran got a phone call from a reporter asking him whether he was aware that the air war in the Gulf had begun. At the same time, Italian President Francesco Cossiga called the new Pro-Secretary of State, Archbishop Angelo Sodano, with the same news.

  During the air war of January-February 1991 and the brief ground war of February 24 to 28, John Paul II made twenty-five more appeals for a just peace in the Gulf. On March 4–5, the Pope convened a meeting of bishops from all the countries involved in the Gulf War, including the seven patriarchs of the Catholic Churches in the Middle East, representatives from the episcopates of Belgium, France, Great Britain, Italy, North Africa, and the United States, officials of the Roman Curia, and Cardinal Carlo Martini, President of the Council of European Bishops’ Conferences.124 The Pope and his diplomats had decided that it was time to start thinking about the postwar period and the Church’s position in the Middle East.125 As it happened, the political aftermath of the war John Paul had resisted for so long helped to create the possibility of a dramatic diplomatic breakthrough he had sought for years.

  An Assessment

  In addition to vindicating international law and the moral principles that gave it force, the Holy See’s concerns during the 1990–1991 Gulf crisis included the precarious position of the minority Christian communities throughout the Middle East (many of which were under extreme pressure from Arab and Islamic states) and the future of negotiations over the status of the Holy Land, which had been a major issue in Vatican diplomacy throughout the twentieth century.126 John Paul II’s convictions about a Church engaging world politics through moral witness and persuasion also influenced the Pope’s initiatives during the crisis. John Paul did not believe that the Pope’s role in such a crisis was to conduct a public review of the classic criteria legitimating a just war, and then give a pontifical blessing to the use of armed force if those criteria had been met. The Church’s mission in world politics was to teach the relevant moral principles that ought to guide international statecraft. Beyond that, it was the responsibility of statesmen to make prudential judgments on the question of when nonviolent means of resolving a conflict and restoring order had been exhausted.127 In this sense, John Paul’s constant appeals for a negotiated solution to the Gulf crisis, and his efforts to keep the Holy See in dialogue with all the parties to the conflict, fit the pattern of his entire pontificate.

  Other factors entered into the Holy See’s analysis and diplomacy. Neither John Paul personally nor the Vatican institutionally had the kind of relationship with the new Bush administration that had existed with the Reagan administration. Under President Reagan, Vatican officials and the Pope himself had been regularly briefed and consulted about American thinking and policy in world affairs. Officials of the Holy See complained during the Gulf crisis and afterward that U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker, III, never stopped in Rome during his frequent shuttles to the Middle East and the Persian Gulf in 1990–1991. (That Baker’s 687-page memoir does not mention John Paul II once suggests that the Vatican complaint was not groundless, and that the Bush administration had a very different view of the Holy See’s role in world affairs than its predecessor.128)

  U.S. Ambassador Melady had been provided by the U.S. Department of State with a series of talking points laying out the Bush administration’s case. In his memoirs, Ambassador Melady does not suggest that he pressed that case vigorously with Vatican officials. Rather, he raised questions about the attacks on U.S. policy that appeared in L’Osservatore Romano, the semi-official Vatican newspaper, and in Civiltà Cattolica, a Jesuit-edited journal with historic linkages to the Holy See’s Secretariat of State.129 The net result was that senior officials of the Holy See did not seem persuaded that the United States and its coalition allies had exhausted every peaceful possibility of resolving the conflict.130 Some thought that President Bush had decided on a violent ejection of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait at the beginning of the crisis. The U.S. administration’s failure to consult broadly and regularly with the Vatican, despite the access that was available, had a considerable impact on Vatican perceptions of American intentions and policies, and thus on the positions taken by the Holy See.

  Making the situation even more complex inside the Vatican was the fact that the Secretariat of State itself underwent a major change in leadership during the Gulf crisis. Cardinal Agostino Casaroli had retired as Secretary of State on December 1, 1990, and was succeeded by the former “foreign minister” and nuncio in Chile, Archbishop Angelo Sodano. Sodano was succeeded as Secretary of the Section for Relations with States by Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, a French veteran of the Holy See’s diplomatic service who had been Sodano’s deputy. Sodano was not experienced in Persian Gulf or Middle Eastern affairs, unlike Tauran, who had spent years in Lebanon, and was not likely in his first weeks in office to be a center of initiative. The Holy See entered the most heated phase of the Gulf crisis with a new diplomatic leadership that, in addition to dealing with the political complexities of the situation, had to cope with a Catholic patriarch in Baghdad, Rafaël Bidawid, who had publicly defended the Iraqi aggression in Kuwait and was given to telling the press during his frequent visits to Rome that Saddam Hussein was a “real gentleman.”131

  Years after the Gulf War had ended, with the Iraqis expelled from Kuwait but with Saddam Hussein still in power in Baghdad and still causing grave problems domestically and internationally, senior officials of the Holy See argued that John Paul II had been “prophetic” in his claim that war would not solve the problem in the Persian Gulf.132 That was certainly true at one level of analysis. Given the obligation to see a just war through to a morally satisfactory political conclusion, though, an equally plausible case could be made that it was not the use of force to expel Saddam from Kuwait that rendered the Pope’s statements prophetic, but the Bush administration’s failures in the endgame of the war, which were caused in part by its phobia about long-term U.S. involvement in reconstructing a post-Saddam Iraq.

  For centuries, the Catholic Church had been one of the chief institutional custodians of the just-war tradition of moral reasoning, which since the days of St. Augustine had attempted to direct the use of armed force to morally worthy political goals. The quality of the Catholic debate during and after the Gulf crisis raised serious questions about the degree to which that tradition was still “received” in Catholic thinking. Some months after the war, the Jesuit editors of Civiltà Cattolica published an editorial suggesting that no modern war could satisfy the tradition’s criteria for a just use of force. The article was so confused conceptually and so misinformed empirically that a notable Jesuit scholar of the just-war tradition labeled parts of the editorial a “willful defiance of the facts” while shredding its argumentation.133 Another distinguished historian of the just-war tradition, reflecting on the papal addresses during the Gulf War and other developments in Catholic just-war thinking, argued that the Church had, in effect, turned the tradition inside out. Contingent judgments about possible outcomes now outweighed the classic tradition’s overriding moral concern that justice be done, to the point where “resort to force is effectively questioned or denied even when there is a just cause.”134 John Paul II was sufficiently concerned that his appeals for peace were being interpreted as declaring pacifism the Church’s normative moral position that he felt compelled to say, on February 17, 1991, “We are not pacifist at any cost.”135 There is no doubt, however, that the Pope’s apocalyptic rhetoric about the possible effects of armed force in the Gulf was used by those who argued against military intervention on just-war or pacifist grounds to buttress their position.

  Just-war reasoning involves rigorous empirical analysis, which was sometimes lacking in the Holy See’s approach to the Gulf crisis. The assumption that more “dialogue” could coax Saddam H
ussein into withdrawing from Kuwait and making restitution for the wreckage he had caused was never very persuasive, given what was already known about his grisly internal record in Iraq (using poison gas, for example, to kill 5,000 men, women, and children in the Kurdish town of Halabja) and his evident willingness to shed blood wholesale in his catastrophic war with Iran.136 Nor did Holy See proposals for negotiation seem to take sufficient account of the likelihood that delays in military action heightened the chance that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction. Exaggerated predictions of the direct effects of military action in the Gulf have already been noted.

  It was curious that the Holy See, perhaps the single most consistent proponent of international security institutions in the twentieth century, should have found itself opposing the United Nations during one of the very few broad-based “collective security” exercises in living memory. A plausible case could be made that, in the Gulf crisis, the UN functioned precisely as the Holy See had urged it to function for decades. Yet the Holy See was broadly perceived as being in opposition. Further, the record it established in the Gulf crisis did not help the Holy See make its argument for “humanitarian intervention” in the Balkan turmoil that was soon to unfold in the wake of Yugoslavia’s political disintegration.