Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  John Paul rose and, without a word, drew Metropolitan Spyridon into an embrace—the ancient kiss of peace.

  The 1991 Eurosynod opened new conversations, gave the bishops present a new experience of the unity-within-diversity of European Catholicism, and began a process for reforming the structure of the pan-European bishops’ conference to include bishops from behind the collapsed iron curtain. It was not, however, the historic, evangelically energizing event John Paul II had hoped it would be. The asymmetries between the Churches remained great, and too much time had passed since the kairos moment of 1989 for that experience of Providence at work in history to bridge the gap between Churches separated for a half-century. The Synod’s closing Declaration pledged the Church’s solidarity with efforts to further reunite once-divided Europe, but the bishops returned to their various homes primarily focused on local concerns and affairs.61 The most visible, concrete steps toward redeeming the Synod’s pledge would be taken by John Paul II personally.

  IN A WORLD WITHOUT A SOVIET UNION

  Six months before the Eurosynod convened, John Paul made his second pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Fatima in Portugal, on the tenth anniversary of Mehmet Ali Agca’s assassination attempt. After stops in Lisbon and the Azores Islands, he arrived in Fatima on May 12 and met the eighty-four-year-old Sister Lucia dos Santos, the sole survivor of the three children who had experienced the Marian apparition in 1917. On May 13, the tenth anniversary of the shooting in St. Peter’s Square, he publicly gave thanks to Mary for the liberation of east central Europe from communism, and for his own deliverance from death a decade before.

  John Paul celebrated his fifth consistory for the creation of new members of the College of Cardinals on the eve of the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, June 28, 1991. Three prominent Catholic witnesses under communism received the red hat. Two were from the newly liberated parts of Europe: Alexandru Todea of Romania and the redoubtable Slovak Jesuit, Ján Chryzostom Korec. The third confessor-cardinal was Ignatius Gong Pin-mei, the bishop of Shanghai, who was revealed as the cardinal named secretly (in pectore) at John Paul’s first consistory in 1979. Weeks short of his ninetieth birthday, the man known in the West as “Cardinal Kung” (according to the pre-communist transliteration of his name) came to Rome to be invested before returning to his retirement home in Stamford, Connecticut. The Chinese government that had jailed and then exiled him refused him permission to come to Shanghai in his new dignity.

  New curial cardinals were prominent in John Paul’s fifth consistory: Angelo Sodano, Pio Laghi, José Sánchez, Edward Cassidy, Virgilio Noè, and Fiorenzo Angelini.62 The Americas received five new cardinals: Nicolás de Jésus López Rodriguez of Santo Domingo, Antonio Quarracino of Buenos Aires, Anthony Bevilacqua of Philadelphia, Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, and Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo of Guadalajara.63 The archbishops of Armagh (Cahal Daly), Berlin (Georg Sterzinsky), and Turin (Giovanni Saldarini) became members of the College, as did John Paul’s vicar for the Diocese of Rome, Camillo Ruini, and the archbishop of Kinshasa, Zaire, Frédéric Etsou-Nzabi-Bamungwabi. There was no intellectual father of Vatican II honored in the consistory of June 1991, but John Paul did give the red hat to the eighty-nine-year-old Paolo Dezza, SJ, his personal delegate to govern the Jesuits in 1981–1983.

  On August 14–15, 1991, John Paul was back in Poland briefly as a million young people, including as many as 70,000 from the Soviet Union, came to Częstochowa for the third international World Youth Day. En route to the Jasna Góra monastery and the shrine of the Black Madonna, John Paul stayed overnight in Kraków and celebrated Mass in the Old Town market square. He stopped briefly in his hometown, Wadowice, where he consecrated a new parish church and met with his high school classmates. Speaking to the towns-people after the Mass, he remembered those Jewish friends who had been lost in the Holocaust:

  Nor can I forget that among our classmates in the school of Wadowice and in its high school there were those who belonged to the Mosaic religion; they are no longer with us, just as there is no longer the old synagogue next to the high school. When a [memorial] stone was [unveiled] in the place where the synagogue used to be, I sent a special letter through one of our classmates [Jerzy Kluger]. In it we find the following words: “The Church, and in her all peoples and nations, are united with you. Certainly first of all your people feel your suffering, your destruction—here we recall how close it is to Auschwitz—then they want to speak to individuals and people, and to all of mankind, to admonish them. In your name this warning cry is also raised by the Pope, and the Pope who comes from Poland has a special reason for this because, in a certain way, he experienced all this with you in our homeland….”64

  The World Youth Day Mass on the solemnity of the Assumption, August 15, had a special flavor. It was the first such celebration, the Pope noted, in which there was a large representation from eastern Europe. Wasn’t that, he asked, “a great gift of the Holy Spirit?” This was “your hour,” he told the youngsters. Building a “civilization of love” in the world of tomorrow depended on “the commitment of the Christian generation of today,” and their willingness to make decisions for the common good. On their shoulders rested the responsibility for defending religious liberty, the “personal dimension of development,” the family, a genuine pluralism of mutual enrichment, and the environment. They were not alone. Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the Virgin of Jasna Góra were with them, helping to create a young, evangelical Church, conscious of its mission: “Receive the Holy Spirit, and be strong! Amen!”

  The response was thunderous applause—after which the Pope spontaneously joked that he didn’t need such applause, but they evidently did, and in any case the “Most Holy Mother” appreciated it, too, as a token of their joy.65

  The next week the Pope was in Budapest when an attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev collapsed and accelerated the Soviet Union’s political disintegration. During his five days in Hungary, John Paul tried to rally a Church whose leadership had played a less-heroic role during the last decades of communism than had other episcopates in east central Europe. At the cathedral in Esztergom, he prayed at the tomb of Cardinal Mindszenty and later met with another stadium full of youngsters in Budapest. On August 23, back in Rome, the Pope sent a telegram to President Gorbachev, extending his “fervent good wishes,” thanking God for “the happy outcome of the dramatic trial which involved your person, your family and your country,” and expressing the wish that Gorbachev would be able to resume his “tremendous task for the material and spiritual renewal of the Soviet Union.”66 It was not to be. The day after the Pope’s telegram, Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, breaking the party-government link that had defined “democratic centralism” since the days of Lenin. Even that dramatic change was too little, too late. Less than four months later, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ceased to exist.

  Changes were being rung ecumenically, as well. On October 2, 1991, Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I died. Three weeks later, the Holy Synod of the Patriarchate of Constantinople elected Metropolitan Bartholomew Archondonis of Chalcedon as his successor. The election of the fifty-one-year-old Bartholomew—who had studied at the Ecumenical Institute of Bossey near Geneva and at the University of Munich, who had earned a doctoral degree in canon law at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University, and who had had extensive contacts with Roman Catholic leaders—raised expectations that progress could be made in advancing John Paul’s great hope for healing the breach between Rome and Constantinople. In his congratulatory message to the new Ecumenical Patriarch, John Paul stressed his fervent wish for “collaboration in view of the reestablishment of full communion between our Churches.”67 Bartholomew had not been elected because of any emerging consensus on the ecumenical imperative within the Holy Synod of Constantinople, however, but because of his youthful vigor and what was hoped would be his capacity to handle the often uncooperative Turkish government. Moreover, intra-Orthodox division
s severely circumscribed his room for maneuver. This would become especially evident in the new Ecumenical Patriarch’s testy relationship with the Patriarch of Moscow, Aleksy II, whose assertiveness as a representative of Orthodoxy increased even as the Soviet Union collapsed and then disappeared.68

  The animosities with which Bartholomew had to contend were made evident in Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia, three weeks before Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios died. There, on September 8—which John Paul had asked Catholic bishops around the world to designate as a special day of prayer for peace in Yugoslavia—Serbian protesters marched outside the Vatican embassy with placards denouncing the “Vatican Satanic State.” As Yugoslavia continued to unravel, the Serbs maintained that Catholic support for the independence of Croatia and Slovenia, two constituent “republics” within Tito’s quasifederalist structure, was aimed at disempowering Orthodox Serbia.

  The Holy See’s diplomats were, in fact, trying to determine just what was going on, and why, in the crumbling Yugoslav federation. On August 8, 1991, the Vatican “foreign minister,” Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, had gone on a special mission to Yugoslavia at the Pope’s request. On his return, he told John Paul, “Holy Father, ‘Yugoslavia’ doesn’t exist anymore. When I was in Zagreb [the Croatian capital] I felt as if I were in Vienna, and when I was in Belgrade I felt as if I were in Istanbul.”69 The cultural differences within the Yugoslav federation were simply too great, and absent the force of a communist regime to hold things together, conflict was inevitable.

  The Holy See would have preferred a “federal” solution to Yugoslavia’s future, if in a much looser federation than Tito had managed to impose. The Vatican view, according to Tauran, was that “nationhood” did not always have to be expressed in statehood, and the social-ethical principle of subsidiarity—leaving as much decision making as possible at local levels—suggested federal solutions to complex ethnic and racial problems. But when the Serb-dominated federal Yugoslav army attacked Croatian nationalists in Vukovar (a city on the Croatian/Serbian border) in September 1991, the Vatican’s judgment was that the federal Yugoslav army had become an aggressor against one portion of the Yugoslav population. Absent European Community [EC] intervention to “name the aggressor” and stop the attack on fellow Yugoslavs, it began to seem as if independence for Slovenia and Croatia was a way to stop the war.70 On January 13, 1992, the Holy See sent notes to the governments in Croatia and Slovenia, recognizing the independence they had declared on June 25, 1991, then suspended while EC negotiators attempted to find a peaceful solution, and finally redeclared on December 23 while applying for admission as independent states to the EC. The Holy See notes indicated, as had previous diplomatic contacts, that this recognition was contingent upon Croatian and Slovene assurances that the new governments would be democratic and would respect minority rights.71

  Serbian Orthodox Patriarch Pavle sent a letter to Orthodox leaders around the world, charging that “the origin of the conflict in Yugoslavia and in the Balkans and not only in this region is the insistence with which the Church of Rome considers the Balkans, which are inhabited mainly by people of Orthodox religion, as a missionary territory.”72 The Patriarch’s letter did not address the question of aggression by the federal Yugoslav army. French President François Mitterand was also unhappy, alleging a pro-Croatian alliance between John Paul II and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and telling Archbishop Tauran three times that the Holy See’s recognition of Croatia and Slovenia was responsible for the breakup of Yugoslavia. Tauran, who explained on each occasion that the federal army’s aggression had made independence seem a means of stopping the war, was well aware of France’s traditional alliance with Serbia, and thought that Mitterand’s pique was due in part to the buddy system among socialists.73

  Over time, the argument that independence for Croatia and Slovenia would end the war in those republics was borne out—albeit far sooner in Slovenia than in Croatia. The violence attendant on the disintegration of the Yugoslav federation did not stop, however, and the locus of ethnic slaughter shifted to Bosnia-Herzegovina. Two years later, in 1994, John Paul, who may have come to wonder whether the rapid recognition of Slovene and Croatian independence was entirely wise (since it had freed the Serbian-dominated Yugoslav army for aggression elsewhere in the shattered federation), would try a private initiative to get all parties to the ongoing conflict into conversation.74

  Advances could be made elsewhere in post-communist Europe. On March 25, 1992, John Paul reorganized the entire Polish hierarchy, establishing thirteen new dioceses, raising eight dioceses to the rank of metropolitan archdiocese, establishing ?ód? as an archdiocese without suffragan sees, reshaping the metropolitan “provinces,” transferring fourteen bishops to new positions as heads of dioceses, appointing seven new bishops, and transferring fourteen auxiliary bishops. The Pope also changed the character of the office of Primate of Poland, which had, under Cardinals Wyszyński and Glemp, been synonymous with the position of President of the Polish Bishops’ Conference. The Polish primacy had historically belonged to the archbishop of Gniezno; Gniezno had been joined to the archdiocese of Warsaw in a “personal union” by having one man serve as archbishop of both Gniezno and Warsaw. John Paul dissolved the “personal union” between the archdioceses of Gniezno and Warsaw, appointed a new archbishop of Gniezno (Bishop Henryk Muzyński of Wrocławek, the Polish bishops’ leader in the Jewish-Catholic dialogue), but allowed Cardinal Glemp—as “Custodian of the relics of St. Adalbert”—to retain the title of “Primate of Poland” during his lifetime. Glemp, of course, remained archbishop of Warsaw.75

  The canonical details and medieval titles notwithstanding, this massive reshuffling was an attempt to bring the Polish episcopate’s structure into line with Vatican II and to facilitate the new evangelization. Poland’s vibrant Catholicism needed more bishops, especially given the challenges of democracy. The office of Primate after Cardinal Glemp’s tenure would become essentially honorific, it would not be assumed that the Primate was necessarily the President of the Polish Bishops’ Conference, and the Polish bishops could choose their leadership like any other national conference of bishops. That, it was thought, would foster a more assertively evangelical Polish episcopate.

  Pastoral outreach to the sick had always been a hallmark of Karol Wojtyła’s ministry as priest and an expression of his Christian humanism. On May 13, 1992, the eleventh anniversary of his own suffering at the hands of a would-be assassin, John Paul announced that the Church throughout the world would observe February 11, the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, as a special World Day of the Sick.76 In Rome, the day would be observed during the following years by a papal Mass for the sick in St. Peter’s Basilica, with patients on wheelchairs and gurneys surrounding the high altar, the tomb of Peter, and Bernini’s bronze baldachino. At the end of the service, during which John Paul often preached on illness as part of the human vocation and a call to deeper conversion, the basilica lights were dimmed. Ten thousand candles were lit inside red and orange tulip-shaped containers and held aloft by all those attending, while the “Lourdes Hymn” was sung in various languages.

  Europe was not the only locus of John Paul’s diplomacy in the early 1990s. On September 21, 1992, the Holy See reestablished full diplomatic relations with the Republic of Mexico, after a hiatus of 132 years. The politics within Mexico’s ruling political party, the PRI, had clearly changed since 1979. John Paul’s two visits to the country, in 1979 and 1990, had also had an impact. By demonstrating the kind of popular support for the Church that the government could not ignore, they had reinserted Mexican Catholicism into the living history of the nation. Recognition of the Church as an institution with a public role had followed, as had constitutional reforms and a “new way of thinking” between political and Church leaders, who could now see themselves as involved in common tasks in the fields of education and social service. Anti-clericalism remained a problem in some sectors of Mexican society, but John Paul’s defense of r
eligious freedom as a basic human right had made a considerable difference in attitudes.77

  Two months after the restoration of diplomatic relations, John Paul beatified twenty-five martyrs of the Mexican Revolution, killed between 1915 and 1937. For the Church in Mexico, the past was now open as well as the future.

  PRIESTS FOR A NEW MILLENNIUM

  Every great reform movement in the history of the Catholic Church has required a reform of the priesthood. The “new evangelization” was, in John Paul’s view, no exception. Even before coining that phrase as the theme for the Church’s transition into the third millennium of its history, the Pope had begun reforming the priesthood. Each of his pastoral pilgrimages around the world included a meeting with local priests, and strengthening the ministerial priesthood was a regular topic in his addresses to local bishops on their ad limina visits to Rome. In the mid-1980s, the Congregation for Catholic Education began a series of evaluative “apostolic visitations” of seminaries throughout the world. These led to recommendations for reforms in the training of priests and provided a preliminary exploration of the terrain to be mapped at a Synod of Bishops in 1990. At a more personal level, John Paul sought to strengthen the priesthood, which some observers believed had been relatively ignored by the Second Vatican Council, through an annual series of letters to priests around the world. The letters were issued on Holy Thursday, the beginning of the Easter Triduum and the feast on which the Church celebrates the institution of the priesthood by Christ at the Last Supper.78

  The Holy Thursday letters are a distinctive form of papal teaching, combining biblical and theological reflection with meditations drawn from John Paul’s rich personal experience of the priesthood.79 The letters touched a wide variety of topics: the priesthood as an experience of being with Christ in the “Upper Room” and in the Garden of Gethsemane; the priesthood as an extension of Christ’s work of redemption; the importance of pastoral ministry to young people; the life and ministry of St. John Mary Vianney, the Curé of Ars; Marian piety and the life of priests; the ordained priesthood lifting up, “in the person of Christ,” the priesthood of all the baptized; the pastoral care of the family; women in the lives of priests. Though the letters are clearly meant as a means to encourage the Pope’s brother priests, the fact that John Paul deemed them necessary reflected his sense that the Roman Catholic priesthood had fallen into crisis in the years after the Second Vatican Council.