Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  Eighteen months after the difficult June 1991 pilgrimage, John Paul II had found his voice again in addressing his fellow Poles.

  The Auschwitz Convent

  Three months after the Polish ad limina visits, on April 9, 1993, the Pope sent a letter to the Carmelite nuns living in a convent just outside the walls of the Auschwitz concentration camp, asking them to move to another location in Oswięcim or to return to their mother convent.

  The Auschwitz convent controversy was one of the most painful and unedifying of the late twentieth century. In late 1984, a small community of Carmelite nuns had moved into an abandoned building on the border of the concentration camp—Auschwitz I, as it was known, in distinction from the extermination camp at Birkenau, known as Auschwitz II. Protests from Jewish leaders followed. After lengthy conversations in Geneva between Catholic officials from throughout Europe and world Jewish leaders, it was agreed in 1987 that a new interfaith information and education center would be built outside the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex and that the cloistered Carmelite nuns, whose stated purpose was to give up their lives in prayerful reparation for what had been done in the camps, would move to the new center. It was further agreed that “there will…be no permanent Catholic place of worship on the site of the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps,” so that “every one will be able to pray there according to the dictates of his own heart, religion and faith.”

  That seemed to settle matters. In Poland’s difficult circumstances in the late 1980s, however, the decisions were not implemented promptly and new charges of anti-Semitism were raised. By the summer of 1989, the situation had once again reached a boiling point, with frequently strident charges and countercharges. The Carmelites were not inclined to leave; nationalistically inclined Polish Catholics saw the international Jewish protests against the convent as an attack on Catholicism itself; Jewish protests at the convent site triggered counterprotests by local Poles and further exacerbated tensions. On July 14, 1989, seven Jews wearing striped concentration camp uniforms and led by New York Rabbi Avraham Weiss climbed over the convent fence and began banging on the convent’s doors and windows, demanding that the nuns abandon the convent. Construction workers making repairs on the second floor of the building dumped water on Weiss and his followers and eventually dragged them away from the site. The police nearby, who had done nothing to stop the demonstrators, did nothing to stop the workers, either, nor did the nuns and a priest who was present. Weiss said that the police had turned their back on Jews “just like your Church did 50 years ago.” Two days later, Weiss’s group was allowed into the courtyard of the Metropolitan Curia at Franciszkańska, 3, in Kraków, where they tacked an appeal to Cardinal Macharski on the door, stating that they had come in peace but saying that “as proud Jews we announce—stop praying for the Jews who were killed in the Shoah, let them rest in peace as Jews.” At a later meeting with an archdiocesan official, Weiss’s group charged that the Catholic Church sought to “remove the Jewish character of the Shoah and give it a Christian character.” Weiss and his group returned to the convent the same day, climbed over the fence again, and staged a six-hour demonstration.

  In the wake of the Weiss incident, Cardinal Macharski suspended efforts to implement the agreement on the new center, saying that it was “impossible for me to create the center as I had planned… [in] this climate of aggressive demands and uncertainty.”112 Macharski was sharply criticized by Catholic and Jewish leaders; whatever some of the latter’s discomforts with Weiss’s antics, it took a measure of courage to disagree publicly with him. Cardinal Glemp made matters even worse on August 26 when he gave a sermon at Częstochowa that dredged up anti-Semitic stereotypes about Jewish control of the mass media and included a wholly unacceptable diktat: “We have our faults with regard to the Jews, but today one would like to say: my dear Jews, do not speak to us from a position of a nation raised above all others and do not present us with conditions that are impossible to fulfill.”113 Glemp’s sermon touched off another firestorm of protest from Jews and Catholics. Within three weeks, the Primate appeared to accept the necessity of fulfilling the Geneva agreement and moving the convent, in the context of the new information center.114

  The Vatican finally intervened on September 19, in a statement from Cardinal Johannes Willebrands, responsible for the international Jewish-Catholic dialogue. The statement made clear that John Paul II supported the nuns moving from their present location and promised financial support for the new information and education center. That intervention broke the fever that had been building since the Weiss incidents and set the stage for what most of the parties involved now hoped would be a speedy and peaceful resolution of the dispute, which was threatening to damage the entire fabric of post–Vatican II Jewish-Catholic relations.115

  By 1993, despite the completion of the new center, the nuns had not yet moved. With new protests mounting and some Jewish groups threatening to boycott the mid-April commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, John Paul II intervened again, with a personal letter to the Carmelites. He reminded them of Thérèse of Lisieux’s description of their common Carmelite vocation: “to be love itself in the heart of the Church.” That was what they had wanted to be in their convent. But it was “now…the will of the Church [that] you should move to another place in this same Oświęcim.” Each sister must decide, as “a matter of free will,” whether she would continue to live in this Carmelite community in its new setting, or return to the group’s mother convent.

  There was still a place for the nuns in the human and Catholic reckoning with all that Auschwitz represented, though:

  “Oswięcim—and all that is connected with it as the tragic heritage of Europe and all humanity—remains a task for the Carmelites…. How the future will grow from this most painful and tragic past largely depends on whether, on the threshold of Oswięcim, “the love which is greater than death” will stand watch. You, dear sisters, in a particular way, are entrusted with the mystery of this redeemed love—this love which saves the world….116

  Władysław Bartoszewski, the eminent Polish historian and a veteran of the Jewish-Catholic dialogue, described the Auschwitz convent controversy as “a struggle between two powerful and contradictory symbols” touching deeply on the “collective memory” of Jews and Poles and the related issue of national identity. “Since the war,” he wrote, “Auschwitz has played a central role in the formation of Jewish identity and an only slightly lesser role in the formation of the Polish equivalent. The issue was not the presence of a few nuns praying in an old dilapidated building. It was about Jews and Poles being able to preserve two separate, conflicting, and essential views of history grounded in the same place.”117

  There were other issues engaged, some as elevated, others far less so. Both communities’ leaderships showed a troubling incapacity to distance themselves from their radicals. Ugly forms of anti-Semitism of the sort that had once been thought consigned to the past were revived. The depth of anti-Christian animus among some Jews came to the surface of public debate. Rabbi Weiss’s confusion of prayers for the dead with postmortem proselytization betrayed a deep confusion. So did the actions and statements of Poles who could not bring themselves to understand why Auschwitz had such a singular meaning for Jews. Questions of responsibility for the Shoah were also lurking just below the surface. The charge that Catholics were trying to give the Shoah a “Christian character” was fueled by intense suspicions that the purpose of any such maneuver was to deny any Christian responsibility for the fate of Europe’s Jews.

  At the root of it all, however, a grave theological issue was being raised. To many Jews, prayer at Auschwitz was blasphemy because Auschwitz was unredeemable—an absolute evil. In the Christian view of history and reality, no place is, in principle, unredeemable. There is no place where, as the Pope put it to the nuns, the “love which saves the world,” the “love which is greater than death” should not “stand watch.” What the Auschwitz controve
rsy really confirmed was the imperative of the intensified theological conversation between Jews and Catholics for which John Paul II hoped.

  Honoring the Martyrs

  Two weeks after writing the Carmelites of Oswięcim, John Paul flew across the Adriatic Sea on April 25, 1993, to Albania, which longtime communist dictator Enver Hoxha had once bragged was “the only really atheistic state in the world”—a project he tried to impose with relentless brutality. After a brief stop in the capital, Tirana, where he was greeted by the world’s most famous Albanian, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the Pope went to Shkodrë in the small Balkan country’s northwest, where he ordained four bishops. One of them, Archbishop Frano Illia, had been condemned to death by Hoxha’s regime exactly twenty-five years earlier. The last catacomb had been opened.

  Some of the spadework for the Albania pilgrimage had been done even as communist rule was crumbling in 1991. Monsignor Vincenzo Paglia, the ecclesiastical adviser to the Sant’Egidio movement and another of John Paul II’s back-channel diplomats, went to Tirana and met with Ramiz Alia, a veteran communist and Hoxha’s successor, then struggling to remain politically viable in a rapidly democratizing Albania. Paglia convinced the president to permit the restoration of the Tirana seminary and the Shkodrë cathedral. The first construction site in post-communist Albania was the seminary, on which the public relations–conscious Paglia hung a large, yellow-and-white Vatican banner. It was, he thought, a way of saying, “We’re back!”118

  From September 4 to 10, 1993, John Paul went to the newly independent Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. It was the first visit by a pope to lands formerly belonging to the Soviet Union. For John Paul, the Lithuanian journey in particular was a pilgrimage to another land of martyrs. Between 1945 and 1955, four bishops, 185 priests, and 275,000 Lithuanian Catholic laity had been arrested and imprisoned or deported to concentration camps in Siberia. No Lithuanian bishops had been allowed to attend Vatican II. The cathedral in Vilnius was turned into a gallery for third-rate art; the Church of St. Casimir, nearby, became a museum of atheism.119

  The most moving event during the papal pilgrimage to Lithuania was the Pope’s walk through the Hill of Crosses in Meškuičiai, outside Šiauliai. The first crosses had been erected on the hill during the anti-Russian insurrection of 1863. A hundred years later, some 10,000 crosses of all shapes and sizes had been erected in protest of another form of imperialism. The communists loathed this symbolic linkage of their stranglehold on Lithuania with the czars’, and began to clear the site as if they were clearing a dense forest. One by one, clandestinely, the crosses returned. By the time Lithuania recovered its independence, virtually every inch of the hill was covered with crosses. A simple wooden prie-dieu had been set up for John Paul amid this forest of crosses. He knelt there in prayer, head bowed and eyes covered by his right hand, remembering (as he later said in Vilnius) those buried without any cross over their graves, like the Lithuanian martyrs lying under the frozen tundra of Siberia.

  The Pope’s address to the “world of culture” in Riga, Latvia’s capital, was seized upon by members of the Catholic left who had been uneasy with Centesimus Annus, and who now suggested that the Pope was retracting his carefully stated appreciation of the free economy. He had done nothing of the sort. Instead, he had reiterated three staples of Catholic social doctrine: that the Church’s social doctrine was neither a political program nor an economic program; that no form of capitalism today fully satisfies the moral criteria of Catholic social doctrine; and that the social doctrine of the Church is not a “third way” between capitalism and socialism. Even more oddly, John Paul’s reference to the “kernel of truth” in Marxism—its condemnation of the exploitation of workers—was taken in some quarters to suggest that the Pope was not the principled anti-communist he had long been thought to be. The suggestion was wholly implausible. Those making it rarely noted that John Paul, having acknowledged the “kernel of truth,” immediately reminded his listeners that Pope Leo XIII had also condemned worker exploitation, on the grounds of a conviction alien to Marxist thought—that “the center of the social order is man, considered in his inalienable dignity as a creature made ‘in the image of God.’”120

  BEGINNING AGAIN WITH ORTHODOXY

  The 1991 creation of the three apostolic administrations in Russia and the appointment of bishops to fill them had created a deep-freeze in Catholic-Orthodox relations. The seventh plenary session of the Joint International Commission for the Theological Dialogue Between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, held in Balamand, Lebanon, from June 17 to 24, 1993, tried to achieve a thaw, to set ground rules for the relations between Orthodox and Catholics in eastern Europe, and to reignite the conversation John Paul passionately hoped would heal the division of the eleventh century before the jubilee year of 2000. A modest thaw was all that could be accomplished.

  The Balamand meeting had been postponed for a year at the request of the Orthodox participants, reflecting the deep divisions within and among their own communities over the future course of what Rome and Constantinople continued to call a “dialogue of love.” When the Joint Theological Commission finally met at Balamand in June 1993, six of the fifteen Orthodox Churches that were participants in the dialogue were not represented. There were different reasons for their absence, but in some cases absence presaged further difficulties downstream. After a week of discussion, the commission agreed on a text entitled “Uniatism: Method of Union in the Past, and the Present Search for Full Communion.”

  As the title suggested, the meeting had dealt with the most burning issue on the ecumenical agenda from the Orthodox perspective—the continuing existence of Eastern-rite Churches, which had, over the past four centuries, entered into full communion with the Bishops of Rome while retaining their Byzantine liturgy and style of internal governance. The largest of these “Eastern Catholic Churches,” also known as the “Uniates,” was the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine, which had a large public presence and was marked by robust vitality in the post-communist period.*

  What came to be known in ecumenical shorthand as the “Balamand Document” tried to deal with this tangled web of historical grievances by affirming that the “Uniate” option could no longer be a way of achieving full reconciliation between “sister Churches” and that the Eastern Catholic Churches had the right to exist and to meet the spiritual needs of their members. Catholics and Orthodox agreed that, as they both shared the same faith, there should be no organized attempt at conversions. In cases where individuals exercised their religious freedom by joining a different communion, there should be no rebaptism, since Catholics and Orthodox recognized the validity of each other’s sacraments. The Eastern Catholic Churches were also encouraged to join the Catholic-Orthodox ecumenical dialogue.122

  Reactions to the Balamand Document were mixed. Addressing an Orthodox delegation that came to Rome in late June 1993 for the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, John Paul II described the document as a “new step” that should help everyone involved, Orthodox, Latin-rite Catholic, and Eastern Catholic, to “live together in a single region, to continue their commitment to the dialogue of charity, and to begin or to pursue relations of cooperation” in pastoral service.123 Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew also welcomed the document, although he took the occasion of a Vatican delegation’s annual visit to the Phanar for the feast of St. Andrew in November 1993 to describe the statement as a “condemnation of Uniatism” and said that the Orthodox in the territories in question tolerated “an abnormal…situation” until such time as “the Uniate Churches finally realize where they belong.”124 Even granting the Ecumenical Patriarch’s difficulties in pursuing an ecumenical agenda in light of intra-Orthodox tensions, it was not the most gracious statement imaginable.

  Those tensions were obvious in the response to Balamand from the Orthodox Church in Greece, which did not send representatives to the meeting. One influential bishop, Metropolitan Christodolous of Dimitrias, denied that
“Uniatism” could exist without “proselytism to the detriment of the Orthodox” and suggested that Eastern Catholics would use the document’s defense of religious freedom as a ruse behind which to forward an aggressive contra-Orthodox agenda. The theologically influential monastic community of Mount Athos went even farther. In a December 1993 letter to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, they denied that the Roman Catholic Church was a “sister Church” possessing the means of salvation, and argued that true Orthodox could never recognize either the validity of the Catholic Church’s sacraments and priesthood or the pope as the canonical Bishop of Rome without an explicit Catholic renunciation of Rome’s heresies. News of what the Balamand Document had described as the “radically altered perspectives and attitudes” in both Catholicism and Orthodoxy during the past decades had evidently not reached Mount Athos, where the monks held fast to the view that the Orthodox Church was the only true Church in an absolute and exclusive way. Another Greek Orthodox theologian and member of the international commission, Father Theodore Zissis, claimed that the Orthodox at Balamand had signed the document “out of charm and polite carelessness.” Zissis objected to the use of the word “Catholic” to describe the Roman communion and also denied that Rome and Constantinople were “sister Churches” with mutually recognized and valid sacraments. Catholicism, to Father Zissis, was heretical—period.