The Romanian Orthodox Church formally accepted the Balamand Document, and one of its bishops, Metropolitan Nicholas of Banat, said that the mutual recognition of Orthodox and Catholics as “sister Churches” required the Orthodox to think of the Eastern Catholics as “sister Churches,” too. But other Romanian Orthodox bishops were not so accommodating. A year before Balamand, the Patriarchate of Bucharest had published a ritual for receiving “schismatic Roman Catholics and others” into the Orthodox Church; the ritual for the reception of Catholics included a prayer of expiation asking Christ to free the ex-Catholic “from the sleep of the deceit of heresy that leads to perdition.” The attitude encoded in that prayer led many Romanian Orthodox leaders to think of Balamand as a sellout. The Greek Catholic leadership of Romania was far from enthusiastic about Balamand. In a letter to Pope John Paul, Bishop Gheorghe Gutiu, speaking for the entire Greek Catholic hierarchy, defended the historical accomplishments of the Eastern Catholic Churches, and put the recent relationship between Romanian Orthodox and Romanian Greek Catholics in the sharpest terms: “They have remained the oppressors, we the oppressed; they were collaborators with communism while we were the victims of it; they the attackers and we the defenders even up to this very day.”
Ukraine had been the reactor core of the meltdown in Catholic-Orthodox relations since the collapse of communism. As the resurgent Greek Catholic Church there became a vital public presence, Ukrainian Orthodoxy split into three bitterly divided factions, Russian Orthodoxy’s historic claims were thrown into jeopardy, and Ukrainian nationalism was energized by the resurgent Ukrainian Catholics, the largest Eastern Catholic Church to emerge from the catacombs. Many Greek Catholics in Ukraine were offended by the Balamand Document’s dismissal of “Uniatism” as a failed method. Some Ukrainian Catholics argued that what the Orthodox dismissed as “proselytism” was often a case of Ukrainian Orthodox believers freely joining the Greek Catholic Church because it was now publicly possible to do so, or because of their dismay with Orthodoxy’s fragmentation in Ukraine. The head of the Greek Catholic Church, however, took an open, positive approach to the document. In an August 1993 letter to Cardinal Cassidy, Cardinal Myroslav Lubachivsky praised Balamand’s description of Catholicism and Orthodoxy as sister Churches with the same faith, the same sacraments, and the same apostolically transmitted ministry, as well as the document’s defense of religious freedom, its teaching that ecclesiastical division is contrary to the will of Christ, and its recognition that the “Uniate method” in the past had been based on a genuine wish to fulfill Christ’s desire for the unity of his Church.125
Balamand was, Cardinal Edward Cassidy suggested, about as far as the Catholic Church could go without betraying its own self-understanding. It was now up to local Eastern Catholic and Orthodox communities to settle their problems peacefully on the ground. The resolution of these historic grievances, the cardinal argued, would only come when these communities had learned to live and work together.126 But Orthodoxy’s difficulties in dealing with its own history were a serious obstacle to grassroots reconciliation.
John Paul II’s vision of Rome and Orthodoxy reconciled on the threshold of the third millennium was one of the most powerful signs that he was living imaginatively in the future. The inability of some of Catholicism’s Orthodox interlocutors to read the past in anything but the most partisan terms, and the rivalry that had begun to emerge between Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in Constantinople and Patriarch Aleksy II in Moscow, was making the Pope’s vision ever more difficult to achieve. Within two years, however, John Paul, determined to pursue the new evangelization with, rather than against, Orthodoxy, would make his boldest proposal yet to what he continued to insist were the “sister Churches” of the East.
THE POPE AGAINST TERROR
Four months before the Balamand meeting, which was so profoundly influenced by the Church’s experience of persecution under communism, John Paul had confronted one of the new faces of post–Cold War persecution on his fifty-seventh pastoral pilgrimage and ninth to Africa.
The itinerary began on February 3, 1993, in Benin, home of Cardinal Bernardin Gantin, Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops and one of the Pope’s closest collaborators. Benin, like central and eastern Europe, was recovering from Marxism, and John Paul praised its people’s efforts to build free institutions. After two days in Benin, which included a meeting with Muslims in Parakou, the Pope flew across the continent to Uganda. John Paul visited AIDS patients in a hospital in Kampala, announced that a Special Assembly of the Synod of Bishops for Africa would be held in Rome in April 1994, and celebrated Mass at the shrine of the Ugandan Martyrs canonized by Paul VI in 1964. The decision to hold the African Synod in Rome rather than in an African locale was criticized in the press, particularly in Europe. Cardinal Francis Arinze, the Nigerian head of the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, had a different memory of the decision. The Pope had asked all the African cardinals to come to Rome to discuss the Synod’s location. Some had argued for Rome; others for Africa. John Paul said, “Let’s do both,” which is what eventually happened. The Synod itself was held in Rome, and the post-synodal apostolic exhortation was signed and promulgated in three African cities. “When I read that the Roman Curia had pickpocketed the Synod out of the hands of the poor Africans, I smiled,” Arinze remembered. “They didn’t have any idea. If we had wanted it only in Africa, that’s what we would have had.”
Arinze’s analysis shed interesting light on what the African bishops were looking for from a Synod that had been bruited for a decade and a half. To hold the Synod in Rome meant that the Pope would be present every day—and the Africans wanted that. It also meant that the leaders of the Curia would be present every day—the Africans also wanted that, so there would be a more open, two-way communication between Africa and the Curia. Finally, Arinze and others thought the African Synod would be taken much more seriously if it were held in Rome: “If it had been in an African country,” Arinze said, “the media would have shown the Pope coming down from the plane. And after that they would have shown the woman washing the baby in dirty water in a village, and the children playing in trees, and monkeys in the forest, and some primitive people. They tell us precious little about the Pope’s meeting with intellectuals at the university. They show only things they think are funny and enjoyable for Europeans. We want to be taken seriously. We have much more to share than that.”127
The most dramatic moments of the pilgrimage came in Sudan, a country ruled by Islamic radicals whose fierce persecution of Christians in the south of the country included selling Christian women and children into slavery and crucifying Christians who publicly professed their faith. The depredations of the Khartoum regime had led to armed resistance. Rebels controlled considerable portions of the south of the vast country and engaged the government in a brutal civil war. Several Sudanese bishops had discouraged John Paul from coming to their country. Some said that it would be inappropriate to greet government leaders whose hands were dripping with blood. Others feared an outbreak of anti-Christian violence by Muslim activists.128 John Paul thought it his duty to defend persecuted Christians, and a nine-hour visit to Khartoum was finally agreed upon.
The Pope kissed the ground at Khartoum airport, and began his address at the arrival ceremony with a frank statement of concern: “When people are weak and poor and defenseless, I must raise my voice on their behalf. When they are homeless and suffering the consequences of drought, famine, disease and the devastations of war, I must be close to them…. ” He had come, he said, on behalf of “justice and peace for all the citizens of this land, without reserve, regardless of their religion, social standing, ethnic background or color.” More and more Africans, he suggested, were becoming aware that “society must become more democratic, more respectful of legitimate differences, more stable through the rule of law, reflecting universally recognized human rights.” The peoples of Africa were no longer content to be free in the technical sense
of belonging to independent states. External colonialism had been consigned to the past. It was now time to shed the internal colonialism imposed by corrupt, authoritarian governments.129
John Paul’s visit to Sudan and his forthright defense of religious freedom did not measurably affect the ongoing persecution of Christians there.130 The nine-hour pilgrimage to Khartoum did help put the issue of the post–Cold War persecution of Christians on the international agenda, however.131 Perhaps even more importantly, it gave a boost to the morale of Christians and those Muslims who opposed the Sudanese government’s Islamic radicalism and the influence on it of the leader of the country’s Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan Turabi.132
Terrorism against Christians in radical Islamic states was one face of an unreconciled post–Cold War world. There were other forms of terrorism, and one of them was very much on John Paul’s mind three months later when, on a three-day pilgrimage to Sicily in May 1993, he made his most vigorous public protest against the Mafia. It was the Pope’s 109th extended pastoral visit in Italy and his third to Sicily. After traveling to Trapani, Erice, and Mazara del Vallo on the island’s western coast, he came to Agrigento, on Sicily’s southern shore. On Sunday, May 9, at an outdoor Mass celebrated in the famous “Valley of the Temples” against the backdrop of the ancient Greek Temple of Concord, what the ever-discreet L’Osservatore Romano described as a “visibly agitated Pope” demanded that the Sicilians live their faith not simply by “interior personal assent,” but also by “condemning evil with conviction ” and by denouncing the “culture of the Mafia, which is a culture of death, a profoundly inhuman, anti-Gospel foe of human dignity and civil harmony.”133 In spontaneous remarks at the end of Mass, he made a passionate plea for a new Sicily:
Dearly beloved, my wish is that, as the deacon just said, you may go in peace and find peace in your land…. In the wake of so much suffering, you have the right to live in peace. Those who are guilty of disturbing this peace have many human victims on their conscience. They must understand that killing innocent human beings cannot be allowed. God once said, “You shall not kill.” No man, no human association, no mafia can change or trample on this most sacred right of God…. In the name of the crucified and risen Christ, of Christ who is the Way and the Truth and the Life, I say to those who are responsible for this: “Repent! God’s judgment will come some day!”134
The Pope’s blunt assault on Sicily’s criminal culture dominated the three days of the visit, as John Paul counterposed Christian solidarity to “the recurring chains of hatred and revenge” in Trapani, where he also described “those forms of organized crime that deaden and ruin consciences” as the products of satanic temptation. In Mazara del Vallo, he urged the local priests, seminarians, and religious sisters to “heal this island of the scourge of the Mafia.”135
Seventeen days later, on May 27, 1993, a car bomb killed five persons, including two children, and destroyed priceless works of art at Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. John Paul immediately sent a telegram to Cardinal Silvano Piovanelli, the city’s archbishop, condemning “this act of inhuman violence and unprecedented savagery.”136 In July, bombs were set off at the Pope’s Roman cathedral, the Basilica of St. John Lateran, and at the venerable Roman church of S. Giorgio in Velabro. Though no group ever claimed responsibility, no one believed the timing was accidental.
The bombings, like the papal visit to Sicily that seemed to have triggered them, took place during a time of exceptional turmoil in Italian public life. The often informal, sometimes extralegal arrangements that had shaped Italy’s politics during the Cold War were breaking down under the pressures of their own long-term implausibility, the desire for political and legal revenge, and a new world situation. As Bishop of Rome, John Paul had committed himself to the reevangelization of Italy. At the same time, and as part of the very same process, he declined to play the same assertive role in Italian domestic politics as his twentieth-century papal predecessors. Italy, too, was to be reconverted “from the head down,” through the reevangelization of culture, rather than through the manipulation of politics.
If there was going to be a public struggle for the character of the new, post–Cold War Italy, Italy’s Polish Primate intended to be involved. The new evangelization demanded action to reconcile an unreconciled society. That, among many other things, demanded a forthright challenge to the “culture of death.”
18
The Threshold of Hope
Appealing to Our Better Angels
AUGUST 12–15, 1993
Fourth international World Youth Day in Denver, Colorado.
OCTOBER 5, 1993
Veritatis Splendor, John Paul II’s tenth encyclical.
NOVEMBER 11, 1993
John Paul breaks shoulder.
DECEMBER 30, 1993
“Fundamental Agreement” between the Holy See and the State of Israel is signed.
JANUARY 15, 1994
John Paul criticizes the idolatry of nationalism in annual address to the diplomatic corps.
APRIL 8, 1994
Rededication of Sistine Chapel completes restoration of Michelangelo’s frescoes.
APRIL 28, 1994
John Paul falls and fractures femur; artificial hip joint implanted on April 29.
MAY 13, 1994
Convent for contemplative nuns opens in the Vatican.
MAY 22, 1994
Apostolic Letter, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, on women and the ministerial priesthood.
JUNE–AUGUST 1994
In twelve audience and Angelus addresses, John Paul tries to re-shape the international debate on family planning and population issues prior to the third international conference on population.
SEPTEMBER 5–13, 1994
The World Conference on Population and Development meets in Cairo.
SEPTEMBER 7, 1994
Papal pilgrimage to Sarajevo cancelled.
OCTOBER 19, 1994
John Paul II’s book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, is published.
NOVEMBER 11, 1994
“Common Christological Declaration” with the Assyrian Church of the East ends 1,500 years of theological estrangement.
NOVEMBER 26, 1994
At his sixth consistory John Paul creates thirty new cardinals.
DECEMBER 13, 1994
John Paul writes Letter to Children throughout the world.
As a helicopter ferried John Paul II to Denver’s Mile High Stadium on August 12, 1993, for the opening of the first World Youth Day in North America, no one aboard knew quite what to expect.
A year before, skeptics on the U.S. Bishops’ Conference staff had warned that there would be little interest in such an event because “pilgrimage” was a foreign notion, unattractive to young Americans. Some even suggested that the Pope himself was a liability whose presence would make it harder to mount a successful gathering. In the months before World Youth Day, the U.S. press had been full of speculation about the difficulties John Paul II would have with America’s “cafeteria Catholics,” determined to pick and choose for themselves among the Church’s doctrines and moral teachings. The senior assistant attorney general of Colorado worried out loud that allowing a papal Mass in a state park would open the door to a demand for park space from the Ku Klux Klan and goodness knows who else. Sierra Club environmentalists and animal-rights activists had complained about the Mass’s impact on the local wildlife. Disenchanted local Catholics in Denver had called a press conference to “disinvite” the Pope to their city.
More than a few U.S. bishops were among the doubters about World Youth Day ’93. The bishops staunchly promoted Church programs for teenagers, urged their priests to work with youngsters, and supported Offices of Youth Ministry in their chanceries, but many of them thought “youth ministry” was virtually impossible. The culture, the music, the lifestyle of the teenagers of the 1990s struck them as alien; so did young people’s struggles with drugs and sex. Between the bishops and restless, contemporary American youth there see
med to be a chasm that few Church leaders thought it possible to bridge. Whatever had happened in Rome, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Compostela, and Częstochowa during the first four international celebrations of World Youth Day, things were going to be different in Denver, because America was different.
This episcopal skepticism extended to some of John Paul’s recent judgments, for it was the Pope who had pressed to hold a World Youth Day in the United States and who had chosen Denver over Cleveland, Minneapolis–St. Paul, and Buffalo as the venue. The majestic Rockies, some thought, must have attracted the mountaineering pontiff. Few seem to have considered that it was precisely Denver’s secularity, its self-conscious modernity, and its sense of living on the cutting edge of the high-tech future that recommended it to John Paul, eager to take World Youth Day into the heart of the contest to define the free society in the 1990s.
As the event itself drew closer, it began to look as if the skeptics would be surprised, at least by the numbers. The bishops’ conference staff’s original expectations of a mere 60,000 registrations had been more than tripled, as over 200,000 young people from all over the world had registered. But what kind of reception would they give the Pope, who, according to pre-event press coverage, was widely perceived by Americans as a moral scold, out of touch with the national temper?
Mile High Stadium had witnessed frenzy during games played there by the city’s beloved football team, the Denver Broncos. It was about to experience something wholly unprecedented.
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