Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  After the encyclical’s publication, John Paul received regular reports on both the positive and negative reaction to Veritatis Splendor.31 The German-speaking theological world was particularly critical, arguing that the Pope was right in what he rejected but claiming that no responsible theologian was writing or teaching the specific theory of “fundamental option” (i.e., that a person’s life-orientation was of greater moral consequence than certain individual acts, no matter how evil in themselves) criticized by the encyclical.32 Similar criticisms were heard from American theologians. Charles Curran stated flatly that “the encyclical does not portray the true picture of Catholic moral theology today.”33 Lawrence Cunningham of Notre Dame described Veritatis Splendor as “this generation’s Humani Generis” and charged that it attempted to impose one theological school’s views on the entire Church.34 Nicholas Lash of Great Britain made the same charge, although in this instance about the imposition of “one school of moral philosophy.”35

  Many theologians critical of the encyclical took it primarily as a papal gambit in the struggle for intellectual power within the Church. The encyclical’s effort to strengthen the moral foundations of the free society went largely unremarked.36 Nor did the critical Catholic theological response to the encyclical seriously grapple with the Pope’s suggestion that the “new” moral theology was a variant on the legalism it so sharply criticized. An opportunity for a genuine development of theology may have been delayed by essentially political responses to an encyclical aimed at getting Catholic moral theology to think, again, about goodness and beatitude as the horizon of the moral life.

  Several prominent Protestant moral theologians and Jewish moral philosophers seemed more inclined to give the encyclical a serious, even sympathetic reading. One American Lutheran, Gilbert Meilaender of Oberlin College, concluded a respectfully critical essay by writing that he was “hard pressed to imagine an equally serious statement on the nature of theological ethics issuing at this time from any major Protestant body.” Ironically enough, if Protestant theologians wanted “to keep alive the questions of the Reformation and the centrality of the language of faith” in moral theology, they had to be in conversation with Veritatis Splendor.37 Hadley Arkes of Amherst College wondered why some of the theologians critical of the encyclical had not grasped what was going on in modern culture: “Over the past twenty-five years,” Arkes wrote, “every taxi driver knows [that] our universities have become seminaries in a new orthodoxy of moral relativism.” This, Arkes continued, was very bad news for democracies. We value our own freedom and respect the freedom of others because we understand ourselves and those others as moral agents, capable of understanding right and wrong. What the modern world had forgotten, and what John Paul II had tried to reinstate, was “the connection between freedom and its moral ground,” the foundation on which claims to freedom were coherent and persuasive.38

  In Defense of Freedom

  Veritatis Splendor’s framework for the future development of Catholic moral theology will continue to shape Catholic life well into the twenty-first century and perhaps beyond. A younger generation of scholars now has a series of authoritative reference points with which to contend. More than their teachers, this younger generation seemed willing to wrestle with the encyclical’s suggestion that the conciliar generation of Catholic moral theologians had redefined the rules of moral legalism within the same inadequate game. The response to the encyclical, particularly in North America, suggested that these younger Catholic philosophers and theologians would find sympathetic interlocutors among Protestant and Jewish thinkers whose communities had first experienced the corrosive effects of moral subjectivism and relativism.

  Veritatis Splendor ought to have spurred a worldwide Catholic theological debate about the “natural law” and its relationship to Christian faith, and about the nature and goal of freedom. It should also have prompted a self-critical reflection on the relationship between what theologians were teaching and what priests and catechists, in their efforts to “translate” the theologians’ work into pastoral life, were doing. Yet the response to the encyclical from too many Catholic moral theologians was characterized more by dismissal (and, in some instances, contemptuous dismissal) than by serious critical engagement. Catholic critics could not even bring themselves to concede what some Protestant commentators readily recognized: that John Paul had courageously taken on a set of issues of utmost importance for the culture of the free society. This failure suggested a curious blindness in those who wanted to construct theologies in tune with the signs of the times.

  In public terms, the human dilemma John Paul was addressing in Veritatis Splendor was an ancient one, although it had been exacerbated by the modern crisis of confidence in the human ability to know the truth of anything: How is freedom to be lived so that freedom does not destroy itself?39 Veritatis Splendor is a proposal to the post–Cold War world at large, in which John Paul, far from seeking to demean freedoms newly won or successfully defended, tried to reconnect freedom to the good of human flourishing. The encyclical is a defense of freedom, because it is for freedom’s sake that the moral culture of the free and virtuous society must guard against freedom becoming self-destructive.

  Veritatis Splendor was also part of John Paul’s comprehensive program to implement the Second Vatican Council. It takes up the mandate of the Decree of Priestly Formation to develop the Church’s moral theology, and does so by a method recommended by many of the great theological fathers of Vatican II: ressourcement, the recovery of foundational theological themes from the Bible, the theology of the first Christian centuries, and medieval scholarship. Veritatis Splendor is just such an exercise in retrieval, reclaiming the venerable notion of freedom as linked to truth and goodness that had gotten lost in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries under the influence of the philosophy called “nominalism” and its equation of freedom with raw willpower. In this respect, Veritatis Splendor is a good example of a pattern that can be found throughout the pontificate of John Paul II, in which the Pope takes up a problem that had not been addressed in the years immediately following the Council and tries to solve it while simultaneously building for the future. Veritatis Splendor should not be regarded as merely a corrective to things that had gone wrong in the recent past, though. Its corrective “reach” is centuries long and aims at fostering a renewal of moral theology in the future. Catholic moral theology, John Paul suggests, has to get back beyond the fourteenth century in order to be prepared for the twenty-first. So did a modern world that the late medieval nominalists and, later, the Enlightenment, had taught to think of freedom as willpower.40

  Veritatis Splendor’s opening reflection on the rich young man’s dialogue with Christ and its concluding meditation on St. Paul’s injunction to the Galatians—that Christ “has set us free for freedom” (Galatians 5.1)—are not pious padding to the “real” encyclical. They are an integral part of John Paul’s reflection on the drama of moral decision. So are his reflections on martyrdom as the paradigm of living freedom in the power of the truth. The “voice” in Veritatis Splendor is primarily that of a pastor, concerned that the power of grace and truth given to the Church through the cross of Christ is being nullified. That pastoral concern extends beyond the Catholic Church and the Christian community to men and women struggling with the demands of freedom, whatever their religious convictions. In Veritatis Splendor, the Pope spoke to everyone who aspires to choose the excellent, not simply the expedient, in exercising his or her freedom. He did so in the conviction that choosing the good, not simply choosing “my way,” is the index of the genuinely human.41

  SOLIDARITY IN A SEASON OF EXCLUSION

  On November 11, 1993, a month after Veritatis Splendor was published, John Paul had just finished addressing a group of workers from the Rome-based UN Food and Agricultural Organization when he slipped on a newly installed piece of carpeting in the Hall of Benedictions atop the atrium of St. Peter’s Basilica and fell down several steps.
In pain, he nevertheless worked the crowd with his left hand on his way out of the hall, while trying a pun—“Sono caduto ma non sono scaduto.” [I’ve fallen, but I haven’t been demoted.] An X-ray revealed a broken shoulder and the Pope spent the night at the Policlinico Gemelli, where the break was set and a cast put on to immobilize the broken joint until it healed. The tumble didn’t appreciably slow down John Paul’s schedule, but it did change his work habits. For the first fifteen years of the pontificate, he had followed his Kraków practice of doing his writing by hand in the morning, usually in the papal apartment chapel, before the Blessed Sacrament. When the broken shoulder made writing impossible for a while, John Paul called in Monsignor Stanisław Ryłko, who had returned to Rome from Kraków and was working in the Secretariat of State. Monsignor Ryłko brought his laptop computer with him and sat beside the Pope while John Paul dictated what would become his 1994 Letter to Families.42 When they had finished a session, Ryłko corrected any typos and printed out the text for the Pope, who could then make revisions. It proved such an efficient way of doing business that, even after his shoulder healed, John Paul used it for much of his written work, including his homilies and books.43

  On January 15, the Pope held his annual New Year’s meeting with the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See. Seated in two rows along both long sides of the magnificent Sala Regia in the Apostolic Palace, beneath frescoes of the Battle of Lepanto by Giorgio Vasari, the diplomats were dressed in a variety of garbs, ranging from Old World diplomatic formal (white tie and tails) to African native traditional. Their dean, Ambassador Joseph Amichia of Ivory Coast, congratulated the Pope on completing his fifteenth year in office, noted that there were fifty armed conflicts under way around the world as they met, and expressed the corps’s gratitude to John Paul for his interventions on behalf of peace. The Pope, seated on a small throne and wearing the red state mozzetta and a broad, embroidered stole, thanked the African diplomat for his greetings, wished everyone a happy New Year, conducted the tour d’horizon of world affairs that was standard on these occasions—and then made his sharpest critique of the ideology of nationalism in a pontificate noted for its defense of nations’ cultural rights.

  Civil war in Angola, ethnic violence in Burundi, the implosion of Zaire, authoritarianism in Nigeria, Gabon, Congo, and Togo, the conflicts devastating Somalia and the Sudan, religious radicalism in a destabilized Algeria, and the ongoing ethnic conflicts in the Caucasus and Bosnia-Herzegovina were each noted in the Pope’s review of 1993. John Paul said that he hoped the impending Synod for Africa would “help the Catholics of those regions…to look around themselves and learn to see in every African the human being which he is, and not just his ethnic identity.” Europe, for its part, was witnessing a reaction to individualism in the revival of “the most primitive forms of racism and nationalism.” In Bosnia-Herzegovina, for example, “the most iniquitous forms of extremism are still being seen,” while “the peoples are still in the hands of torturers without morals.”

  At the root of both the African and European traumas, John Paul asserted, were “exaggerated forms of nationalism.” The issue was not a proper love of country or a determination to defend its identity. The issue was “a rejection of others because they are different, in order more easily to dominate them.” This was nothing less than a “new paganism: the deification of the nation.” That was bad enough in itself, as 1993 had demonstrated in blood. But the twentieth century ought to have made clear that it could lead to even worse: “History has shown that the passage from nationalism to totalitarianism is swift, and that, when States are no longer equal, people themselves end up no longer being equal. Thus the natural solidarity between peoples is destroyed…and the principle of the unity of mankind is held in contempt.”

  Against those who regarded the Rwandas, Burundis, and Bosnias of the late twentieth century as regrettable but unavoidable examples of the way things simply are in some places, John Paul threw down a flat challenge: “The Catholic Church cannot accept such a vision of things.” The universal reach of the Christian mission made the Church conscious of the fundamental identity of all human beings as human beings, and required the Church to defend that common human identity against anyone who challenged it in the name of nation, ethnic group, or religion. With an eye toward ancient and contemporary history and the churnings in the new democracies of eastern Europe clearly in mind, John Paul issued an evangelical warning to Catholics and Orthodox: “Every time that Christianity—whether according to its Western or Eastern tradition—becomes the instrument of a form of nationalism, it is, as it were, wounded in its very heart and made sterile.”

  Idolatrous nationalism was not what the world expected or deserved after the Cold War. The turn into the new century and millennium should be a “season of…solidarity between East and West, between North and South.” In the Christmas season, in which the “unheard-of tenderness of God is offered to all mankind,” it was past time to listen to an invitation the world had ignored in 1993—the invitation to “the boldness of brotherhood.” That was what the Bishop of Rome wished for the entire world in 1994.44

  The moral unity of the human race was one of the principal leitmotifs of the pontificate throughout the 1990s, and John Paul’s January 1994 New Year’s address to the diplomatic corps was the toughest, most challenging articulation of that theme yet. The use of a family concept—brotherhood—as a metaphor for transcultural and international political responsibility was not without its own difficulties. It was, after all, family- and clan-like politics that were making such a mess out of Africa, southeastern Europe, and the Caucasus. As the Pope continued to explore a new vocabulary to express his convictions about the post–Cold War world, he also continued to insist that politics, even world politics, remained an arena of moral judgment and action. If invoking the image of a global “human family” helped remind his listeners of that reality—if Serbs and Bosnians, Hutu and Tutsi, Armenians and Azeri began to understand that their common humanity provided a basis for escaping the death spiral of genocidal violence—then perhaps it was worth the danger of misinterpretation.

  THE HOLY SEE AND ISRAEL: FUNDAMENTALLY AGREED, AT LAST

  On December 30, 1993, two weeks before the Pope’s New Year’s address to the diplomatic corps, the Holy See and the State of Israel signed a “Fundamental Agreement” that set the foundations for regularizing the Church’s legal position in Israel and provided for full diplomatic relations between the two parties.

  The Fundamental Agreement was widely regarded as one of the diplomatic master strokes of John Paul II’s pontificate and a historic turning point in Jewish-Catholic relations. It was both. It was also, as the Duke of Wellington famously said of Waterloo, a “damn near-run thing.” That it was accomplished at all was due to the initiative of John Paul II, the vagaries (or, as the Pope would insist, the providential coincidences) of history—and a remarkable back-channel negotiation that saved the historic agreement at a moment when it seemed about to unravel.45

  The Burdens of History

  Officials of the Holy See understandably stress the continuity of their Middle East policy and the unchanging character of their basic diplomatic interest in the region, which is to secure the Church’s legal position in Christ’s native land, the theater of the redemption of the world. Since the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in A.D. 638, defending that interest had been a considerable challenge involving different forms of intervention. Negotiations with the local Muslim authorities were one early strategy. Attempts at forcible reconquest came later with the Crusades. From the sixteenth century on, the Holy See adopted a “bilateral way,” in which treaties between European powers and the Ottoman Empire, generally involving commercial issues, included guarantees of the minimal conditions necessary for Christian access to the holy places.

  Maintenance of the Church’s legal rights in the Holy Land continued to dominate the Holy See’s Middle East concerns during the late nineteenth and early twentieth cent
uries, which saw the rise of the Zionist movement, World War I, the Balfour Declaration of British support for the creation of a Jewish homeland in the region, and the League of Nations mandate to Britain in the aftermath of the war. In the Holy See’s view, the League mandate and the creation of mandatory Palestine had internationalized the question of the Holy Land and the holy places. That view did not change when the United Nations became the regional legatee after World War II.

  The UN’s 1947 plan for the partition of British mandatory Palestine, embodied in Resolution 181, provided for two territorial, national states joined by an economic union, and a direct international administration for Jerusalem, including religious freedom for all the city’s residents. Resolution 181 also provided for religious freedom in the Jewish and Arab states being carved out of mandatory Palestine, guaranteeing the rights of Muslims in the Jewish state, Jews in the Arab state, and Christians in both. Acting primarily through Latin American countries, the Holy See was involved in crafting the religious freedom provisions of Resolution 181, which the Arab invasion of the new State of Israel and the subsequent Arab-Israeli war made politically, if not legally, moot.