Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  In the years after the Fundamental Agreement was completed, it also became clear that the new relationship between the Holy See and Israel, welcome as it was, could not by itself change other realities of the region. The numbers of Christians in the Holy Land continued to dwindle after the 1993 Israeli/Palestinian accords, due largely to Arab Christian migration under economic, political, and religious pressure. For the first time in history, the prospect loomed of a Holy Land without living Christian communities—which meant Christian holy places reduced to the status of museums. On November 6, 1995, Afif E. Safieh, director of a new “Office of the Representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization to the Holy See,” was received at the Vatican, in what was widely understood to be the first step toward diplomatic relations with a future Palestinian state. Seven weeks later, at Christmas, PLO chairman Yassir Arafat, celebrating the holiday in a Bethlehem now under the control of his Palestinian Authority, came close to blasphemy by proclaiming it “the city of the Palestinian Jesus.”59 As for Jerusalem, the Secretariat of State was sufficiently concerned about its future that it issued a formal diplomatic note in May 1996, reiterating the Holy See’s call for an “international juridical instrument” for “the protection of the holy city’s identity,” irrespective of how the question of sovereignty was eventually resolved.60

  Those for whom the Fundamental Agreement was to be the first step toward an entirely different mode of Catholic interaction with Israeli society and culture were as disappointed in the years immediately following the Fundamental Agreement as those who had expected a reasonably prompt completion of the remaining issues on the bilateral negotiating agenda. The disappointments could not change the fact that the Fundamental Agreement was—as its preamble suggested and as those involved in its negotiation sensed during their often difficult work—a historic and irrevocable milestone in the relationship between the Jewish people and the Roman Catholic Church. The seeds firmly planted by the Fundamental Agreement would, the negotiators believed, germinate in time.

  The Pope’s Role

  Like other epic events, the completion of the “Fundamental Agreement Between the Holy See and the State of Israel” has attracted myth-making of various sorts.

  It is sometimes said that the Madrid peace conference following the Persian Gulf War forced the Holy See to change its policy on diplomatic relations with Israel. The Gulf War certainly changed the regional and international politics of the Middle East, but the Pope’s desire for a new course vis-à-vis Israel was evident to his associates long before the Gulf War. The Holy See’s crucial decision to pursue full diplomatic relations in the context of a broader “menu” of issues was made before the Madrid conference convened. The Israeli negotiators made the crucial policy reversal by agreeing to deal with “the menu” rather than making the negotiation of every other item on it dependent on the establishment of full diplomatic relations. The Gulf War and the Madrid peace conference created conditions for accelerating a course on which the Holy See was already launched. They did not create the new course.

  Two U.S. ambassadors to the Holy See, Thomas P. Melady and Raymond Flynn, have suggested that U.S. diplomatic interventions at the Vatican were instrumental in getting the negotiations that resulted in the Fundamental Agreement started. Diplomatic representations indicating that the Bush and Clinton administrations would look favorably on full diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Israel were certainly undertaken, as were numerous informal conversations with Vatican officials. But there is no evidence that the U.S. position had any serious impact on either the Pope’s decisions or those of his diplomats. The Fundamental Agreement itself was warmly applauded by American officials. But according to Holy See officials involved in the process, the Fundamental Agreement was not significantly influenced by American lobbying.61

  Roman journalists and Vatican observers have also speculated that John Paul II, determined to get the bone of the diplomatic relations issue out of the throat of the Jewish-Catholic dialogue, finally put his foot down and told his subordinates to make the deal. Those involved in the negotiation deny that such an incident ever occurred, and the scenario ill-fits the evidence and the record of John Paul’s II’s style of papal management. At no time during the actual negotiation, according to Father Jaeger, did John Paul ever “condition” other issues by insisting on the absolute priority of achieving full diplomatic relations. The Pope, too, was committed to the negotiation’s achieving success on the full “menu” of issues. In this sense, at least—his concern for securing the Church’s legal position in the Holy Land—his policy was in continuity with that of his predecessors.

  Yet there can be no serious doubt that John Paul had a decisive impact on the achievement of the Fundamental Agreement. He made the basic decision to pursue full diplomatic relations with Israel—which, as one of his negotiators later put it, “No one else would have had the courage to do.” That decision was based on his sense of justice as well as on his acute sensitivity to the fact of Jewish pain and its relationship to Catholicism. The decision having been made, he typically left the details of its implementation to others, while continuing to confirm that the course he had chosen should be pursued to a successful conclusion. A “successful conclusion” was not limited to the issue of full diplomatic relations with Israel, although that question understandably drew the most public and media attention.

  Several objectives seem to have intersected in the unified mind and imagination of John Paul II. There were the Church’s historic interests in the Holy Land, which had to be defended. There was his intuition of Jewish pain and his theological commitment to getting the long-delayed theological dialogue between Jews and Catholic under way again. Both involved solving the problem of diplomatic relations. For that act would respond persuasively to the pain caused by the perception of “nonrecognition,” demonstrate the Church’s millennial commitment to beginning a conversation of a radically different sort with the Jewish people, and irrefutably demonstrate that Catholicism had no theological “problem” with the State of Israel and with living Judaism. At the same time, the achievement of diplomatic relations would help secure the Church’s legal position in the theater of the redemption. John Paul saw a whole where many others, including officials of the Holy See and Israeli politicians and diplomats, saw only fragments and pieces.

  Given the hangover of historic prejudices and the cautiousness of the Holy See’s professional diplomats, the Fundamental Agreement simply would not have happened without its being widely understood throughout the Vatican that such an agreement, in all its dimensions, was the Pope’s intention, in which his considered judgment coincided with the desire of his heart. Everything else—including the formal negotiations and the back channel—depended on this.

  SISTINE INTERMEZZO

  In April 1994, and for the first time in centuries, the world saw Michelangelo’s Last Judgment as the artist had painted it.

  The Florentine genius’s Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes, which covered more than 8,000 square feet, had been restored, one twelve-inch-square section at a time, between 1980 and 1990. Cleaning away more than 400 years of dirt, grime, incense and candle residues, and pigeon droppings had revealed a brilliant array of forgotten golds, greens, and violets, and details of shading long obscured. A similarly painstaking process of restoration, begun in 1990 and completed over four years, now revealed the richly textured blues of the Last Judgment, achieved in part by Michelangelo’s mixing ground lapis lazuli with his paints.

  In addition to authorizing the restoration of the frescoes, which caused considerable controversy in some artistic circles, John Paul made sure, when it came time to clean the Last Judgment, that the restorers removed about half the leggings, breechcloths, and other drapings with which prudish churchmen had hidden Michelangelo’s nudes, years after the masterpiece had been completed (the remaining drapings were left in place for historic reasons).62 With the restoration finished, the Pope wanted to underscore theologic
ally the truths Michelangelo’s frescoes expressed. The occasion was a Mass marking the restoration’s completion, which John Paul celebrated in a scaffolding-free Sistine Chapel on April 8, 1994, the Friday after Easter Sunday.

  The timing, he suggested, was eminently appropriate, for Michelangelo’s Last Judgment revealed “an extraordinary Christ…endowed with an ancient beauty that is somehow detached from the traditional pictorial model.” To stand before this massive fresco during Easter Week was to “stand before the glory of Christ’s humanity,” which, in the Second Coming, would penetrate “the depths of the human conscience [while] revealing the power of the redemption.” The Last Judgment was an icon, in which “Christ expresses in himself the whole mystery of the visibility of the Invisible.”

  Christianity had had a long, bitter struggle over icons, the Pope recalled, until the issue was settled in their favor by the last ecumenical council of an undivided Christian Church, the Second Council of Nicaea in 787. The defeat of those who wanted to ban icons from public worship and private devotion was a defense of the Church’s sacramental intuition about all of reality—that the extraordinary lay just on the other side of the ordinary, through which the extraordinary was revealed. Icons and paintings like the Last Judgment are not simply works of pictorial art; each is, “in a certain sense, likea sacrament of Christian life, since in it the mystery of the incarnation becomes present…the Mystery of the Word made flesh is reflected in a way that is ever new…” and both the artist and those who “participate” in his art by seeing it are “gladdened by the sight of the Invisible.”

  Michelangelo, the Pope continued, had been courageous enough to admire God the Father at the moment of his creation of the human race, and to transfer the visible, corporeal beauty of Adam to God himself. It was, John Paul said, “an extraordinary piece of artistic audacity,” which, some might argue, verged on blasphemy. Yet we can “recognize, in the visible and humanized Creator, God clad in infinite majesty.” Michelangelo had taken humanity’s desire to see the divine as far as it could possibly go, artistically. Images had “intrinsic limits” in expressing divinity, but “everything which could be expressed has been expressed here.”

  John Paul then linked the Sistine ceiling and the Last Judgment to the theology of the body he had been developing for a decade and a half. Because of the incarnation of the Son of God, Christians can and must say that the human body is the kenosis, the outpouring in self-giving, of God. Far from being prudish about the body, Christians ought to understand that “the great humility of the body must be expressed so that what is divine can be revealed.” At the same time, Christians must understand that “God is the source of the integral beauty of the body.”

  The Sistine Chapel was “the sanctuary of the theology of the human body.” By bearing witness so magnificently to “the beauty of man created by God as male and female,” Michelangelo’s frescoes also conveyed “the hope of a world transfigured, the world inaugurated by the Risen Christ.” Within the mystery of God and his creative purposes, the human body was revealed in all its splendor and dignity.63

  The New York Times correspondent found it surprising that, in this remarkable homily and standing before Michelangelo’s undraped nudes, John Paul “appeared not the least embarrassed, despite his frequent reaffirmations of the Church’s conservative teachings on sexuality.”64 It was not “despite” the Church’s moral teaching on sexuality, however, but precisely because of it that John Paul celebrated Michelangelo’s work as a “testimony to the beauty of man,” whose physicality and sexuality, understood in the context of creation and redemption, were icons of the life of God. By reducing the body to an object, the sexual revolution had betrayed itself. An appeal to the better angels of our sexual nature might yet redeem the promise of a sexuality in which men and women deepened their intuition of the mysterious border between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the embodied and the divine.

  In the months ahead, the debate over the meaning of human sexuality moved from the splendor of the restored Sistine Chapel to the less edifying arena of a major international conference.

  CONFRONTATION AT CAIRO

  The 1994 confrontation between Pope John Paul II and the administration of U.S. President Bill Clinton over world population and family planning issues was inevitable, and could have been foreseen as early as the summer of 1992.

  Governor Clinton and his vice presidential running mate, Senator Al Gore, ran in 1992 on the most radical “social issues” platform in American history, committing themselves to federal funding of abortion on demand at any time during pregnancy, deploring “explosive population growth in the Third World,” and pledging the use of federal tax dollars to fund “greater family planning efforts” in U.S. foreign aid programs. On the day President Clinton was inaugurated, January 20, 1993, he signed five executive orders widening the U.S. government’s involvement with, and funding of, elective abortion. Four days later, the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, published an editorial charging that the “renewal” Clinton had promised in his campaign “comes by way of death [and] by way of violence against innocent beings.”65 It was the first salvo in what would become the most serious confrontation ever between the Holy See and the United States government.

  The confrontation was international in scope. The Clinton administration’s full agenda for the September 1994 World Conference on Population and Development in Cairo was ambitious, and was shared by officials of the United Nations Fund for Population Activities [UNFPA] and by major international nongovernmental organizations such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation. It sought nothing less than to define sexual expression, devoid of any connection to marriage or procreation, as a freestanding personal autonomy right under international law, and, in this context, to define a legally enforceable universal human right to abortion on demand. This was, in part, what politicians call “payback.” The 1984 world population conference at Mexico City, heavily lobbied by the Reagan administration and inspired by the grim example of communist China’s policy of coercive abortion for state-defined population-control purposes, had stated flatly that abortion was not a legitimate means of family planning. In addition to reversing their defeat at Mexico City, the UN officials, European politicians, and American-led nongovernmental organizations that supported the Clinton administration’s approach to Cairo were also engaging in one of the distinctive features of post–Cold War international politics—the use of international institutions and international law to achieve political goals that could not be reached by normal democratic procedures at home.

  The difficulties the Holy See would have in this struggle were aptly illustrated by a meeting between Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran and U.S. Under-secretary of State Timothy Wirth, a former U.S. senator and longtime population-control supporter now occupying the “global affairs” desk at the Department of State. Undersecretary Wirth’s office ordinarily featured a “condom tree” as a desk ornament. The tree was removed for Archbishop Tauran’s visit on November 16, 1993, but little else was achieved. Wirth began talking with Tauran about the widespread problem of children having children in the United States and around the world. The archbishop, eager to identify some common ground, agreed that this was indeed a problem, and one that underlined the importance of cooperation between the Church and governments since moral education was surely part of the solution. This Undersecretary Wirth refused to concede. The issue was biological information, period— “Young people have to know about their bodies,” was his summary statement. Moral considerations and moral education were irrelevant.66 Wirth’s attitude was not unique in an administration that seemed to think of population control as the answer to any number of problems. The administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, J. Brian Atwood, had defended a new five-year, $75 million grant to the International Planned Parenthood Federation on the grounds that overpopulation was the “core” of the recent chaos in Somalia, in which U.S. troops were then embroi
led. How a country of 7 million inhabitants with a territory considerably larger than California could be considered “overpopulated” was not clear. Atwood’s claim illustrated just how confused the question of “overpopulation” had become.67

  The View from the Papal Apartment

  For John Paul II, the impending confrontation at the World Conference on Population and Development focused several aspects of the crisis of humanism in the 1990s through a single lens.

  As Catholicism had understood for millennia, along with other great world religions, abortion was an intrinsically evil act that killed a child and did grave damage to its mother, its father, the abortionist, and society as a whole. Abortion, the Pope insisted, was not an issue of sexual morality but of human rights. The moral locus of the abortion debate was the ancient injunction against killing the innocent, not the next commandment in the Decalogue, enjoining chastity. To declare this grave wrong a “right” not only debased the language, it threatened the legitimacy of international law. The Pope’s distinctive feminism, as well as his extensive pastoral experience, also suggested that abortion on demand—abortion regarded as one item in a long list of family planning options—was very bad for women and for the relations between women and men, as it provided a technological “solution” to the irresponsibility of predatory males. The Church’s extensive, worldwide experience in providing health and counseling services to women caught in the dilemma of unwanted pregnancy suggested that the relationship between the quest for women’s equality and abortion on demand was not as simple as some insisted.