Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  Nonetheless, some had continued to argue that the question of the ordination of women was open to debate or that the Church’s tradition was a matter of discipline rather than of doctrine. Thus, John Paul wrote, he had to speak: “Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church’s divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Luke 22.32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.”114

  In his commentary on Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, Cardinal Ratzinger emphasized that this was “not a new dogmatic formulation” but rather “a doctrine taught by the ordinary Papal Magisterium in a definitive way; that is, proposed not as a prudential teaching, nor as a more probable opinion, nor a mere matter of discipline, but as certainly true.” That meant, in the practical order, that the teaching required the “full and unconditional assent of the faithful,” and that teaching the contrary was “equivalent to leading consciences into error.”115

  The debate intensified, rather than abated, in the wake of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis. Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini of Milan said that “the papal document was decisive: it does not admit of either rebuttal or reformability. That is absolutely clear.” But Martini went on to say that the truth involved was not a “truth of faith,” as it did not concern a matter of revelation. Martini also suggested that the future discussion of women’s “absolutely necessary and irreplaceable” mission in the Church should focus on the diaconate, which, the cardinal said, “the Pope does not mention and therefore does not exclude.” In Germany, Rita Waschbüsch, president of the prominent lay organization the Zentralkomitee der Deutschen Katholiken, argued that it was impossible for the Pope or anyone else to close discussion of a subject that continued to be debated throughout the Church, but proposed that the conversation should now focus on how women could exercise a fuller mission in the Church as “presently” constituted. The hint of an alternatively consituted Church in the future seemed to suggest that the doctrinal message of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis had not been received. Criticism of the apostolic letter was most dramatic in the United States. “Priests for Equality,” an organization claiming 4,000 members, issued a statement arguing that Ordinatio Sacerdotalis “is not infallible, does not enjoy the consultation of the 2,500 bishops of the Church, and most certainly does not express the sentiments of the faithful.” The statement concluded with an apology for “the insensitivity of our Pope.” Ruth Fitzpatrick, national coordinator of the Women’s Ordination Conference, asked how a papal mandate could stop people from thinking: “That seems to be the real breach of divine law.” Similar criticisms were heard from the Women in the Church Committee of the Conference of Religious in England and Wales, which claimed that its vision of a “Church of real inclusivity in all its ministries and Church structures” was shared by groups in Ireland and Australia.116

  A Question and an Answer

  Given the misrepresentation and misreading of the nature and substance of John Paul’s teaching in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, the next step in the controversy followed inexorably. During the firestorm of debate occasioned by the apostolic letter, a bishop sent a dubium—a question requesting an authoritative response—to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Formally stated, the query read as follows:

  Dubium: Whether the teaching that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women, which is presented in the Apostolic Letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis to be held definitively, is to be understood as belonging to the deposit of faith.117

  Less formally, and according to Cardinal Ratzinger’s recollection, CDF had received a query from a bishop who had said, in effect: How am I to understand all this? The Pope says he has spoken in a definitive way, but the theologians say he hasn’t. Some bishops have been giving the impression that the teaching is, indeed, not “definitive.” The Holy See had to clarify whether the teaching is definitive or not. CDF, the bishop concluded, had a duty to give an answer.

  The dubium, according to Ratzinger, led to a “difficult discussion” involving the members of the Congregation and John Paul. The difficulty did not have to do with the substance of the teaching of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, which all concerned believed to be true, definitive, and part of Christ’s constituting will for the Church. The discussion was “difficult,” Ratzinger remembered, “because the implication of the word ‘infallible’ is tutti terremoto [an earthquake for everyone]. So there were initially different voices, even among the cardinals. All were in agreement that it is so. The only question was how to say it better, [and on this people had] different opinions.”118

  The solution the Congregation finally accepted, and the reply John Paul personally approved, was published over Cardinal Ratzinger’s signature on October 28, 1995:

  Responsum: In the affirmative.

  This teaching requires definitive assent, since, founded on the written Word of God and from the beginning constantly preserved and applied in the Tradition of the Church, it has been set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal Magisterium (cf. Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium, 25, 2). Thus, in the present circumstances, the Roman Pontiff, exercising his proper office of confirming the brethren (cf. Luke 22.32), has handed on this same teaching by a formal declaration, explicitly stating what is to be held always, everywhere, and by all, as belonging to the deposit of faith.119

  CDF’s answer to the bishop’s question was that the teaching of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis was to be definitively held by all Catholics because it had, throughout the centuries, been constantly taught by the bishops of the Church in communion with the Pope. This teaching constituted an infallible instance of the “ordinary and universal Magisterium” (or teaching authority of the Church) as that had been defined by Vatican II in Lumen Gentium 25. John Paul II was not personally exercising the infallibility of the papal office in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis. He was teaching definitively what the Church’s “ordinary” teaching authority had already defined as a matter of the “deposit of faith” through its constant tradition.120

  This set off another bruising controversy, centered on the question of whether CDF and John Paul were not unilaterally expanding the scope of infallible teaching. The “deposit of faith” was composed of truths the definition of which was protected by the charism of infallibility given by the Holy Spirit to the Church’s teaching authority, the bishops in communion with the Bishop of Rome. Could the Pope identify as belonging to that “deposit” matters to which neither the bishops in ecumenical council nor the Pope had previously applied the term “infallible”? How could an admittedly noninfallible act (such as the issuing of an apostolic letter or the approval of a CDF responsum) nevertheless identify an infallible teaching that was to be definitively held as part of the constitutive truths of Catholic faith? The question of the ordination of women became enmeshed in the complex argument the First Vatican Council had intended to settle by its definition of papal infallibility but clearly had not—the question of the nature and means of exercising the Church’s highest teaching authority.

  The rhetoric in some of the post-responsum commentary was high. British theologian Nicholas Lash, the Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, accused the Pope of a “quite scandalous abuse of power,” which would likely “undermine the very authority the Pope seeks to sustain.”121 Hans Küng charged the Pope and Cardinal Ratzinger with making “every effort…to scare, to repress, to forbid discussion.” The German dissident group “We Are the Church” released a petition, signed by 1.5 million German Catholics, calling for the ordination of women.122 Father Richard McBrien of the University of Notre Dame said that it was “utterly irresponsible for the Vatican to say something that doesn’t quite mean what it seems to mean.” Did John Paul mean to suggest, he asked, that those who disagreed with Ordinatio Sacerdotalis wer
e heretics who were thus by definition “outside the Church”?123

  The post-responsum debate helped clarify some of these issues. Father Avery Dulles, SJ, often regarded as the very model of theological carefulness among Catholic thinkers in the United States, sorted through the question of the teaching’s authoritative status in a lecture to the bishops of the United States in June 1996. The doctrine taught by Ordinatio Sacerdotalis was infallible, Dulles said, not because of the apostolic letter or the CDF responsum. That was beyond CDF’s competence, and John Paul had decided not to exercise his power to define the doctrine by a statement directly invoking his infallible teaching office. Rather, the apostolic letter and the responsum had drawn on a “classical theological method” by appealing to a wide range of sources, including the Word of God in Scripture, the constant tradition of the Church, and the “ordinary and universal magisterium” as described by Vatican II. The weight of those sources, Dulles argued, “strongly supports the Holy See in the present instance.” John Paul had authoritatively identified a truth infallibly taught over two millennia by the “ordinary and universal” teaching authority of the Church.124

  At the same time as Dulles was defending Ordinatio Sacerdotalis and the CDF responsum, the Catholic Theological Society of America was adopting the first draft of a report that flatly dissented from the apostolic letter’s teaching and from the understanding of teaching authority in the responsum.125

  An Opportunity Missed?

  The terms, direction, and, in some instances, verbal violence of the dissent from Ordinatio Sacerdotalis and the CDF responsum suggest the possibility that the original decision made by John Paul and his theological advisers—to issue the apostolic letter as a papal confirmation of Inter Insigniores rather than to make a more developed statement of why the spousal nature of the Church meant that the Church could not ordain women to the ministerial priesthood—was a strategic error.

  John Paul II had laid the foundations for such a developed statement throughout his pontificate. His development of the Church’s teaching on the body, which held that maleness and femaleness were not biological accidents but revelations of deep truths about the human condition that directly touched God’s redemptive purposes for the world, was a rich resource that simply had not existed when CDF issued Inter Insigniores in 1976. Brought to bear on the controversy over women and ordination, the theology of the body would have challenged what Hans Urs von Balthasar once described as contemporary “monosexism,” a leveling-out of the meaning of sexual differentiation that had ominous implications for Church and society and that had distorted the debate over women’s ordination since its inception in the 1970s.

  The Pope’s 1987 Christmas address to the Curia on how the “Marian Church”—the Church of disciples rooted in Mary’s unambiguous “Yes” to God’s call—preceded and made possible the “Petrine Church” of authority and office had set a foundation for getting the Catholic debate about the priesthood out of the post-Vatican II rut of political categories. With Pastores Dabo Vobis, it held out the welcome prospect of rethinking the ministerial priesthood for the twenty-first century as a service that ennobled the baptismal priesthood common to all Christians.

  John Paul’s defense of the dignity of women and the distinctive “feminine genius” in Mulieris Dignitatem, the feminism he would continue to develop in his public statements on the Cairo population conference, and his stated commitment to amplifying the unique mission of women in the Church could have been drawn on to illustrate why the reservation of priestly ordination to men could not be adequately understood according to the canons of contemporary ideological politics. A more developed statement than Ordinatio Sacerdotalis could also have clarified the question of justice and demonstrated why the Church’s tradition could not be properly understood as an injustice to women.126

  Given the passions engaged by this issue and the cultural confusions those passions reflected, it might well have been impossible for any reiteration of the Church’s tradition, no matter how developed, to have lifted the level of the debate substantively. Still, the brevity and character of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, which led inexorably to the CDF responsum, reinforced the public perception that this was an issue to be understood as a pawn in an ongoing ecclesiastical power struggle, not an issue of doctrine that touched core Catholic perceptions about the sacramental nature of reality.127

  That was a loss, not only for the peace of the Church, but for a modern world in which the sexual revolution and certain forms of gender feminism had devalued human sexuality and the crucial importance of our being created male and female. John Paul’s intense effort to develop a new humanism on the threshold of the new millennium was thus impeded, not by the content of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, but by the kind of debate the apostolic letter inadvertently reinforced.

  A PAPAL BESTSELLER

  The fall of 1994, for John Paul II, was marked by two disappointments, a major personal triumph, a largely unnoticed but significant ecumenical break-through—and a special appeal to the children of the world.

  Blocked in Sarajevo

  The first major disappointment was the cancellation of a planned papal pilgrimage to Sarajevo. The world seemed to want to forget the city’s slow-motion destruction under relentless shelling. In and out of season, the Pope had worked to keep Sarajevo before the world’s attention.

  Earlier in the year, John Paul had tried another back-channel approach to revive his constantly frustrated initiatives in the former Republic of Yugoslavia. He sent Monsignor Vincenzo Paglia, the ecclesiastical adviser to the Sant’ Egidio Community, on a private mission to Zagreb, Sarajevo, and Belgrade. Paglia was to try to arrange a papal pilgrimage to Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia. Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, a Catholic, and Bosnian President Alija Izetbegović, a Muslim, agreed immediately. At Paglia’s third meeting with Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević, the president of the rump of Yugoslavia had agreed to a visit without conditions. Even Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić, one of the principal instigators of the shattering of Sarajevo, had agreed to the Pope’s coming to the Bosnian capital.

  But then things began to unravel, and John Paul’s visit to Belgrade was blocked by a majority of the Holy Assembly of Bishops, the highest authority of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Patriarch Pavle and his four counselorbishops, all of whom favored the visit, could not convince the rest of their brethren. The Belgrade portion of the papal pilgrimage had to be dropped. As Joaquín Navarro-Valls put it delicately at a press conference on August 3, “the Holy See has been told that the time is not yet ripe.” At the same press conference, however, Navarro announced that Father Roberto Tucci, SJ, the impresario of John Paul’s travels, and Archbishop Francesco Monterisi, the nuncio in Bosnia-Herzegovina, would soon leave for Sarajevo to “examine the possibility of a visit by the Holy Father to Sarajevo in the near future.”128

  The Sarajevo visit was not to be, at least this time. On September 7, days before he was to depart, the visit was canceled for what the Vatican termed “security reasons.” Those were certainly real. Though John Paul was not a man to fret about his own safety, there were concerns about the danger to civilians that would be posed by an attack on him during the visit. The Pope was bitterly disappointed about the cancellation, speaking of his “great inner suffering” at having to defer the visit when he announced the postponement at the general audience on September 7. The next day, the feast of the birthday of Mary, John Paul offered Mass in the courtyard of the papal villa at Castel Gandolfo for the relief of the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and read the sermon he was supposed to have given that day in Sarajevo. It was an impassioned plea for an end to the “fury of destruction.”129

  On September 10–11, John Paul did go to Zagreb for the 900th anniversary of the archdiocese. A week and a half later, though, continuing difficulties with his hip forced him to defer for a year a visit to the United States. The cancellation immediately set off a fresh round of rumors and media speculations that the Pope was
in extremis.

  In Conversation with the World

  Stories of a disabled, diminished Pope were soon overrun by one of the most remarkable publishing events of the 1990s—the October 1994 release of John Paul’s book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, which quickly became an international bestseller.

  Threshold began with a television interview that never happened. To mark the fifteenth anniversary of the pontificate in October 1993, Italian Radio and Television had proposed that John Paul be interviewed live by a journalist, Vittorio Messori; the Italian broadcast would then be shared with major networks around the world. The Pope accepted, but scheduling conflicts in September 1993 made it impossible to bring the project to completion in time to meet the October broadcast deadline. After a few months, Messori got a phone call from Joaquín Navarro-Valls, one of the principal promoters of the broadcast interview. Navarro had a message from the Pope: “Even if there wasn’t time to respond to you in person, I kept your questions on my desk. They interested me. I didn’t think it would be wise to let them go to waste. So I thought about them and…responded to them in writing. You have asked me questions, therefore you have a right to responses…. I am working on them. I will letyou have them. Then do with them what you think is appropriate.”