As for the Great Jubilee of 2000, there did not seem to be much of a sense that this was a moment of great opportunity. Behind closed doors, various cardinals had expressed their concerns about aspects of the Pope’s proposed program, including cleansing the Church’s conscience in public. Observers were hard put to suggest that the College of Cardinals left the consistory on June 14, 1994, on fire with enthusiasm about the Great Jubilee of 2000.
Five months later to the day, John Paul II personally ignited the universal Church’s preparation for the Great Jubilee. There was a kairos, a providential opportunity, to be seized and he was determined to seize it. The enthusiasm of busy prelates who sometimes had difficulty seeing epic historical opportunities amid their quotidian concerns would follow in due course.1
SANCTIFYING TIME
A millennial theme emerged in the first hours of John Paul II’s pontificate. Shortly after his election, Cardinal Wyszyński had said to him that he must “lead the Church into the third millennium.”2 John Paul’s inaugural encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, had spoken about the time leading up to the year 2000 as a “new Advent,”3 and the impending jubilee had shaped the agenda of the Extraordinary Synod of 1985. In the wake of the cardinals’ meeting of June 1994, John Paul offered the Church and the world the most developed statement of his millennial vision in the apostolic letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente [The Coming Third Millennium], which was signed on November 10 and issued on November 14, 1994. In his most lyrical papal document, the Pope suggested that the year 2000 was the interpretive “key” to his entire pontificate.4
The Axial Moment
Tertio Millennio Adveniente begins with a precise definition of what the turn into the third millennium means. What is on the horizon, John Paul writes, is nothing less than the 2,000th anniversary of the axial moment in history: the Incarnation in human flesh of the Son of God, the Word through whom God the Father had made the universe.5 The Incarnate Son had shown the world the face of God the Father. At the same time, Christ, the redeemer of the world, shows us the true face of humanity.6 Thus the year 2000 has universal significance. It is, one might say, the 2,000th anniversary of the unveiling of true humanism.
The Incarnation of Christ is the axial point of human history for another reason. In the Incarnation, the great human search for God was satisfied—and by God himself, God in search of humanity, “God who comes in Person to speak to man of himself and to show him the path by which he may be reached.” Christianity is not a blind search for the divine, but the human “response of faith to God who reveals himself.” In that response, men and women come to know themselves as “the epiphany of God’s glory,” as creatures “called to live by the fullness of life in God.”7 The Incarnation speaks to the human yearning for a destiny that transcends the limitations of time, space, and death: Christianity is “the religion of ‘dwelling in the inmost life of God,’” as St. Paul had told the Corinthians. And that is a dwelling without end, made possible by the self-emptying of the Word of God in his Incarnation, birth, life, and sacrificial death.8
With the Incarnation, John Paul writes, “eternity entered into time” and the truth about time was revealed: time is not flat chronology but richly textured drama. Conversely, when the Son of God, while remaining the second Person of the Trinity, entered history, he took time upon himself, and then, as it were, lifted it up into the very life of God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. From all of this, the Pope writes, there came “the duty to sanctify time.” Jubilees came from this concept of sanctified time, which the Church had learned from its Jewish roots. In Christianity, as in Judaism, jubilees were times of liberation linked to a messianic hope. The final liberation of humanity, still in the future, would be messianic in character—the completion of God’s saving work in history through the definitive establishment of God’s Kingdom.9 To mark the 2,000th anniversary of the commencement of that Kingdom in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, the Church would celebrate the year 2000 as the “Great Jubilee.”10
The Great Jubilee, John Paul immediately continues, is a preparation for a “new springtime of Christian life,” a moment of evangelical possibility in the wake of a century of winter. The year 2000 should be marked, not by millennarian frenzy, but by a new spirit of attentiveness. The entire purpose of the Great Jubilee is to get the Church to listen to “what the Spirit is suggesting to the different communities,” from the smallest families to the largest nations.11
A Church of Pilgrims and Penitents
Jubilees were traditional times of pilgrimage in which the Church relived “the journey of Christ through the centuries.”12 For his own part, the Pope signaled his “fervent wish” to visit Sarajevo, Lebanon, Jerusalem, and the Holy Land in the years leading up to the Great Jubilee. During the jubilee year itself, he proposed “to visit the places on the road taken by the People of God of the Old Covenant, starting from the places associated with Abraham and Moses, through Egypt and Mount Sinai, as far as Damascus, the city which witnessed the conversion of St. Paul.”13
Jubilees were also times of repentance. The deepest form of human liberation—liberation from the grip of sin and its effects—requires the acknowledgment and confession of sins. Confession leads to forgiveness, and forgiveness gives birth to the joy characteristic of jubilee years. Thus, John Paul writes, “it is appropriate that, as the Second Millennium of Christianity draws to a close, the Church should become more fully conscious of the sinfulness of her children, recalling all those times in history when they departed from the spirit of Christ and his Gospel, and instead of offering to the world the witness of a life inspired by the values of faith, indulged in ways of thinking and acting which were truly forms of counter-witness and scandal.”14
Vatican II had affirmed that the Church is, at the same time, holy and always in need of purification. In times of jubilee, that consciousness should be more acute in the Church, and it should be particularly sharp at a millennial jubilee. John Paul illustrates the point with a metaphor from Rome’s Holy Year tradition: “The Holy Door of the Jubilee of the Year 2000 should be symbolically wider than those of previous Jubilees, because humanity, upon reaching this goal, will leave behind not just a century but a millennium. It is fitting that the Church should make this passage with a clear awareness of what has happened to her during the last ten centuries.”15 Christian sinfulness had led to divisions within Christianity. That was why the preparation for the Great Jubilee of 2000 had to be a time of intensified ecumenical work.16 The Church’s sons and daughters also had to repent the times when they gave way “to intolerance and even the use of violence in the service of truth.” Turning from the errors of the past, the Church should deepen its commitment to what Vatican II had taught in its Declaration on Religious Freedom: “The truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth, as it wins over the mind with both gentleness and power.”17
The Church of the twentieth century also had accounts to clear. It is delusory, the Pope argues, to blame moral relativism, or the religious indifference of late modernity, or the loss of a sense of transcendence on some impersonal process called “secularization.” Christians had to look into their own hearts and consciences to see how they had contributed to the religious crisis of the late twentieth century “by not having shown the face of God.” The Church also had to repent the ways in which some of its sons and daughters had failed to read the dangers inherent in modern totalitarianism, to the point of acquiescing in massive violations of human rights. And a reckoning was needed with the various ways in which the Church had failed to live out the great promise of Vatican II.18
As it was confronting its failures, the Church ought to reflect more deeply on the great spirits it had helped nurture, and foremost among these were the martyrs. It was imperative that Christians understand that, as John Paul put it, “at the end of the second millennium, the Church has once again become a Church of martyrs.” The witness of modern martyrs, a great ecumenical sign, must not be lost. The
Church of the martyrs, now in glory, had achieved the unity that Christ willed for his Church. That, John Paul suggests, is a great lesson for the Church on earth.19
The Program of the Great Jubilee
The Pope laid out a trinitarian program for celebrating the Great Jubilee of 2000. There would be three years of preparation, each dedicated to one of the persons of the Trinity and one of the theological virtues: 1997 would be the year of reflection on Jesus Christ and a year devoted to strengthening the faith and witness of Christians; 1998 would be dedicated to the Holy Spirit and the virtue of hope; 1999, given to reflection on God the Father, would also be the year to meditate on the virtue of love, for God himself is love.20
The aim of the jubilee year itself would be “to give glory to the Trinity, from whom everything in the world and in history comes and to whom everything returns.” Thus the Great Jubilee would help the Church experience, in an anticipatory way, its destiny—life forever within the light and communion of God the Holy Trinity.21 That was why the Great Jubilee ought to be marked by a “meeting of all Christians,” to be prepared “in an attitude of fraternal cooperation with Christians of other denominations and traditions.” Such a meeting, John Paul hoped, would be open “to those religions whose representatives might wish to acknowledge the joy shared by all the disciples of Christ.”22
The Great Jubilee grew out of the fact that the Church had endured for two millennia. But, as John Paul writes, the Church endures in order to grow in witness to the truth, in service to the world, in proclamation of the good news of Jesus Christ—in a word, in mission. The Great Jubilee, the Pope concludes, must be celebrated by looking ahead, to a new springtime of evangelization in which the Church proposes to billions of unevangelized human beings the true story of their origin and astonishing destiny.
John Paul II had little doubt that civilization was in crisis, but his millennialism, in Tertio Millennio Adveniente, was not of the apocalyptic sort. Everything necessary for salvation had been done in history, he had mused to dinner companions on one occasion. But much more remained to be done for the human condition, and Christ would do it in and through the Church. The possibility of springtime following a winter of crisis—that was how the Church should look at the century that was ending and the century that lay ahead.23
More than sixteen years after his election, the lodestar of the pontificate of John Paul II remained the Incarnation of the redemptor hominis, Jesus Christ, and the truth about the human condition revealed in Christ remained John Paul’s proposal to the world. Many things had changed since the College of Cardinals had done the unthinkable on October 16, 1978. This had not.
TEMPORALITIES
At the extraordinary consistory in June 1994, Cardinal Edmund Szoka, President of the Prefecture for the Economic Affairs of the Holy See, was able to give his fellow cardinals some welcome financial news. In its 1993 fiscal year (which coincided with calendar year 1993), the Holy See had enjoyed its first surplus after twenty-three straight years of deficits—the worst of which, in 1991, amounted to more than $87 million, or almost 101,000,000,000 Italian lire. FY 1993 ended a decade of Vatican red ink that totaled more than $540 million. Things had been turned around when what some Curialists call “the way we do things here” was changed. By many reckonings, it was none too soon, and not just fiscally. In addition to all the red ink, the Holy See’s reputation for financial probity had suffered in the early 1980s.
Vatican wealth is vastly exaggerated in the public imagination. The Holy See’s net assets, which are estimated to be between $1 billion and $2 billion, are in fact rather modest—in 1994, smaller than the endowments of thirty-two U.S. colleges and universities.24 The ocean of red ink the Holy See generated during the 1970s and 1980s was an unforeseen result of the Second Vatican Council. A considerable expansion of the Church’s central bureaucratic machinery and the creation of new institutions like the Synod of Bishops had increased expenses tremendously, while income had failed to keep pace. Accounting changes added to the deficit, as the costs of Vatican embassies abroad and Vatican Radio were moved from the separate Vatican City State budget to the Holy See budget, reflecting the fact that these costs involved services to the universal Church.
The Pope had discussed this problem with several extraordinary consistories of cardinals. The 1981 discussion led to the formation of a “Council of Cardinals to Study the Organizational and Economic Problems of the Holy See,” often called the “Council of Fifteen,” the most active members of which included Cardinal John Krol of Philadelphia and Cardinal Josef Höffner of Cologne. The Council tried to rationalize the Holy See’s budgeting and accounting procedures, which were wholly inadequate by modern standards. Shortly after this, scandal threatened to overwhelm the Institute for the Works of Religion [IOR], a bank that, although not technically part of the Holy See, is widely and not altogether inaccurately referred to as the “Vatican Bank.” Its American head, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, had had no international financial experience when he was appointed to IOR by Archbishop Benelli, chief-of-staff, or Sostituto, to Pope Paul VI. Inexperience, compounded by naïveté and overextension (Marcinkus was also governor of Vatican City and, prior to Father Roberto Tucci, the impresario of John Paul II’s international travels), led the American archbishop into difficulties with Italian financier Robert Calvi and his Banco Ambrosiano in Milan. Thinking he was helping a friend gain time to work his way out of a financial jam, Marcinkus gave Calvi letters indicating IOR support for the Banco Ambrosiano, while at the same time getting a letter from Calvi stating that IOR was not responsible for Ambrosiano’s activities. Only Marcinkus’s letter to Calvi was given to Ambrosiano’s creditors, however. It looked to some like fraud, but to those who knew Marcinkus, it was indicative of his naïveté. When Calvi’s $1.2 billion empire imploded in 1982, there was considerable fallout. Calvi was found hanging, dead, from Blackfriars Bridge in London on June 18, 1982, and thirty-three fraud convictions were eventually obtained in Italian courts. Although the Vatican continued to deny any malfeasance, Cardinal Casaroli negotiated a settlement with the Italian government in 1984 in which IOR paid $244 million to the Ambrosiano creditors as settlement of all present and future claims. Archbishop Marcinkus, whose difficulties may have included opposition from veteran Curialists to the presence of a powerful American in the Vatican, eventually retired from the IOR in 1989, his ecclesiastical career finished.25
Reform of the Holy See’s financial practices accelerated in 1990 when Cardinal Edmund Szoka, the archbishop of Detroit since 1981, was appointed President of the Prefecture for the Economic Affairs of the Holy See. Cardinal Szoka, who was determined to “professionalize the operation” and to demand “complete transparency” in light of the Ambrosiano fiasco, helped introduce modern accounting and budgeting methods to the Vatican, and by force of personality and will brought resistant dicasteries into line.26 When Szoka arrived, the prefecture had no computers. The annual audit and the Holy See consolidated financial statement took sixteen months to complete after the close of the fiscal year. After getting the operation computerized (with help from U.S. Catholic foundations) and hiring some badly needed staff, Szoka cut that to five months.27 Now, auditors from Ernst & Young review the work of the in-house auditors on contract. The consolidated financial statement and annual audit report are published in five languages (Italian, English, French, German, and Spanish) after review by an oversight committee of fifteen cardinals.28
Cardinal Szoka gradually brought the expenditure side of the ledger under control by professionalizing Vatican accounting and limiting budget increases to the inflation rate, thus lowering operating costs in real terms. The long-term problem would not be solved until income was increased, however, and to this end Szoka proposed, and John Paul approved, a meeting of the presidents of the national episcopal conferences, which was held in Rome on April 8 to 9, 1991. This particular configuration of bishops had never met before. That innovation, and the fact that the subject was money, ma
de the traditional managers of Vatican finance nervous. But Cardinal Szoka believed that bishops’ conferences, and through them, the local bishops, were the key to solving the Holy See’s income problem. In the cardinal’s mind, at issue was Canon 1271 in the revised Code of Canon Law, which stipulated that the bishops were obligated to support the universal ministry of the Holy See. The record indicated that they were not doing enough.
Szoka, not a man to mince words, explained the financial situation bluntly to the conference presidents. Cardinal Rosalio José Castillo Lara, SDB, the Venezuelan President of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See and another Vatican financial reformer, spoke on the obligations of Canon 1271.29 Though no assessments were levied and the bishops were asked to “solve this at home,” a sufficient number of conferences were cooperative enough that income increased substantially. The Holy See’s statements showed a modest surplus in FY 1993.30 Still, a June 1996 letter to all the world’s bishops from the “Council of Fifteen” noted that “the implementation of Canon 1271 thus far, unfortunately, has only been partial.”31
Throughout his seven-year tenure at the Prefettura, Cardinal Szoka, who was appointed President of the Pontifical Commission for Vatican City State—and thus governor of Vatican City—in October 1997, met with John Paul as needed to review the budgets and audits of various offices, and to go over the annual Holy See audit and consolidated financial statement. According to Szoka, the Pope’s grasp of the major points is quick, but there is no lengthy discussion of details.32 John Paul willingly leaves auditing and budget-making details to others whom he trusts.33
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