Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  Direct financial support of the Pope from the laity comes via the annual “Peter’s Pence” collection, which is separate from the Holy See’s operating budget. Its income rose from $27.5 million in 1983 to $67 million in 1993. The funds are primarily used by John Paul to bolster the Church in poor countries. It is not unusual for the IOR to get a call from the papal apartment in the morning, saying that the Pope needs a certain number of envelopes containing $20,000 or $50,000 by noon—gifts to bishops from Africa, Latin America, and Asia coming on ad limina visits or for other business. John Paul also takes gifts of money with him to poor Churches on his foreign travels. During the hardest days of martial law in Poland, the Pope made personal financial contributions to support the families of Solidarity leaders through a relief effort operated at St. Martin’s Church in Warsaw’s Old Town.34

  The Papal Foundation, founded in 1987 and headquartered in Philadelphia, is another vehicle for supporting the Holy See’s activities and poorer local Churches around the world. In November 1987, Cardinal John O’Connor of New York, Cardinal John Krol of Philadelphia, and Archbishop Theodore McCarrick of Newark met with prominent American lay leaders at the Vatican embassy in Washington to discuss the Holy See’s financial difficulties. The proposal that emerged from the meeting was to establish a U.S.-based foundation, an endowment whose income would support the Pope’s work. Regional fundraising events to create the endowment were held throughout the United States. Within the first ten years, over $37 million in cash contributions had been received. The Papal Foundation’s investments had a market value of $44 million in June 1998. Governed by a board composed of all resident U.S. cardinals and lay trustees chosen by the cardinals, the Papal Foundation made $8.2 million in grants between 1990 and 1997. Grants in the foundation’s first years focused on capital improvements in the Holy See, including modernizing Vatican Radio and the Vatican printing works, which helps prepare catechetical materials for developing countries. John Paul II has used the foundation to rebuild churches and Catholic institutions in the former Soviet Union (including seminaries in Ukraine, Lithuania, and Latvia), to support the 1994 Synod for Africa and the beleaguered Church in Sarajevo, to create centers for needy children in the Third World, to help drought victims in North Korea, to build missionary chapels in Ivory Coast and an AIDS hospice in Chile, and to support the work of the Pontifical Academy for Life. The substantial sums raised by the Papal Foundation testified to the impact the Pope had made on American donors of considerable means.

  ASIA: TRIUMPH AND TENSIONS

  Strengthening solidarity with the world’s most populous and least Christian continent was the focus of John Paul’s pontificate in early 1995. The year began with a 20,000-mile pilgrimage to the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Australia, and Sri Lanka, during which the Pope tried, again unsuccessfully, to open a bridge to the People’s Republic of China [PRC]. The terms in which the papal offer of dialogue was made suggested a new Vatican strategy for dealing with the divided Church in China and the recalcitrant PRC government.

  The Largest Gathering in Human History

  In January 1995, international World Youth Day was celebrated for the first time in Asia, in Manila. At the prayer vigil on the night of January 14, John Paul engaged in some banter with more than a million youngsters. They began a rhythmic chant of “Lolek, Lolek,” the Pope’s boyhood nickname. John Paul said, half-chidingly, “Lolek is not serious.” The youngsters stopped. “But John Paul II is too serious,” the Pope continued. “We need something in the middle. Yes, in the middle there was Karol…” John Paul laughed and a thunderous new chant began, “Karol! Karol!”35

  The following morning, what was likely the largest crowd in human history gathered for the closing Mass of World Youth Day ’95. A Japanese company, using overhead photography to calculate the number of persons per acre, estimated a minimum of 5 million people and suggested that there may have been as many as 7 million. The crowds were so dense that it was impossible to use the Popemobile to drive John Paul into the venue as planned. Arrangements were quickly made to helicopter him to the area where Mass would be said.36

  Eighteen months later, John Paul was still amazed at what had happened in Manila: “I’ve never seen so many people in my life,” he told Henrietta De Villa when the Philippine ambassador presented her credentials.37 But WYD ’95 had its dark side.

  Just prior to the Pope’s arrival, firefighters rushed to a Manila apartment, near the Vatican embassy where John Paul was to stay. Inside the smoke-filled apartment, the firemen found smoldering chemicals, a computer diskette containing plans for assassinating the Pope and blowing up a dozen 747 jumbo jets over the Pacific, sufficient materials to build a large pipe bomb, maps of the Pope’s expected routes through Manila, and priests’ cassocks. The two men who had rented the apartment, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef and Wali Khan Shah, escaped but were eventually arrested. Ramzi Yousef, one of the leading figures in world terrorism, was convicted in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. In a separate trial, he and Khan were convicted of conspiring to kill 4,000 people in the 747s they had planned to destroy by planting explosive chemicals in the planes’ lavatories.38 Given the opportunity, Yousef and Khan would certainly have tried to kill John Paul II in Manila.

  On January 16, the Pope flew from Manila to Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea. There, John Paul beatified Peter To Rot, a lay catechist and father of three children who was murdered by Japanese troops in 1945 after resisting their persecution of Christians and attempts to reintroduce polygamy. John Paul began his beatification homily in Pidgin, continued in English, but then switched back to Pidgin while reminding the congregation of what the thirty-three-year-old catechist had told those threatening him: “I have to fulfill my duty as a Church witness to Jesus Christ.” A new Church, first catechized at the beginning of the century, had given its proto-martyr to the universal Church on the edge of the third millennium.39

  Australia celebrated the first beatification of a native daughter on January 19 when John Paul beatified Mother Mary MacKillop, foundress of the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart, in a liturgy celebrated on Randwick Racecourse in Sydney. Mary MacKillop was born in 1842 to immigrant Scottish parents whose ancestors had survived centuries of anti-Catholic persecution. The religious community she founded, known in Australian vernacular as the “Brown Joeys” from the color of their habit, was dedicated to education and works of charity. In addition to primary schools, the sisters established orphanages, homes for the elderly, and homes for “girls in danger”—in short, as the postulator of her beatification cause wrote, for “the friendless of all ages.” The Irish clergy of her time were not accustomed to assertive Scottish women, and Mary MacKillop was once illicitly excommunicated for what he claimed was “disobedience” by an irascible bishop, who lifted the excommunication a week before he died.40 Mother Mary MacKillop’s grave became a place of pilgrimage after her death in 1909. After a lengthy investigation of her life, the beatification process was finally completed and evidence for the miraculous cure of a cancer-stricken woman through Mary MacKillop’s intercession was accepted in 1993.41

  In his beatification homily, John Paul recalled that Mary MacKillop had not been afraid to reckon with the desert of Australia’s vast outback. Today, the Pope suggested, “the Christian community is faced with many modern ‘deserts’: the wastelands of indifference and intolerance, the desolation of racism and contempt for other human beings, the barrenness of selfishness and faithlessness…” Saints were people who saw richness where others saw only emptiness: “They teach us to see Christ as the center and summit of God’s lavish gifts to humanity,” which could be discerned all over Australia. That was why Catholicism recognized sanctity in Mary MacKillop, and in all the others the Church canonized and beatified—the blessed were those who taught those around them to see the truth about human life and human solidarity.42

  The Travails of a New China Strategy

  World Youth Day �
��95 coincided with the twenty-fifth anniversary of Radio Veritas Asia. On January 14 John Paul visited the Catholic station’s Manila headquarters for a commemorative ceremony. There, he broadcast a special message to all the Catholics of China, urging them “to seek paths to communion and reconciliation” among themselves. The English-language broadcast was a delicately balanced attempt to facilitate two new sets of relationships: between persecuted Catholics in China and those who were cooperating in various ways with the Chinese regime-approved Patriotic Catholic Association [PCA], and between the PCA’s bishops, clergy, and laity and the Bishop of Rome.43

  Chinese communist persecution of the Catholic Church after Mao Zedong’s 1949 victory had been brutal. The first phase involved expelling foreign missionaries from the country; there were 5,496 missionaries in China in 1947, but only 723 in 1952 and twenty-three in 1957. In the second phase, the Maoist regime tried to create a schismatic Catholic Church, loyal to Beijing and separated from Rome—the “Patriotic Catholic Association,” formally established in 1957. The third and ongoing part of the persecution was the bloodiest: to try to destroy every person of influence who remained loyal to the Church and refused to cooperate with the PCA, through outright execution or condemnation to the laogai, the Chinese Gulag.44 In June 1958, three months before his death, Pius XII condemned the PCA. For the next several decades, it was assumed that there were two Catholic communities in China—a true Church, underground, and numbering perhaps 6 to 10 million adherents, and the false PCA, which by the 1990s was reckoned to have 10 million congregants.

  In the early 1990s, Cardinal Jaime Sin of Manila, himself a Chinese ethnic, began to explore privately the possibility of a new conversation with the People’s Republic of China. After a PRC cultural affairs office was established in the Philippine capital, the cardinal asked the Chinese diplomats to his home for “some good Chinese food.” During dinner, Sin casually mentioned that he would like to go to China to visit his relatives; what he really wanted to do was assess the Church’s situation. An invitation was extended and the wily Philippine cardinal went to the PRC. There, he found clergy and laity from the Patriotic Catholic Association pressing slips of paper into his hand, asking Sin to tell the Pope that they loved him and were praying for him. The Curia was not altogether pleased with Sin’s personal initiative, but John Paul, to whom Sin reported on his experiences, never said a critical word to him.45

  Even before making his own investigation of the situation, Sin had begun preparing for a different kind of Catholic future in China. In the 1980s, he founded the Lorenzo Ruiz Institute in his diocese to train Chinese-ethnic Filipino seminarians. When China was open, there would be priests, graduates of the institute, ready to go. Meanwhile, the seminarians lived in a Chinese architectural ambience, polished their language skills, immersed themselves in their ancestral culture, and, after ordination, worked as priests in Chinese parishes in the Philippines. In setting up the institute, the cardinal believed he was implementing the Pope’s constant injunction to the Philippine bishops during their ad limina visits to Rome: “Gentlemen, you cannot stay home. Gentlemen, you cannot just keep the faith for yourselves; it is good news that you must share with others.”46

  John Paul had sent Cardinal Roger Etchegaray on a personal diplomatic exploration of China in 1993. Etchegaray came back convinced that the situation was far more complex than the “true Church/false Church” dichotomy suggested. Many, perhaps most, of the PCA bishops were in communion with Rome in their hearts, he believed.47

  The French cardinal’s judgment coincided with a new pattern of thinking in the Holy See, where the key officials on China included Cardinal Jozef Tomko, in charge of the Church’s worldwide missionary efforts, and Monsignor Claudio Celli, then serving in the Secretariat of State as the equivalent of a deputy foreign minister. According to their analysis, the Catholic situation in China in the 1990s was not strictly analogous to the Church’s former position in east central Europe under communism. In China, religion had always been a state affair. When the great Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci first came to China in 1583, the mandarins asked him how he, a simple man, could approach God—in China, only the emperor could do that. Post-1949, the Vatican analysis continued, the Communist Party had become the new emperor, rather easily assuming the historic cultural role of manager of all Chinese religious activity. The mistake the communists made, according to Cardinal Tomko, was to “try to impose the handbook of Lenin” on Chinese Catholicism: they had tried to create a national Church as Lenin and his heirs had eventually created a regime-acquiescent Russian Orthodoxy. But Catholicism was not Orthodoxy, and there was no tradition of “national Catholicism” in China, which had always understood itself as in communion with Rome.

  Over time, Vatican officials believed, the traditional Roman loyalty of Chinese Catholics who had aligned themselves with the Patriotic Catholic Association had reasserted itself, often clandestinely. The evidence for this lay in cooperation between PCA members and underground Catholics countrywide, and in statements of submission and fealty that many PCA bishops had managed to smuggle to John Paul II in Rome. That some PCA clergy publicly prayed for the Pope at Mass suggested that something significant had changed, even if others continued to toe the party line publicly—a practice that infuriated the underground Church and its leaders, who remained under relentless regime pressure.48 The Church had sometimes encountered this before. However unfairly, the heroic witness of the politically recalcitrant, by its effect on both the less-heroic and the regime, was helping make reconciliation within the Church and a new position vis-à-vis the government possible.

  A careful reading of this analysis also suggests that two other considerations were in play. Vatican officials today are acutely aware that the Holy See’s decision in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to proscribe traditional Chinese devotions (including the veneration of ancestors) as inherently superstitious and incompatible with Catholicism was quite probably a serious misreading of the spiritual resources of an ancient culture. Born of ignorance, it was an error that had cut off vast evangelical possibilities, and key officials of the Holy See seemed determined that such a grave misreading of Chinese culture not happen again. That determination, coupled with the judgment that Marxism in China is an anomaly that cannot fundamentally alter an ancient civilization in a mere half-century, suggested a new, if complex and delicate, strategy: to promote reconciliation between the underground Church and the PCA while pressing the Chinese government for religious freedom and resisting Beijing’s insistence that nothing could be resolved until the Holy See broke diplomatic relations with Taiwan. Such a strategy, it was hoped, would keep faith with the heroic and persecuted underground Church while opening up new lines of conversation with those millions of PCA members who, Vatican officials believed, were fully in communion with Rome in their hearts.

  In the context of this new strategy, fifteen PCA priests, nuns, and laity were invited to Manila for World Youth Day ’95. The instruction to Manila from Rome was that the PCA members should be treated “as friends,” although the priests ought not say Mass in public.49 Seven months later, when John Paul met with the ten bishops of Taiwan on their ad limina visit, he spoke further of “reconciliation,” making three things clear: he honored the witness of the underground Church and intended to defend it; he believed that the expressions of fealty he had received from PCA bishops, clergy, and laity were authentic; and he judged that reconciliation within Chinese Catholicism was everybody’s responsibility, not a question of one group submitting to another:

  I know that many are wondering how this reconciliation can come about. All need to move; all have to turn towards Jesus Christ, who calls us to unity and to communion. Everyone must discover the steps that can lead to reconciliation. Everyone must bring along his whole self, his past, his moments of courageous witness and his moments of weakness, his present sufferings and his hopes for a better future. What we are speaking of is a long and difficult journey. The
goal is clear enough, but the path leading to it seems still obscure. We need to invoke the light of the Spirit, and to let ourselves be guided by his inspiration.

  Please assure the priests, religious and lay members of your local Churches in Taiwan of my deep affection in the Lord. At the same time, I renew the assurance of my love, encouragement, and good wishes to all the Catholic members of the greater Chinese family. If these brothers and sisters of ours already pray for the Pope and in some way recognize in him the special ministry of Peter, how much longer will it be before he can embrace them and confirm them in faith and unity?50

  For its part, the Beijing government showed little interest in a new relationship with the Holy See. While continuing to insist that the Vatican sever diplomatic relations with Taiwan, the PRC stepped up the pressure on the underground Church in various regions of the country. Anti-Catholic government policy frequently overlapped with the regime’s one-child-per-family policy and led to further persecution. In December 1996, John Paul’s “Message to the Church in China,” marking the seventieth anniversary of the consecration of the first Chinese bishops by Pope Pius XI, continued to urge fidelity to the Bishop of Rome and reconciliation among divided Catholics. The Pope also asked the Chinese government what it was so afraid of: “The civil authorities of the People’s Republic of China should rest assured: a disciple of Christ can live his faith in any political system, provided that there is respect for his right to act according to the dictates of his own conscience and his own faith. For this reason I repeat to the governing authorities…that they should have no fear of God or of his Church. Indeed, I respectfully ask them, in deference to the authentic freedom which is the innate right of every man and woman, to insure that those…who believe in Christ may increasingly contribute their energies and talents to the development of their country.”51