Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  That explicit challenge did not result in a change in government policy. Two Chinese bishops personally invited by the Pope to a 1998 Synod for Asia were refused passports by the regime. In his homily at the Synod’s final Mass, John Paul diplomatically expressed the hope that, “as the People’s Republic of China gradually opens to the rest of the world, the Church in China will also be permitted to have more contact with the universal Church.”52 The Holy See’s “foreign minister,” Archbishop Tauran, was more blunt. “One struggles to understand the reason put forth by the Chinese authorities” for denying the bishops passports, he told an Italian newspaper. That there were no formal diplomatic relations between Beijing and the Holy See was a nonissue: “For many years the Holy See did not have diplomatic relations with the United States or England or Mexico, and bishops from those countries could freely come to Rome.”53

  Tauran further suggested that “the Catholic Church is not extraneous to Chinese history.” But despite John Paul’s private and public efforts to open a conversation, China’s communist rulers seemed determined to keep the Church extraneous to any history they directly controlled. Meanwhile, amid criticism from some underground Church members and Chinese émigrés, the Pope continued to urge reconciliation on his divided Chinese Church, anticipating the day when Catholics could play a free role in the building of a new China. Concurrently, he made provision for the immediate future of Hong Kong and Taiwan. In 1996, prior to the British colony’s reversion to Chinese rule, the hierarchical succession was assured in Hong Kong when John Paul named a sixty-four-year-old Salesian priest, Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, as coadjutor to Cardinal John Baptist Wu Chenh-chung. In 1998, Taiwan was given its first cardinal, Paul Shan Kuo-hsi, SJ.

  THE GOSPEL OF LIFE AND THE FUTURE OF FREEDOM

  Issued in March 1995, John Paul’s eleventh encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, actually began at the fourth plenary meeting of the College of Cardinals, held from April 4 to 7, 1991, to discuss threats to the dignity of human life.

  A lecture by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had located the heart of the problem in the philosophical nihilism of contemporary Western high cultures: when a “freedom of indifference” dominated society, the dignity of life was seriously imperiled. Ratzinger cited the example of Weimar Germany as a cautionary tale. If moral relativism was legally absolutized in the name of tolerance, basic rights were also relativized and the door was open to totalitarianism. Nazism had not found it difficult to violate the most basic human rights in a society that no longer knew how to make public arguments for absolute values.54 Abortion, euthanasia, and the manipulation of life for eugenic or experimental scientific ends were thus not “Catholic” issues; they were civilizational issues. The cardinals, agreeing that a cultural turning point had been reached, adopted a closing declaration that asked the Pope “to give an authoritative voice and expression…to the Church’s Magisterium in regard to the dignity of human life.”55 It was, in effect, an invitation to write an encyclical. John Paul accepted.56

  The drafting process began with the Pope writing a letter to every bishop in the world, asking their suggestions for the forthcoming document. John Paul also got counsel from bishops with long public experience in pro-life activism, like New York’s Cardinal John O’Connor.57 More than four years of consultation resulted in a 48,000-word encyclical, Evangelium Vitae [The Gospel of Life], which John Paul signed on March 25, 1995. It was the feast of the Annunciation, the solemn annual celebration of the Incarnation of the Son of God, who entered history as an unborn child through the consent of Mary of Nazareth.

  New Things to Say

  The encyclical begins with a survey of contemporary threats to the dignity of human life, which John Paul sums up in the phrase “the culture of death,” continues through a biblical meditation on life as a divine gift, discusses the relationship of the moral law to civil law, and explores the ways in which every sector of the Church ought to involve itself in promoting a civilization at the service of life. But more than sixteen years into a pontificate that had vigorously defended the inviolability of human life in hundreds of different cultural settings, it was reasonable to wonder what more John Paul could possibly say about abortion, euthanasia, and other threats to innocent life. In fact, Evangelium Vitae broke new ground in historical analysis, doctrine, moral teaching, and the practical application of moral norms to the complexities of democratic politics.

  Evangelium Vitae should be read as the third panel in John Paul’s triptych of encyclicals about the moral foundations of the free and virtuous society. In 1991, Centesimus Annus had celebrated the opportunities that lay before the new democracies of east central Europe and elsewhere, while cautioning against the idea that democracy could be value-neutral. In 1993, Veritatis Splendor had deepened the Pope’s moral analysis of the democratic prospect by linking the recognition of absolute moral norms to democratic equality, the defense of the socially marginal, the just management of wealth, integrity in government, and the problem of self-interest and the common good in a democracy. Now, Evangelium Vitae argued that democracies risked self-destruction if moral wrongs were legally defended as rights.

  John Paul’s language is unsparing. Democracies that deny the inalienable right to life from conception until natural death are “tyrant states” that poison the “culture of rights” and betray the “long historical process…that once led to discovering the idea of ‘human rights.’”58 This was not the kind of critique of democracy popes had mounted in the nineteenth century. That was a critique from outside the democratic experiment, looking in with a deeply skeptical eye. This was a critique from inside. A Church that had identified law-governed democracies as the best available expression of basic social ethics was trying to prevent democracies from self-destructing. John Paul, a longtime critic of utilitarianism, was trying to alert democracies old and new to the danger that reducing human beings to useful (or useless) objects did to the cause of freedom.59

  Evangelium Vitae also put an unmistakable imprint on well-traveled ground by the solemnity of its teaching on three specific questions. The direct and voluntary killing of the innocent, abortion, and euthanasia are declared gravely immoral; a similar formula is used in each instance; and each declaration of grave immorality is footnoted to Lumen Gentium 25—in which the Second Vatican Council confirmed the infallibility of the “ordinary, universal Magisterium” of the world’s bishops in communion with the Bishop of Rome.60

  The appeal to Lumen Gentium 25 was used to avoid another bruising controversy over papal infallibility—this time, over whether the Pope could infallibly define specific principles of natural law unless those principles were taught in Scripture. There were widespread press reports that, once again, Cardinal Ratzinger had had to talk John Paul out of invoking the infallibility of the papal office in Evangelium Vitae.61 Ratzinger himself denies that this was the case. According to the cardinal, John Paul had asked the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for its “suggestions…about what is possible in this area” and had waited for the congregation’s response. “There was never an opposition,” Ratzinger insists, “because the Holy Father wanted to be informed about the precise possibilities. He did not take a decision before our suggestions. It was a good collaboration. He wanted to give a very strong formulation, and he was always open to how this should be done. In the collaboration between the Holy Father and our congregation it was decided that this [i.e., the solemn formulas and citations of Lumen Gentium 25] was the way corresponding to the tradition of the Church.”62 Different formulations were evidently tried at different stages of the drafting process, and Ratzinger said at the press conference presenting the encyclical that one draft text did invoke papal infallibility for purposes of making an explicit, dogmatic definition. As the cardinal later made clear, this was part of an ongoing discussion process. The interpretation put on it, of a more intellectually sophisticated Ratzinger convincing John Paul that he was overreaching, was a journalistic invention.

  The stri
king development in Evangelium Vitae was on capital punishment. The Church’s tradition, based on the Bible, had defended capital punishment not only in terms of societal self-defense but as just retribution for an evil done and as a deterrent against future crime. The Catechism of the Catholic Church had reviewed this classic reasoning while seeming to narrow the scope of the death penalty’s justification to societal self-defense: if nonlethal means were available to protect society from an aggressor, they ought to be used.63 Now, John Paul narrowed the criterion of social self-defense in cases of “absolute necessity” even further, suggesting that “today…as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent.”64 The Catechism was subsequently revised in its definitive Latin edition to cohere with the encyclical’s teaching, which seemed to reflect Karol Wojtyła’s experience of, and loathing for, the state’s power of execution. It was an issue on which the Pope had strong personal feelings, but it had not matured to the point where the consensus that had been cited in Evangelium Vitae’s teaching on abortion and euthanasia could be invoked. The encyclical’s silence about the traditional arguments from retributive justice and deterrence seemed likely to fuel further debate on the issue.65

  Evangelium Vitae also had new things to say about the relationship between the moral law and democratic pluralism, and about the moral responsibilities of legislators. On the moral status of laws permitting abortion and euthanasia, John Paul II is uncompromisingly blunt: “Abortion and euthanasia are…crimes which no human law can claim to legitimize. There is no obligation in conscience to obey such laws; instead, there is a grave and clear obligation to oppose them by conscientious objection.”66 The methods of civil disobedience were not spelled out. Nonetheless, this was an unprecedented papal challenge to laws passed, or legal situations created, according to the canons of democratic procedure.

  The Pope also teaches that no one can licitly take part in a political campaign favoring such laws, nor can any legislator licitly vote for such laws. There was a difference, though, when a conscientious legislator faced a particular kind of legislative situation: “When it is not possible to overturn or completely abrogate a pro-abortion law, an elected official, whose absolute personal opposition to procured abortion was well known, could licitly support proposals aimed at limiting the harm done by such a law and at lessening its negative consequences at the level of general opinion and public morality.”67 The encyclical seemed to support the efforts of pro-life American public officials, like Pennsylvania Governor Bob Casey and Illinois Congressman Henry Hyde, to work incrementally for the full legal protection of the unborn, while flatly rejecting the claim of New York Governor Mario Cuomo that bringing his “personal opposition” to abortion into the public square was a violation of the separation of Church and state.68

  A Different Kind of Response

  Hans Küng thought the entire exercise another example of John Paul’s authoritarianism. “The voice in the document is not that of a good shepherd but of a spiritual dictator,” Father Küng opined in a press statement. Evangelium Vitae proved the Pope’s “dogmatic coldness and unrelenting rigorism.”69 But this time Küng was in a clear minority. And it was not simply Catholic bishops who lined up to praise Evangelium Vitae. Newsweek, one of the three leading U.S. news weeklies, devoted a cover story to the encyclical, which religion editor Kenneth Woodward praised as “the clearest, most impassioned and most commanding encyclical” of the pontificate, one that would be John Paul’s “signature statement” in history.70 Paperback editions of the encyclical soon appeared in bookstores and supermarket checkout counters. Protestant and Jewish scholars were complimentary, and moral theologians who had been highly critical of Veritatis Splendor found many things to praise in Evangelium Vitae.71 The encyclical evidently spoke to a widespread concern that the use of abortion for “family planning” and campaigns in favor of euthanasia bespoke a general coarsening, even cheapening, of life that ought to be resisted somehow.72 It would be claiming too much to suggest that John Paul’s deeper analysis of the “culture of death” was seriously engaged by the public in the older democracies, but his defense of the dignity of life, even on such bitterly controverted public policy issues as abortion and euthanasia, struck a chord. Perhaps, he mused to guests, things had gotten bad enough that attention could now be paid.73

  Evangelium Vitae had implications for the Church, too. If, as the encyclical strongly suggested, the “Gospel of Life” was, in fact, the Gospel—if the issues the encyclical addressed were not peripherals, but were at the core of Christian belief—then Evangelium Vitae would eventually reshape the ecumenical dialogue between Roman Catholicism and those liberal Protestant communities whose views on the moral issues involved were quite different. Post–Vatican II ecumenism had downplayed these divergences to concentrate on what were considered central theological issues, such as justification, ministry, sacraments, and authority. Evangelium Vitae suggested that such bracketing was inappropriate and that unity in the truth included unity in moral truth on issues of this gravity.74

  The encyclical’s combination of passion and nuance may have helped account for its generally positive and thoughtful reception. On the question of medical treatment of the terminally ill, for example, John Paul reiterated the classic Catholic position that allows for a family and physician to discontinue medical treatment when, as Evangelium Vitae puts it, “medical procedures…no longer correspond to the real situation of the patient either because they are by now disproportionate to any expected results or because they impose an excessive burden on the patient and his family.” Pain relievers that sometimes shorten life could be licitly used, provided that the purpose of providing them is to relieve pain and not to hasten death.75 This moderation and moral realism, stated with compassion, made it more difficult for critics to accuse John Paul of pastoral insensitivity or mindless rigorism on a whole range of issues—although, as noted, Hans Küng and others tried.

  The London-based Independent, not infrequently a critic, had editorialized in the wake of the Pope’s Manila triumph that John Paul II was the “only truly global leader left” on the world stage.76 The response to Evangelium Vitae helped clarify the nature of that leadership. John Paul did not stand out among the world figures of the 1990s simply because he was so striking a personality and they were so bland. The Pope’s leadership, and the public response to it, was a matter of substance. He was raising questions that millions of men and women around the world recognized as some of the gravest on the human agenda for the twenty-first century. They may not have agreed with his answers, but his steady insistence on the centrality of moral questions to human flourishing and his willingness to defend unpopular positions under attack had given his leadership an integrity, even a nobility, that was sorely lacking among the politicians of the mid-1990s.

  In pressing those questions in an appeal to “all people of good will,” who were among the addressees of Evangelium Vitae, he was affirming human solidarity, and the possibility of a common conversation about the human future in a season of division and irresponsibility.

  THE UNITY OF CHRISTIANS

  On May 25, 1995, two months after signing Evangelium Vitae, John Paul issued yet another encyclical, Ut Unum Sint, on the imperative of Christian unity. Its title [That They May Be One], commemorated the last words of Pope John XXIII, who died in 1963 with Christ’s priestly prayer for his disciples on his lips.77

  For sixteen years, John Paul II’s ecumenical activism had embodied the vision articulated by Vatican II in Lumen Gentium, 8—the Catholic Church was necessarily involved with all Christians, who were in some fashion related to Catholicism by their baptism. No matter what they might think of the Catholic Church, the Catholic Church thought of them as brothers and sisters in Christ. Other Christian communions might regard ecumenism as tangential, even optional. At Vatican II, Catholicism had declared itself irrevocably committed to ecumenism because of its own self
-understanding.

  But was there anything further to be said, given what had been said and done already? John Paul evidently thought so, and the encyclical—which was the Pope’s personal initiative, according to Cardinal Edward Cassidy, President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity—deepened the Catholic concept of ecumenism while making what was arguably the boldest papal offer to Orthodoxy and Protestantism since the divisions of 1054 and the sixteenth century.78

  The first new thing about Ut Unum Sint was the unmistakable set of signals it sent throughout the Catholic Church. Those who thought ecumenism a Vatican II fad that would mercifully fade away were unquestionably informed that they were mistaken. The first encyclical ever dedicated to ecumenism made clear that Catholicism’s ecumenical commitment was irreversible. The encyclical also challenged those who had grown comfortable in the grooves of post-conciliar ecumenical dialogue. Ut Unum Sint asks the ecumenical professionals to recover a sense of the urgency of their task. Christian disunity made it even more difficult to proclaim the Gospel and to bridge the chasms of race, ethnicity, and nationalism that were dividing a conflicted and dangerous world. If Christians could not repair the unity of the Church, they were poorly positioned to advance the unity of the human race. John Paul asked Catholics throughout the world to reignite the commitment to ecumenism that had burned high during the heady years right after Vatican II, but had dimmed since.

  Ut Unum Sint was also notable for the degree to which John Paul focused his ecumenical attention on Orthodoxy. With the Great Jubilee rapidly approaching, the Pope was determined to make every possible effort to close the breach of the eleventh century before the end of the twentieth. In the face of the Orthodox opposition and criticism he had experienced throughout the 1990s, the encyclical continues to stress that the Orthodox are “sister Churches” with whom the Catholic Church seeks “full unity in legitimate diversity.”79 The model for how that full communion might be lived could be found in the experience of the first millennium. Then, “the development of different experiences of ecclesial life did not prevent Christians…from continuing to feel certain that they were at home in any Church, because praise of the one Father, through Christ in the Holy Spirit, rose from them all, in a marvelous variety of languages and melodies…The first Councils are an eloquent witness to this enduring unity in diversity.”80 The suggestion was clear: Why could Catholicism and Orthodoxy not return to the status quo ante 1054? This assumed there were no Church-dividing doctrinal issues remaining between Rome and the East, but that seemed to be John Paul’s conviction, notwithstanding some Catholic and Orthodox views to the contrary.