Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  The encyclical also discussed the pursuit of Christian unity with the communities of the Reformation, but at less length and with less a sense of possibility than was evident in the Pope’s appeal to Orthodoxy. John Paul praised the progress that had been made in bilateral theological dialogues since Vatican II, but his list of the remaining unresolved issues suggested the magnitude of the task ahead: they included such basics as the relationship of Scripture and tradition, the nature of the Eucharist, the apostolic and priestly ministry, the teaching authority of the Church, and Mary as an icon of the Church. Justification by faith, often regarded as the central question between Rome and the Reformation traditions, was not mentioned, perhaps in anticipation of a long-anticipated joint statement on justification by the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation.

  World Protestantism had changed dramatically since Vatican II. The communions with which many of the bilateral dialogues had been conducted were dispirited and declining in the developed world. The growth in Protestantism among evangelicals and pentecostals posed entirely new questions for the ecumenical conversation between Catholics and Protestants. Those questions were not addressed by Ut Unum Sint, and many evangelicals in the United States, who deeply admired Evangelium Vitae and were eagerly promoting it in their communities, felt somewhat ignored.

  The boldest initiative in the encyclical was John Paul’s proposal that Orthodox and Protestant Christians help him think through the kind of papacy that could serve them in the future. The ministry of the Bishop of Rome, he writes, had been intended by Christ as a ministry of unity for the entire Church. History, human error, and sin had made that ministry a sign of division. For some Christians, John Paul freely admits, the memory of the papacy “is marked by certain painful recollections. To the extent that we are responsible for these, I join my predecessor Paul VI in asking forgiveness.”81 Despite these memories, Christians of different communions were coming to understand the importance of a unifying ministry at the service of the universal Church, and some seemed willing to rethink the question of the “primacy” of Peter’s successor in terms of that kind of unifying ministry. John Paul felt a “particular responsibility” to advance this discussion, “heeding the request made of me to find a way of exercising the primacy which, while in no way renouncing what is essential to its mission, is nonetheless open to a new situation.”82 This was an “immense task” which Christians could not ignore, and which he frankly concedes, “I cannot carry out by myself.”

  Therefore, he asks, “could not the real but imperfect communion existing between us” set the foundation on which Christian leaders and their theologians could work with him to explore the kind of papacy that could serve the needs of all?83 The Bishop of Rome, 941 years after the decisive split between Rome and the East, and 478 years after the division of western Christianity in the Lutheran Reformation, was asking his separated brothers and sisters to help him redesign the papacy for the third millennium as an office of unity for the whole Church of Christ.

  In this daring proposal, John Paul was suggesting yet again that Orthodox, Protestants, and Catholics alike stop thinking about the quest for Christian unity on the model of a labor negotiation. In a negotiation between a union and a company, the goal—a contract—does not exist; it has to be created, often through a zero-sum exercise in which one side’s gain is another’s loss. That is not, John Paul insists in Ut Unum Sint, the situation of divided Christianity. The goal—the unity of the Church willed by Christ—already exists, as a gift to the Church from Christ. The ecumenical task is to give that unity fuller theological expression and more complete ecclesial form amid legitimate diversity.84 Christians don’t create Christian unity. Christ creates the unity of the Church, and ecumenism’s task is to bring that already given unity to expression in history.

  Despite its historical uniqueness and the bold offer it contained, Ut Unum Sint did not receive the extensive media attention given Evangelium Vitae. That seemed to reflect the widespread editorial judgment that the pursuit of Christian unity is a matter of internal Church housekeeping, and thus of little consequence for the human future. But this, one commentator argued, was a serious misjudgment: “In a world increasingly marked by resurgent religion, notably Christianity and Islam, the ecumenical reconfiguration of 1.8 billion Christians is a matter of enormous world-historical import.”85 Ut Unum Sint could not make that reconfiguration happen by itself. It did secure the ecumenical imperative in the heart of a Church with a billion members.

  A Vision Ahead of Its Time

  The boldness of John Paul’s ecumenical offer in Ut Unum Sint was not matched by the creativity of the responses it received.

  The deepest difficulties in the Western ecumenical dialogue were graphically illustrated a month before Ut Unum Sint was signed. On April 4, 1995, Dr. Konrad Raiser, Secretary-General of the World Council of Churches, gave a lecture at Rome’s Centro Pro Unione, proposing what he termed a “paradigm shift” in ecumenism. At the end of the second millennium, a “de facto apartheid between rich and poor,” and a “progressive degradation of the whole ecosphere” required an “urgent reordering of the ecumenical agenda.” It was time, Raiser argued, to “close the books over our past struggles and to concentrate all our energies on addressing together the life and survival issues of today and tomorrow in the light of the Gospel of Christ.” That was the contemporary ecumenical imperative.86

  The ecumenical movement as conceived since the 1910 Edinburgh Missionary Conference—the reunification of Christianity on the basis of agreed doctrine and practice—was over, according to the head of the World Council of Churches, the institutional heir of the 1910 initiative. Ideologically driven politics were what mattered. Battling global warming was of more consequence for the Churches than debating how we are justified before God; international income redistribution was a more urgent Christian task than celebrating the Lord’s Supper together. Insofar as it reflected widespread sentiment within the leadership of the communions represented at the World Council of Churches, Konrad Raiser’s address in Rome may be viewed in the future as having marked the end of the old ecumenism. The ecumenical movement described by Ut Unum Sint was now the only global ecumenical movement still committed to the movement’s original goal.87

  A month after Ut Unum Sint, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I visited Rome for the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul and participated in the solemn Mass celebrated by the Pope at the papal altar in St. Peter’s Basilica on June 29. During the Liturgy of the Word, Bartholomew and John Paul were seated beside each other on identical presidential chairs set before the high altar. The Gospel was chanted in Latin and Greek, and both Pope and Patriarch preached homilies. The impending Great Jubilee framed John Paul’s sermon and prompted a question from the successor of Peter to the successor of Andrew. In Luke’s Gospel, John Paul reminded Bartholomew, the first disciples’ mission was described in these terms: “‘He sent them on ahead of him, two by two’ (Luke 10.1).” Was there not a lesson for them in the text? Did it not “suggest that Christ is also sending us out two by two as messengers of the Gospel in the West and in the East?” “We cannot remain separated! ” the Pope insisted. Unity was Christ’s will, and unity was what the evangelization of the new millennium required.88

  Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew did not reply directly to the Pope’s poignant query. His homily suggested that he was not prepared to commit himself publicly to the proposition that the only questions separating Orthodoxy and “Old Rome” involved issues of jurisdiction, as Ut Unum Sint had proposed. The Common Declaration signed by the Pope and the Ecumenical Patriarch on the evening of June 29 noted that a “common witness of faith” was “particularly appropriate on the eve of the third millennium.” But its statement that the Great Jubilee would be celebrated “on our pilgrimage toward full unity” seemed to indicate that John Paul’s millennial vision of a reunited East and West was not going to be realized according to his timetable.89

  Personal witne
ss and symbolic acts of reconciliation continued to advance John Paul’s ecumenical agenda. The Good Friday way of the cross celebrated by the Pope at Rome’s Colosseum took on a new ecumenical cast in the mid-1990s. The 1994 meditations for each station had been prepared by the Ecumenical Patriarch. The 1995 meditations were written by Sister Minke de Vries, Prioress of the Sisters of Grandchamp, a community of nuns in the Reformed or Calvinist tradition, and the 1997 meditations were prepared by Karekin I Sarkissian, Catholicos of All Armenians and head of the Armenian Apostolic Church, with whom the Pope signed a Common Christological Declaration in December 1996.90

  John Paul also worked to defuse centuries-long religious animosities in east central Europe. Plans for the May 1995 canonization of Jan Sarkander, a Catholic martyr during the religious wars of the early seventeenth century in Moravia, had triggered a bitter response from Czech Protestants. Letters protesting the canonization were sent to the Pope and Cardinal Cassidy by Protestant leaders convinced that Jan Sarkander had been involved in the forcible Catholicization of Protestant areas. Cassidy and the Pope replied that careful scholarly investigation had shown that Sarkander had never been involved in violence against Protestants, and that the canonization was meant to honor Sarkander’s fidelity to his priestly vocation at the cost of his life.

  The situation remained volatile until John Paul arrived in the Czech Republic on May 20. At the arrival ceremony, he offered special greetings to “my beloved brothers in Christ, the representatives of the various Churches and Christian communities,” and emphasized that he had come to Bohemia and Moravia “as a pilgrim of peace and love.” That afternoon, speaking to young Czechs at the Marian shrine of Svaty Kopaček, he told them that Sarkander’s martyrdom “takes on extraordinary ecumenical eloquence” speaking to all separated Christians of their mutual “responsibility for the sin of division” and of the importance of prayer for the forgiveness of sins. “Indeed, we are in debt to one another,” he concluded, and recognizing that indebtedness was the beginning of reconciliation.91 Throughout his pilgrimage to Bohemia and Moravia, the Pope asked forgiveness for the wrongs Catholics had committed in the history of the Czech lands, and forgave Protestants for the harm they had done to Catholics. Two months later, on a pilgrimage to Slovakia during which he canonized three priests martyred in the wars of religion, John Paul added to his itinerary a July 2 visit to a monument in Košice, in order to honor Calvinists martyred in 1687 for their refusal to be forcibly converted to Catholicism.92

  By 1997, a difficult, even bitter, situation had been turned around, thanks to John Paul’s efforts and the local leadership of Prague’s Cardinal Miloslav Vlk, who had publicly praised the Christian witness of the pre-Reformation reformer and Czech national hero Jan Hus, burned at the stake by Catholics in 1415. When the Pope returned to the Czech Republic in late April 1997, one of Hus’s twentieth-century heirs, Pavel Czerny, head of the Evangelical Church of the Bohemian Brethren, participated with John Paul in an ecumenical service at Prague’s St. Vitus Cathedral marking the millennium of the martyrdom of St. Adalbert, the first evangelist of Bohemia. At the April 27 service, the Pope praised the common witness to Christ of Protestants and Catholics under communist persecution. In that witness, he said, would be found the courage to forgive and to break down “the barriers of mutual suspicion and mistrust…in order to build a new civilization of love” in the new Czech democracy.93

  The Anglican–Roman Catholic dialogue continued to demonstrate that it was easier to break down centuries-old prejudices than to break through to theological agreement. When the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, came to the Vatican in December 1996, John Paul admitted, in remarks to the archbishop and his entourage, that “the path ahead may not be altogether clear to us.” Still, he continued, “we are here to recommit ourselves to following it.” He then invited his “brothers and sisters of the Anglican communion” to “reflect on the motives and reasons of the positions I have expressed in the exercise of my teaching office.” Ordinatio Sacerdotalis was one of those “positions” so was the invitation to think through an exercise of the papal primacy that might serve Anglicans. John Paul evidently thought the invitation had not been answered very satisfactorily.94

  The stalemate in the Anglican–Roman Catholic dialogue, Orthodoxy’s inability to respond with a united voice to John Paul’s steady pleas for a millennial reconciliation, and the abandonment of a theologically grounded ecumenism implied in Konrad Raiser’s 1995 lecture—these hard facts of ecumenical life in the 1990s, coupled with the probability that few Catholics had internalized Lumen Gentium’s vision of a Catholicism ecumenically engaged with everyone, suggest that Ut Unum Sint expresses a vision ahead of its time, a vision for the long haul of history. John Paul recognizes that there may have been some romanticism in the immediate post-conciliar years about the possibilities of full ecclesial reconciliation within the West and between East and West. But Ut Unum Sint requires Roman Catholicism to pursue that goal faithfully and doggedly, in the conviction that this is what Christ wills for his Church. It would not be an easy road to travel. John Paul II insisted that it must be traveled, nonetheless.

  “A VOICE FOR THE MARGINALIZED AND VOICELESS”:

  THE BEIJING WOMEN’S CONFERENCE

  Another challenge to the unity of humanity had to be faced when, on September 4, 1995, the Fourth World Conference on Women opened in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. John Paul II had been preparing for it for almost a year.

  The Pope’s annual message for the World Day of Peace on January 1, 1995, was on the theme “Women: Teachers of Peace.” Looking at what he termed “the great process of women’s liberation,” John Paul noted that “the journey has been a difficult and complicated one and, at times, not without its share of mistakes. But it has been substantially a positive one, even if it is still unfinished, due to the many obstacles which, in various parts of the world, still prevent women from being acknowledged, respected, and appreciated in their own special dignity.”95 Seven months later, in a personal Letter to Women, the Pope insisted that “this journey must go on!”96 That the journey continue in ways that met the needs of women unlikely to get much attention in international meetings was the Holy See’s strategic goal for the Beijing conference.

  The Pope began to lay out the substantive framework for the Holy See’s participation at Beijing well in advance of the meeting. In February 1995, he started a series of fifteen Sunday Angelus addresses that further developed his distinctive feminism. These addresses continued through the summer months and touched on philosophical issues (e.g., the equality of personhood between women and men and the complementarity and reciprocity built into sexual differentiation) and practical questions (e.g., the urgent need for women’s education, equity for working mothers, political opportunities for women, and the full participation of women in the Church’s life and mission).97 John Paul’s 1995 “Letter to Priests” for Holy Thursday stressed the importance of women in a priest’s life, suggesting that “in order to live celibacy in a mature way, it is important for the priest to develop deep within himself the image of women as sisters.” The ordained priesthood, he insisted, “must guarantee the participation of everyone —men and women alike—in the threefold prophetic, priestly, and royal mission of Christ.”98

  On May 26, John Paul met with Mrs. Gertrude Mongella, a Tanzanian and Secretary-General of the forthcoming Beijing conference. At the end of what the Pope remembered as a very cordial meeting, quite different from his session with Mrs. Nafis Sadik prior to the Cairo population conference, the Pope gave Mrs. Mongella a formal message, stressing that real solutions to the “suffering, struggle and frustration that continue to be a part of all too many women’s lives” had to reflect the truths contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Pope vigorously defended women’s active involvement “in all areas of public life,” and urged that the Beijing conference call on “all countries to overcome situations which prevent women from being a
cknowledged, respected, and appreciated in their dignity and competence.” John Paul also urged the conference to “draw attention to the terrible exploitation of women and girls which exists in every part of the world.” As for the sexual revolution and its effects on women, the Pope hoped the conference would reflect on the ways in which the sexual revolution had increased burdens on women by giving license to male “promiscuity and irresponsibility.” The dilemma of unwanted pregnancy should not be met by abortion, but by “a radical solidarity with women” in crisis, and a recognition that “there will never be justice, including equality, development, and peace, for women or for men, unless there is an unfailing determination to “respect, protect, love, and serve life—every human life, at every stage and in every situation.”99

  Mrs. Mongella was impressed and said to the press afterward, with reference to the Beijing women’s conference, that “if everyone reasoned like he did, perhaps these kinds of meetings would no longer be necessary.”100