Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  In his June 29 Letter to Women, John Paul tried to speak to women in a multitude of different cultural, religious, economic, and political circumstances. He frankly acknowledged that the world was heir to a history and a “conditioning” that has been an obstacle to the progress of women.” “Women’s dignity has often been unacknowledged and their prerogatives misrepresented; they have often been relegated to the margins of society and even reduced to servitude.” This had led to a “spiritual impoverishment of humanity.” The causes of what the world called sexism were complex, but “if objective blame, especially in particular historical contexts, has belonged to not just a few members of the Church, for this I am truly sorry.”

  As women and men looked toward a new millennium, John Paul wanted to highlight the problems of contemporary motherhood, in itself and in relationship to economic life: “Certainly much remains to be done to prevent discrimination against those who have chosen to be wives and mothers.” He also stressed the urgent need for “real equality in every area: equal pay for equal work, protection for working mothers, fairness in career advancement, equality of spouses with regard to family rights,” and full political rights. Educational opportunity for women had to be promoted, as did far better women’s health care. Were this to be done, the distinctive “feminine genius” he had described in Mulieris Dignitatem would help the family, society, and the Church rediscover the truths that authority is service and that empowerment is for the sake of self-giving.

  The Pope who had urged the full expression of women’s gifts in the Church made sure the Holy See’s delegation to Beijing reflected that commitment. Fourteen of its twenty-two members were women. One of them, Dr. Janne Haaland Matlary, a Norwegian political scientist, had converted to Catholicism in 1982 after having disentangled herself from the radical skepticism about truth that dominated the academic culture in which she was being trained.101 Another, Kathryn Hawa Hoomkamp, was a former Nigerian minister of health who had been imprisoned for nine months after a military coup.102 The head of delegation was not a Vatican diplomat, but the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard University, Mary Ann Glendon, a fifty-seven-year-old legal scholar specializing in comparative family law and international human rights law. All three of these accomplished professional women were mothers.

  Monsignor Claudio Celli, the Undersecretary for Relations with States, told the Holy See delegation to the Beijing conference at a pre-meeting briefing that they should “try to be a voice for the marginalized and voiceless.” It was not going to be easy. Mary Ann Glendon, a professional who knew how to cut through the thickets of international legal documents, was not happy with the draft document that had been prepared for Beijing. It had some sensible things to say about equal opportunity, education, and economic development. But the overall impression created, she later recalled, was unreal: “Reading the drafts, one would have no idea that most women marry, have children, and are urgently concerned with how to mesh family life with participation in broader social and economic spheres. The implicit vision of women’s progress was based on a model…in which family responsibilities are avoided or subordinated to personal advancement. When dealing with health, education, and young girls, the drafts emphasized sex and reproduction to the neglect of many other crucial issues. The overall effect was like the leaning tower of Pisa: admirable from some angles, but unbalanced, and resting on a shaky foundation.”103

  Joaquín Navarro-Valls, the Holy See press spokesman who was another member of the Beijing delegation, was also worried. Ten days or so before the conference opened, he met with John Paul, Cardinal Sodano, and Archbishop Tauran to review the situation. Navarro’s assessment was blunt: “We’re dead. We have two, maybe three countries with us.” The talk turned to diplomatic options, with Cardinal Sodano describing the many meetings he had already had with ambassadors and UN officials. The Pope acknowledged what Sodano had said, and then added two new ideas. “We have to pray more,” was the first, directed to everybody. The second was a suggestion for Navarro: “If you get in trouble, go to the people.”104 It was good advice, and as things worked out, it made a difference at Beijing.

  Taking the Argument to the People

  The opening ceremonies on September 4 in Beijing reminded Mary Ann Glendon of the conference documents themselves. They were “an odd mixture of the sublime and the silly…. Mistresses of ceremonies who appeared to be on loan from the trade show commissariat presided in sequined evening gowns over a program that mingled ballet dancers and hula-hula girls, a performance by a Chinese women’s philharmonic orchestra and a parade of fashions, world-class gymnastics and a martial arts display where the women vanquished all the men.”105 The serious business then got started, and the Holy See delegation settled down to eighteen-hour days of seemingly endless negotiating.

  Professor Glendon’s opening statement on September 5 specified the problems the Holy See had with the conference’s draft report and program of action. The documents almost never mentioned marriage, motherhood, and the family except as obstacles to women’s self-realization and occasions for violence and exploitation. Sexual and “reproductive health” matters dominated the section on women’s health, and virtually no attention was paid to the health problems most of the world’s women suffered from: nutritional deficiencies, poor sanitation, tropical diseases, infant and maternal mortality and morbidity, and access to basic health care. Economic inequality was discussed solely in terms of women and men, with the economic problems caused for women by family dissolution and unjust economic structures getting slight attention. Glendon argued that “effective equality” for women would be an illusion without recognizing and supporting women in their roles as mothers. There could be no progress for women, men, or humanity at the expense of children or the underprivileged. It was time to move from aspiration to action on an agenda of basic reforms that would touch the lives of the overwhelming majority of the world’s women.106

  It seemed reasonable enough, but there were soon signs of trouble. Holy See interventions at working sessions were being gaveled out of order. The threat of foreign aid losses was weighing heavily on Third World delegations who had asserted their independence at Cairo. And in any case, the Cairo coalition wouldn’t work in Beijing because the Holy See’s positions on the advancement of women were at cross purposes with the policies of several Islamic states.107 Five days into the conference, things took a serious turn for the worse when a minority coalition dominated by the European Union [EU] and including Canada, Barbados, South Africa, and Namibia began pressing the sexual rights and abortion agenda that had been rejected at Cairo, and which the United States, at least overtly, was not trying to get adopted at Beijing.108 When others rose to protest this agenda they were sometimes ignored by the chair. In one session, a delegate from Slovakia finally called out in frustration, “Why don’t you recognize Slovakia? I am in a red dress, I am eight months pregnant, and I have been standing here waving my sign for half an hour!” The chair declined to recognize her.109

  The EU coalition’s determination to salvage Cairo at Beijing blocked agreement on everything else. Mary Ann Glendon thought the coalition was taking positions that would do serious damage to international human rights. The Europeans were trying to undermine the preferential support many states provided to families with children by broadening the definition of marriage, and by implicitly rejecting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ statement that “motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance.” The coalition wanted to strip the Beijing final document and program of action of every reference to religion and ethics, and eliminate any recognition of parental rights and responsibilities in education from the section on children. Coalition members also tried to argue that the “human dignity” principle at the heart of the Universal Declaration was inimical to the pursuit of equality.110

  Glendon and her Holy See colleagues began to see what was happening. European and other governments, thinking that a conference on wo
men was of no great consequence, had used delegation appointments as consolation prizes for the radical population controllers and feminists who had lost so badly at Cairo. These delegations, in turn, were determined to make Beijing the occasion to win what had been lost at Cairo. The time had come to take advantage of John Paul’s instruction to Navarro: “If you get in trouble, go to the people.”

  It was to the Holy See’s considerable advantage that its head of delegation was one of the world’s leading authorities on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and on European constitutional and family law. Mary Ann Glendon talked with the head of the EU coalition, a Spaniard, and asked her why she was proposing a program that was against not only the Universal Declaration but her own country’s constitution. The Spaniard “didn’t have a clue,” Glendon recalled later; neither did other coalition members.111 Glendon and Joaquín Navarro-Valls then met on Friday night, September 8, put together a one-page press release summarizing the coalition’s agenda and its self-contradictory character, and faxed it to every major newspaper in Europe.112 The story broke on Sunday, and on Monday questions were being put to now-embarrassed governments in several European parliaments. The governments, in turn, began to take Beijing seriously, sending new instructions to retreat from the agenda the EU coalition had been pressing. The case had been taken to the people through the media and the results were what John Paul had expected. “The people” had shown more moral sense than those who had devised the Beijing agenda.113

  With the EU coalition defeated, the question now became whether the Holy See could accede to the final report and program of action. Some within the delegation, and some Catholics who participated in the parallel nongovernmental organization conference outside Beijing, argued that the documents’ concept of the human person was still so defective that they should be rejected outright. Mary Ann Glendon and others had a different view. The matter was thoroughly debated within the Holy See delegation before a summary of the arguments was faxed to the Vatican. On Friday morning, September 15, the last day of the conference, John Paul’s decision was received back by fax: “Accept what can be affirmed, and vigorously denounce what you cannot accept.” That was what Mary Ann Glendon did, in a closing statement that welcomed the conference’s sections on the needs of women living in poverty, on improving literacy and education, on ending violence against women, and on the importance of women’s access to capital, land, technology, and employment. Then Glendon blasted the documents’ “exaggerated individualism,” which had compromised commitments made in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Surely, she said, “this international gathering could have done more for women and girls than to leave them alone with their rights!”

  The Beijing documents, she concluded, were at odds with themselves in some ways. But the Holy See continued to hope that “the good for women will ultimately prevail,” because “women themselves will overcome the limitations of and bring out what is best in these documents.”114 It was an appropriately feminist ending to a conference at which the Holy See delegation, following the Pope’s lead, had been a populist voice for many of the women too often ignored by the Western women’s movement.115

  ON THE UNDERSIDE OF HISTORY

  John Paul II continued to hope in Africa during a decade in which one American foreign policy analyst suggested that the continent be allowed to fall off the edge of history in a form of international political triage, and a British historian proposed reviving colonialism as the only answer to Africa’s crisis of crises.116 The Pope’s intense interest in bringing Africans into the mainstream of the universal Church and of world affairs was embodied in a Special Assembly for Africa of the Synod of Bishops, which met in Rome from April 10 to May 8, 1994. John Paul’s broken hip had made it impossible for him to celebrate the Synod’s closing Mass at St. Peter’s, at which Cardinal Francis Arinze presided as the Pope’s legate. The Pope was determined, though, to issue his post-synodal apostolic exhortation, Ecclesia in Africa [The Church in Africa] in person, and in Africa.

  Part of the rationale for holding the Synod in Rome was that a Vatican venue would compel the Roman Curia, whose senior members would be rubbing shoulders for a month with over 200 African bishops, to take the Synod—and Africa—more seriously. In this sense, the Synod for Africa was another mission of the Pope to his central bureaucracy. Everyone agreed that the “celebration” phase of the Synod, which included the release of Ecclesia in Africa, ought to be held in Africa itself. Where, though? The Pope and his advisers thought the celebration should be continent-wide in scope. On September 14, 1995, John Paul flew to Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, the first stop in a week-long celebration that continued in Johannesburg, South Africa, and Nairobi, Kenya.

  Ecclesia in Africa was signed in Yaoundé, which Cardinal Arinze thought was symbolically important in itself: “It’s usually ‘given at St. Peter’s,’ or ‘given at Castel Gandolfo.’ A major document that is ‘given at Yaoundé, in Cameroon, on 14 September, Feast of the Triumph of the Cross, in the year 1995, the seventeenth of my pontificate’—that is something exceptional.”117 For the first time in 2,000 years of Christian history, Africa had been the site of a teaching document of the papal magisterium.

  Even by the standards of a pontificate not noted for the brevity of its texts, Ecclesia in Africa was lengthy. One crucial section dealt with “inculturation,” the ongoing debate about how basic Christian doctrine could be communicated through distinctively African religious practices and categories of thought. The two criteria that had guided John Paul’s teaching on “inculturation” were reaffirmed. Any local “inculturation” of doctrine and practice, including worship, must be compatible with the Christian message, and in communion with the universal Church. Moreover, syncretism had to be avoided.118 At the same time, Ecclesia in Africa urged African bishops’ conferences to work with universities and Catholic institutes to set up study commissions “for matters concerning marriage, the veneration of ancestors, and the spirit world, in order to examine in depth all the cultural aspects of problems from the theological, sacramental, liturgical, and canonical points of view.”119 As Cardinal Arinze pointed out later, “One hundred years ago, even fifty years ago, if anyone had raised the question of ancestor veneration and said the Church should look into what can be done about it, that person would not have received much welcome. At that time it was simply regarded as pagan, and was rejected and condemned. Today, we see there are elements in it that are good and that Christianity shouldn’t jettison.”120 It could, for example, be a way to begin teaching the Christian doctrine of the Communion of Saints, the Church now living in glory with the Trinity.

  Ecclesia in Africa was not widely discussed throughout world Catholicism, but in Africa it became the basis for a new conversation between bishops and their people. As the 1990s unfolded, though, Africa continued to suffer: sixty missionaries were killed on the continent in 1997, and the Church had to bear a new burden of guilt as priests were involved in ethnic massacres in Rwanda.121 John Paul refused to concede Africa’s marginality or hopelessness. In March 1998, he flew to Nigeria, vigorously denounced the human rights abuses, authoritarianism, and corruption of the country’s military junta, and beatified Nigeria’s first candidate for sainthood, Father Cyprian Michael Iwene Tansi, who had been Cardinal Arinze’s teacher and had died in 1964. More than a million Nigerians attended the beatification ceremony in Oba, held in sweltering heat. Mass was celebrated in English, with different parts in Igbo, Efik, Tiv, Hausa, Edo, and Yoruba. John Paul, insisting in his homily that “Christ is…a part of the history of your own nation on this continent of Africa,” challenged the Nigerians to build a very different kind of society from the one in which they were living. The “key to resolving economic, political, cultural and ideological conflicts,” he preached, “is justice.” And “justice is not complete without love of neighbor…. This reconciliation is not weakness or cowardice. On the contrary, it demands courage and sometimes even heroism: it is victo
ry over self rather than over others. It should never be seen as dishonor.”122

  Archbishop John Onaiyekan of the Nigerian capital, Abuja, said afterward that “the visit of the Pope comes to us like a redeeming factor in a situation where we have been having so much bad news.”123 That seemed to sum up John Paul’s impact on Africa. He had strengthened the faith of new Christians by the millions and made them feel like brothers and sisters in the household of Catholicism. That, in turn, had reminded the world that Africa and Africans remained players in the human drama.

  Central America, Again

  Central America was another region that had been largely forgotten during the 1990s, as the wars of previous decades ended and democratic regimes tried to take root in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and elsewhere. John Paul II returned to Central America in February 1996 on an eight-day pilgrimage that took him to Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador prior to a brief visit to Venezuela.

  That things had changed in Nicaragua was evident on the road into town from the Managua airport on February 7. Thirteen years after his confrontation with the Sandinistas, John Paul found himself facing a billboard en route to the capital: “Welcome, Holy Father, to Your Nicaragua.” It was signed, “Daniel Ortega.”124 The former chief of the Sandinista directorate, then attempting a political comeback, evidently thought that a cordial greeting to the Pope would help. The greeting was appreciated, if with a certain sense of irony, but Ortega’s welcome had no discernible effect on boosting his political fortunes.125

  John Paul mused on the difference between 1983 and 1996 during an in-flight press conference en route to Guatemala City on February 5. In 1983, “going to Nicaragua was like a somersault,” he said. “But we survived. Then everything changed. Now Ortega himself writes that there is no problem; everything has changed. He does not remember that the last time it was not so easy to meet the people. So goes the world.” A journalist asked about criticism of the recently appointed archbishop of San Salvador, Fernando Sáenz Lacalle, and about the possible canonization of the murdered Archbishop Oscar Romero. John Paul replied that the new archbishop had once been Romero’s confessor, and that “if the cause for canonization moves ahead, it will be handled in the usual way.” Several months later, the Pope appointed Monsignor Vincenzo Paglia, the ecclesiastical adviser to the Sant’Egidio Community and one of John Paul’s back-channel diplomats, as the “postulator” or director of Romero’s cause. In 1982, Paglia had given the Pope a biography of Romero and said, “This bishop is the Church’s bishop, not the Left’s bishop.”126