Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  WITNESS TO HOPE

  On October 4, 1995, John Paul arrived in the United States for the pastoral visit and UN address that had had to be postponed the year before.

  Addressing the United Nations General Assembly in October 1979, John Paul II had exuded physical vigor, vitality, and a sense of command. Sixteen years later, a frailer Pope, slightly hunched in his posture, walking far more slowly, and showing an occasional tremor in his left hand, arrived at the General Assembly rostrum to speak to the delegates and the world on the UN’s fiftieth anniversary. His sense of command was, if anything, more palpable on October 5, 1995. He was no longer a historic curiosity. By the reckoning of admirers and critics alike, he was one of the dominant figures of the twentieth century, a maker of contemporary history. Before a global television audience, he had some things to say about what that century had meant, and what a new century and a new millennium might bring.

  Universals and Particulars

  As in 1979, his theme was the universality of human rights, but his address was less a philosophical reflection than an analysis of “what the extraordinary changes of the last few years imply, not simply for the present, but for the future of the whole human family.” Since he had last spoken to the UN, a “global acceleration of that quest for freedom which is one of the great dynamics of human history” had vindicated the hope he had expressed in 1979. “Men and women throughout the world, even when threatened by violence, have taken the risk of freedom.” The fact that this had happened in so many cultures and circumstances was the empirical answer to those who were arguing that the human yearning for freedom was not universal.

  The global character of the human rights movement, he continued, empirically confirmed that there is a universal human nature and a universal moral law. The “moral logic” built into human beings was the basis for genuine dialogue between individuals and peoples. If the world wanted “a century of violent coercion to be succeeded by a century of persuasion,” dialogue was imperative. And the “universal moral law written on the human heart is precisely [the] kind of ‘grammar’ which is needed if the world is to engage this discussion of its future.”127

  The universality of human nature and human rights then led the Pope to discuss particularity and its discontents. History, he suggested, had shown that men and women came to an understanding of their common human nature through the experience of being part of a particular family and a particular nation. There was an unavoidable tension between universality and particularity, two poles of the human condition. That tension, John Paul continued, could be “singularly fruitful” if “lived in a calm and balanced way” that recognized the “rights of nations.” Those rights were, in the first instance, cultural. Not every nation could be a sovereign state. But every nation, as a cultural subject with a specific history, had a right to respect and protection: “no one—neither a State nor another nation, nor an international organization—is ever justified in asserting that an individual nation is not worthy of existence…. History shows that in extreme circumstances (such as those which occurred in the land where I was born) it is precisely its culture that enables a nation to survive the loss of political and economic independence.” A national culture, in other words, had a spiritual quality. And it was the human spirit that had, over time, proven itself the most potent force in world affairs.

  Recent history had shown that “the world has yet to learn how to live with diversity.” “Difference” was still perceived as a threat. When “amplified by historic grievances and exacerbated by the manipulations of the unscrupulous, the fear of ‘difference’ can lead to a denial of the very humanity of ‘the other,’ with the result that people fall into a cycle of violence in which no one is spared, even the children.” That was happening in Bosnia, in Rwanda, and in Burundi, even as they met. That was why the world had to learn that difference was enriching, for “different cultures are but different ways of facing the question of the meaning of human existence….”128 And at the heart of every culture was its distinctive approach to “the greatest of all mysteries: the mystery of God.”

  Religious freedom and freedom of conscience were thus “the cornerstones of the structure of human rights and the foundation of every truly free society.” Religious freedom, like every other form of freedom, had an object, a goal—living in the truth. Truth, in turn, was freedom’s great protector: “Far from being a limitation upon freedom or a threat to it, reference to the truth about the human person…is, in fact, the guarantor of freedom’s future.”129

  The twentieth century was drawing to a close enmeshed in a great paradox. The century had begun with humanity full of self-confidence and certain that it had come of age. It was ending with a world full of fear. Human beings were afraid of themselves, afraid of what they might be capable of, afraid of the future. At the turn of the millennium, in order to make possible “a new flourishing of the human spirit, mediated through an authentic culture of freedom… we must learn not to be afraid, we must discover a spirit of hope and a spirit of trust.”

  This was not, the Pope quickly added, optimism. This was hope, a hope nurtured “in that inner sanctuary of conscience where ‘man is alone with God’ and thus perceives that he is not alone amid the enigmas of existence….”130 Optimism was a matter of psychology; hope was a theological virtue informed by faith. In order to conquer fear “at the end of this century of sorrows,” he suggested, even politicians and diplomats had to “regain sight of that transcendent horizon of possibility to which the soul of man aspires.”131

  Hope required a secure foundation. For him, as for all Christians, that foundation was Jesus Christ, in whose “Death and Resurrection were fully revealed God’s love and his care for all creation.” That particular conviction led to a universal hope, for it was precisely because Christians believed that God had become part of the history of humanity in Jesus Christ that “Christian hope for the world and its future extends to every human person.” That was why Christian faith led not to intolerance, but to respectful dialogue with other religious traditions and to a sense of responsibility for all of humanity.132

  And that, finally, was why he was at the United Nations. He was not in the General Assembly hall as one more player in the politics of nations. He had come, he said, because he was a “witness to hope”:

  We must not be afraid of the future. We must not be afraid of man. It is no accident that we are here. Each and every human person has been created in the “image and likeness” of the One who is the origin of all that is. We have within us the capacities for wisdom and virtue. With these gifts, and with the help of God’s grace, we can build in the next century and the next millennium a civilization worthy of the human person, a true culture of freedom. We can and we must do so! And in doing so, we shall see that the tears of this century have prepared the ground for a new springtime of the human spirit.133

  Captivating New York, Challenging Baltimore

  The Pope’s third extended pilgrimage and sixth visit to the United States had begun the evening before, with a service of evening prayer in the magnificent gothic cathedral of Newark, New Jersey.

  Aides to President Bill Clinton, who had met the Pope at the Newark airport, had proposed to the papal trip planners that the president escort John Paul up the center aisle of Sacred Heart Cathedral. It was explained, politely but firmly, that the Pope would enter the cathedral as he entered every church in the world—by himself, in order to greet his people as a religious leader. The president was seated in the cathedral’s first row, where he heard John Paul begin his homily by referring to “the extraordinary human epic that is the United States of America.” When the service was completed, President and Mrs. Clinton strode down the center aisle, working the crowd as if it were a campaign rally. John Paul left for Newark Archbishop Theodore McCarrick’s residence through a side door, pausing for several moments of prayer at the cathedral’s Blessed Sacrament chapel.134

  The following evening, after his General Asse
mbly address and a lunch at the Vatican’s Permanent Observer Mission to the UN, John Paul went across the Hudson River to Giants Stadium, home to New York’s professional football teams, for an evening Mass attended by more than 70,000 members of the Newark archdiocese. It had been raining heavily all day and security regulations dictated that no one could bring an umbrella into a papal venue. Members of the enormous congregation had waited for John Paul for as long as seven hours in a driving autumn storm. Their enthusiasm, televised all over the country, completed the change in the media storyline that had begun in Denver in 1993. Alienated Catholics would not have done what the people of the Newark archdiocese did on October 5, 1995.

  The Pope’s Newark homily stressed the multiethnic heritage of Catholicism in America and the need for social solidarity. His description of an American character trait suggested that he had been studying the history of American democracy: “Early Americans were proud of their strong sense of individual responsibility, but that did not lead them to build a radically ‘individualistic’ society. They built a community-based society, with a great openness and sensitivity to the needs of their neighbors.” Close to the New Jersey shore, he noted, “there rises a universally-known landmark which stands as an enduring witness to the American tradition of welcoming the stranger, and which tells us something important about the kind of nation America has aspired to be.” The Statue of Liberty was a reminder that “the United States is called to be a hospitable society, a welcoming culture.” Today, he continued, it was the unborn child who was the “stranger” to be welcomed and brought into the circle of society’s protection, along with the immigrant, the poor, the elderly, the handicapped—all those “others” he had defended at the UN.

  The papal Mass on Friday at Aqueduct Racetrack was celebrated for the people of the Diocese of Brooklyn. In his homily, the Pope returned to one of his favorite themes, the necessity of a culture that cherished the family and a legal system that protected it.135 That afternoon, John Paul visited the New York archdiocesan seminary in Yonkers, where he celebrated evening prayer with the faculty and students. On Saturday, October 7, the monthly papal First Saturday rosary was prayed in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, after which the Pope blessed the new offices of his UN representatives. The Mass in New York’s Central Park earlier Saturday morning provided several of the pilgrimage’s most striking images.

  The park’s fifty-acre Great Lawn had been transformed into a kind of sylvan cathedral. It was, the New York Times reported, “a morning of ethereal beauty, with gray mists moving in veils over park woodlands touched by russet and yellow-gold, and treetops swaying like waves rolling on a green sea.”136 Four choirs and soloists from the city’s opera companies provided music for the Mass.

  John Paul began his homily by referring to the 1993 Denver “surprise” once again, but quickly began playing to his audience: “I know this is not Denver; this is New York! The great New York!” They cheered, and the onetime student actor proceeded to play the theater capital of the world as if he had spent his life on stage. His homily was a celebration of the human love he had learned to love through his first contacts with young couples preparing for marriage. Every genuinely human love, he said, “is a reflection of the Love that is God himself, to the point where the First Letter of St. John says, ‘The man without love has known nothing of God; for God is love’ (1 John 4.8).”

  That theme led into a reflection on the first three joyful mysteries of the rosary, which commemorate the annunciation to Mary, her visit to her cousin Elizabeth (the mother of John the Baptist), and the first Christmas. Suddenly, the Pope, who had loved Christmas since he was a small boy, took off from his prepared text and started speaking about one of his favorite Polish Christmas carols—which then he began, spontaneously, to sing: “In the silence of the night, a voice is heard: ‘Get up, shepherds, God is born for you! Hurry to Bethlehem to meet the Lord.’” The huge congregation roared its approval once again. The Pope, cocking his head to one side, waited for the applause to die down, put his hand to the side of his face, assumed an expression of wonderment, and remarked, “And to think—you don’t even know Polish.” They applauded even more boisterously. As one visitor told him two months later, it was a perfect imitation of the American comedian, Jack Benny.

  But this was not comedy, though there was ample laughter. His Polish Christmas carol conveyed, he said, the same message as a carol everyone in Central Park knew, “Silent Night.” That message was that the Son of God had become a human being so that men and women could become holy. “It is,” John Paul concluded, “a song to help us not to be afraid.”137

  On Sunday morning, October 8, the Pope flew to Baltimore, Maryland, the first Catholic diocese in the independent United States. On a crisp, clear autumn morning, his homily at Mass in the city’s baseball stadium, Camden Yards, was a call to read the signs of these particular American times carefully: “Christian witness takes different forms at different moments in the life of a nation. Sometimes, witnessing to Christ will mean drawing out of a culture the full meaning of its noblest intentions, a fullness that is revealed in Christ. At other times, witnessing to Christ means challenging that culture, especially when the truth about the human person is under assault.”

  One hundred thirty years ago, John Paul reminded them, Abraham Lincoln had asked in his Gettysburg Address “whether a nation ‘conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal’” could “long endure.” That, John Paul said, was a question for every generation of Americans. For “democracy cannot be sustained without a shared commitment to certain moral truths about the human person and human community.” All Americans, he concluded, must remember that “freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.”138

  Hosted by Baltimore’s Cardinal William Keeler, John Paul had lunch with local poor people at “Our Daily Bread,” an archdiocesan soup kitchen next door to the Basilica of the Assumption, the first cathedral in the United States and a treasure of Federal period American architecture. At a meeting later that afternoon in the city’s newer Cathedral of Mary Our Queen, the Pope defended the right of Americans to bring religiously based moral arguments into public debate, recommitted the Church to interreligious dialogue with Judaism and Islam, and made a pointed historical linkage in the debate over abortion and euthanasia. Baltimore’s late archbishop, Cardinal Lawrence Shehan, had become a public hero for defending the civil rights of black Americans in the early 1960s against vocal and sometimes ugly opposition. When the cardinal had done that, the Pope said, “he was expressing a moral truth about the equal dignity before God of all human beings.” That same conviction “should compel all of you today to defend the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death, to care for and protect the unborn and all those whom others might deem ‘inconvenient’ or ‘undesirable.’ That moral principle is not something alien to America, but rather speaks to the very origins of this nation! ”139

  An Argument from Inside

  John Paul’s 1995 visit to the United States was arguably the most successful of his American pilgrimages. The press, perhaps chastened by the criticism that senior journalists had raised about the media’s performance at World Youth Day ’93 in Denver, was less focused on the “canon” of dissent (contraception, abortion, divorce, women as priests) and more willing to take seriously John Paul’s oft-repeated argument that America had to rethink its relationship to its historic moral foundations. There was also some healthy skepticism, this time, about instant opinion polling and what it revealed about Catholic views of the Pope and the “canon.” As columnist and television commentator Paul Gigot wrote early in the visit, “Imagine a Washington Post/ABC poll on the Second Coming: ‘Ninety percent of Americans agree he should come, but a third have doubts about his timing.’”140

  The Pope’s UN address was almost uniformly well-received. The Wall Street Journal editorially praised John Paul for filling the “emp
ty vessels” of contemporary public discourse about behavior and responsibility. The UN speech, the Journal noted, was “no mere collection of sentences.” It was, rather, “an argument…that makes the innate dignity of the human person the fulcrum of existence—for families, communities, and nations…”141 The Baltimore Sun, a paper with a very different political orientation from the Journal’s, was similarly impressed with the Pope’s claim that “we do not live in an irrational or meaningless world.” John Paul’s proposal, that a culture of genuine freedom and a civilization worthy of the human person could be built in the next century, was “more than happy talk” because it was based on what the Pope had called “the truth that is written on the human heart, the truth that can be known by reason and can therefore form the basis of a profound and universal dialogue among people about the direction they must give to their lives and their activities.” These were, the Sun concluded, “encouraging words in an age that sorely needs encouragement” amid a pervasively “gloomy, deterministic view of life.”142