Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  Without mentioning the current Cuban regime, John Paul had laid out the framework for its replacement by an authentically Cuban system of freedom, in four historically acute paragraphs.

  That night, the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party met in emergency session. The following morning, Fidel Castro’s brother Raul, second-in-command in fact if not in name, unexpectedly showed up for the Pope’s Mass in Santiago, which was being held against the backdrop of the Sierra Maestra, the romantic center of the Castro revolution. There, Raul Castro witnessed the first public display in forty years of Cuba’s national icon, the small statue of Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre, which was processed around the venue atop a gray Toyota truck to the ecstatic cheers of the crowd of a quarter-million—many of whom had been funneled to places far away from the papal altar by blue-clad security forces. At the beginning of Mass, Raul had to listen to a blunt denunciation of “false messianism” by the archbishop of Santiago, Pedro Meurice Estíu, whose welcome to the Pope included a biting critique of those “Cubans who have confused the fatherland with a single party, the nation with the historical process we have lived through during the last few decades, and culture with an ideology.”

  John Paul’s homily extended his Cuban history lesson, recounting the process of Christian evangelization and culture-formation that “has continued to forge the characteristic traits of this nation.” He unwound a list of Cuban cultural and political heroes who, throughout the centuries, “chose the way of freedom and justice as the foundation of their people’s dignity,” and then made a plea for the release of political prisoners. As for the future, the Church, he insisted, “does not seek any type of political power in order to carry out her mission.” The Church sought something else—“to be the fruitful seed of everyone’s good by her presence in the structures of society.” By defending religious freedom, “the Church defends the freedom of each individual, of families, of different social units, which are living realities with a right to their own sphere of autonomy and sovereignty.” It was another frontal assault on the still-unnamed Cuban regime, and the crowd responded with chants of Libertad ! Libertad ! John Paul then crowned the statue of La Caridad of El Cobre as Queen of Cuba, reminding everyone present that El Cobre had been the first place in Cuba to free its slaves, and that the father of Cuban independence, Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, had made the first Cuban flag from the canopy of his family’s altar, prostrating “himself at the feet of Our Lady before beginning the battle for freedom.”30

  It was another call to arms, but arms of a different sort. During the crowning, shouts of Viva ! Viva ! echoed back from the Sierra Maestra. Raul Castro, perhaps wondering what temporary insanity had inspired his brother to permit the saying of what had not been said in Cuba for forty years, flew back to Havana. So did John Paul, who spent the evening at a prayer service for patients of a local leprosarium.

  What the regime called Revolution Plaza and the Church called by its pre-Castro name, José Martí Plaza, was bracketed by competing revolutionary icons for the closing Mass of the papal visit on Sunday, January 25. A steel profile of Che Guevara dominated the facade of one building. Across the plaza, on another high-rise, was a ten-story-tall picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, complete with the inscription, Jesucristo En Ti Confio [Jesus Christ, In You I Trust]. Fidel and Raul Castro, Caridad Diego, and virtually the entire higher echelon of the Cuban party apparatus and government were present for the Mass, which was attended by more than a million Cubans who punctuated the liturgy and the Pope’s homily with chants of Libertad ! Libertad ! Visitors who had decided they could see more by watching the Mass on a hotel television noticed one oddity. The regime-controlled television network described the proceedings in a straightforward fashion, while one of CNN’s correspondents announced that the Mass, the homily, and indeed the entire papal visit proved that “Catholicism and communism can co-exist.”

  John Paul took the occasion of his last major public address in Cuba to criticize the U.S. economic embargo, thus reiterating a longstanding Holy See position that economic embargoes are, as a general rule, unjust, because those who feel the pain are not those in charge of the government whose policies an embargo seeks to change. It was one sentence in a half-hour homily, the rest of which demonstrated the fatuousness of claims about the coexistence of communism and Catholicism. Cuba’s problems, the Pope insisted, were the result of a system that denied the dignity of the human person. John Paul vigorously defended religious freedom again, urging neither a sacred state nor an atheistic state, but a state “which enables every person and every religious confession to live their faith freely, to express that faith in the context of public life, and to count on adequate resources and opportunities to bring its spiritual, moral, and civic benefits to bear on the life of the nation.” No communist state had ever done that. A Cuban government that did permit this kind of free Church in a free civil society would, by definition, be neither communist or totalitarian.

  The Pope’s affirmation of the Church’s duty to defend “the concrete human person” in the face of “any injustice, however small” was met by a long burst of applause. When it died down, John Paul improvised a comment: “I am not against applause because when you applaud, the Pope can take a little rest. But there is still a page to go.” Even Fidel Castro laughed. But he did not seem amused when the crowd kept chanting, “The Pope is free and wants us all to be free.” To which John Paul replied, “Yes, he lives with that freedom for which Christ has set us free.”

  Cuba, the Pope concluded, “has a Christian soul ” that had brought her “a universal vocation.” It was not the vocation that had brought the Cuban army to Africa in the 1970s. It was a vocation to “overcome isolation…to open herself to the world.” “This is the time to start on new paths,” not because the welfare paymaster had collapsed in Moscow, but because “these are times of renewal which we are experiencing at the approach of the third millennium of the Christian era.” He then commended “this people so close to my heart” to the Queen of Cuba, La Caridad of El Cobre, that she might “obtain for her children the gifts of peace, progress, and happiness.”31

  Beyond Canossa

  The materialist delusion that had ruined so many lives in the twentieth century was amply displayed in Fidel Castro’s Cuba during the papal pilgrimage—ironically, in the utter collapse of the materials of modern life on the island. Very few people took seriously Castro’s claim that the crumbling buildings, semiclad children, anorexic prostitutes (many of them professional women desperate for income to feed their families), rusting vintage automobiles, and closed-down housing projects evident all over Havana were the results of the economic embargo. They were the artificial products of the Castro revolution itself. The average worker’s wage in Cuba in January 1998 was eight dollars a month; doctors might make as much as twenty. Milk cost more than a dollar a quart, when available, and by government order was rationed only to children under seven. Cooking oil was rationed to a liter every month. The party elite and the army excepted, the entire population was living outside the law, simply to survive.

  Everyone involved with the papal pilgrimage understood that rebuilding Cuban Catholicism in these grim circumstances would be a colossal job. The Church claimed that perhaps forty percent of the population was Catholic, down from seventy percent in 1958 but no mean achievement under the conditions of the intervening years. Still, visitors at the papal Masses saw that even those who attended and participated so enthusiastically required basic religious education: priest-commentators explained each segment of the Mass to the huge crowds before it took place. John Paul’s gift to Cardinal Ortega of a cornerstone for a new archdiocesan seminary at the closing Mass was a symbol of the need to reevangelize the entire island.

  The dance between the regime and the Church continued throughout 1998. Two hundred fifty political prisoners on the list submitted to the government in January by Cardinal Angelo Sodano were released within the next several months; some we
re required to emigrate, to Canada. Seventy others were refused release on the grounds that, as the regime put it, “there cannot be nor will there be immunity for the enemies of the homeland nor for those intent on destroying Cuba.” The regime also began to limit some prisoners’ access to the priests, deacons, and nuns who worked as prison chaplains. On June 9, 1998, John Paul met in Rome with all thirteen of Cuba’s bishops to review the situation. The visit signaled the regime that things ought to be moving faster.32

  In public terms, John Paul’s 1998 Cuban pilgrimage created openings in which the free institutions of civil society can grow over time. Cuba’s underground, independent trade unions were encouraged by the visit, as were independent journalists and Cuban human rights activists, whose ranks grew to include members of professional associations. The visit also strengthened the spirits of Cuba’s evangelical Protestants, one of whose pastors told a visiting American that “the Pope has done everything just right. This is a kairos and things can never be the same again.”33 Two days after his return to Rome, John Paul told his weekly general audience of his hope that “the fruits of this pilgrimage for our brothers and sisters on that beautiful island will be similar to the fruits of [his 1979] pilgrimage to Poland.” Given the still-fragile condition of the Cuban Church, and the fact that Castro’s political opponents had, virtually without exception, been murdered or exiled, the communist crackup in Cuba would undoubtedly take time. By creating the first mass experience of genuine pluralism on the island in forty years, however, John Paul may well have set in motion a chain of events that will have the same effect in Cuba that his revolution of conscience had in east central Europe.

  More than one on-site observer of the visit suggested that Fidel Castro, whose appearance often varied between wistful and haunted, looked like a man who wanted, somehow, to go to confession, to the one man in the world to whom his ego would allow him to confess. Although that did not happen, as far as is known, in a formal, sacramental sense, the very fact of the Pope’s visit and the response it generated among the Cuban people was a living refutation of the theme of one of Fidel’s legendary revolutionary writings: “History will absolve me.” Here were two men who had given their lives to two claims about the truth—and one seemed to sense that the other had made the right choice. John Paul knew that his successor would be a Catholic; Fidel Castro had no reason to be confident about the communist future of Cuba.

  Some even imagined the entire visit as analogous to the Emperor Henry IV asking absolution of Pope Gregory VII at Canossa in 1077. But that was not quite right. John Paul was not claiming the power to depose tyrannical rulers and Castro was no Christian prince. The Pope’s five days in Havana had demonstrated something that went far beyond Canossa. On the edge of the third millennium, the Church’s proposal, as John Paul always described it—the proposal of the truth about the human person found in the Gospel—had a power of sparking national renewal far greater than the power of the anathemas popes had once wielded.34

  That was the linkage between Poland 1979 and Cuba 1998.

  UNRESOLVED ISSUES

  As the three-year preparation period for the Great Jubilee of 2000 formally opened on the First Sunday of Advent, December 1, 1996, John Paul II continued to address several knotty problems where progress had been difficult to come by during his pontificate.

  Vietnam

  Marxism-Leninism may have been finished as a historically viable proposal for the ordering of modern societies but the totalitarian delusion remained in power in several locales. John Paul had worked for years to improve the Church’s situation in Vietnam and to open a dialogue with the country’s communist rulers. Vietnam had made impressive economic progress since the end of the Second Indochina War in 1975, and normal diplomatic relations had been resumed with the United States in 1995. But it was still a country where a native Christian evangelist could be sentenced to three years in prison for “propagating religion illegally” by teaching a Bible class to ten adults.

  John Paul had dramatically signaled his concern for the Church in Vietnam when he canonized 117 Vietnamese martyrs of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries at a great outdoor ceremony in St. Peter’s Square on June 19, 1988. Cardinal Roger Etchegaray was in Vietnam three times at John Paul’s request—once in 1989 and twice in 1990—to convey the Pope’s support to the local bishops and to explore what kind of conversation might be possible with the government. In addition to the continuing repression of Christians and their communities, the appointment of bishops was a chronic problem. For ten years after the 1988 death of Archbishop Philippe Nguyen Kim Dien, an outspoken critic of the government-sponsored Catholic Committee for Solidarity, the government refused to allow the appointment of a new archbishop of Huê. The appointment was finally made in March 1998, at the same time as a five-year logjam over the appointment of a new archbishop for Ho Chi Minh City (the former Saigon) was broken. Exiled Archbishop Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan, then serving as vice president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace in Rome, had been denied an entry permit to attend the ordinations of two new Vietnamese bishops the year before.35 Several bishops were denied passports and thus could not attend the Vietnamese ad limina visit to Rome in December 1996.36

  Seven rounds of negotiations took place between officials of the Holy See and officials of Vietnam’s bureau for religious affairs between 1990 and 1998, although there was an eighteen-month break between early 1995 and the resumption of talks in October 1996. According to Archbishop Claudio Celli, the principal Vatican negotiator at the time, the Holy See, in addition to pressing the government to ease restriction on bishops, priests, and seminarians, made it known that it was “available for diplomatic relations.” The initial response was that that was impossible “for historical reasons”—the Church’s identification with French colonialism and with the former South Vietnam’s American ally. Celli, observing that Vietnam now had diplomatic relations with both France and the United States, asked his government counterpart whether the Holy See was more responsible for Vietnam’s post–World War II difficulties than France or America. After all, the Vatican representative said, “We didn’t bomb you.” “You didn’t bomb us,” the Vietnamese vice minister for Religious Affairs retorted, “because you have no planes.” Celli was not sure whether the Vietnamese official was joking or not. These were, he recalled, “very difficult negotiations.”37

  Even while negotiations were under way and some progress was being made on seminaries and the appointment of bishops, the government censored the Vietnamese-language edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, omitting those sections that dealt with human rights and human dignity, the Christian’s role in society, and the pursuit of the common good.38 Despite the difficulties, popular piety remained strong. In August 1998, tens of thousands of Vietnamese Catholics came to the Marian shrine of La Vang in central Vietnam for the 200th anniversary of a Marian apparition there.39 Their fidelity, the changing world economic and political situation, and pressure from younger communist party members eager to reconnect with the world eventually led the government of Vietnam to take a new position. In the first months of 1999 it agreed to a joint study, with the Holy See, of the possibility of diplomatic relations—the essential precondition to any papal visit to their country, from the Vietnamese point of view.

  Sarajevo and Beirut

  On the weekend of April 12 and 13, 1997, John Paul was finally able to go on pilgrimage to Sarajevo. Arriving at the Bosnian capital’s airport on the afternoon of April 12, he described himself as a “pilgrim of peace and friendship” come to urge a rejection of the “the inhuman logic of violence.” 40 After the arrival ceremony, the Pope was driven to Sacred Heart Cathedral, where he presented Cardinal Vinko Puljić with the oil lamp he had had hung and kept lit in St. Peter’s Basilica as a reminder to pilgrims of Bosnia’s suffering and of the imperative of solidarity with those under brutal attack. Preaching in Serbo-Croatian at a Vespers service for the priests, nu
ns, religious brothers, and seminarians of Bosnia, the Pope spoke of Sarajevo as a “martyr-city” still “scarred by a violent and crazed ‘logic’ of death, division, and annihilation.” He thanked the priests who had remained with their people during the worst of the war, urged all to make “a profound examination of conscience” as the prelude to a “decisive commitment to reconciliation and peace,” and asked that special care be taken to “encourage the young, who have often been…forced by the harshness of conflict to grow up much too soon.”41

  Snow was falling, and John Paul was visibly chilled, at the Mass in Koševo Stadium on Sunday morning. One of the papal masters of ceremonies had to hold an umbrella over the shivering Pope to keep the snow off him during the liturgy. A determined John Paul once again responded to the congregation of tens of thousands and seemed to grow stronger as the Mass unfolded.

  His homily theme, chosen for a city that had often had good reason to think itself forgotten by the world, was that the people of Sarajevo always “have an advocate with God…Jesus Christ the righteous!” It was the Second Sunday of Easter, and he reminded them of what Christians had just celebrated during Holy Week. As Christ had had to suffer, so had they; as he had risen, so, now, must they: “Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, arise! You have an advocate with God! His name is Jesus Christ the righteous !” Who else but Christ, he asked, could be “an advocate for all these sufferings and tribulations” before the throne of God? “Who else can fully understand this page of your history, Sarajevo? Who else can fully understand this page of your history, O Balkan nations, and of your history, O Europe?” Who else, he asked, could give them the peace that is “born of love,” and move them to forgiveness and reconciliation?42

  Just prior to the Pope’s arrival, Bosnian security forces found a large bomb, built from twenty anti-tank mines and more than fifty pounds of plastic explosive, hidden under a bridge John Paul was scheduled to cross during his visit. The bomb was dismantled, but it had been another brush with violent death for the seventy-seven-year-old Pope. Local police and Western intelligence agencies said that the bomb seemed to have been the work of an Iranian-controlled terrorist network.43 Three weeks later, on May 3, John Paul received the credentials of the new Iranian ambassador to the Holy See.