Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  After beatifying the first Gypsy in history, Ceferino Jiménez Malla, on May 4, the Pope fulfilled a longstanding desire to visit another shattered city when he flew to Beirut on May 10, 1997. In Harissa, north of Beirut, John Paul met with Lebanese Catholic youth at the Basilica of Our Lady of Lebanon, where he signed the post-synodal apostolic exhortation that concluded the Special Assembly for Lebanon of the Synod of Bishops. In a French address to the young Lebanese, the Pope urged them to “let yourselves be seized by Christ,” and thus break out of the cycle of ethnic and sectarian violence that had destroyed so much of their country’s patrimony. After the lengthy address the Pope began joking with the young people he had called “the treasure of Lebanon”: “Now I must tell you that you have followed my address attentively. And I must tell you that I have also paid attention to you: are they reacting at the right moment? Are they applauding when they ought to? This is how I knew. So you have passed your examination!”44

  Mass on Sunday, May 14, was celebrated outdoors before a congregation of hundreds of thousands in and around the esplanade near Martyrs’ Square and the Beirut naval base. The liturgy was primarily in French, with some Arabic. The patriarchs of the Eastern Catholic Churches in Lebanon concelebrated with the Pope. The Gospel was proclaimed in the Byzantine style, and during the offertory procession of bread and wine to the altar Maronite hymns were sung. John Paul, preaching in French, stressed his long desire to come to Lebanon and the love he had for Lebanese Muslims and Druze, for Christians of other communions, and for the Catholics of the six different rites present in the country: Maronite, Melkite, Armenian, Chaldean, Syrian, and Latin. He vigorously defended the historic mission of Lebanon as a country that had once shown that “different faiths can live together in peace, brotherhood, and cooperation” and that “people can respect the rights of every individual to religious freedom.” That was wholly appropriate, for it was Christ himself who had first brought the Gospel to what was now Lebanon, whose people had been aware of the history of salvation for more than 2,000 years. Noting that Martyrs’ Square had also been called “Freedom Square” and “Unity Square,” John Paul urged those present to make their recent experience of martyrdom the occasion not to further divide their country, but to restore it in freedom and unity.

  On the flight from Rome to Beirut, a reporter had jokingly asked the Pope whether, in light of the dangers of a terrorist attack, John Paul shouldn’t give everyone on the plane general absolution. Given the political circumstances and the numbers of people involved, Beirut might have been expected to be a scene of frenzy on Sunday. In fact, those present remember it as characterized by a remarkable calm.45 For some months afterward, guests in the papal apartment in the Vatican noticed a Lebanese tablecloth, decorated with embroidered cedars, on the Pope’s dining room table. Like the “martyr-city” of Sarajevo, what he had termed “martyr-Lebanon” was a country he was determined the world would not forget.

  CELEBRITY AND SANCTITY

  The contemporary cult of celebrity, in which fame is a function of ephemera—wealth, beauty, social position, the endless attentions of the paparazzi and the international tabloid press—was another threat to the development of a new humanism for the new millennium. Self-absorption and self-indulgence, transformed into a shabby notoriety, were in conflict with the self-giving required by the Law of the Gift built into human nature, and with the message of Christ and the cross.

  On the surface, the juxtaposition of the deaths of two famous women in the late summer of 1997 was entirely coincidental. For years, the world had anticipated the death of eighty-seven-year-old Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who died on September 5. No one had expected the violent death five days earlier of Diana, Princess of Wales, killed in an automobile wreck in Paris. John Paul II saw a link between the two events: “It was providential,” he told lunch guests at the end of September, “that Mother Teresa died at the same time as Diana.” A Pole present volunteered that what seemed a coincidence had in fact illustrated the contrast between the hollow beatification that comes from modern secular celebrity and the true holiness of discipleship. John Paul, whose compassion for the family of the late Princess of Wales was as obvious as his admiration for Mother Teresa, did not disagree. Still another guest suggested that Mother Teresa was a “person-message” for our times, and the Pope agreed. She had embodied many of what he regarded as the central themes of his pontificate—the defense of life, the defense of the family, concern for the poor, the dignity of women, the human rights of the humblest of men and women. She had been a real “sister of God,” as St. Albert Chmielowski had been a “brother of our God,” John Paul said. The death of the saintly Albanian nun with whom he had enjoyed an intuitive, mutual understanding had “left us all a little orphaned.” 46

  Both Diana and Mother Teresa were “personalities.” Their lives and deaths illustrated a point John Paul had been making throughout the half-century of his priesthood: true human greatness is found in a personality that points beyond itself, as Mother Teresa’s did in pointing to the poor she served, each of whom, she once said, was Jesus in a particularly “disturbing disguise.” Wealth, beauty, and position need not be insuperable obstacles to happiness, but they can only become instruments of grace when they are surrendered to the logic of the cross, to the demands of self-giving. On the eve of the third millennium, the royal way to human happiness remained the way of self-abnegation—the way of the cross.

  In reminiscing about Mother Teresa weeks after her death, John Paul remarked, “I hope she will be a saint.” Even before her September 13 funeral Mass there were calls from around the world for an instant canonization. The Pope, determined not to let doubts be cast on the results by taking shortcuts, was content to let the process run its course. He seemed to have few doubts about its eventual outcome.47

  THE TRAVAIL OF DIALOGUE

  During 1997 and 1998, the first years of preparation for the Great Jubilee of 2000, the ecumenical dialogues with the Orthodox and Lutheran Churches, in which great hopes had been invested, ran into difficulties. And a new controversy was ignited after the Holy See issued its long-anticipated statement on the Catholic Church and the Holocaust.

  A Non-meeting and a Boycott

  The Roman Catholic dialogue with Orthodoxy experienced a particularly difficult period between the spring and fall of 1997. Hopes for a long-awaited meeting between Patriarch Aleksy II and Pope John Paul II in June 1997 were dashed, and in a way that further complicated Rome’s dialogue with the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I. The tangled web of missteps, misapprehensions, and misjudgments that led to several embarrassing outcomes illustrated just how complex the Roman Catholic–Orthodox dialogue had become. Ongoing tensions between Russian Orthodoxy and the renascent Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine, and intra-Orthodox tensions between world Orthodoxy’s largest Church, headed by Aleksy, and the claims of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, were the primary factors involved in the cancellation of John Paul’s meeting with Aleksy. The difficulties in making the meeting happen also illustrated how hard it is to get everyone moving in the same direction at the same time, even at the higher echelons of a small and disciplined bureaucracy like the Roman Curia.

  According to Cardinal Edward Cassidy, President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity [CU], the question of a meeting between John Paul and Aleksy in June 1997 was first broached in Moscow in December 1996 at a meeting between representatives of CU and the Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow. The meeting was to take place during the Second European Ecumenical Assembly in Graz in southern Austria. In the wake of this discussion, Cardinal Cassidy asked the Pope if he would be willing to go to Vienna to meet Aleksy before or during the Graz meeting. John Paul said he would, and CU started organizing the meeting on what was understood by all parties directly involved to be a confidential basis, with no public discussion until things had been finalized. But there was a leak in Moscow, a Greek Orthodox archbishop in Vienna was told that the me
eting was all set (it wasn’t), and the archbishop reported what seemed to be afoot to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew.

  Bartholomew was very unhappy that this had been arranged without his having been informed. Cardinal Cassidy told him that he had not been informed because, in fact, nothing had been settled and the Holy See was still unsure whether the meeting would take place. The Ecumenical Patriarch then informed Cassidy that if the Pope were to meet Aleksy but not him, he would take that very badly. Cassidy said that the Pope would be very happy to meet with him, but that the Ecumenical Patriarch may have gotten the wrong idea. The Pope was only going to go to Vienna for part of a day, and as the plans had evolved to date, the Pope and Aleksy would have a private meeting, a public meeting, a joint prayer service, and lunch, all in a monastery—that was it. Bartholomew said that if there was going to be a meeting between the Pope and Aleksy in Vienna, and he, Bartholomew, was going to be in Graz (a plan of which the Holy See had been unaware), then he, too, must meet with the Pope. Cassidy, after consulting with John Paul, said, fine, they’d delay the Pope’s departure until the afternoon so that he and Bartholomew could meet. The Ecumenical Patriarchate responded that that was impossible, that Bartholomew had to meet John Paul before, not after, Aleksy. Before when? CU asked. The Ecumenical Patriarchate replied that it could be a half-hour, even fifteen minutes, before Aleksy arrived. The Pope and Cassidy thought that that would be ridiculous. As Cassidy later put it, it would hardly serve Bartholomew’s wish to underline his role as first-among-Orthodox-equals to rush in, say hello, and then rush out, with Aleksy then arriving, accompanied by the world media. John Paul came up with another idea. Since Bartholomew was flying to Vienna on a private plane, why couldn’t he stop in Rome on the way so that he could be received properly and the two men could talk and have lunch together? The Ecumenical Patriarch declined. He had already been to Rome, John Paul hadn’t returned the visit, so he could not come to Rome again. This seemed to exhaust the possibilities, and the Ecumenical Patriarchate was informed that the Holy See was sorry, but there seemed to be nothing left to do. Bartholomew I then canceled his visit to Graz even after Cardinal Cassidy had insisted that the Pope’s meeting with Patriarch Aleksy hadn’t been finalized.

  As indeed it hadn’t. There had been laborious discussions over the joint declaration that John Paul and Aleksy would sign; the most difficult issue remained the question of what the Orthodox regarded as “proselytism” by Greek Catholics in Ukraine. Property issues involving churches in Ukraine also remained to be resolved, the Holy See arguing that it was moving things along as fast as possible, and Moscow disagreeing.

  While negotiations on these questions continued, there was another stumble. At the end of the International Eucharistic Congress in Wrocław, Poland, on June 1, 1997, Cardinal Achille Silvestrini, Prefect of the Congregation for Oriental Churches, announced to the world press that the meeting between John Paul and Aleksy would in fact take place. This unintentionally violated CU’s solemn promise to the Patriarchate of Moscow that there would be no statement or even public reference to such an event until the Patriarchate’s Synod had held its June 11 meeting. In the wake of that session, the Patriarchate canceled the Vienna meeting between Patriarch Aleksy and the Pope. In a television interview in Moscow, Patriarch Aleksy publicly blamed the Holy See for the cancellation. Cardinal Cassidy, while acknowledging that problems remained, believes that the more serious reason for the cancellation was that Patriarch Aleksy couldn’t get the full agreement of his Synod to his meeting with the Pope. Orthodox opposition to the meeting, Cassidy was convinced, was the reason the encounter in Vienna never took place.48

  But that was not the end of this embarrassing sequence. After, and presumably because of, the failure to reach agreement on Bartholomew’s meeting the Pope prior to what turned out to be the meeting with Aleksy, the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople informed the Holy See that, for the first time in a quarter-century, it would not be sending a delegation to the annual celebration of the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul in Rome on June29. Weeks later, having been criticized by some of his metropolitans for not sending representatives to Rome, Bartholomew remarked that this had all been just a “passing cloud.” It was an unprecedented rebuke, nonetheless. Cardinal Cassidy was then asked by several American bishops what should be done about Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew’s scheduled visit to sixteen U.S. cities in October, in which numerous ecumenical events were planned. Cassidy talked to the Pope, and John Paul said that the plans for the ecumenical meetings with Bartholomew should go ahead “as if none of this had ever happened.” Moreover, John Paul said, a Roman delegation would be going to the Ecumenical Patriarchate as usual, on November 30, for the feast of St. Andrew.49

  The delegation was received cordially by Patriarch Bartholomew, who had, however, raised further, substantive questions about the future of the Roman Catholic–Orthodox dialogue during his American tour. In a lecture at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., on October 21, 1997, Bartholomew claimed that, during the second millennium, the “divergence” between Orthodoxy and Rome had “continually” increased, so that today the obstacles to the restoration of full communion could not be reduced to “a problem of organizational structures [or] jurisdictional arrangements.” Something “deeper and more substantive” blocked the way to communion between East and West: “the manner in which we exist has become ontologically different.”50 That formulation, radically different from the vision John Paul II had articulated in Ut Unum Sint, seemed to suggest that there were essential, possibly even unbridgeable, differences between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Two days later, Bartholomew participated in an ecumenical service with Cardinal William Keeler in Baltimore, praying with men whom, he implied at Georgetown, he regarded as heterodox, but whom he now described as brothers in Christ.

  Ecumenical officials at the U.S. Bishops’ Conference were later told by members of the Patriarch’s staff that Bartholomew had made major changes in his Georgetown address at the last minute, eliminating, for example, an attack on Uniatism (which would have meant, in practice, the Greek Catholics of Ukraine), and that there hadn’t been a chance to “fix” all the language in the address before it was delivered. The suggestion was that Catholics should watch what the Ecumenical Patriarch did (as in the joint prayer service in Baltimore) as well as what he said (as in the address at Georgetown).51 Even those who sympathized with Bartholomew’s difficulties with the anti-ecumenical factions in Orthodoxy were left wondering just how full communion could be imagined with an Orthodoxy that thought itself to be living an “ontologically different”—which was to say, essentially different—experience of the Church and the sacraments than did Roman Catholics. Four months later, after an intra-Orthodox meeting of twelve Church leaders in Istanbul, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew told the Belgian daily La Libre Belgique that Catholicism and Orthodoxy would “be entering the third millennium without regaining unity.”52

  John Paul II cordially welcomed the Orthodox delegation that attended the celebration of Sts. Peter and Paul in Rome in June 1998, and Catholic ecumenists appreciated the positive things the delegation leader, Metropolitan Jean de Pergame, said about Ut Unum Sint. Late in 1998, progress seemed possible on at least one front when Patriarch Teoctist of the Romanian Orthodox Church announced that he would welcome a pilgrimage by John Paul II to Romania, which in May 1999 became the first majority-Orthodox country the Pope visited. Despite this development, and several more encouraging statements by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in 1998 and early 1999, the hard fact remained that the Pope’s visionary hope of closing the breach between Rome and the East by the turn of the millennium was not going to be realized.

  In fidelity to Vatican II and to his sense of kairos, John Paul had bent every possible effort in that direction—too much so, according to critics in Ukraine and elsewhere. No one, though, could reasonably claim that John Paul II’s efforts had been reciprocated by the majority of Orthodoxy’s leaders.
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br />   Remembrance

  In twenty years of meetings with Jewish communities at the Vatican and in every corner of the world, John Paul had persistently, vigorously, and unambiguously condemned the Shoah, the Holocaust of the European Jews during the Second World War. Perhaps his most eloquent statement had come during a meeting with Jewish leaders in Warsaw, on June 14, 1987, when he described the Holocaust as a universal icon of evil:

  Be sure, dear brothers, that…this Polish Church is in a spirit of profound solidarity with you when she looks closely at the terrible realization of the extermination—the unconditional extermination—of your nation, an extermination carried out with premeditation. The threat against you was also a threat against us; this latter was not realized to the same extent, because it did not have time to be realized to the same extent. It was you who suffered this terrible sacrifice of extermination: one might say that you suffered it also on behalf of those who were in the purifying power of suffering. The more atrocious the suffering, the greater the purification. The more painful the experience, the greater the hope…. [Because] of this terrible experience…you have become a loud warning voice for all humanity, for all nations, all the powers of this world, all systems and every person. More than anyone else, it is precisely you who have become this saving warning. I think that in this sense you continue your particular vocation, showing yourselves still to be the heirs of that election to which God is faithful. This is your mission in the contemporary world before all the peoples, the nations, all of humanity, the Church….53