Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  That John Paul broke the mold of the bureaucratic-managerial papacy will certainly bear on the deliberations of the conclave that will elect his successor. The world and the Church have expectations of a pope that were simply not in place in 1978. The world expects a witnessing pope, not a bureaucrat or an impossibly distant, ethereal figure. The Catholic Church has a new and powerful presence in the world because John Paul II has touched consciences in a way that political leaders cannot. That ability to appeal to conscience is papal leadership on the world stage in the twenty-first century, and it is a quality that papal electors cannot ignore in pondering the succession. The Church also has new expectations of a pope. John Paul has reshaped the primacy in a decisively evangelical direction while avoiding the iron cage of bureaucracy. The qualities necessary to carry on his ministry of “presence” to the Church throughout the world will have to be taken into account when considering his successor. Taken together, these two sets of expectations suggest that the Italian and curial hope for a return to pre-Wojtyła “normality” is likely to be frustrated.23

  In Universi Dominici Gregis, John Paul made unmistakably clear his conviction that papal conclaves cannot be understood on the model of democratic electoral politics. Theologically, that means that the Holy Spirit is the supreme protagonist of a conclave. At the same time, the Holy Spirit works through human instruments, the cardinal-electors, who must measure the fit between the historical circumstances and the papabili, the men-who-might-be-pope, as best they can. These electors cannot help being aware of the dramatic reconstruction of the papacy John Paul II has achieved, and the new expectations it has created. Many will be aware that John Paul was able to revitalize the papacy because he had been the evangelically successful bishop of a local Church. Some will likely conclude that, insofar as any man can be prepared to be the Successor of Peter, that form of preparation has once again proven sound.

  The cardinals will also have to take account of the major challenges facing the next pope in weighing candidates for the office. In a world of resurgent religious conviction, the Catholic defense of religious freedom and the Catholic commitment to culture-formation through proposing rather than imposing will have to be vigorously promoted, in dialogue with Orthodoxy, Protestantism, Judaism, Islam, and other world religions. Cloning, stem-cell research, and other developments in biotechnology are among the developments that will raise previously unimaginable moral questions in the years ahead. What had seemed the assured triumph of democracy in the early 1990s now looks far more fragile. The values of Christian humanism will have to be applied to public life in a world in which new forms of authoritarianism will undoubtedly emerge. Within the Church itself, the rich and diverse teaching of John Paul II remains to be digested, and facilitating that process will loom large as a task for the next pontificate.

  These realities, and the fact that the electoral college for the next conclave will have the lowest percentage of Italian electors in a very long time, make it likely that nationality will have no significant role in choosing the next Bishop of Rome.24 Given the expectations the Church and the world now have of the pope, nationality is neither a major asset nor a crippling liability. It is almost an irrelevance—which is precisely the way things ought to be. And that, too, is a historic accomplishment of the pontificate of John Paul II, preparing the Church for a new millennium.

  THE LONG-DISTANCE DISCIPLE

  As he aged, John Paul II’s rhetorical style became simpler and purer, the distillate of decades of prayer and reflection. Some things about John Paul did not change, though, even as he became frailer physically. Friends and visitors found that the Pope’s most recent encounters with pain and suffering had deepened his convictions that God is in charge of his life, that everyone has a place in the great cosmic drama of creation and redemption, and that the world’s various melodies have a divine composer—even the melodies piped by discordant flutes. He remained a man with a profound sense of kairos, convinced that everything has its time, that time tests ideas and projects, and that one shouldn’t accelerate that testing process artificially. He did not demand measurable results from every intellectual and pastoral initiative he had taken. In some cases, he was content to know that he had planted certain ideas in the life of the Church, ideas that would flower many years after his death. “It is the ‘turning point’ that is the most important,” John Paul once wrote, “as when a train enters a switch where an inch decides its future direction.”25 Still, on those rare occasions when he looked back rather than ahead, Karol Wojtyła could detect the truth of what his old friend and fellow philosopher Father Józef Tischner had once said of him: that he was a man whose “ideas turned into institutions.”26

  Approaching the completion of his eighth decade, he remained a Carmelite at heart. The deepest meaning of prayer, he once wrote, could only be understood by reflecting for a long time on a passage from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans:

  For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved (Romans 8.19–24).

  His was the prayer of a joyful man and a witness to hope, who believed and wanted to affirm before the world “the value of existence, the value of creation and of hope in the future life.”27 He was utterly convinced that “evil…is neither fundamental nor definitive,” but he had also learned that the joy a Christian experiences from knowing Christ’s ultimate victory over evil intensifies one’s awareness of evil’s enduring power in the world.28 Life, and the daily papal duty of bringing the world’s suffering before the Lord in prayer, had deepened his Carmelite intuition that all roads to the truth eventually wind their way to Calvary, to the cross. And Calvary was, and remains, a lonely place.

  Like many Christians his age, John Paul II in his late seventies experienced something of the loneliness that Danuta Michałowska had explored dramatically in I Without Name. Even as he entered more fully into the experience of Christ’s abandonment on the cross, the hope he drew from the Easter victory that lay beyond that singular, redemptive abandonment made him a more compelling public figure. A different kind of loneliness—the loneliness of the autonomous, self-asserting self—haunted the world of the late twentieth century. Freedom understood as willfulness had not led to a net increase in the sum total of human happiness. Willfulness had, in fact, made millions even lonelier, living alone with their rights but with little else. Analyzing this frigid cultural climate, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre concluded that the world was waiting not for Godot, “but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.”29 And that is as good a description as any of what Karol Wojtyła had become on the edge of a new millennium: a man whose lifelong experience of forming communities out of the loneliness of modernity, from the “little family” of Rodzinka and the “milieu” of Środowisko to the largest crowds in human history, had been given global scope through the mysteries of chosenness.

  The antidote to despair amid the sundry madnesses of late modernity, the Pope had long proposed, was the experience of a community of self-giving love in which we learn the destiny that awaits us on the far side of loneliness—life within the community of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That is what St. Benedict had done in forming monastic communities in what history knows as the “Dark Ages.” That is what Karol Wojtyła did throughout his distinctively twentieth-century life.

  If the Church of the future knows John Paul II as “John Paul the Great,” it will be for this reason: at another moment of peril, when barbarisms of various sorts threatened civilization, a heroic figure was called fro
m the Church to meet the barbarian threat and propose an alternative. In the case of Pope Leo the Great (440–461), the barbarians in question were Attila and his Huns. In the case of Gregory the Great (590–604), the barbarians were the Lombards. In the case of John Paul II, the barbarism threatening civilization has been a set of ideas whose consequences include barbarous politics—defective humanisms that, in the name of humanity and its destiny, create new tyrannies and compound human suffering.

  A yearning for the absolute, it seems, is built into the human condition. When fragments of truth are absolutized by barbarians, the world’s suffering begins to take on the aspect of the demonic.30 That is what happened at Auschwitz and in the Gulag Archipelago. That is what happens when utility becomes the sole measure of human life. Against the new barbarisms set loose in the world by absolutized fragments of truth, Karol Wojtyła preached a consistent message, a thoroughly Christian humanism, throughout more than fifty years of priestly ministry: you are greater than you imagine, and greater than the late modern world has let you imagine. By demonstrating, not merely asserting, that faith can transform the world, John Paul II helped restore a spiritual dimension to a history that had become flat, stale, and, as a consequence, brutal.

  During almost eighty years of personal pilgrimage to what his former student Halina Bortnowska once described, simply, as “the place he really wants to be,” Karol Wojtyła came to resemble G. K. Chesterton’s description of Thomas More: “he was above all things, historic: he represented at once a type, a turning-point and an ultimate destiny. If there had not been that particular man at that particular moment, the whole of history would have been different.”31 And, like More’s, John Paul II’s historic qualities have not been generically humanistic, but specifically religious, in origin. They have been, in a word, Christian qualities.

  The Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas once said that what most impressed him about John Paul II was that he was a man utterly without fear. That fearlessness is not Stoic, nor is it a consequence of Karol Wojtyła’s “autonomy” as someone independent of others. It is an unmistakably Christian fearlessness. In Christian faith, fear is not eliminated but transformed, through a profound personal encounter with Christ and his Cross—the place where all human fear was offered by the Son to the Father, setting us all free from fear.32 All popes are in some sense men of mystery. That has to do, finally, not with the mysteriousness of the office and its history, but with the Mystery that popes serve. The encounter with that Mystery—the truth of the world revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ—is the source of Karol Wojtyła’s witness to hope. That is the hope that can enable the Catholic Church of the twenty-first century to propose and practice the Gospel of God’s devotion to humanity, in what John Paul II believes can be a springtime of the human spirit.

  Piotr and Teresa Malecki, longtime members of Karol Wojtyła’s Środowisko, were staying in the papal villa at Castel Gandolfo in the late summer of 1997 as the Pope’s guests. Their bedroom was just below his, and before dawn each morning they knew by the thumping of his cane that he was up and about. One morning, at breakfast, the Pope asked whether the noise was disturbing them. No, they answered, they were getting up for Mass anyway. “But Wujek,” they asked, “why do you get up at that hour of the morning?”

  Because, said Karol Wojtyła, the 264th Bishop of Rome, “I like to watch the sun rise.”33

  AFTERWORD

  A Church for the New Millennium

  The Great Jubilee of 2000

  JANUARY 22–26, 1999

  John Paul II concludes the Synod for America in Mexico City and then visits St. Louis.

  MAY 2, 1999

  Beatification of Padre Pio.

  JUNE 5–17, 1999

  John Paul II’s seventh pilgrimage to Poland.

  JUNE 29, 1999

  Papal Letter Concerning Pilgrimage to the Places Linked to the History of Salvation.

  OCTOBER 1, 1999

  Opening the second Special Assembly for Europe of the Synod of Bishops, John Paul II proclaims St. Catherine of Siena, St. Bridget of Sweden, and St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) co-patrons of Europe.

  NOVEMBER 5–9, 1999

  John Paul II in India and the Republic of Georgia.

  DECEMBER 24–25, 1999

  At Christmas Midnight Mass, John Paul II opens the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica and solemnly inaugurates the Great Jubilee of 2000.

  JANUARY 18, 2000

  Ecumenical opening of the Holy Door of the Basilica of St. Paul Outside-the-Walls in Rome.

  FEBRUARY 23, 2000

  “Spiritual Pilgrimage” to Ur, home of Abraham.

  FEBRUARY 26, 2000

  Jubilee pilgrimage to Mount Sinai.

  MARCH 12, 2000

  John Paul II celebrates “Day of Pardon” at St. Peter’s.

  MARCH 21–26, 2000

  Jubilee pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

  APRIL 30, 2000

  Canonization of St. Faustina Kowalska.

  MAY 7, 2000

  Commemoration of the martyrs of the twentieth century at the Roman Colosseum.

  MAY 13, 2000

  Beatification of Fátima visionaries in Portugal.

  JUNE 18, 2000

  Forty-seventh International Eucharistic Congress opens in Rome.

  AUGUST 14–20, 2000

  Eighth International World Youth Day in Rome.

  SEPTEMBER 3, 2000

  John Paul II beatifies Pope Pius IX and Pope John XXIII in Rome.

  SEPTEMBER 5, 2000

  Declaration Dominus Iesus of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

  OCTOBER 1, 2000

  Canonization of 120 martyrs of China, St. Katherine Drexel, and St. Josephine Bakhita.

  OCTOBER 6–8, 2000

  Fourteen hundred bishops make jubilee pilgrimage to Rome.

  OCTOBER 15, 2000

  Hundreds of thousands celebrate “Jubilee of Families” during driving rain in St. Peter’s Square.

  OCTOBER 31, 2000

  John Paul II names St. Thomas More “patron of politicians and statesmen.”

  JANUARY 6, 2001

  Solemn closing of the Great Jubilee of 2000.

  On a crisp Roman winter night in late 1999, Pope John Paul II seemed to have reached the climax of a life of extraordinary drama.

  For more than two decades, he had conducted his papacy in the conviction that his God-given vocation was to lead the Church across the threshold of its third millennium. On more than one occasion during that period, history was poised to take another direction: John Paul II had been the target of several assassination attempts; he had endured numerous hospitalizations; he had borne the daily grind of sixteen-hour days, year after year. In the latter half of the 1990s, it sometimes seemed as if the septuagenarian Pope might break physically under the constant weight of the traditional papal “care of all the Churches.”

  Yet here he was, shortly before midnight on Christmas Eve 1999, standing before the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica, about to inaugurate the Great Jubilee of 2000. In a departure from tradition that spoke volumes about John Paul’s understanding of the jubilee, the Pope did not symbolically knock the door down by rapping on a loosened brick with a gold and ivory hammer. Rather, John Paul II walked slowly up to the Holy Door and gently touched it with both hands. The great bronze doors swung open easily—a fitting symbol, the Pope thought, for the gently welcoming embrace of God’s mercy, which the Great Jubilee of 2000 invited the Church and the world to experience anew.

  John Paul II knelt for several minutes of prayer at the open Holy Door. As he bowed his head and leaned on his pastoral staff, more than one of those watching imagined that the Pope might be reciting the Canticle of Simeon, in which the aged prophet, after seeing the Christ child, prays, “Now, Lord, you may dismiss your servant, in peace, according to your word” (Luke 2.29). Yet as the Great Jubilee of 2000 unfolded in the months to follow, it became clear that this was
no valedictory. Rather, the jubilee gave the Pope a unique platform from which to reiterate, often dramatically, the great themes of his papacy: God’s passionate love for the world he had created; God’s presence in history, through the Jewish people, the Church, and the human quest for truth; unity among Christians; reconciliation between Christians and Jews; the inalienable dignity of every human life; calling the young to moral heroism; living freedom for excellence in free and virtuous societies.

  Throughout the Great Jubilee, a year in which millions of men and women experienced a deepening of their spiritual lives, John Paul continued to embody a papacy that is primarily evangelical and pastoral rather than bureaucratic and managerial. The success of the jubilee as a yearlong celebration of spiritual renewal thus strengthened the position of those who argued that, with John Paul II, the Catholic Church and the papacy have passed through a historic gate: a gate hinged in such a way that, once traversed, there is no turning back. In that respect and many others, the Great Jubilee of 2000 was about the future, not the past.

  IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF PATRIARCHS, PROPHETS, AND APOSTLES

  If the jubilee was the “key” to his pontificate, as John Paul II frequently insisted, the key to the jubilee was the Pope’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land in March 2000.

  John Paul II had yearned to go there since the first days of his papacy. Whenever the seemingly insuperable difficulties were explained to the Pope by his diplomats, he would ask, “Quando mi permetterete di andare?” [“When will you let me go?”] In his 1994 apostolic letter on the Great Jubilee, Tertio Millennio Adveniente, John Paul proposed an even more ambitious papal pilgrimage through the great sites of biblical history: Ur, home of Abraham, father of believers; Sinai, site of the covenant with Israel and the gift of the Ten Commandments; Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Jerusalem, in the Holy Land itself; and Damascus, marking the conversion of St. Paul and the beginning of the mission to the Gentiles. Five years later, Holy See diplomats were privately expressing doubts that any part of this dream could be realized.