Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  10.See Christian Mission and Interreligious Dialogue, Paul Mojzes and Leonard Swidler, eds. (Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), which includes both Tomko’s “provocation” lecture and his response to his critics.

  11.Author’s interview with Cardinal Jozef Tomko, January 19, 1997.

  12.John Paul II, Redemptoris Missio, 62.1, in Miller, Encyclicals [emphasis in original].

  13.“Missionary evangelization… is the primary service which the Church can render to every individual and to all humanity in the modern world.” [Ibid., 2.4.]

  14.Ibid., 2.3 [emphasis in original].

  15.Ibid., 1.1.

  16.Ibid., 5.3.

  17.Ibid., 6.1.

  18.Ibid.

  19.Ibid., 10.1.

  20.On this crucial point, see Redemptoris Missio, 11: “Mission is an issue of faith, an accurate indicator of our faith in Christ and His love for us.” Evangelization is indeed about salvation: the salvation of the members of the Church, no less than those to whom they preach.

  21.On these six points, see Richard John Neuhaus, “Reviving the Missionary Mandate,” First Things 16 (October 1991), pp. 61–64.

  22.John Paul II, Redemptoris Missio, 37.5, in Miller, Encyclicals.

  23.See ibid., 37.6–37.10.

  24.Ibid., 37.11–37.14.

  25.Ibid., 39.2 [emphasis in original].

  26.Ibid., 42.1–45.4.

  27.Ibid., 45.4. The Pope’s reference to martyrdom was no rhetorical flourish; in 1996, for example, forty-six Catholics were killed while working in the missions: three bishops, eighteen priests, eight religious brothers, thirteen religious sisters, and four lay workers. They were martyred in Algeria, Ghana, Zaire, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Bosnia, Cambodia, and India.

  28.See ibid., 50.1–50.3; 55.1–57.3.

  29.See ibid., 52.1–54.2.

  30.Ibid., 58.2.

  31.Although dated December 7, 1990, Redemptoris Missio was not published until January 22, 1991, when it was presented at a press conference by Cardinal Jozef Tomko. Tomko’s presentation may be found in OR [EWE], January 28, 1991, pp. 1, 21. That the encyclical was presented six days after the Gulf War had started and massive anti-Soviet demonstrations had broken out in Lithuania also made for a problematic reception in the world news media.

  One exception to the general neglect of Redemptoris Missio in the West was the positive reception the encyclical received in many evangelical Protestant circles. The International Bulletin of Missionary Research editorialized that the encyclical was a “refreshingly positive document, breathing confidence, optimism, and encouragement; devoid of condemnations or anathemas, yet pointing to pitfalls to be avoided…. Itdeserves study by all Christians concerned about the Church’s missionary mandate.” [International Bulletin of Missionary Research 15:2 (April 1991), p. 1.]

  32.John Paul II, Redemptoris Missio, 86.1, in Miller, Encyclicals.

  33.Richard John Neuhaus, “Christian Mission and the Third Millennium,” First Things 13 (May 1991), p. 8.

  34.On the countercultural character of Redemptoris Missio, see Neuhaus, ibid., and “Reviving the Missionary Mandate.”

  35.The Byelorussian situation was further complicated by the fact that the dioceses in what was now the Byelorussian SSR involved territory that had once been part of czarist Russia and/or interwar Poland.

  36.The new Archdiocese of Minsk-Mohilev would serve some 350,000 Latin-rite Catholics, living in some seventy parishes served by thirty priests. The new diocese of Pinsk had approximately 100,000 Catholics with thirty-two parishes and twenty priests. The new diocese of Grodno (established on territory that had belonged to the Archdiocese of Wilno [Vilnius] in interwar Poland) included some 900,000 Catholics served by more than 120 parishes. [See OR (EWE), pp. 6–7.]

  37.Canon 371§2.

  38.The Moscow area had an unknown number of Catholics of Polish, Lithuanian, and Russian origin, as well as Catholic diplomats and students. There were also some 10,000 Catholics in Leningrad, mostly of Polish origin, and Catholic “Volga Germans” were beginning to return to European Russia from their places of deportation in the central Asian steppes. Siberia had been essentially without Catholic priests since the mid-1930s, but Catholic life had begun to revive in the capital, Novosibirsk, and in the cities of Prokopievsk, Irkutsk, Tomsk, and Omsk. In Kazakhstan there were more than 600,000 Catholics of German, Polish, and Ukrainian descent, deportees or the descendants of deportees during the Stalin period. [The remarkably tangled history of the Catholic Church in what then constituted the USSR was summarized in OR (EWE), April 22, 1991, pp. 1, 6–7.]

  39.The Patriarchate of Moscow’s ancient sensitivities were compounded by the fact that the Russian Orthodox leadership had not played a heroic role during the last decades of Soviet communism, in marked contrast to the Catholic leadership in Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere. The Patriarchate’s post–World War II entanglement with the Soviet government, for whom it had frequently served as a mouthpiece in international ecumenical conferences, was a further complication. Russian

  Orthodox priests and laity who had resisted the corruption of the Soviet embrace often identified ecumenism with communist manipulations of the Church, and the Orthodox leadership directly involved with world ecumenical activity had not yet persuasively demonstrated its independence from the manipulations of politicians, the state security services, or the new “mafias” of ex-communists that were taking advantage of economic restructuring in the USSR.

  40.Author’s interviews with Cardinal Edward Cassidy, January 14, 1997, and John Long, SJ, May 5, 1997. Sodano and Cassidy were cardinals-elect at this time, and were created cardinals on June 28, 1991; for the sake of simplicity I refer to them as “Cardinal” here.

  41.Bishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, forty-five, the former apostolic administrator of Minsk, was named Apostolic Administrator of European Russia with residence in Moscow, and given the title of archbishop. Father Joseph Werth, SJ, the thirty-eight-year-old son of German parents deported to Kazakhstan, was named Apostolic Administrator of Novosibirsk. Father Jan Lenga, MIC, the forty-one-year-old Ukrainian-born son of Polish parents, was named Apostolic Administrator of Karaganda in Kazakhstan.

  42.Author’s interview with John Long, SJ, May 5, 1997.

  43.The Patriarchate’s statement of refusal to participate in the 1991 Eurosynod, and the subsequent Holy See response, may be found in the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity Information Service #81 (1992/III-IV), pp. 84–86. The Patriarchate’s statement explicitly cited the establishment of the apostolic administrations as one cause for its refusal to participate. The Holy See responded that it had made a “great effort” to explain the situation to the Patriarchate “in the last six months.” Which was a month or two too late. On May 31, 1991, John Paul wrote a letter to all the Catholic bishops of Europe, explaining what had been done in the past months about regularizing Catholic life in central and eastern Europe, and encouraging the burial of ancient animosities. “Brothers who once shared the same sufferings and trials,” the Pope wrote, “ought not to oppose one another today, but should look together at the future opening before them with promising signs of hope.” [Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity Information Service #77 (1991/II), p. 37.]

  44.Author’s interview with Henryk Woźniakowski, June 5, 1997.

  45.Author’s interview with Cardinal Franciszek Macharski, June 12, 1991.

  46.PawełŚpiewak, “Taking Sides,” in “Clericalism: Myth or Reality,” a pre-visit symposium in Warsaw Voice, June 2, 1991, p. 7.

  47.Author’s interview with Zbigniew Brzeziński, February 7, 1997.

  48.“Press Release from the Polish Episcopate,” OR [EWE], March 18, 1991, p. 12.

  49.This anomaly was finally resolved in 1996 when, in what a leading Ukrainian historian described as an “unprecedented act of generosity on the part of the Pope,” the Greek Catholic Diocese of Przemyśl was raised to an a
rchdiocese (of Przemyśl-Warszawa) and removed from the jurisdiction of the Primate so as to be subordinate to the Greek Catholic Major-Archbishop of L’viv. [Author’s interview with Bogdan Bociurkiw, August 10, 1996.]

  50.Author’s interview with Jerzy Janik, July 17, 1996.

  51.See, inter alia, Bernstein and Politi, His Holiness, pp. 489–494.

  52.See, again, ibid.

  53.Author’s interview with Cardinal Jan Schotte, March 14, 1997.

  54.Martin Kettle, “John Paul’s Grand Design for Europe,” The Guardian, April 27, 1990, p. 14.

  55.John Paul II, “An East-West Exchange for Future of Europe,” OR [EWE], June 11, 1990, pp. 1, 6–7 [emphasis in original].

  56.Author’s interview with Cardinal Miloslav Vlk, December 5, 1997. Vlk thought that one exception to this general incomprehension was Cardinal Joachim Meissner of Cologne, who had previously been bishop of divided Berlin. Meissner’s appointment to Cologne in December 1988 had caused much controversy, but in light of Vlk’s reading of Meissner’s knowledgeability, it may have been that John Paul, seeing 1989 coming, wanted a cardinal in Germany’s most prestigious See with precisely this kind of understanding.

  57.Author’s interview with Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, October 24, 1996.

  58.Author’s interview with Cardinal Jozef Tomko, January 19, 1997.

  59.Author’s interviews with Cardinal Bernard Law, November 9, 1996; Cardinal Jozef Tomko, January 19, 1997; and Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, October 24, 1996.

  60.Author’s interview with Cardinal Miloslav Vlk, December 5, 1997.

  61.See OR [EWE], December 23–30, 1991, pp. 3–4, 13–14.

  62.Sodano was, of course, the Secretary of State. Laghi was Prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education; Sánchez, a Filipino, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy; Cassidy the President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity; Noè, a former papal master of ceremonies; and Angelini, the President of the Pontifical Council for Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers.

  63.Cardinal Posadas was murdered in still-unexplained circumstances on May 24, 1993.

  64.John Paul II, Spiritual Pilgrimage, p. 154.

  65.See Insegnamenti di Giovanni Paolo II, 1991.

  66.OR [EWE], August 26, 1991, p. 1.

  67.The full text of the papal message was as follows:

  The announcement of your election as Ecumenical Patriarch has brought me great joy. The bonds of fraternal affection which already unite us will doubtlessly facilitate our collaboration in view of the re-establishment of full communion between our Churches. I ardently hope that the theological dialogue whose opening I had the joy of announcing with your beloved predecessor, Dimitrios I, on the occasion of my memorable visit to the Phanar will continue. May the Lord grant Your Holiness an abundance of his light and strength in your new and difficult pastoral charge. I assure you of my prayer and of all my fraternal charity. IOANNES PAULUS PP. II. [OR (EWE), November 4, 1991, p. 12.]

  68.Author’s interview with Ronald G. Roberson, CSP, March 31, 1997. For an overview of the difficulties that Bartholomew faced with both the Turkish government and his Orthodox brethren, see Ronald G. Roberson, CSP, The Eastern Christian Churches: A Brief Survey, 6th ed. (Rome: Edizioni “Orientalia Christiana,” 1995), pp. 43–46.

  69.Author’s interview with Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, March 18, 1997.

  70.Ibid.

  71.See OR [EWE], January 15, 1992, p. 12 for the full list of conditions.

  72.Cited in The Tablet, January 18, 1992, p. 79.

  73.Author’s interview with Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, March 18, 1997.

  74.Author’s interview with Monsignor Vincenzo Paglia, December 7, 1997.

  75.See OR [EWE] April 1, 1992, pp. 6–7 for all the details. John Paul explained the rationale for the changes in an apostolic letter to the entire Church in Poland; the text may be found in ibid., p. 1.

  76.The announcement was made in the form of a papal letter to Cardinal Fiorenzo Angelini, President of the Pontifical Council for Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers; see OR [EWE], May 27, 1992, p. 2.

  77.Author’s interview with Archbishop Norberto Rivera Carrera, November 21, 1997.

  78.In 1979, John Paul II wrote two letters, one to all the Church’s bishops and the other to all the Church’s priests, on Holy Thursday. In 1980, there was no letter to priests, but rather an apostolic letter to the bishops, Dominicae Cenae, “On the Mystery and Worship of the Eucharist,” with obvious implications for the priesthood. In 1981, the Pope wrote another letter to bishops on Holy Thursday, marking the 1,600th anniversary of the First Council of Constantinople and the 1,550th anniversary of the Council of Ephesus; once again there was no letter to priests. Beginning in 1982, John Paul wrote an annual “Letter to All the Priests of the Church.”

  79.See John Paul II, Letters to My Brother Priests.

  80. See Philip Jenkins, Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

  81.See “Editor’s Introduction to Pastores Dabo Vobis,” in Miller, Exhortations, pp. 466–468.

  82.Pastores Dabo Vobis, 12.4.

  83.Ibid.

  84.Ibid. 21.2.

  85.Ibid. 23.2 [emphasis in original].

  Another New Testament image, St. Paul’s depiction of Christ as the Bridegroom of the Church (see Ephesians 5.21–32), gives further definition to this priestly form of holiness: the priesthood is an office of love, in which the priest is “called to live out Christ’s spousal love toward the Church, his Bride.” Thus the priest (who, as a man, shares in the human dynamics John Paul analyzed in his Theology of the Body) must be a distinctive kind of lover:

  …the priest’s life ought to radiate this spousal character, which demands that he be a witness to Christ’s spousal love and thus be capable of loving people with a heart which is new, generous and pure, with genuine self-detachment, with full, constant and faithful dedication and at the same time with a kind of “divine jealousy” (cf. 2 Corinthians 11.2), and even with a kind of maternal tenderness, capable of bearing “the pangs of birth” until “Christ be formed” in the faithful (cf. Galatians 4.19). [Ibid., 22.3.]

  86.Ibid., 36.1 [emphasis in original].

  87.See John Paul II, “Ad Limina Address to the Bishops of Michigan and Ohio,” OR [EWE], May 27, 1998, p. 5–6.

  88.See John Paul II, Pastores Dabo Vobis, 35.2, 34.6, in Miller, Exhortations.

  89.Ibid., 39.2.

  90.Ibid., 41.2 [emphasis in original].

  91.Ibid., 51.2.

  92.Ibid., 53.1; author’s interview with Archbishop Christoph Schönborn, OP, December 11, 1997.

  93.See John Paul II, Pastores Dabo Vobis, 60.2, 60.3, 60.6, in Miller, Exhortations.

  94.Pastores Dabo Vobis also takes account of the new demographics of seminary life, in which men enter the seminary at a latter stage in life, often after some experience of a professional career, but just as often without a detailed understanding of the Church’s doctrine and practice. Thus, following a Synod recommendation, the Pope proposes a “pre-theology” experience of a year or two, in which spiritual formation and charitable service are combined with a broad-based introduction to Catholic thought and culture. [Ibid., 62.1–62.6.] In the wake of Pastores Dabo Vobis, “pre-theology” programs of various sorts were launched throughout the world and are now a staple of priestly formation.

  The exhortation’s stress on rigorous academic formation has raised questions among some responsible Latin American bishops who describe a local situation in which the brief period of formation given evangelical Protestant leaders often results in effective pastors. The bishops’ concern is that the academic rigor encouraged by Pastores Dabo Vobis risks making the seminary and the priesthood less attractive in these cultural circumstances. It is an issue sure to be debated in world Catholicism well into the twenty-first century. Pastores Dabo Vobis concludes with the first extended discussion of ongoing education for Catholic pri
ests in the history of papal teaching. Continuing education programs, focused on theological renewal and pastoral skills, had become a regular feature of Catholic life in the years after the Council. John Paul, convinced that priestly formation is an ongoing task that does not stop at the moment of ordination, reflects on this phenomenon under the biblical rubric of Paul’s injunction to Timothy: “I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you” (2 Timothy 1.6). That, the Pope suggests, is the deepest reason for ongoing priestly formation: “to release all the extraordinary riches of grace and responsibility” contained in the gift given in ordination. John Paul also discusses continuing education in terms of professional updating and as a matter of justice for the people of the Church, who have the right to hear the word preached effectively. But he characteristically locates a discussion that is usually focused on “professionalization” in an evangelical context. Ongoing clergy education exists to enable each priest “to safeguard and develop in faith his awareness of the total and marvelous truth of his being : he is a minister of Christ and steward of the mysteries of God.” That, the Pope suggests, is the ground on which the priest can also develop his sense of unity with the people of the Church and his commitment to the Church’s saving mission. [Ibid., 70–75.]

  95.Author’s interview with Cardinal William W. Baum, November 5, 1996.

  96.Letter to the author from Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien, June 10, 1997. Prior to his appointment as coadjutor archbishop of the Archdiocese for the Military Services of the United States, O’Brien had served two terms as rector of St. Joseph’s Seminary, Dunwoodie, in the Archdiocese of New York, before and after his rectorship of the Pontifical North American College in Rome.

  97.Ibid.

  98.The press release from the Gemelli described the procedure in technical terms: “…on the morning of July 15, His Holiness, Pope John Paul II, underwent colon resection surgery for a voluminous tubulovillous adenoma of the sigmoid colon accompanied by modest and localized cytological alterations related to a dysplasia of moderate size. The operation was radical and curative because the lesion was of a benign nature. A cholecystectomy for multiple lithiasis of the gall bladder was also performed.” [OR (EWE), July 15, 1992, p. 1.]