The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  This is the door of the Lord. The just will enter through it.

  I shall go up to your house, O Lord. I shall prostrate myself in adoration in your holy temple.

  Open to me the gates of justice. I shall enter them and give thanks to the Lord.

  Finally, in silence, with the interior lights of the vast basilica dimmed, John Paul II placed both his hands on the two panels of the Holy Door and gently pushed them open, before kneeling in silent prayer in the portal, his head bowed and his hands grasping the silver pastoral staff of the crucified Christ with which he had once greeted the crowds at the Mass inaugurating his pontificate, waving it back and forth as if it were a great sword of faith. It took a hardened heart not to recognize that here was a man living the supreme moment of his life, the moment toward which the previous seventy-nine years had been directed—and doing so in such a way that he pointed beyond himself to Christ, the door.

  Five and a half years before, more than one senior churchman believed that arranging something as massive as the Great Jubilee in the form that John Paul II imagined it was simply impossible. Yet now, with the world’s attention focused on the man kneeling in the portal of the Holy Door of St. Peter’s, what had seemed impossible had become reality—in large part because of the indomitable will of John Paul II himself. But that may be to put the matter too psychologically, as a question of willfulness or stubbornness. It was the indomitable faith of John Paul II—his conviction that the Incarnation was indeed the axial moment in human history—that brought him to the Holy Door on Christmas Eve 1999 and to the axial moment of his own pontificate.

  As the choir sang “Christ yesterday and today/the end and the beginning/Christ the Alpha and the Omega/to him be glory forever,” the Pope rose from his knees and returned to the portable cathedra in the narthex of the basilica while Catholics from Asia, Australia, and Oceania decorated the Holy Door with flowers and perfumes, and African Catholics sounded traditional horns; these innovations, designed by the papal master of ceremonies, Bishop Piero Marini, were intended to highlight the new churches of the second millennium, as the entire Catholic Church symbolically crossed the threshold of the third millennium through the Holy Door. The Pope then returned to the now garlanded door, stood in the portal showing the Book of the Gospels to the thousands gathered inside, and led the procession up the basilica’s center aisle for the celebration of Christmas Midnight Mass.

  When the procession reached the high altar, the Book of the Gospels was enthroned and incensed, after which the deacon and the choir, in an antiphonal chant, sang the proclamation of the Great Jubilee of 2000, which led immediately into the singing of the Gloria, the liturgical hymn derived from the angelic salutation to the shepherds on the first Christmas night. Then, after the proclamation of Luke’s Christmas narrative in both Latin and Greek, John Paul II (now vested in a less dramatic white chasuble) blessed the congregation with the Book of the Gospels and preached his first homily of the new millennium.20

  Typically, he began with a reminder that, for the faithful there is nothing to fear: “On this holy night, the angel repeats to us, the men and women living at the end of a millennium: ‘Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of great joy … to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour’ ” (Luke 2.10–11). In these words, John Paul said, “the ‘today’ of our redemption becomes a reality,” for today “we are spiritually linked to that unique moment in history when God became man.” That moment forever changed history—for now, “the incomparable ‘today’ of God has become present in every human life.” This was the truth that had sustained the Church for two millennia; this was the truth the Church “wants to pass on to the third millennium”—that “ever since the night of Bethlehem, humanity knows that God became Man … in order to give man a share in his divine nature.” And so on this night, above all other nights, the Church confesses its faith and prays, “You, O Christ, the Son of the living God, be for us the Door! Be for us the true Door, symbolized by the door which on this night we have solemnly opened! Be for us the Door which leads us into the mystery of the Father! Grant that no one may remain outside his embrace of mercy and peace!”21

  John Paul returned to the theme of Christ the Door in his message for the traditional Christmas blessing Urbi et Orbi [To the City and the World], which he delivered from the central loggia of St. Peter’s at noon on Christmas Day, calling humanity to turn to Christ the “ ‘Door of our salvation,’ the ‘Door of Life,’ and the ‘Door of Peace,’ and pleading that legislators and political leaders, men and women of goodwill … be committed to welcoming human life as a precious gift.”22 Later that afternoon, the Pope opened the Holy Door at his cathedral, the Basilica of St. John Lateran, and preached at the celebration of Christmas Second Vespers. There, the Pope prayed that his Roman diocese would embrace the Christmas “mystery of holiness and hope” so that the “special dimension of the history of salvation which is linked to the graces of the jubilees and the historical memory of the Church of Rome” might “grow in faith and missionary zeal,” for these were “the principal legacy of the Apostles Peter and Paul.”23

  The first week of the Great Jubilee of 2000 concluded with the traditional Te Deum for the conclusion of the year and the celebration of First Vespers of the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, on the evening of December 31, 1999. The Sediarii (who had once carried pontiffs on the sedia gestatoria, a kind of papal sedan chair) slowly wheeled the Pope up the center aisle of St. Peter’s on a rolling platform, with John Paul stopping at various moments to touch hands or caress a baby. His Vespers homily, a meditation on time and the human immersion in time and history, stressed the universal call to holiness and thanked God for all “the saints of this millennium: those raised to the honors of the altar and, even more numerous, those unknown to us who sanctified time by their faithful adherence to God’s will.” For the saints remind us that Christ is the Lord of time, Christ who is “the same yesterday, today, and forever,” Christ who is “the goal of human history” and the “focal point of the expectations of every human being.”24 That night, moments after midnight, the Pope came to the window of the papal apartment in the Apostolic Palace and blessed the tremendous crowd that filled every inch of available space in St. Peter’s Square. “In crossing the threshold of the new year,” he said, “I should like to knock on the door of your homes to give each of you my cordial greetings for a happy new year in the light that, from Bethlehem, radiates throughout the entire universe! … Thank you! Happy new year to everyone! May Jesus Christ be praised!”25

  In another break with jubilee precedent, John Paul opened each of the holy doors of the four patriarchal Roman basilicas; so on January 1, 2000, the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, and the annual papal World Day of Peace, the Pope opened the Holy Door at the Liberian basilica, St. Mary Major; there, he invoked the intercession of Mary, Queen of Peace, to whom he entrusted “the days of the new year, the future of the Church, the future of humanity, the future of the entire universe.”26 In his message for the 2000 World Day of Peace, John Paul had stressed characteristic themes: that respect for human rights and for the dignity of every human person was the essential foundation for peace; that crimes against humanity cannot be considered any country’s internal affair and that humanitarian intervention is an obligation in cases of real or impending genocide; that true international community can only be built on the foundation of a “culture of solidarity” in which the poor become “the agents of their own development” and all are empowered to “exercise the creativity which is characteristic of the human person and on which the wealth of nations is dependent.” Returning to a theme from his 1995 Address to the General Assembly of the United Nations, the Pope also described the natural moral law that can be known by reason as a “ ‘grammar’ of the spirit” that can turn cacophony into genuine dialogue about the “problems posed by the future of humanity.”27

  John Paul II maintained a vigorous pace as the second week of the Great J
ubilee opened, meeting with tens of thousands of children in St. Peter’s Square at the Jubilee of Children on January 2, and greeting individually more than 200 graduates, faculty, and friends of a joint American-European seminar on Catholic social doctrine in the Sala Clementina the next day. The Pope hosted the seminar faculty to lunch on January 4, joked about the Goodyear blimp hovering above St. Peter’s Square (“You see? Buon Anno!”), and showed his guests the Kazanskaya, the priceless and historic Russian icon he hoped to return personally to Moscow at some point.28 On January 18, he completed the opening of the four holy doors of the patriarchal Roman basilicas, inviting Anglican primate George Carey and Metropolitan Athanasius of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople to join him in opening the jubilee door at St. Paul Outside the Walls—a unique ecumenical gesture that initiated the annual Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity. The Liturgy of the Word celebrated at the basilica on the Ostian Way was the largest ecumenical assembly in Rome since the Second Vatican Council, with representatives of twenty-two Christian communities participating.29 In his homily, John Paul urged all present to “give new impetus to the ecumenical commitment” as an “imperative of Christian conscience,” for “the future of evangelization and the proclamation of the Gospel to the men and women of our time” depended “in great part” on healing the breaches in the one Church of Christ that had opened up during the previous two millennia. The Pope, who had bent every possible effort to unite his separated brethren as they crossed the threshold of the third millennium, completed the opening phase of the Great Jubilee of 2000 with an eloquent plea and a heartfelt prayer:

  From this basilica, which sees us gathered together with hope-filled hearts, I look ahead to the new millennium. The wish that flows from my heart and becomes a fervent entreaty before the throne of the eternal Father is that, in the not too distant future, Christians will at last be reconciled and be able to walk together again as one people obedient to the Father’s plan, a people that can repeat with one voice and in the joy of renewed brotherhood, “Blessed be God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with all the spiritual blessings in the heavens” [Ephesians 1.3].

  May the Lord Jesus hear our prayers and our ardent plea. Amen!30

  On January 23, John Paul II took a cinematic break from the public events of the Great Jubilee, hosting the distinguished Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda and the cast of Wajda’s new film, Pan Tadeusz, to Mass and a private screening of the movie in the Vatican. For Karol Wojtyła, who had taken part in a 1942 Rhapsodic Theater production of Adam Mickie-wicz’s classic during the Nazi occupation of Poland, it was an emotionally charged moment. Afterward, the Pope stunned both director and cast by reciting large chunks of Mickiewicz’s epic poem from memory.31

  WALKING WITH ABRAHAM AND MOSES

  The ad limina visits of the world’s bishops may have been suspended for the Great Jubilee, and the Pope may have agreed to a weekly day off, but the papal schedule remained formidable. On January 6, the Solemnity of the Epiphany, John Paul ordained twelve new bishops at St. Peter’s. In the Sistine Chapel on January 9, the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, he baptized eighteen infants from Italy, Brazil, Spain, the United States, and Switzerland. On January 10, he gave his annual address to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See. Speaking from the experience of the twentieth century to the political leaders of the twenty-first, he made an impassioned plea for solidarity, for religious freedom, and for a new awareness of the divine presence in human affairs:

  I speak to you as one who has himself been a fellow-traveler of several generations of the century just ended. I shared the harsh ordeals of my native people [in] the darkest hours experienced by Europe. Twenty-one years ago, when I became the Successor of the Apostle Peter, I felt myself charged with a universal fatherhood which embraces all the men and women of our time without exception. Today, in addressing you who represent practically all the peoples of the earth, I would like to share with each one something personal: at the opening of the doors of a new millennium, the Pope began to think that people might finally learn to draw lessons from the past.…

  The words which Deuteronomy puts on the lips of God himself come to mind: “See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil … therefore choose life, that you may live” [Deuteronomy 30.15–19].32

  The vocational jubilee days continued in February with the Jubilee of Consecrated Life (February 2, the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord), the Jubilee of the Sick (February 11, the liturgical commemoration of Our Lady of Lourdes), the Jubilee of Artists (February 18, the day before the liturgical commemoration of Fra Angelico, whom John Paul had beatified in 1982), and the Jubilee of Permanent Deacons (February 19). The Jubilee of the Sick included a festival of sound and light in St. Peter’s Square, with thousands of pilgrims participating in a Marian procession aux flambeaux, as at the shrine of Lourdes in the Pyrenees.33

  John Paul had intended to begin his personal jubilee pilgrimage to the places most closely linked to the history of salvation by going to the home of Abraham: “If it be God’s will, I would like to go to Ur of the Chaldees, the present-day Tell el-Muqayyar in southern Iraq, the city where, according to the biblical account, Abraham heard the word of the Lord which took him away from his own land, from his people, from himself in a sense, to make him the instrument of a plan of salvation which embraced the future people of the Covenant and indeed all the peoples of the world.”34 Whatever God’s will in the matter may have been, it was the will of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, that eventually made it impossible for John Paul to begin his jubilee pilgrimage as he wished.

  In his June 1999 Letter Concerning Pilgrimage to the Places Linked to the History of Salvation, John Paul had emphasized that his would be “an exclusively religious pilgrimage in its nature and purpose,” for “to go in a spirit of prayer from one place to another, from one city to another, in the area marked especially by God’s intervention, helps us not only to live our life as a journey, but also gives us a vivid sense of a God who has gone before us and leads us on, who himself set out on man’s path, a God who does not look down on us from on high, but who has become our traveling companion.” He then added that he would be “saddened if anyone were to attach other meaning to this plan of mine.” Saddam Hussein, for his part, saw nothing but political possibility in the desire of John Paul’s heart, and demanded that the Pope defy the UN’s ban on direct flights to Iraq. The Pope, following traditional Vatican policy, had long opposed sanctions against Iraq; but he would not allow himself or his pilgrimage to become a pawn in Saddam’s chess match with the United Nations, and at the end of 1999, he reluctantly concluded that the Iraqi dictator had made it impossible for the first step on his jubilee pilgrimage to be the kind of step it had to be. On December 10, 1999, Joaquín Navarro-Valls told the press that the Vatican had been informed by Iraq that the “abnormal conditions” created by the postwar international embargo and the no-fly zones in the north and south of the country did not “allow for an adequate organization of a visit by the Holy Father.” There was no need for further comment on the Iraqi regime’s crude effort to twist the story for its own propaganda purposes.35

  If John Paul II could not go to Ur, then the Ur of his religious imagination could come to Rome, such that John Paul would make a “spiritual pilgrimage” to the home of Abraham. Thus on February 23, 2000, the Paul VI Audience Hall in the Vatican was transformed into an evocative setting for a Celebration of the Word in Commemoration of Abraham, Our Father in Faith. The platform in the rear of the audience hall was decorated with oak trees, to commemorate the terebinths of Mamre beneath which Abraham had pitched his tent and offered sacrifice to God. To the right of three copper pots containing burning candles was an uncarved and rough stone, reminiscent of the stone of Isaac’s sacrifice and the altars built by Abraham during his sojourns. Next to the stone was the focal point of the platform: a reproduction of perhaps the greatest of icons, Andrei Rublev�
��s portrayal of the three angels visiting Abraham, a scene that Christians have long regarded as a proto-expression of God the Holy Trinity. John Paul was seated on a small, red throne beside the iconic display; the audience hall was filled with thousands of pilgrims, and an even larger crowd watched the Commemoration on giant television screens in St. Peter’s Square. After a video showing the ruins of Ur and the rivers of Canaan, the land of promise, there were readings from the book of Genesis, recounting the call of Abraham, God’s covenant with him, and the drama of the sacrifice of Isaac; from Paul’s Letter to the Romans and the Letter to the Hebrews, extolling Abraham as the father of all believers; and from John’s Gospel, recounting Jesus’s dramatic proclamation that “Abraham rejoiced that he was to see my day” (John 8.56). In his homily, John Paul stressed that it was Abraham’s radical obedience to the will of God for his life that had made him not only the father of a great nation, but the father of all believers in the one, true God. Abraham’s faith, John Paul said, posed a continuing challenge, down the centuries, to grasp the remarkable breadth and depth of the divine promises: for “the land to which human beings are moving, guided by the voice of God, does not belong exclusively to the geography of this world.” Abraham’s life and the fulfillment of God’s promise to him points to the truth that man is ultimately destined for “a promised land that is not of this world,” which is a destination we only reach in “the obedience of faith.” The Commemoration concluded with the burning of incense atop the stone, recalling the worship of the one, true God that Abraham had inaugurated.36