The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  September 15, 2000 Jubilee of Apostolic Nuncios and Papal Representatives.

  September 15–24, 2000 Twentieth International Marian-Mariological Congress.

  September 17, 2000 Jubilee of the Elderly.

  October 8, 2000 Jubilee of Bishops.

  October 14, 2000 Jubilee of Families.

  October 18–22, 2000 World Missionary Congress.

  October 29, 2000 Jubilee of the World of Sports.

  November 1, 2000 Mass for the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

  November 4, 2000 Jubilee of Government Leaders and Politicians.

  November 8–10, 2000 John Paul II meets Karekin II, Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos of All Armenians, in the Vatican.

  November 12, 2000 Jubilee of the World of Agriculture.

  November 19, 2000 Jubilee of Armed Forces and Police.

  November 26, 2000 Jubilee of the Lay Apostolate.

  December 3, 2000 Jubilee of the Disabled.

  December 10, 2000 Jubilee of Catechists.

  December 17, 2000 Jubilee of the World of Entertainment.

  January 6, 2001 Closing of the Holy Door at St. Peter’s Basilica; John Paul II issues apostolic letter, Novo Millennio Ineunte [Entering the New Millennium].

  On Sunday morning, April 30, 2000, more than 200,000 pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’s Square for the canonization of the first saint of the new millennium. The spiritual trajectory of her life had been a striking one, touching several obscure Polish convents, the Index of Forbidden Books, and innumerable Catholic parishes around the world.

  Born on August 25, 1905, in the village of Głogowiec near Łódź, Helena Kowalska was the third of ten children born to poor parents who could provide her with only two years of formal education. Unable to enter the convent at seventeen because her family needed the modest income she helped provide, she worked as a housekeeper for two years before making a failed attempt to enter a Warsaw convent. A year later, in 1925, she managed to enter the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy, having experienced a vision of the suffering Christ. Taking the religious name Maria Faustyna, she completed her novitiate in Kraków and made her final vows in 1933. In the remaining five years of her life, she served her fellow sisters as a doorkeeper, gardener, and cook in convents in Kraków, Płock, and Vilnius (then part of the Polish Second Republic).

  On February 22, 1931, in Płock, Sister Mary Faustyna experienced a vision in which Jesus appeared as the merciful savior, with red and white rays of light shining out from his heart; the “King of Divine Mercy” asked her to promote the Second Sunday or Octave of Easter as a celebration of divine mercy and to spread devotion to God’s mercy throughout the world. After a psychiatric examination confirmed that Sister Faustyna was not suffering from mental aberrations, Father Michał Sopoćko took the young nun under spiritual direction in 1933, and arranged for a painter to render an image of the vision of Christ Sister Faustyna had seen. Her visions and other extraordinary spiritual experiences (including the hidden stigmata) continued, known only to her religious superiors and her spiritual director, and were recorded in the detailed diary she kept. In 1935, she experienced a vision that laid out the prayer cycle now known as the Chaplet of Divine Mercy. The following year Sister Faustyna fell ill with tuberculosis and spent time in a sanatorium before returning to her convent at Kraków-Łagiewniki, where she died in 1938.

  The Łagiewniki convent was close to the Solvay chemical factory where Karol Wojtyła worked from October 1941 until August 1944; the young robotnik would sometimes stop at the convent chapel to pray, on his way to or from carrying buckets of lime and doing his clandestine seminary studies. Images of Jesus as the king of divine mercy had begun to appear in Polish churches, but the posthumous course of Sister Faustyna’s work took an unexpected turn when, shortly after his election, Pope John XXIII signed a decree prepared by the Holy Office placing the deceased Polish nun’s diary on the Index of Forbidden Books. During the Second Vatican Council, Archbishop Karol Wojtyła took up Faustyna’s cause with the Roman authorities, convinced that the Divine Mercy devotion had significant pastoral merit and that the condemnation of the diary had been based on a faulty Italian translation of the original Polish. Wojtyła asked one of the readers of his habilitation thesis, Father Ignacy Różycki, to prepare a critical edition of the diary as a first step toward rectifying Faustyna’s status with the Holy See. Years of patient work led to the Vatican sanctions being lifted; meanwhile, the Chaplet of Divine Mercy had spread throughout the world, with pastors in a wide variety of circumstances finding it a remarkably effective tool for rekindling Catholic devotional life, which had become decrepit in many countries in the years after Vatican II. Sister Mary Faustyna Kowalska, the apostle of divine mercy, was beatified by John Paul II on April 18, 1993. Now, the Pope wanted to make a point about both the third millennium and its predecessor by canonizing her as the first saint of the Great Jubilee of 2000.

  The vast outdoor congregation in St. Peter’s Square on April 30, 2000, was living testimony to the spread of the Divine Mercy devotion throughout the Catholic world. The presence of a large number of Polish pilgrims, including prime minister Jerzy Buzek, testified to the Polish character of the gift John Paul II intended to give the world through the canonization of Sister Faustyna: the gift of a renewed sense of God’s mercy. The mercy of God, John Paul preached, comes to the world “through the heart of Christ crucified”; the reminder of that great truth came from “this humble daughter of Poland” who had received the vision of the king of divine mercy precisely between the First and Second World Wars. And, as John Paul said, “those who remember, who were witnesses and participants in the events of those years and the horrible suffering they caused for millions of people, know well how necessary was the message of divine mercy.”

  Thus Sister Faustyna’s vision became “the bridge” to the third millennium from the last century of the second millennium: a “gift of special enlightenment that helps us live the Gospel of Easter more intensely, to offer it as a ray of light to the men and women of our time.” No one knew what the years of the third millennium would bring, but it was “certain that in addition to new progress there will unfortunately be no lack of painful experiences.” All the more need, then, for the “light of divine mercy, which the Lord in a way wished to return to the world through Sister Faustyna’s charism,” in order to “illumine the way for the men and women of the third millennium.” Therefore, the Pope explained, the Second Sunday of Easter would henceforth be known as Divine Mercy Sunday, for John Paul wished to pass to the entire third millennium the message that had been entrusted to Sister Faustyna, now Saint Faustyna.

  John Paul concluded his homily by returning to two themes that had been prominent throughout his pontificate. He had spoken frequently about the Law of the Gift—the law of self-giving—built into the human person; the Second Vatican Council’s summary of this law, that “man can fully discover his true self only in a sincere giving of himself,” had been one of the two most cited Vatican II texts in his magisterium. The Law of the Gift was not, however, easy to live. For “it is not easy to love with a deep love, which lies in the authentic gift of self. This love can only be learned by penetrating the mystery of God’s love. Looking at him, being one with his fatherly heart, we are able to look with new eyes at our brothers and sisters, with an attitude of unselfishness and solidarity. All of this is mercy!” And the embrace of that mercy was essential if the third millennium were to be spared the worst experiences of the second:

  It is this love which must inspire humanity today, if it is to face the crisis of the meaning of life, the challenges of the most diverse needs, and, especially, the duty to defend the dignity of every human person. Thus the message of divine mercy is also implicitly a message about the value of every human being. Each person is precious in God’s eyes; Christ gave his life for each one; to everyone the Father gives his Spirit and offers intimacy.

  This consol
ing message is addressed above all to those who, afflicted by a particularly harsh trial or crushed by the weight of the sins they have committed, have lost confidence in life and are tempted to give in to despair. To them the gentle face of Christ is offered; those rays from his heart touch them and shine upon them, warm them, show them the way and fill them with hope.1

  THE WITNESS OF MARTYRS

  The canonization of St. Faustyna Kowalska was the first striking moment in the second phase of the Great Jubilee of 2000. The first period of the holy year focused on the history of salvation, with the Church’s attention (and much of the world’s) riveted on John Paul II’s biblical pilgrimage to the places where God had come in search of man. The second period of the jubilee lifted up the imperative of Christian witness in the world. Its dramatic opening came a week after Faustyna’s canonization, with the venue shifting from St. Peter’s Square to the Roman Colosseum.

  The veneration of martyrs lies at the deepest roots of Christian faith, consciousness, and practice. That the martyrs were understood to be crucial actors in the cosmic drama of salvation history is clear from the first century of the Christian era and St. John’s vision in the Book of Revelation:

  When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne; they cried out with a loud voice, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before thou wilt judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell upon the earth?” Then they were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their brethren should be complete, who were to be killed as they themselves had been. [Revelation 6.9–11]

  The number of martyrs “to be completed” increased exponentially in the twentieth century. Yet in countries where the practice of Christian faith involved neither pressures nor penalties nor threats, the idea of “martyrdom” was firmly located in the past—“martyrs” were people who had faced lions in the Roman arenas, not people “like us.” From the beginning of his pontificate, John Paul II was determined to shake the Church, and especially the Church in the Western world, out of its complacency about the contemporary realities of martyrdom. This was a duty of justice to those who had died. It was also a reminder to the Church in the present that the martyr was the ideal of the Christian disciple, for the martyr had lived the Law of the Gift in the most radical way possible, and to the end. Thus John Paul lifted the tacit ban Pope Paul VI had placed on beatifying and canonizing martyrs from the Cristero uprising in Mexico in the 1920s and the Spanish Civil War; John Paul beatified and canonized those who had suffered death for the faith at Dachau, Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and Buchenwald, as well as martyrs who suffered in Tibet, Papua New Guinea, and Zaire; and he regularly referred to the ecumenism of martyrdom, for in death the martyrs of many Christian confessions had found a unity the Church was still denied in this world.2

  The Great Jubilee seemed a fitting occasion to underscore the witness of the modern martyrs, which is why John Paul ordered that one of the concrete products of the jubilee year be a revised “Roman Martyrology”: the authoritative catalogue of those whom the Church had honored by canonization or beatification. To that end a special commission on “new martyrs” was set up within the Central Committee for the Great Jubilee. Its president, Bishop Michel Hrynchyshyn, was a Canadian Redemptorist of Ukrainian parentage who lived in Paris and served as Apostolic Exarch for Ukrainians of the Byzantine-rite resident in France. The commission was given the formidable task of compiling a historically credible record of the “new martyrs” of our time—formidable, in no small part, because of the frequent anonymity of industrialized murder as committed by communists and Nazis.3

  “Martyrdom” may not have been a prominent feature of the contemporary Catholic religious imagination in North America and western Europe, but the historical fact of the matter was that the twentieth century, the century of homicidal totalitarian ideologies, had been the greatest century of martyrdom in two millennia: indeed, more Christians gave their lives for Christ in the twentieth century than in the previous nineteen centuries combined.4 Bishop Hrynchyshyn estimated that there had been perhaps twenty-seven million twentieth-century martyrs, two-thirds of the entire martyrology of the first two millennia. Their heroic self-sacrifice was honored on May 7, at a Commemoration of the Witnesses to the Faith of the Twentieth Century, which was celebrated in the Roman Colosseum. The Commemoration took the form of an ecumenical Liturgy of the Word, prior to which opening prayers were offered by John Paul II (in Latin), Greek Orthodox Metropolitan Gennadios (in Greek), and the Rev. Dr. Ishmael Noko of the Lutheran World Federation (in English).

  In his homily, John Paul immediately struck an ecumenical chord, stressing that “the witness to Christ borne even to the shedding of blood has become a common inheritance of Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, and Protestants.” He then quoted the Russian Orthodox Metropolitan Benjamin of St. Petersburg on the eve of his execution in 1922—“The times have changed and it has become possible to suffer much for love of Christ”—and the Lutheran pastor Paul Schneider’s charge to his guards at Buchenwald—“Thus says the Lord: ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life!’ ” These witnesses and millions of others had proven that “love is stronger than death” in circumstances “where hatred seemed to corrupt the whole of life, leaving no escape from its logic.” They had stood firm against “the cult of the false gods of the twentieth century”; pastors had died because, “like the Good Shepherd, they decided to remain with their people, despite intimidation”; women had died “to defend their dignity and purity”; indeed, “on every continent and throughout the entire twentieth century, there have been those who preferred to die rather than betray the mission that was theirs.”

  Why did the Church honor its contemporary martyrs? For the same reason it had honored its martyrs twenty centuries before: “If we glory in this heritage it is not because of any partisan spirit … but in order to make manifest the extraordinary power of God, who has not ceased to act in every time and place.” Moreover the Church honored its martyrs by offering pardon, “faithful to the example of the countless witnesses killed even as they prayed for their persecutors.” John Paul concluded with a prayer that the example of this “cloud of witnesses which surrounds us” would be the source of a “profound Christian renewal,” the “leaven for bringing all Christ’s disciples into full communion,” and an aid to the Church in the third millennium so that the men and women of the twenty-first century and beyond might “express with no less courage our own love for Christ.”5

  While light rain fell, there were readings from a pan-Christian company of twentieth-century martyrs and confessors, including Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow, a martyr-confessor under communism; an Anglican bishop who had died in a Japanese concentration camp; Jolique Rusimbamigera, a seminarian from Burundi who survived massacres there, after praying for those who were killing Hutu and Tutsi seminarians who refused to be separated along tribal lines; W. G. R. Jotcham, a Canadian doctor and a Baptist, who had died while treating Muslim victims of a meningitis epidemic in Nigeria in 1938; Father Christian de Chergé, one of the martyred Trappists of Tibherin in Algeria, killed just four years earlier, in 1996. After each reading, a candle was lit before the Book of the Gospels. In all, 12,692 confessors and martyrs were recognized in eight categories: witnesses to the faith under Soviet totalitarianism; victims of communism in other nations of Europe; confessors under Nazism and fascism; Christians who gave their lives in Asia and Oceania; persecuted Catholics of Spain and Mexico; witnesses to the evangelization of Africa; confessors in the Americas; witnesses to the faith in various other parts of the world. The last category included John Paul II’s friend, the Armenian Catholicos Karekin I.

  The three-hour service ended with John Paul’s prayer that God would continue to cherish all those who had died for the faith and, “in your infinite mercy, their persecutors as well.”6

  MARIAN WITNESS

&nb
sp; Marian apparitions had been one of the most striking of Catholic spiritual phenomena in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The 1830 apparition to Catherine Labouré at the convent of the Daughters of Charity on the Rue du Bac in Paris had given Catholicism one of its most popular “sacramentals,” the Miraculous Medal; its prescribed invocation, “O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee,” played a role in creating the conditions in popular piety necessary for the reception of Pope Pius IX’s dogmatic definition of the Immaculate Conception in 1854. The 1858 apparitions to Bernadette Soubirous outside the village of Lourdes in the French Pyrenees, during which Mary identified herself to the visionary with the words, “I am the Immaculate Conception,” gave world Catholicism its greatest center of healing, both physical and spiritual. The 1917 apparitions at Fátima in Portugal, granted to three peasant children, had created a major world pilgrimage site and were identified in Catholic popular piety of the pre–Vatican II period with the upheavals caused by the First World War, including the rise of Bolshevism in Russia.7

  John Paul II’s Marian piety had long been psychoanalyzed by the uncomprehending as displaced maternal affection following the death of his mother.8 The truth of the matter is that, by his own testimony, Karol Wojtyła had become dissatisfied with the conventional Marian piety of his day by the time he left Wadowice for Kraków and the Jagiellonian University in 1938. It was during the war years that he was introduced to a more theologically sophisticated form of Marian devotion by the lay mystic Jan Tyranowski. In addition to lending Wojtyła books by the classic Spanish Carmelite mystics John of the Cross and Teresa of Ávila, Tyranowski gave the young day laborer and underground theater actor a copy of the seventeenth-century treatise on Marian piety, True Devotion to Mary, in which St. Louis Grignion de Montfort explains that all true Marian piety points toward Mary’s son, Christ, and through Christ (who is both Son of God and son of Mary), to the Trinity: thus genuine Marian piety is both Christ-centered and Trinitarian. Wojtyła was persuaded, and later adopted the Montfortian slogan Totus Tuus [Entirely Yours] as the motto on his episcopal, and later papal, coat of arms.9 During his pontificate, John Paul II worked to revive Marian piety and give it a new theological depth—every first Saturday of the month, he led a recitation of the Rosary that was broadcast worldwide on Vatican Radio from the Paul VI Audience Hall—and to deepen the Church’s understanding of Mary’s role in salvation history and in the life of the Church. He devoted his sixth encyclical, Redemptoris Mater [The Mother of the Redeemer] to the subject and declared that the period between Pentecost 1987 and Pentecost 1988 would be celebrated throughout the Church as a special Marian Year. In a striking Christmas address to the Roman Curia in December 1987, the Pope, borrowing from the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, had suggested to some shocked senior churchmen that the “Marian profile” in the Church was prior to, and made sense of, the Church’s “Petrine profile.” Mary’s fiat, John Paul said, had set the pattern of Christian discipleship, and the Petrine structure of the Church—its governance by the pope and the bishops—was intended primarily to foster discipleship, and indeed made no sense without discipleship.10 No small part of John Paul’s strategic purpose in deepening the theology of Marian piety was to give the Church materials with which to respond to the more aggressive forms of secular feminism with a positive vision of genuine liberation; thus he issued the apostolic letter Mulieris Dignitatem [The Dignity of Women] shortly after the close of the 1987–88 Marian Year.