The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  The most dramatic episode in John Paul II’s life of Marian piety came on May 13, 1981. To the Pope, there was nothing accidental about the fact that he had escaped death at the hands of a professional assassin on the day on which the Church liturgically honors Our Lady of Fátima. Mehmet Ali Agca had fired at point-blank range; but as John Paul later put it, “One hand fired, and another guided the bullet.”11 He had gone to Fátima a year later, in May 1982, to give thanks to the Virgin Mary for his life having been spared; one of the bullets from Agca’s Browning 9-mm semiautomatic had been placed in the crown of the statue of Our Lady of Fátima. In May 1991, he was back in Fátima for the tenth anniversary of the assassination attempt, and on that occasion gave public thanks to the Blessed Mother for the liberation of east central Europe from communism.

  And he would return once again, during the Great Jubilee, spending May 12 and 13 in Fátima. There, he beatified two of the three child-visionaries of the apparitions, Francisco and Jacinta Marto. At the end of the Mass, the Cardinal Secretary of State, Angelo Sodano, offered greetings in the name of all present to the Pope on his impending eightieth birthday, announced that John Paul had decided that it was now time to make public the so-called “third secret” of Fátima (about which there had been enormous, and often lurid, speculation for decades), and then read a statement approved by the Pope:

  [The] text contains a prophetic vision similar to those found in Sacred Scripture, which do not describe photographically the details of future events, but synthesize and compress against a single background facts which extend through time in an unspecified succession and duration. As a result, the text must be interpreted in a symbolic key.

  The vision of Fátima concerns above all the war waged by atheistic systems against the Church and Christians, and it describes the immense suffering endured by the witnesses of the faith in the last century of the second millennium. It is an interminable Way of the Cross led by the popes of the twentieth century.…

  The successive events of 1989 led, both in the Soviet Union and in a number of countries of Eastern Europe, to the fall of the communist regimes which promoted atheism. For this, too, His Holiness offers heartfelt thanks to the Most Holy Virgin. In other parts of the world, however, attacks against the Church and against Christians, with the burden of suffering they bring, tragically continue. Even if the events to which the third part of the “secret” of Fátima refer now seem part of the past, Our Lady’s call to conversion and penance, issued at the start of the twentieth century, remains timely and urgent today … let us thank Our Lady of Fátima for her protection. To her maternal intercession let us entrust the Church of the Third Millennium.12

  As Cardinal Sodano’s announcement indicated, the vision in the third part of the “secret” involved a vast number of twentieth-century martyrdoms, including the shooting of a “bishop dressed in white.” That John Paul II would have spiritually identified his own experience of May 13, 1981, with that of the “bishop dressed in white” was quite natural; yet it was also true that the decision to release the so-called “third secret” was intended to dampen down some of the more dramatic forms of Catholic apocalypticism during the millennium year. In addition to releasing the texts of the Fátima “secrets” and the transcript of an interview conducted with the surviving visionary, the ninety-three-year-old Sister Maria Lúcia dos Santos, by the secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, S.D.B., in April 2000, the Vatican also issued a “theological commentary” on the “third secret” by CDF’s prefect, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Like Sodano, Ratzinger stressed that the visions of Fátima were not (as so often popularly misunderstood) a cinematic preview of impending events, a “glimpse into a future which cannot be changed.” Rather, the visions were a call to conversion that was meant “to bring freedom onto the scene and to steer freedom in a positive direction.” That freedom should need redemption from its own follies ought to have been a clear conclusion from the century just past. Yet that was not the final word, as Ratzinger’s commentary concluded:

  The heart open to God, purified by contemplation of God, is stronger than guns and weapons of every kind. The fiat of Mary, the word of her heart, has changed the history of the world, because it brought the Savior into the world—because, thanks to her yes, God could become man in our world and remains so for all time. The Evil One has power in this world, as we see and experience continually; he has power because our freedom lets itself be led away from God. But since God himself took a human heart and has thus steered human freedom toward what is good, the freedom to choose evil no longer has the last word. From that time forth, the word that prevails is this: “In the world you will have tribulation, but take heart: I have overcome the world” [John 16.33]. The message of Fátima invites us to trust in this promise.13

  The Marian aspect of the Great Jubilee took a scholarly form in September, when the twentieth International Marian-Mariological Congress met in Rome. After several days of papers being presented on various themes related to Mary’s place in the history of salvation and in the contemporary life of the Church, the Congress concluded with Mass in St. Peter’s Square on September 24. In his homily, John Paul preached on the special relationship of Mary, the Theotokos [Mother of God, or God-Bearer], to the three persons of the Holy Trinity, and concluded with an outline of authentic Marian devotion for the third millennium. Such devotion must be based on Scripture and Tradition; the popular piety arising from it must be rooted in the Church’s liturgy; Marian devotion must express itself “in an effort to imitate the All Holy in a way of personal perfection”; and it must avoid every form of “superstition and vain credulousness,” especially in terms of Marian appearances, which were to be judged by the teaching authority of the Church. Above all, John Paul said, all true devotion to Mary “must always … go back to the source of Mary’s greatness, becoming a ceaseless Magnificat of praise to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.”14

  PRIESTLY WITNESS

  One of the more intriguing facets of Karol Wojtyła’s personality was that this most priestly of priests—a man who had inspired thousands of young men to give their lives to Christ and the Church in the Catholic priesthood—had first intended to live his own Christian life as a layman. In Gift and Mystery, the vocational memoir he published in 1996 on the golden jubilee of his ordination, he reflected in a touching way on his struggle to achieve some measure of vocational clarity as a young man. That clarity came, not in a blinding flash, but in a slow process of discernment. At the same time, he was keenly aware of the influential people who had shaped his discernment, including his father (whose example, John Paul wrote, had been his “first seminary”) and Jan Tyranowski. He also understood that the experience of the occupation had hammered him into a certain kind of priestly steel, strong yet supple, even as it had deepened in him the conviction that the priest should be a “leaven of fraternity” in a world desperately in need of solidarity.15

  The priest, John Paul believed, was not somehow “above” the universal call to holiness. On the contrary: the priest was one with his people in living out that call. Yet the priest ought to live the call to holiness in a distinctive way, he wrote in the 1992 post-synodal apostolic exhortation, Pastores Dabo Vobis [I Will Give You Shepherds]. For the ordained priest, by reason of his ordination, participated in a unique way in the priesthood of Jesus Christ, becoming an alter Christus, a sacramental re-presentation of Christ himself. Ordination, as John Paul explained it, was far more than a matter of the Church’s authorizing a man to conduct certain kinds of ecclesiastical business; Holy Orders “configured” a man to Christ in a radical way so that he could make a “total gift of self to the Church.”16

  The specifically priestly form of witness in the Church and in the world was the witness of the Good Shepherd, John Paul taught. That Gospel image also specified the distinctive form of holiness that priests ought to embody, which the Pope called the holiness of “pastoral charity.
” That, in turn, meant that the spiritual “headship” that the priest exercised in a local Christian community was not the headship of power but of service—the service of one who spends out his life in the care of the sheep.17

  John Paul II knew that the Catholic priesthood throughout the world was in crisis when he assumed the burden of the papacy. Since the Second Vatican Council, more priests had left the active ministry than at any time since the Reformation in the sixteenth century. The priesthood was aging throughout the Western world, and once full seminaries had been shut or were largely empty. The conventional explanations for this were Latin-rite Catholicism’s tradition of priestly celibacy, and the antiauthoritarianism of postsixties Western culture. John Paul thought the problems of the priesthood in the last quarter of the twentieth century had deeper cultural roots. The often unconscious rationalism of late modernity had drained biblical revelation of its drama and often of its credibility, rendering it at best a noble fiction; yet if Christ was not, in truth, the Good Shepherd, why should an intelligent, able man offer himself to such a vocation? Then there was the radical individualism of late modernity, which made close relationships difficult and unleashed, in consequence, a frantic quest for pleasure and instant gratification. Even those young men who were believers were touched by the default atheism of much of Western public culture, which drained life of its mystery and reinforced the culture’s tendency to encourage purely pragmatic decisions about life choices. And then there were those confusions of freedom with license and the will to power, both of which uncoupled freedom from truth and thereby rendered the notion of self-sacrifice a form of masochism.18

  By giving a compelling personal example of priestly holiness, priestly witness, and priestly manliness in Rome and throughout the world, John Paul II had, at the very least, restored the morale of many Catholic priests. Theirs was a witness that the Pope especially wanted the Church to affirm during the Great Jubilee. So the Jubilee of Priests was set for May 18, 2000—John Paul’s eightieth birthday—and was preceded by three days of celebrations of the priesthood in Rome. The program began on Sunday, May 14, with the solemn celebration of Vespers in the Basilica of St. Mary Major; earlier that day, John Paul II ordained twenty-six new priests on the World Day of Prayer for Vocations. On the morning of May 15, Lauds and Mass were celebrated for the Jubilee of Priests in the Basilica of St. John Lateran, followed by a conference in the Paul VI Audience Hall that afternoon on “The Priest: Minister of Hope, Epiphany of God among Men,” led by the prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, the Colombian cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos (who had once disguised himself as a milkman in order to confront drug kingpin Pablo Escobar and call him to repentance). On Tuesday, Lauds was celebrated at the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, followed by testimonies from priests from six continents. That evening, the Slovak cardinal Ján Chryzostom Korec, S.J. (who had spent years in communist prisons and work camps during his days as a clandestinely ordained underground priest and bishop) led a solemn Way of the Cross at the Circus Maximus, recalling the many priests who had suffered for the faith and for their vocations during the previous two millennia.

  The greatest of the celebrations of the Jubilee of Priests took place on Thursday, May 18, when John Paul II led the largest concelebration of Mass in history, joined in St. Peter’s Square by 6,000 priests, 74 cardinals and patriarchs, and 250 bishops. In his homily, the Pope remarked on the paradox that the sacramental gift of the priesthood had been bestowed on “so many frail men,” a gift that “never ceases to amaze those who receive it.” He looked back with “an intense need to praise and thank God for his immense goodness” in calling them all to the priesthood; and in that need to give thanks, he found himself carried back in memory “to the Upper Room in Jerusalem where, during my recent pilgrimage to the Holy Land, I was able to celebrate Holy Mass … in that place where my priesthood and yours arose from the mind and heart of Christ.” There, he reminded his brothers in the priesthood, Christ wanted to give his priests a “share in the vocation and mission entrusted to him by the heavenly Father,” not for the sake of honor but so that Christ’s priests might “bring people into [the] universal mystery of salvation.”

  He was also thinking, he said, “of the priests who for different reasons no longer exercise their sacred ministry”—of those who had left the practice of the priesthood. They were, the Pope reminded them, still configured to Christ in a special way by “the indelible character of Holy Orders,” and so he prayed for them, and invited the whole Church to join him in that prayer, so that these men “may continue to fulfill the commitment to Christian integrity and ecclesial communion.”

  He closed by challenging the priests present, and priests throughout the world, to give themselves with renewed devotion to their specific “way of holiness,” which had been described in the First Letter of St. Peter: “to tend the flock God entrusted to us, not by constraint but willingly, not as domineering over those in our charge, but by setting them an example—a witness that, if necessary, can reach the point of shedding one’s blood, as did many of our confrères in the century which has just ended.” Then, this priest, bishop, and pope who had been formed in his ministry by the friendship of laypeople closed by asking the people of the Church to pray for the priests of the Church:

  Pray for us … dear Christian people, who have gathered around us today in faith and joy. You are a royal people, a priestly race, a holy assembly. You are the People of God who, in every part of the earth, share in Christ’s priesthood. Accept the gift which we renew today in the service of this, your special dignity. O priestly people, thank God with us for our ministry and sing with us to your Lord and ours: Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ, for the gift of the priesthood! Grant that the Church of the new millennium may count on the generous work of many holy priests! Amen.19

  The following day, Maestro Gilbert Levine, who had led a Holocaust Memorial Concert in the Paul VI Audience Hall in 1994, conducted the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus in a performance of Haydn’s The Creation in the same Aula Paolo VI, in honor of the Pope’s eightieth birthday. It brought to a close, the Pope said afterward, a “day that for me has been one of gratitude to the Lord for the inestimable gift of life and for the numerous graces with which he has wished to enrich my life.” And there was yet another birthday present from another great artist, the Polish poet and Nobel laureate, Czesław Miłosz—an “Ode for the Eightieth Birthday of Pope John Paul II”:

  We come to you, men of weak faith,

  So that you might fortify us with the example of your life

  And liberate us from anxiety

  About tomorrow and the next year. Your twentieth century

  Was made famous by the names of powerful tyrants

  And by the annihilation of their rapacious states.

  You knew it must happen. You taught hope:

  For only Christ is the lord and master of history.

  Foreigners could not guess from whence came the hidden strength

  Of a novice from Wadowice. The prayers and prophecies

  Of poets, whom money and progress scorned,

  Even though they were the equals of kings, waited for you

  So that you, not they, could announce urbi et orbi,

  That the centuries are not absurd but a vast order.

  Shepherd given us when the gods depart!

  In the fog above the cities the Golden Calf shines,

  The defenseless crowds race to offer the sacrifice

  Of their own children to the bloody screams of Moloch.

  In the air, fear, a lament without words:

  Since a desire for faith is not the same as faith.

  Then, suddenly, like the clear sound of the bell for matins,

  Your sign of dissent, which is like a miracle.

  People ask, not comprehending, how it’s possible

  That the young of the unbelieving countries