The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  Those who expected the Catholic Church to present itself as one consumer option in a supermarket of religious possibilities were thus mistaken. Some (including some Christian ecumenists who had long since abandoned any notion of the ecclesial distinctiveness of their communities) were doubtless disappointed, even angered. But whatever the expectations of those who imagined ecumenism and interreligious dialogue to be a conversation over matters of taste and lifestyle rather than matters of truth, Dominus Iesus “fit,” if in a challenging way, within the Great Jubilee of 2000. For this was not a jubilee celebrating some generic possibility of salvation, but a holy year lifting up the core Christian conviction that, in the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the salvation of the world had been achieved in a definitive and unsurpassable way.

  In his Angelus remarks on October 1 after the canonization of Saint Augustine Zhao Rong and his 199 Companions (martyrs in China), Saint Katherine Drexel (the Philadelphia heiress who founded a religious order devoted to work with African-Americans and Native Americans), Saint María Josefa del Corazón de Jesús Sancho de Guerra (the first Basque saint), and Saint Josephine Bakhita (a former Sudanese slave), John Paul II tried to end Italian press speculation about a rift between himself and CDF prefect Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, while meeting the charge of “arrogance” head-on.32 In words tinged with ecumenical challenge, the Pope said that Dominus Iesus had been “approved by me in a special way at the height of the Jubilee Year” in order to “invite all Christians to renew their fidelity to [Christ] … to bear unanimous witness that the Son, both today and tomorrow, is ‘the way, the truth, and the life’ ” (John 14.6). To confess Christ as “the only Son through whom we … see the Father’s face” was not an act of “arrogance that disdains other religions.” Rather, it was a joyful—and humbling—acknowledgment that “Christ has revealed himself to us without any merit on our part.” Moreover, to have been encountered by Christ was to have undertaken an obligation: “to continue giving what we have received and to communicate to others what we have been given, since the Truth that has been given and the Love which is God belong to all people.”

  As for the interreligious controversy following Dominus Iesus, John Paul was equally firm: to proclaim, with the apostle Peter in Acts 4, that “there is no salvation in anyone else” but Christ “does not deny salvation to non-Christians, but points to its ultimate source in Christ, in whom God and man are united.” This should not be an obstacle to genuine interreligious dialogue, just as the Catholic Church’s frank statement of its self-understanding as the fullest expression of the one Church of Christ ought not be an impediment to ecumenical dialogue. For Dominus Iesus to have clarified these “essential elements” of Catholic faith ought to help make genuine dialogue possible by showing the “bases” of a true conversation; for a “dialogue without foundations,” John Paul continued, “would … degenerate into empty wordiness.” Dominus Iesus, despite “so many erroneous interpretations,” expressed the “same ecumenical passion” that John Paul himself had stressed in his 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint [That They May Be One], and the same convictions about the imperative of interreligious tolerance and respect that had motivated his encounters with the world religions throughout his pontificate. Thus the Pope prayed that “this Declaration, which is close to my heart, can … finally fulfill its function both of clarification and of openness. May Mary, whom the Lord on the Cross entrusted to us as the mother of all, help us to grow together in our faith in Christ, the Redeemer of mankind, in the hope of salvation offered by Christ to everyone, and in love, which is the sign of God’s children.”33

  John Paul II continued to lift up the sanctity of heroic witness to Christ throughout the remaining months of the Great Jubilee. His September 3 beatification of two popes, Pius IX (who reigned from 1846 to 1878) and John XXIII (who had summoned Vatican II), led some of the Pope’s Catholic critics to complain that he was trying to take the edge off Pius IX, who had issued the Syllabus of Errors, by linking him to “Good Pope John.” The charge ignored the fact that John XXIII—whatever he may have thought of Pius’s entanglements with nineteenth-century Italian politics and the intellectual ferment of his times—had himself wished to beatify Pius IX, whom he regarded as a man of heroic virtue and pastoral courage. John Paul II, for his part, explained in his beatification homily that for the Church to honor a deceased pope by beatification or canonization is not necessarily to “celebrate the specific historical decisions” a pope may have made, but to acknowledge him as “someone to be imitated because of his virtues.” Like everyone else, John Paul reminded the congregation that day, popes live in history and so does sanctity: “holiness lives in history and no saint can escape the limits and conditioning that are part of our human nature.”34

  LEAVING THE SHALLOWS, SETTING OFF “INTO THE DEEP”

  Every night during the Great Jubilee, a special Vespers service was held in St. Peter’s Square for the pilgrims who kept flocking to Rome from all over the world. In the fall and winter of 2000, the vocational jubilee days unfolded with a similar regularity: there were jubilees for university professors (September 9), for papal diplomatic representatives (September 15), for the elderly (September 17), and for bishops (October 8). The Jubilee of Bishops was originally intended to be part of a holy year Synod of Bishops, but the Pope was finally persuaded that it would be more prudent to move that meeting, which would consider the bishop’s role in the evangelization of the third millennium, to 2001. During the bishops’ jubilee, which was the largest gathering of the Catholic episcopate since the Second Vatican Council, John Paul II once again entrusted the world to the Virgin Mary in a public act of consecration in which the 1,500 bishops and 80 cardinals present joined.

  History did not stop for the jubilee year, of course; in a preview of more lethal acts to come, the USS Cole was attacked by al-Qaeda suicide bombers in the harbor of Aden on October 12, four days before Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh visited with John Paul II in the Vatican. And still the vocational jubilees continued, with the seemingly indefatigable Pope addressing each one: the Jubilee of Families was held on October 14, the Jubilee of the World of Sports on October 29, and the Jubilee of Government Leaders and Politicians (to whom John Paul gave St. Thomas More as a special patron) on November 4. John Paul then hosted the Armenian Catholicos, Karekin II, for three days (November 8–10) before the special jubilee days began again: farmers (November 12); the armed forces and police (November 19); the lay apostolate (November 26); the disabled (December 3); catechists (December 10); and finally the entertainment world (December 17). At the Sunday Angelus of December 17, the Pope appealed for a worldwide abolition of the death penalty, an appeal rooted in his teaching in the 1995 encyclical on the life issues, Evangelium Vitae [The Gospel of Life].35

  A week after the entertainers had their jubilee day, John Paul began the second Christmas of the Great Jubilee by reminding the congregation at Christmas Midnight Mass in the Vatican basilica that it had been a year since that “unforgettable night … when the Holy Door of the Great Jubilee was opened” and “the Door of grace opened wide for all.” For twelve months, it had been “as if the Church had never ceased to repeat day after day.… ‘Today is born our Savior.’” That proclamation, which was at the center of the jubilee’s meaning and message, had an “inexhaustible power to renew” the Church and the world, for the holiness of Christ had “made all time holy: the days, the centuries, the millennia,” and had done so “once and for all.” At the birth of Christ, time had been turned “into the ‘today’ of salvation.”36

  That continuous “today” would be lived in many tomorrows. And so at the end of the Great Jubilee of 2000, John Paul II, rather than looking nostalgically back on the past—even the extraordinary immediate past of the jubilee year—determined to point the Church firmly into the future.

  The Great Jubilee was solemnly concluded on January 6, 2001, as the Pope, vested in a white cope, knelt in the portal
for a moment of prayer, as he had done on December 24, 1999—and then drew closed the two bronze panels of the Holy Door at St. Peter’s. A procession led by the Book of the Gospels then left the basilica for the sagrato, the esplanade in front of St. Peter’s, where John Paul led a concelebrated Mass for the Solemnity of the Epiphany, which was attended by a congregation that completely filled the square and spilled down the Via della Conciliazione. The Pope built his homily around the responsorial psalm in the day’s liturgy: “All the peoples of the earth will adore you, O Lord!” That messianic hope, John Paul said, had its first fulfillment when the gentile Magi came to adore the Christ child at Bethlehem, which marked the “beginning of the manifestation of Christ—his ‘epiphany’ precisely—to those who represented the peoples of the world.” That all the peoples of the earth would adore the Lord was also a prophecy “being fulfilled by degrees in the course of time.” It was being fulfilled, for example, through the Great Jubilee, during which “countless individuals … set out in the footsteps of the Wise Men in search of Jesus … the true ‘holy Door’ [who] makes it possible for us to enter the Father’s house and who introduces us into the intimacy of the divine life.”

  The Holy Door had been closed, but “the Heart of Jesus remains more open than ever,” John Paul continued. In gratitude to God for that openness and for allowing all those who participated in the Great Jubilee to experience “the happiness which filled the Wise Men … as they [placed] at the Child’s feet not only their gifts but their lives,” a solemn Te Deum would be sung at the end of the day’s Mass. Yes, there was much for which to be thankful. But now, the Pope insisted, “it is time to look to the future, for, like the Wise Men, the Church must “start out afresh on a new stage of the journey on which we become proclaimers and heralds.” What had been freely received must now be freely given away. That was how the Church would “become in history a true epiphany of the merciful and glorious face of Christ the Lord.”37

  At the end of the ceremony John Paul II signed a new apostolic letter, Novo Millennio Ineunte, which addressed the entire Church on the themes of its title: “Entering the Third Millennium.” Like its 1994 book-end, Tertio Millennio Adveniente, Novo Millennio Ineunte was both a lyrical reflection on time and faith and a bold prescription for future pastoral action throughout the world Church.

  The Church of the third millennium, John Paul began, could not rest in the shallows of institutional maintenance. Rather, it had to obey Christ’s command to his disciples, to “put out into the deep” for a catch (Luke 5.4). That command in its Latin form, Duc in altum, was the antiphon woven throughout the Pope’s letter, which, while reflecting on many of the major events of the jubilee year, was primarily a challenge to the entire Church “to take up [the] evangelizing mission with fresh enthusiasm.”38 That, indeed, had been one of the primary purposes of both Vatican II and the Great Jubilee: to point the Church into a future that “mirrors the movement of the Incarnation itself,” for the impact of that axial moment in history continues down the corridors of time and in every place.39

  That was why the Church’s first duty was the duty of praise—“the point of departure for every genuine response of faith to the revelation of God in Christ.” And the Church’s praise arises from the Church’s continuing experience in history of the profligacy of God’s love: “Christianity is grace, it is the wonder of a God who is not satisfied with creating the world and man, but puts himself on the same level as the creature he has made and, after speaking on various occasions and in various ways through his prophets, ‘in these last days … has spoken to us by a Son’ ” (Hebrews 1.1–2). Thus the Great Jubilee had been a protracted meditation on the holy face of Christ, who shows us both the countenance of the Father and the truth about our own humanity—and is thus “confessed as the meaning of history and the light of life’s journey.”40

  The holy face of Christ, John Paul continued, was what had drawn so many pilgrims to Rome and to the Holy Door that had been one of the jubilee’s focal points:

  I have often stopped to look at the long queues of pilgrims waiting patiently to go through the Holy Door. In each of them I tried to imagine the story of a life, made up of joys, worries, sufferings; the story of someone whom Christ had met and who, in dialogue with him, was setting out again on a journey of hope.

  As I observed the continuous flow of pilgrimages, I saw them as a kind of concrete image of the pilgrim Church, the Church placed, as Saint Augustine says, “amid the persecutions of the world and the consolations of God.” … Who can measure the marvels of grace wrought in the human heart? It is better to be silent and to adore, trusting humbly in the mysterious workings of God and singing his love without end: “Misericordias Domini in aeternum cantabo” [I shall sing the mercy of the Lord forever].41

  To contemplate the face of Christ—“Christ considered in his historical features and in his mystery”—was not a call to quietism, however: for “in the cause of the Kingdom, there is no time for looking back.”42 Therefore, the postjubilee Church must place itself in the position of those who heard Peter’s first sermon and asked, “What must we do?” (Acts 2.37). In answering that question, there was need for neither formula nor program, for “we shall not be saved by a formula but by a person,” and “the program already exists”: to bring others to Christ, “so that in him we may live the life of the Trinity, and with him transform history until its fulfillment in the heavenly Jerusalem.… This program for all times is our program for the Third Millennium.”43

  If there was no “new program” to be announced, there were nonetheless pastoral priorities to be suggested. The first of these was holiness:

  [S]ince Baptism is a true entry into the holiness of God through incorporation into Christ and the indwelling of his spirit, it would be a contradiction to settle for a life of mediocrity, marked by a minimalist ethic and a shallow religiosity. To ask catechumens, “Do you wish to receive Baptism?” means at the same time to ask them: “Do you wish to become holy?” It means to set before them the radical nature of the Sermon on the Mount: “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” [Matthew 5.48].44

  Holiness, in other words, was the “standard of ordinary Christian life.” All were called to it; no one was exempt; no one was permitted to be mediocre. That fact of Christian life led to the second pastoral priority: prayer, the reciprocal conversation with Christ that was “the condition of all true pastoral life.” Christian communities ought therefore to be schools of prayer that did not “distract us from our commitment to history” but rather made the Church “capable of shaping history according to God’s plan.” In that school of prayer, the Christians of the early third millennium ought to recover the spiritual habits of regular Sunday Mass attendance and frequent confession of sins—the latter being a practice that pastors should present “with more confidence, creativity, and perseverance.”45

  From those schools of prayer, the entire Church should set out into the deep on mission and evangelization. Mission, the Pope insisted, “cannot be left to a group of ‘specialists’ but must involve the responsibility of all the members of the People of God.”46 That responsibility was exercised, in the first instance, by the people of the Church demonstrating by the quality of their own lives that the Church is indeed a “communion of love,” a love “which springs from the heart of the Eternal Father and is poured out upon us through the Spirit which Jesus gives us … to make us all ‘one heart and one soul’ ” (Acts 4.32). By building this communion of love, “the Church appears as ‘sacrament,’ as the ‘sign and instrument of intimate union with God and of the unity of the human race.’ ”47 And, as such, the Church is in a position to add a distinctive voice to the dialogue on the hard questions of the immediate future: the defense of the right to life and other fundamental human rights; the quest for peace; the management of scientific knowledge so that it enhances rather than degrades life.48 In addressing these and other issues, the “communion of love” that is the Church works bes
t, the Pope wrote, through a charity that “will … become a service to culture, politics, the economy, and the family,” always building the culture of life on which depend “the destiny of human beings and the future of civilization.”49 At the same time, and toward the same ends, the Church as a communion of love will foster an interreligious dialogue that does not descend into “religious indifferentism” but which bears witness to “the hope that is within us” by “a profound willingness to listen.”50 That principle held true, not only in interreligious dialogue and ecumenism, but for the Christian dialogue with culture and science. Differences were real; genuine tolerance and a willingness to listen led to differences engaged respectfully, not differences ignored.

  At the end of the Great Jubilee, John Paul concluded, the Church could not turn from “enthusiasm” to “a dull everyday routine.” For if the pilgrimage of the Great Jubilee of 2000 had been a genuine walk with God, then “it will have … stretched our legs for the journey still ahead.”51