The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  That was never the case with John Paul II. But what about the “Nunc dimittis” scenario? Did the Pope consider resigning after the Great Jubilee?

  During the papal Lenten retreat that followed the jubilee Day of Pardon, John Paul added notes to his spiritual Testament—a collection of reflections and requests, the first of which were recorded five months after his election, in March 1979. In the March 2000 additions to the Testament, the Pope recalled Cardinal Wyszyński’s admonition, on the day of his election, that he had been chosen to lead the Church into the third millennium. Well, that had happened. “In accordance with the designs of Providence,” John Paul had lived through “the difficult century that is retreating into the past” and had been permitted to lead the Church and the world into a new century and a new millennium. So now, completing his eightieth year, it was time to ask himself “whether the time has come to say with Simeon of the Bible, ‘Nunc dimittis.’ ” For a man of the Bible, it was a natural question. God had “miraculously” saved him from death on May 13, 1981, and restored his life. So “ever since that moment,” the life of Karol Wojtyła had belonged “ever more” to God. Therefore, what must be done had come into focus:

  I hope [God] will help me recognize how long I must continue this service to which he called me on 16 October 1978. I ask him to deign to call me to Himself whenever he wishes: “If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then … we are the Lord’s” [cf. Romans 14.8]. I hope that as long as I am granted to carry out the Petrine service in the Church, God in His Mercy will grant me the necessary strength for this service.4

  It was, simply, a matter in God’s hands. The Nunc dimittis of John Paul II’s Testament was a prayer of thanksgiving for having been spared in order to bring the Church through the portal of the Great Jubilee; it was not a valedictory. Providence would decide when to end the pontificate. To be sure, there would be questions, perhaps doubts, certainly “dark nights” ahead. That was normal in any Christian life, even a pope’s. But the responsibility was clear—to set out with the rest of the Church “into the deep” of the third millennium.

  IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF ST. PAUL

  On February 21, 2001, Pope John Paul II held his eighth consistory for the creation of new cardinals, raising forty-four churchmen to what earlier generations had called “the sacred purple.” Prior to the consistory, there was an unusual amount of turmoil in senior Church circles over the Pope’s intention to create Bishop Walter Kasper a cardinal. A distinguished German theologian who sometimes treated crucial questions of the nature of the Church somewhat differently than John Paul II or Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Kasper had been brought to Rome as secretary of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, where he was heir apparent to the president of the council, Cardinal Edward Cassidy. The flap over a possible Kasper nomination, coupled with other German ecclesiastical turmoil, as well as the time it was taking for the synod of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church to elect a new major-archbishop of L’viv, led to the oddity of the new cardinals being announced over two Sundays, whereas the normal procedure was to announce everyone at once.

  The consistory, like the Great Jubilee, displayed the remarkable diversity of the Catholic world. The new cardinals included a considerable number of curialists (including both Sergio Sebastiani and Crescenzio Sepe, the man who replaced Sebastiani as chief staff officer for the Great Jubilee); a large Third World contingent from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, India, Ivory Coast, Peru, and South Africa; Europeans from France, Great Britain, Ireland, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and Ukraine; two American residential archbishops (Edward Egan of New York and Theodore McCarrick of Washington); three Germans (Kasper; Karl Lehmann of Mainz, a progressive whose nomination was also protested by some senior churchmen; and Johannes Degenhardt, whom some regarded as a “balance” to the liberal Lehmann); John Paul’s longtime trip planner, Roberto Tucci, S.J.; and the most distinguished of American theologians, Avery Dulles, S.J., the first U.S. scholar honored in such a way.5 The first cardinal named, and thus the “head” of the “Class of 2001,” was Giovanni Battista Re, longtime Sostituto, or papal chief of staff, who had recently been appointed prefect of the crucial Congregation for Bishops. Two cardinals whose names had been held in pectore, or secretly, by the Pope at the 1998 consistory received their red hats publicly in 2001: the Latvian Janis Pujats, and John Paul’s old friend and fellow philosopher, the Pole Marian Jaworski, Latin-rite archbishop of L’viv in Ukraine.

  The entire College of Cardinals was called back to Rome three months later to discuss the immediate future of the postjubilee Church in light of Novo Millennio Ineunte. This sixth extraordinary consistory of the pontificate took place from May 21 to May 23, 2001. With 155 cardinals in attendance, John Paul stressed in his opening remarks the importance of discussing “a number of practical suggestions for the Church’s mission of evangelization at the dawn of the new millennium,” including “the superlative formation and intelligent assignment of our priests and lay collaborators, because the field of apostolic action before us is vast and complex.”6 Some cardinals seemed to have a different agenda; the meaning of “collegiality” was debated yet again, as were proposals for more synods and changes in the functioning of the Roman Curia. One of the newly created cardinals, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor of Westminster, called for a pan-Christian council of churches to be held in Jerusalem, Compostela, or perhaps even England, in which the Catholic Church would not predetermine the agenda and the Pope would preside only “in love”; Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, O.P., of Vienna remarked to reporters after the meeting that Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor’s proposal was an “eschatological dream,” a theologically polite way of saying that any such gathering would likely happen only after the return of Christ in glory. Another European cardinal, Belgium’s Godfried Danneels, struck some observers and journalists as behaving rather like an American presidential candidate in an early primary election; future conclave politics were also at work in the cardinals’ discussions of the relationship between the Church’s Roman center and the local Catholic Churches around the world. The newly created Cardinal Dulles made an intervention defending a strong papacy, pointing out how other Christian communities suffered from the lack of such a center of unity and teaching authority.7

  At the end of the three-day session, it was hard for some observers not to draw the conclusion that the cardinals were, as a body, far more eager to debate bureaucratic change than to ponder the specifics of the new evangelization, out there “in the deep” of the third millennium. For all the talk of “collegiality,” it would, once more, be John Paul II who had to take the lead in demonstrating that mission remained the Church’s entire raison d’être. He did so in a dramatic way by continuing his jubilee pilgrimage to “the places linked to the history of salvation”—in this case, walking in the footsteps of St. Paul, the great missionary ad gentes [to the nations], in Greece, Damascus, and Malta, all of which had been sites of Pauline mission in the Acts of the Apostles.

  For the first two decades of the pontificate, John Paul II nurtured the hope that the first rupture in Christianity—between Rome and the Christian East—might be repaired so that the spiritual heirs of Peter and Andrew could once again concelebrate the Eucharist together. As the jubilee year approached, however, it became increasingly clear that history was not yet ready for John Paul’s vision of a great reconciliation between Rome and Constantinople at the end of a millennium of division. The Orthodox themselves were extravagantly divided. There was competition between the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople—a tiny Orthodox island in a Turkish and Islamic sea—and the Patriarchate of Moscow, which imagined itself the “Third Rome.” The Orthodox Churches of eastern Europe had been deeply damaged by communism. Perhaps even more to the point, many Orthodox had, over the centuries, internalized a view of Orthodoxy in which the fracture with Rome was an integral part of Orthodox identity. So while the Catholic Chu
rch regarded the Orthodox Churches as sister “Churches” (as Dominus Iesus had reaffirmed), most Orthodox did not reciprocate—thus the refusal of several Orthodox leaders to join in public prayer with John Paul II.

  John Paul’s proposal to visit the Areopagus of Athens as part of his jubilee pilgrimage had met with a frosty initial reception in Greek Orthodox circles. The Holy Synod of the Greek Church declared that the Pope could come only if he recanted the historic errors of Rome; the Orthodox monks of Mount Athos, who considered themselves the true guardians of Orthodoxy, laid down a propaganda barrage against the Pope as the leader of a heretical community. The logjam was broken when Greek president Constantinos Stephanopoulos, on a visit to Rome, extended an invitation to John Paul to visit Greece in the Pope’s capacity as head of state of Vatican City. This put the Holy Synod in an awkward position, and, after an exchange of letters between the Pope and Archbishop Christodoulos of Athens, an invitation from the Holy Synod was forthcoming, if grudgingly. Christodoulos had to spend weeks trying to calm down his Orthodox brethren; the Athonite monks went on the rhetorical rampage again, denouncing “another of Wojtyła’s hegemonic tours.” As late as April 2001, the senior Catholic prelate in Greece, Archbishop Nikolaos Foscolos, confessed that he was unsure how the visit would work out, or even if it would happen, because “ecumenism does not exist in Greece.” That Archbishop Foscolos was not being overly pessimistic was made clear on April 25 when a large anti-papal demonstration in Athens featured banners denouncing John Paul as a “two-horned heretic.” Posters describing the Pope as “the Beast of the Apocalypse” sprouted all over the Greek capital, and one of the demonstration organizers, a Greek Orthodox priest, decried the Pope’s “sins against humanity.”

  When he kissed Greek soil at the Athens airport in the late morning of May 4, John Paul II became the first Bishop of Rome to set foot in Greece since the schism of 1054 had formalized a breach between Rome and Constantinople that had been widening for centuries. Neither President Stephanopoulos nor Archbishop Christodoulos was at the airport to greet John Paul, who went to the presidential palace and praised the Greek Fathers of the Church who had made decisive contributions to the civilization of the West, such as St. Basil and St. John Chrysostom. Through these great teachers, the Pope said, “gradually the Hellenistic world became Christian and Christianity became to a certain extent Greek.” After paying that tribute to the Greek contribution to Europe, John Paul went to the residence of Archbishop Christodoulos and seized the initiative by asking God’s forgiveness “for the occasions past and present when sons and daughters of the Catholic Church [had] sinned by action or omission against their Orthodox brothers and sisters.” The Pope specifically cited the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204, which, he said, “fills Catholics with deep regret.” Christodoulos, touched, still clung to ancient grievances. Insisting in his remarks that “the Greek and Orthodox people have suffered a great deal at the hands of the West,” the archbishop cited Rome’s full communion with the Eastern Catholic Churches as an obstacle to dialogue and complained that the Holy See did not take up the Greek cause with respect to Cyprus.8

  Still, hardened hearts had been moved: when the Holy Synod met John Paul on the Areopagus that afternoon, they spontaneously applauded him. The Areopagus had long held a special place in John Paul II’s religious imagination, for the apostle Paul’s attempt to crack the facade of Athenian cynicism there by appealing to the “unknown god” seemed to the Pope an apt metaphor for the Church’s mission in post-Christian Europe. During the brief ceremony, John Paul and Christodoulos signed a common “Declaration on the Christian Roots of Europe,” which was then read aloud; virtually every sentence in it had been contested prior to the trip between the Holy See and the Greek Orthodox authorities.

  On May 5, John Paul celebrated Mass at the Sports Palace in the Athens Olympic Complex and then left for Damascus. At his farewell meeting with Christodoulos, he proposed that each say the Lord’s Prayer in his own language, which the Orthodox archbishop was willing to do. During the private encounter, Christodoulos admitted to being “proud of this visit” and conceded that “a new era is opening,” according to Joaquín Navarro-Valls.9 At least some of the Greek press agreed: the newspaper Kathimerini claimed that “the ice of twelve centuries has cracked,” while the magazine Etnos had a large front-page headline, “John Paul II Changes History.”10 It was the future that John Paul wanted to shape; but with the exception of the irreconcilables, such as the monks of Mount Athos, it did seem that the Pope’s self-evident humility and generosity of spirit had healed at least a few of history’s wounds.

  Ancient hatreds were on virulent display when John Paul II arrived in Damascus later on May 5. There, he was greeted by Syrian president Bashar al-Assad with an anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic tirade in which Assad appealed to the blood libel of Jews by denouncing those “who try to kill the principles of all religion with the same mentality with which they betrayed Jesus Christ.” The Pope spoke of his hopes for peace and for reconciliation among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. That he did not immediately rebut Assad’s calumnies set off an international media tempest. Rabbi Arthur Schneier of New York did not take the bait and simply said that “People know what this man stands for”; Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League graciously allowed as how John Paul “has earned our patience,” even though he spoke of the Pope’s “sin of silence.”11 As the Syrian portion of the Pope’s visit unfolded, it became clear that the Pope was in fact responding to Assad’s butchery of history and Catholic doctrine by laying out a radically different view of the Catholic Church’s relations with Judaism and Islam, and of the civility that ought to prevail among people of genuine faith in the God of Abraham.12

  The ecumenical climate was considerably warmer in Syria than in Athens, as the Eastern Catholic Churches and the Orthodox Churches in the country enjoyed good relations. Patriarch Ignatius IV Hakim of the Antiochian Orthodox Church went out of his way to make clear that he and his flock, the largest Christian group in Syria, did not share the animosities of their Greek Orthodox brethren: “We have our own Orthodox personality, and our circumstances are different,” the patriarch said. (As they certainly were: the various Christian groupings in Syria amounted to about 7 percent of the total population.) During the visit, the patriarch recited the Creed together with the Pope during an ecumenical meeting.13

  On May 6, John Paul II presided and preached at a Mass attended by 40,000 people and all the bishops of Syria, of whatever Catholic rite, which was held in the Abbassyine stadium outside Damascus. In his homily, he spoke of the importance of Damascus in Christian history, a point he underscored by visiting the traditional site where St. Paul had been lowered through an opening in the city wall to escape his persecutors. Later that day, John Paul became the first pope to set foot in a Muslim house of worship when he came to the Omayyad Grand Mosque for a meeting with Muslim leaders. Presented with a Qur’an, he kissed it. It was a gesture that would be criticized for the duration of his pontificate by some of his most ardent supporters, who could not seem to grasp that, as one close Catholic student of Islam put it, the gesture was a “kiss for Muslims,” not a recognition of the Qur’an as divine revelation—a notion the Pope had specifically rejected in his 1994 bestseller, Crossing the Threshold of Hope.14

  In the view of one of the Catholic Church’s leading experts on Islam, the German Jesuit Christian Troll, John Paul II’s address at the Omayyad Grand Mosque was his “testament concerning his vision of Islam and its relationship to Christianity in a globalized world.” The venue itself was deeply suggestive, as the Grand Mosque had formerly been the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, known to Muslims as Yahya, and includes a traditional site of the tomb of the beheaded prophet whom both Christians and Muslims venerate. Thus it was important, Father Troll wrote, that the papal address in the Grand Mosque began by invoking this shared figure as the exemplar of a common responsibility: “John’s life, wholly dedicated to God
, was crowned with martyrdom. May his witness enlighten all who venerate his memory so that they—and we, too—may understand that life’s great task is to seek God’s truth and justice.” The Pope then stressed the common Christian and Muslim commitment to prayer. After discussing the importance of places of worship and education where the young could learn the faith of their fathers, John Paul deplored the “misuse of religion itself to promote or justify hatred and violence,” which “destroys the image of the Creator in his creatures and should never be considered as the fruit of religious conviction.” Thus the Pope’s “ardent hope” was that “Muslim and Christian leaders and teachers will present our two great religious communities as communities in respectful dialogue, never more as communities in conflict.” Given the realities of the moment, that “ardent hope” was also an unmistakable challenge to the Pope’s Muslim hosts.15

  On May 7, John Paul II prayed for peace in the ruins of a Greek Orthodox church in Quneitra on the Golan Heights before returning to Damascus and a youth meeting at the Greek-Catholic Cathedral in the Syrian capital. Spokesman Navarro-Valls, conscious of the world media storm over President Assad’s anti-Israeli remarks (which had been echoed by the Grand Mufti of Syria, Sheikh Ahmad Kaftaro, at the Omayyad Grand Mosque), cautioned reporters against over-interpreting the Quneitra visit: its “sole objective and sole reason was to pray for peace,” Navarro said, and “people of goodwill will understand and … appreciate this gesture.”16

  After the chilly reception in Greece, which he managed to thaw, and the political histrionics (and worse) in Syria, which he tried to counter by proposing a different vision of the future than that held by either President Assad or Sheikh Kaftaro, it was a relief for an obviously tired Pope to arrive in Malta, which is 98 percent Catholic and has a high rate of Catholic practice. Site of St. Paul’s shipwreck in Acts 27–28, the island had been ruled from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries by the Catholic equestrian order, the Knights of Malta.17 Two-thirds of the island’s population attended John Paul’s beatification of three Maltese natives at an outdoor Mass on May 9.18