The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  That John Paul’s strategic objectives might sometimes be in tension with one another, given certain circumstances, was amply demonstrated by the Pope’s pastoral visit to Kazakhstan in formerly Soviet Central Asia, and to Armenia, home of one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, from September 22 through September 27, 2001. Kazakhstan was a place close to the Pope’s Polish heart, as it had been the destination of many Polish families deported from the Soviet-occupied parts of Poland at the beginning of World War II. In three days of meetings in the city of Astrana with politicians, religious and intellectual leaders, and young people, and in his homilies at two Masses, John Paul stressed the imperatives of peace, civility, and mutual respect among diverse ethnic and religious traditions, in what he termed a “land of encounter and dialogue.” Quoting “one of your country’s great thinkers, the teacher Abai Kunanbai,” he reminded an audience of Kazakh cultural leaders that reason must never give way to passion; as Abai Kunanbai had put it in a poem,

  If the heart no longer aspires to anything, who can unveil its thought?

  … If reason abandons itself to desire,

  it loses all its depth.

  … Can a people worthy of this name do without reason?

  It was in this context, he said, that he wished to reaffirm “the Catholic Church’s respect for Islam, for authentic Islam: the Islam that prays, that is concerned for those in need. Recalling the errors of the past, including the most recent past, all believers ought to unite their efforts to ensure that God is never made the hostage of human ambitions.” Terrorism, and the hatred that lay beneath it, was both a profanation of “the name of God” and a disfigurement of “the true image of man.”34

  The thoughts were noble and unexceptionable. Yet with the world expecting imminent U.S. military action in Afghanistan in response to the attacks of 9/11, the European Left and its allies in the European media began interpreting the Pope’s admonitions to dialogue and peace as an implicit papal condemnation of the expected American assault on al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Joaquín Navarro-Valls, concerned about this, raised the point with the Pope, saying that once military action started there was a danger that the pontiff would be hijacked by the European media as a symbol of opposition to U.S. policy and action. On his own initiative but as a “matter of conscience,” Navarro then gave an interview to Philip Pullella of the Reuters news agency while the two men were together in Astrana. In the interview, Navarro made clear that John Paul’s promotion of peace and interreligious reconciliation should not be twisted into a papal case for pacifism in response to 9/11, and that military action to forestall any such attacks in the future was morally justifiable. The cardinal secretary of state, Angelo Sodano, seemingly unaware of what was afoot, was unhappy with Navarro’s initiative; the papal spokesman simply told him that something had to be done or the Pope’s position would have been compromised. Bishop Stanisław Dziwisz, the papal secretary, asked Navarro what was going on, and quickly understood when the Spaniard explained the reasons for what he had done.35

  The Pope spent three days in Armenia, where he was warmly welcomed by the Catholicos of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Karekin II, with whom he joined in an ecumenical celebration in the newly consecrated Cathedral of St. Gregory the Illuminator in Yerevan. The two also signed a common declaration that noted the many martyrs among the million and a half victims of the Armenian genocide during World War I. It was a welcome moment of ecumenical warmth in the former Soviet Union, as the winds blowing from the Moscow Patriarchate remained chilly. John Paul’s hopes for a visit to Russia were not making progress; the head of “external affairs” for the Russian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk, had recently declared that all eleven time zones of Russia were “canonical Orthodox territory” within which Catholics should not be permitted to work to convert others, even from atheism.36 Yet despite the slow but steady decline in John Paul’s physical condition, his mind remained both clear and imaginative. In an attempt to break through another ancient barrier of animosity (and perhaps open the door to another great nation he yearned to visit), he had recently sent a letter to a congress marking the four hundredth anniversary of the Jesuit scholar Matteo Ricci’s arrival in Beijing, in which the Pope asked God’s forgiveness for offenses Christians may have committed against China in the past. As papal spokesman Navarro-Valls noted at the time, this bold stroke was entirely John Paul’s idea: “nobody in the [Vatican] bureaucracy would ever have thought of such a thing.”37

  BISHOPS “INTO THE DEEP”

  One of the great accomplishments of the Catholic Church since the French Revolution (and perhaps the single greatest accomplishment of modern Holy See diplomacy) often goes unremarked: the lengthy, sometimes delicate, and occasionally contentious process by which the Church regained control over the appointment of its bishops. In the mid-nineteenth century, Pope Pius IX had a free choice of appointment in only a small number of Catholic dioceses in the world, primarily in Australia, Belgium, and the United States. The appointment of bishops elsewhere was heavily influenced, or in some instances controlled, by governments—a concession the Second Vatican Council tried to bring to a definitive end and that was in fact banned by the 1983 Code of Canon Law.38 By the time of John Paul II’s election in 1978, the Holy See exercised a free right of episcopal appointment throughout the world, with the Church’s freedom of action being seriously impeded only in Vietnam and China. John Paul appointed thousands of bishops; the gravity with which he took this responsibility could be read from his nominations to the crucial curial post of prefect of the Congregation of Bishops—the Beninese cardinal, Bernardin Gantin, the first African to hold the position; the Brazilian Dominican, Lucas Moreira Neves; and his former Sostituto, or chief of staff, Giovanni Battista Re. All were men in whom John Paul reposed great trust.

  No one would claim, however, that the system of episcopal appointment was perfect. And at times, the Pope seemed frustrated with the inability of bishops to share his own sense of evangelical urgency and his own commitment to a vibrant Catholic public witness in the world; on one occasion, John Paul told several luncheon guests, who had asked whether a forthcoming compendium of Catholic social doctrine was really necessary, that “it is necessary because the bishops don’t know the social doctrine of the Church.”39 Some obviously did, as indeed some shared the Pope’s sense of high adventure in setting out “into the deep” of the third millennium. But others clearly did not, and it was to send a jolt of evangelical energy into the world episcopate that John Paul had planned a synod on the role of the bishop in the new century as part of the Great Jubilee of 2000. It just couldn’t be done in 2000, however, given everything else that was happening in Rome during the holy year. So the Synod of Bishops on bishops was deferred a year, and convened in Rome on September 30, 2001.

  In his opening homily at St. Peter’s, John Paul made unmistakably clear that he expected the bishops of the Church to join with the Bishop of Rome in leaving the shallows of institutional maintenance and setting out into the turbulent “deep” of twenty-first-century history:

  Dear Brothers in the Episcopate! Christ repeats to us today: “Duc in altum—Put out into the deep!” [Luke 5.4]. Following his invitation, we may reread the triple munus entrusted to us in the Church: munus docendi, sanctificandi et regendi (the ministry of teaching, sanctifying, and governing).…

  Duc in docendo! (Lead in teaching.) With the Apostle, we will say: “Preach the world, be urgent in season and out of season, convince, rebuke, and exhort—be unfailing in patience and in teaching” [2 Timothy 4.2].

  Duc in sanctificando! (Lead in sanctifying.) The “nets” we are called upon to cast among men are, first of all, the Sacraments, of which we are the principal dispensers, governors, guardians, and promoters.… They form a sort of saving “net,” which frees from evil and leads to the fullness of life.

  Duc in regendo! (Lead in governing.) As Shepherds and true Fathers, assisted by the Priests and other collaborators, w
e have the task of gathering the family of the faithful and in it fostering charity and brotherly communion.

  As arduous and laborious a mission as this may be, we must not lose heart. With Peter and the first disciples, we, too, with great confidence renew our sincere profession of faith: Lord, “at your word I will lower the nets” [Luke 5.5]!40

  Four weeks of speeches (technically known as “interventions”) and small group discussions followed. There were debates over “effective collegiality” (theological code for ecclesial power sharing between Rome and the world episcopate) and “affective collegiality” (the bishops’ mutual support of one another). Some Synod fathers argued that the social doctrine principle of subsidiarity, which held that decision-making should be located at the lowest level possible in a social hierarchy, also applied to the internal governance of the Church; others disagreed, arguing that the purpose of the papal magisterium was to be the ultimate safeguard of the truths of the faith, which are universal and not local. Interesting in themselves, these debates also served as a polite, intellectual facade behind which some bishops pressed for a decentralization of decision-making in the world Church. Thus it seemed noteworthy that the most vigorously applauded intervention of the Synod’s first week was given by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, who told his brother bishops that if they were exercising the munus regendi and defending orthodoxy, the so-called problem of decentralization would “take care of itself.” That Ratzinger was applauded suggested, at a minimum, that the Synod fathers were happy to recognize courage, even if some were not prepared to exercise that cardinal virtue as often as Cardinal Ratzinger might have liked.

  The Synod was also an occasion for some bishops and cardinals to engage in a bit of discreet politicking in anticipation of the Pope’s death. Others took the opportunity to denounce globalization and the free economy in terms that suggested they had not read John Paul’s 1991 encyclical, Centesimus Annus. Still others voiced the now-familiar complaints about the Curia and the Synod process. After several weeks of interventions that oscillated between serious theological argument and oratorical inventories of discontents, one Synod auditor summarized her view of those narrowly focused on internal Church power issues by saying that she wished they would “stop complaining and act like men.” Many, of course, did, and spoke eloquently about the imperative of evangelization in what was becoming, at least in the West, a postreligious culture. Moreover, as John Paul often remarked about these lengthy synodal exercises, what happened outside the Synod Hall, in the informal conversations between bishops, was often as important, and sometimes more so, than what happened inside. For it was often “outside” that the ordained leaders of the Church got to know one another and one another’s problems—and gained a new sense of possibility in the process.41

  One high point of the monthlong assembly came on October 21, World Mission Sunday, when John Paul II fulfilled a long-standing ambition and celebrated history’s first beatification of a married couple, Luigi and Maria Beltrame Quattrocchi, three of whose children were present for the Mass in St. Peter’s Square. Their lives, the Pope said in his homily, were a shining example of a positive answer to Christ’s question: “And when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Luke 18.8). The beatification of the Quattrocchis had been scheduled to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of one of John Paul’s favorite documents in a pontificate replete with magisterium: the apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio [The Community of the Family], by which he had completed the work of the 1980 Synod of Bishops. With Familiaris Consortio doubtless in mind, the Pope noted that Luigi and Maria Beltrame Quattrocchi had lived “an ordinary life in an extraordinary way,” showing that heroic virtue was indeed a possibility in the vocation of spouse and parent; through their example, the Church had “distinctive confirmation that the path of holiness lived together as a couple is possible, beautiful, extraordinarily fruitful, and fundamental for the good of the family, the Church, and society.” Like the bishops present, the Pope concluded, married couples must “renew your missionary zeal,” by making their homes “privileged places for announcing and accepting the Gospel in an atmosphere of prayer and … Christian solidarity.”42

  The Synod concluded with Mass in St. Peter’s on October 27, and the Pope took as his homily text the responsorial psalm antiphon for the Mass of the day—“Proclaim his salvation to every people.” He called the bishops to have, “above all,” the “courage to announce and defend sound doctrine,” even when it entails suffering, and urged them to be good pastors and fathers to their priests. At the end, John Paul read an honor roll of the twenty-two bishops who had been canonized as saints during the twentieth century, a roster that included two Doctors of the Church (Albert the Great and Robert Bellarmine), the English martyr John Fisher, the Irish martyr Oliver Plunkett, several bishops martyred in Vietnam, and the Bohemian emigré who had become bishop of Philadelphia, John Neumann. From these men, as well as from those martyr-bishops who had been beatified (most recently in Ukraine), “there emerges, as in a mosaic, the face of Christ the Good Shepherd and Missionary of the Father.” At the “beginning of a new epoch,” the Pope concluded, “we fix our eyes on this living icon … so that with ever greater dedication we may be servants of the Gospel, hope of the world.”43

  On October 7, as the Synod was concluding its first week of work, American and British forces had begun the military campaign that would eventually depose the Taliban regime in Afghanistan while uprooting the al-Qaeda terrorist camps that had been welcomed by the radical Islamist government; the Taliban collapsed on December 9. John Paul, continuing to carve his own unique path through the turbulence of late 2001, accelerated the planning for a second meeting of world religious leaders in Assisi, which would be held on January 24, 2002. As the new Afghan government took over in December, the Pope marked another milestone, visiting his three hundredth Roman parish in the course of what was by then a twenty-three-year-long personal effort to re-evangelize his own diocese. It was the Third Sunday of Advent, Gaudete Sunday, a traditional day of rejoicing during a season of penitential preparation for Christmas. The Pope thanked the parish of St. María Josefa of the Heart of Jesus and all the parishes of the city for the great encouragement he had received from being with the people of Rome in their neighborhood churches. At the end of a difficult year in which the lethal face of distorted religious conviction had horrified the civilized world, he reminded his Roman parishioners that the Christ Child, whose birth they would celebrate in a few short days, would “come in the silence, humility, and poverty of the crib, and will bring his joy to all who welcome him with open hearts.”44

  THE LONG LENT OF 2002

  On January 6, 2002, the Boston Globe reported on its front page that a former priest, John Geoghan, had been credibly accused of molesting more than 130 boys over a period of some thirty years—during which time he had been assigned by officials of the Archdiocese of Boston to three different parishes, after the officials were assured by therapists that Geoghan had been “cured.” Thus began one of the darkest periods in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States and a period of prolonged anguish for John Paul II.

  Karol Wojtyła had come to the papacy with little direct experience of the U.S. Church, save that which he had gained by two visits to America, primarily spent visiting American Polish communities. Over more than two decades of the pontificate, the Pope had come to the view that the Catholic Church in America, for all its difficulties, was in far stronger condition than the Church in western Europe. He had begun to sense that this was the case during his first pastoral visit to the United States in 1979; his evolving view of American Catholic possibility had been confirmed by the tremendous success of World Youth Day-1993, held in Denver at the Pope’s insistence (and despite the considerable skepticism of more than a few U.S. bishops). John Paul was also aware that his encyclicals on social doctrine, on the reform of moral theology, on the imperat
ive of Christian mission, on the life issues, on ecumenism, and on the relationship of faith and reason were closely analyzed and vigorously debated in the United States, not simply in ecclesiastical circles but in national newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal. In the wake of the communist crack-up, the Pope had encouraged American scholars to work with Polish colleagues in developing a leadership training program for students from the United States and the new democracies of east central Europe; there was much to be learned in both directions, he believed, and the engaged U.S. Church seemed to him a better model for the newly liberated Church in Poland and throughout the Warsaw Pact than the hard-beset Catholic communities of western Europe, which he believed risked becoming a post-Christian culture. John Paul II knew that nothing was perfect in the Church, this side of the Second Coming; but all things considered, the Church was in rather good shape in the United States.

  John Paul’s response to the unfolding drama of clerical sexual abuse and episcopal misgovernance in America was influenced by this conviction that the Church in the United States was, relatively speaking, sound. The incapacities of the apostolic nunciature in Washington and the Roman Curia also played a role; the papal apartment did not seem to be fully informed of the scandals as the revelations came into the public eye, day by day and week by week. The fact that the Vatican, historically skeptical about media exaggerations, had not yet begun to grapple with the 24/7 world of instant communications and commentary was another factor. So was the ingrained curial instinct, in the face of grim news, to think that “it can’t be as bad as all that”—an attitude that shaped (and blunted) perceptions at the senior levels of both the Congregation for Bishops and the Congregation for the Clergy, to whom the Pope would have looked for counsel and guidance. Yet another factor was John Paul’s memory of the ways in which charges of sexual impropriety had been used by the SB and other communist intelligence services to destroy the reputations of priests and bishops. In addition, it must have seemed to him almost impossible, at first, that so many American bishops could have been so malfeasant in the exercise of their office, or so taken in by the assurances of the psychotherapists.