The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  The chronology and details of the crisis of Catholic life in the United States, which was aptly dubbed the “Long Lent of 2002” by Father Richard John Neuhaus, have been put on the public record elsewhere.45 John Paul’s first public comment on what had by then become a firestorm in the United States came in his annual Holy Thursday letter to the priests of the world, in which he acknowledged “the sins of some of our brothers who have betrayed the grace of Ordination in succumbing even to the most grievous forms of the mysterium iniquitatis [mystery of evil] at work in the world.” Unfortunately, in his presentation of the papal letter to the press, the prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy, Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, dismissed reporters’ questions about the crisis in the United States, implied that the Pope had far graver matters to worry about (such as peace in the Middle East), and suggested that the whole affair was an American media circus.46 This only exacerbated the problem with the press, which could readily see that the Pope had made no such suggestion in his Holy Thursday letter.

  The American crisis escalated dramatically on April 8 (the Monday after Divine Mercy Sunday), when the Boston Globe reported at length on the case of Paul Shanley, who had made a reputation as a “street priest” in Boston. Shanley, it turned out, had defended sex between men and boys at a 1978 meeting of the North American Man-Boy Love Association, and had committed numerous acts of sexual abuse in the following decades. Yet he had been recommended by the Archdiocese of Boston to the Diocese of San Bernardino, California, in a 1990 official letter stating that the abuser had had no known difficulties during his time as a priest in the Massachusetts capital. Other documents obtained by the newspaper demonstrated that Shanley had received several letters of praise from Boston archdiocesan officials, as recently as 1996, when he had retired. Two days later, the Globe editorially called on the archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Bernard Law, to resign his office. The Globe had long been unhappy with Law’s vigorous public pro-life advocacy, but its editorial call for the prelate’s resignation was repeated by a much less anti-Law paper, the Boston Herald. On April 13, Cardinal Law arrived secretly in Rome and went immediately to see the Pope. At a meeting in the papal apartment with John Paul and Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re of the Congregation for Bishops, Law offered to resign. But the others, who had yet to be fully informed of the magnitude of the problem because of months of inadequate reporting from the nuncio in Washington, Archbishop Gabriel Montalvo, urged Law to stay and resolve the problems, and promised their full help.

  To his credit, Cardinal Law was reflecting the realities of the moment, April 13, 2002; John Paul II, Cardinal Re, and others were, in effect, three months behind and were reacting as they might have done had Law come to Rome in January, when the Geoghan story first broke. The following weekend, John Paul and Bishop Stanisław Dziwisz, his secretary, received a dossier of materials on the U.S. crisis, including commentary from prominent U.S. Catholics who were known to be defenders of the pontificate and who were urging strong leadership to address the twin problems of clerical sexual abuse and episcopal misgovernance. That materials of this sort seemed not to have been sent to the papal apartment before underscored that the Holy See was not dealing with the crisis in real time.

  The secret meetings with Cardinal Law, the dossier of press materials, and the tough message delivered to the Pope on April 9 by the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Bishop Wilton Gregory of Belleville, Illinois, convinced John Paul and his senior colleagues in the Curia that something had to be done, and soon, before the situation spiraled out of control. Thus on April 15, the cardinals of the United States and the senior officials of the U.S. bishops conference were summoned to Rome for an emergency meeting to be held a week later with the Pope, Curia officials, and the American cardinals then resident in Rome. John Paul II addressed the emergency meeting on April 23, making it unmistakably clear that “there is no place in the priesthood or religious life for those who would harm the young.” He also spoke of his own distress at the gravity of what had been revealed, acknowledged that people were justifiably concerned at how bishops had handled these cases, and put the entire crisis in its proper religious context:

  I have been deeply grieved by the fact that priests and religious, whose vocation it is to help people lead holy lives in the sight of God, have themselves caused such suffering and scandal to the young. Because of the great harm done by some priests and religious, the Church herself is viewed with distrust, and many are offended at the way in which the Church’s leaders are perceived to have acted in this matter. The abuse which has caused this crisis is by every standard wrong and rightly considered a crime by society; it is also an appalling sin in the eyes of God. To the victims and their families, wherever they may be, I express my profound sense of solidarity and concern.

  John Paul concluded with a call to a “holier priesthood, a holier episcopate, and a holier Church,” a call that underscored that this was, at bottom, a crisis of fidelity that could be met only by a deeper, more radical fidelity to the truths of Catholic faith—an important response to those Catholics, especially numerous in the Boston area, who were calling for changes in the moral teaching and governance of the Church in response to the crisis.47

  Further damage was done by a notably inept press conference at the end of the U.S. cardinals’ meeting. Few of the American prelates attended; there was no opening statement; a kind of chaos of questioning ensued. Yet despite that sorry end to the process, several crucial points had finally been clarified by the emergency meeting, if months later than they should have been.

  The crisis was real, and it was the Church’s crisis, not a fantasy concocted by a hostile press. The crisis had many dimensions—psychological, legal, canonical, and political—but it was, fundamentally, a spiritual crisis, a point John Paul had stressed several times in his address to the cardinals’ meeting. The demographics of the crisis—subsequently confirmed by a study commissioned by the U.S. bishops—were better understood: there had been odious cases of genuine “pedophilia” (i.e., sexual abuse of prepubescent children), but the overwhelming majority of the abuse had been a matter of homosexual predation by a small percentage of priests over a period of decades. The linkage between those patterns of abuse and the inadequate episcopal response to them, on the one hand, and a culture of dissent against Catholic moral teaching, on the other, had not been thoroughly evaluated, but the subject had been broached. And it had been made unmistakably clear that bishops had failed in their tasks of oversight and would have to exert far more courageous and dynamic leadership in the future.48

  Some reporters and commentators may have missed the significance of the Pope’s assertion in his Holy Thursday letter to priests that the crisis of sexual abuse and episcopal misgovernance had been a powerful example of the mysterium iniquitatis—the mystery of evil—at work in the world. That, however, was how John Paul II experienced the Long Lent of 2002. He had spoken forcefully about the reform of the priesthood, all over the world, for more than twenty-three years. He had convened an international Synod of Bishops to spend a month discussing seminary formation, and had completed its work with a powerful apostolic exhortation, Pastores Dabo Vobis [I Will Give You Shepherds], that had become the magna carta of seminary reform, especially in the United States. He had sought out priests to strengthen and encourage them; he had shared his eightieth birthday with priests in a global celebration of priestly goodness, less than two years before. He had urged priests to work closely with the young, and had shown just how that could be done during the half century of his own priestly service. For a man who had lived his priesthood nobly, as a continuing act of self-giving, the revelation that some of his brother priests had deeply harmed the Church’s young was a terrible wound.

  So was the revelation that bishops, whom he had also summoned to a more courageous exercise of their office, had often been less than wise, less than prudent, and in some cases less than honest or courageous in facing cleric
al sexual abuse. The irony was that John Paul had bent every effort for more than two decades to get bishops thinking of their ministry more in terms of evangelization and less in terms of institutional maintenance; now it seemed that, in some instances, bishops weren’t even capable managers, and their administrative failures had created fresh impediments to the credibility of the new evangelization.

  A very long Lent, indeed, and one that, for John Paul, would continue to cast shadows for some time. No one having the slightest acquaintance with Karol Wojtyła could doubt that he had been appalled by what had come to light during the Long Lent. Indeed, throughout the first four months of 2002, the question, “Why doesn’t Rome do something about this?” reflected the great confidence that U.S. Catholics had in a pope they had come to revere. That, until late April, the Holy See was not experiencing the crisis in real time was an important reminder that even so strong a pope as John Paul II could not always get the Roman Curia to function as it ought, and that the patterns of clericalism and careerism still present in curial life could cause a pope deep personal grief and impede his evangelical mission.49

  THE CONTINUING CHALLENGE OF HOLINESS

  On January 24, John Paul II left Rome by train for Assisi, where, as in 1986, he would welcome world religious leaders whom he had invited to bear witness to their commitment to peace. The 1986 Assisi meeting had been sharply criticized in some quarters as a form of syncretism, despite the Pope’s insistence that the meeting was a matter of “being together to pray,” rather than “praying together.” The 2002 program was arranged to avoid any confusions. The religious leaders (representing the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Churches, the Anglican Communion, the Reformation communities, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, traditional African religions, and other faiths) began by giving “testimonials to peace” in Lower St. Francis Square. With an eye clearly focused on the events in New York and Washington more than four months before, John Paul opened the gathering by citing the North African Father of the Church, Cyprian: “Let us pray to the heavenly father. Let us implore him as befits those who weep over the ruins, and who fear what remains standing.” After the “testimonials to peace” (during which Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi made a political statement about Vatican “support for the Palestinian people”), the leaders went with their coreligionists to various sites in Assisi to pray for peace; John Paul led the Christians in prayer in the Basilica of St. Francis. After sharing a “fraternal meal,” the leaders returned to St. Francis Square where a “common commitment to peace” was read in English, Arabic, and Italian. The leaders then each lit a lamp on a candelabrum, and a sign of peace was exchanged before they visited several other Assisi sites and re-boarded the train for Rome.50

  John Paul II had been a staunch defender of Assisi I in 1986; he had also supported the Assisi I follow-up activities of the Sant’Egidio Community, and he believed Assisi II could be helpful in addressing a world of fraying religious comity. Throughout his pastoral life, Karol Wojtyła had never demanded immediate results, content to plant seeds that might flower at a much later date. The Assisi meetings were expressions of that long-range view.

  Of perhaps greater immediate importance for the future of interreligious dialogue, however, was a lengthy document issued by the Pontifical Biblical Commission and released in May 2002: “The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible.” In an interview with the ZENIT News Service, the Commission’s secretary, Father Albert Vanhoye, S.J., put in strikingly unambiguous terms the continuing religious debt that Christianity owes to Judaism and to the Hebrew Bible, the privileged place that Judaism will always hold in genuine interreligious dialogue conducted by the Catholic Church, and the reasons why:

  The divine initiatives of deliverance and salvation, the election of Israel, the Covenant, the Law, prayer and worship, the privileged position of Jerusalem and the Temple—all are elements of Israel’s Testament that nourish the spiritual life of Christians.… We Christians and Jews are really united. Religiously, we are intensely brothers, as we accept the same divine revelation, with the difference that Christians complete it with the paschal mystery of Jesus, which is a great novelty, but this novelty does not cancel the previous revelation, but rather highlights it.… [So] this must be the truly Christian attitude: We must consider Jews as brothers and sisters of Jesus and Mary, and, therefore, elder brothers and sisters, as the Holy Father has said.51

  These were themes that John Paul II had been stressing for more than two decades. That they could be deeply anchored in scholarly biblical analysis suggested that this way of considering Catholicism’s relationship to Judaism was not something idiosyncratic to the biography of Karol Wojtyła, but was securely rooted in the foundations of Catholicism—a crucial point to have made if the third millennium of Catholic-Jewish relations was to continue the progress that had been made at the very end of the second millennium, after centuries of pain and difficulty.

  ORTHODOX DIFFICULTIES, ORTHODOX POSSIBILITIES

  For a brief moment in early 2002, John Paul’s efforts to open a door to Russia seemed to be making some progress. On January 15, 2002, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, told the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza that he was “willing to invite the Pope at any time,” but that the ultimate decision on a papal visit to Russia “unfortunately does not depend on me,” but on the leadership of Russian Orthodoxy (a curious formulation, given the pattern of relations between the Russian state and the Russian Church for centuries, as well as the KGB connections of both Putin and Patriarch Aleksy II).52 In any event, the patriarchate seemed to be thawing ever so slightly in its attitude toward John Paul and the Catholic Church, agreeing on January 17 to send a representative to Assisi II.53 The following day, Patriarch Aleksy said that Putin’s willingness to invite the Pope had been “wise,” but its wisdom lay in its focus on “the problems between the two Churches,” which consisted primarily in the Vatican’s “continuing its proselytizing activity in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.”54 The mini-thaw began to refreeze a week later, when Russian Orthodoxy’s chief ecumenist, Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk, insisted that the Catholic Church in Russia has “no future.” Kirill conceded that the Pope’s pastoral visit to Ukraine “was not a catastrophe” but immediately added that it had not “contributed anything to Catholic-Orthodox relations.”55

  The freeze became virtually arctic three weeks later. Determined to provide for the pastoral care of Catholics across the vast expanses of “all the Russias,” John Paul canonically erected four Catholic jurisdictions in that country on February 11, 2002: the archdiocese of the Mother of God at Moscow; the diocese of St. Clement at Saratov; the diocese of St. Joseph at Irkutsk; and the diocese of the Transfiguration at Novosibirsk. The unusual diocesan nomenclature—saints and a biblical event, rather than cities—was an effort to ease the aggravations of a still-hostile Russian Orthodox leadership about what some of its leaders were determined to misperceive as an encroachment into its “canonical territory.” Joaquín Navarro-Valls issued a statement describing the acts as a “normal administrative decision” and noting that the decision corresponded “to the same pastoral concern that has led the Russian Orthodox Church to create dioceses and other organizational structures for the faithful who live outside the traditional territory.” Thus “Catholics in Russia are [being] given the same organization and pastoral care that is enjoyed by Russian Orthodox who live in the West.”

  Predictably, the Moscow Patriarchate had a different view, describing the moves as “an unfriendly act.” Metropolitan Kirill found the Vatican decision “very alarming” and warned that “to divide people on religious grounds means to weaken the nation.”56 The Orthodox attitude hardened even more when it was announced that, on March 3, John Paul II would make a “virtual” visit to Moscow via a television link to the Catholic cathedral in the Russian capital, during which he would lead a prayer service for Russian young people. Orthodox spokesman Vsevolod Chaplin’s response to the news was har
sh: “One can only be astonished by the irrational persistence and determination with which the Vatican suggests different methods to mark, even if only symbolically, the Pope’s presence in Russia.”57

  What could be plausibly interpreted as retaliation was not long in coming, and in a form that illustrated the continuing linkages between Russian Orthodoxy and the Russian state. On April 5, the Russian visa of an Italian priest who had worked in Moscow for thirteen years was lifted from his passport at Sheremetyevo-2 airport outside the Russian capital. Two weeks later, on April 19, Bishop Jerzy Mazur of the diocese of St. Joseph at Irkutsk was returning to Russia from Poland when he was told by the Border Guard Service at the Moscow airport that his multientry visa was no longer valid, because he was named on a list of those to be denied entry to the country. A Polish Embassy official who went to the airport to find out what was happening was told that the decision to block Bishop Mazur’s entry had been made by “higher authorities.”58 The dubiously orthodox linkage between Russian Orthodoxy and Russian nationalism was continuing to prove itself the hardest obstacle both to John Paul’s ecumenical efforts with the Moscow Patriarchate and to his desire to bring the icon of the Kazanskaya home to Russia.