The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  March 6, 2003 John Paul’s poem cycle, Roman Triptych, is published in Poland.

  March 19, 2003 American-led coalition military forces invade Iraq.

  April 17, 2003 John Paul II issues his fourteenth encyclical, Ecclesia de Eucharistia [The Church from the Eucharist].

  May 3–4, 2003 John Paul II in Spain.

  June 5–9, 2003 John Paul’s visit to Croatia marks his hundredth pastoral pilgrimage outside Italy.

  June 22, 2003 John Paul II in Bosnia-Herzegovina

  June 28, 2003 Publication of Ecclesia in Europa [The Church in Europe], John Paul’s apostolic exhortation completing the 1999 Synod on Europe.

  September 11–14, 2003 John Paul II in Slovakia.

  October 16, 2003 On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the pontificate, John Paul issues the apostolic exhortation Pastores Gregis [Shepherds of the Flock], which completes the work of the 2001 Synod of Bishops.

  October 19, 2003 Beatification of Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

  October 21, 2003 John Paul II creates thirty-one new cardinals at his ninth ordinary consistory.

  March 14, 2004 John Paul II becomes third-longest-serving pope in history, after Peter and Pius IX.

  May 16, 2004 John Paul II’s last canonization ceremony.

  May 18, 2004 Alzatevi, andiamo! [Rise, Let Us Be on Our Way!], John Paul’s memoir of his life as a bishop, is published.

  June 5–6, 2004 John Paul II in Switzerland.

  August 14–15, 2004 In Lourdes, John Paul describes himself as “a sick man among the sick.”

  August 28, 2004 Kazanskaya icon is returned to Patriarch Aleksy II in Moscow.

  October 7, 2004 John Paul issues Mane Nobiscum Domine [Stay with Us, Lord] for the 2004–5 Year of the Eucharist

  On Sunday evening, October 12, 2003, Polish national television staged a two-and-a-half-hour tribute to Poland’s most famous son, four days before John Paul II’s silver jubilee as Bishop of Rome. The program was anchored from the Sala Clementina of the Apostolic Palace in Rome, with live participation from Kraków, Częstochowa, Warsaw, and the Pope’s hometown of Wadowice. The audience in the Sala Clementina consisted of senior members of the Roman Curia and members of the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See. For a half hour or so before the live broadcast began, the guests were entertained by a Polish youth choir, whose voices could be heard in the chapel of the papal apartment, the windows of which open into the Clementina.

  The five commentators who had been invited to speak from the program’s Roman anchor site had been told that the Holy Father, who would not appear during the broadcast, would watch the program in his apartment via a special direct feed. But the Pope had evidently heard the choir and decided he wanted to go downstairs to thank the youngsters. Thus, twenty minutes or so before airtime, John Paul II was wheeled into the Sala Clementina on a mobile chair, from which he greeted and blessed the choir. He then asked that the Polish anchorman, Piotr Kraśko, and the five commentators be brought to the rear of the Sala Clementina so that he could extend his greetings.

  One by one, the six men bent down and shook hands with the man being honored—a man who found it difficult to hold his head upright, whose face seemed a frozen mask, and whose suffering was almost palpable, but who spoke with burning intensity through his eyes. He could say little; but then there was little to say. In the week in which he celebrated his twenty-fifth anniversary as pope, Karol Wojtyła of Wadowice, Kraków, and Rome was continuing his pilgrim’s journey through a darkening valley. Those clear, blue eyes spoke of his pain at what his body had done to him. Yet they also spoke silently of suffering borne in faith and of the abandonment of self to the will of God.1

  His silver jubilee was celebrated as his pilgrim’s progress took him into two years of troubles, both personal and public. Among the latter were the war he tried and failed to prevent in Iraq, and his ever more frustrating efforts to convince the newly expanded European Union to acknowledge the Christian roots of European civilization as one important resource for building Europe’s future. Yet his anniversary year also saw the return of Karol Wojtyła, poet, and the following year saw another installment of papal memoirs and the completion of a book-length philosophical conversation on the nature of freedom, the concept of “nation,” cultural and personal memory, the coexistence of good and evil in the world—and what all this might mean for the twenty-first century. In 2003 and 2004, there was sanctity to be acknowledged publicly—as with the beatification of Mother Teresa of Calcutta and the canonization of the pro-life heroine Gianna Beretta Molla—and there were new cardinals to be created. Determined to “strengthen the brethren” as long as possible, John Paul II continued his pastoral pilgrimages, concentrating now on a Europe he saw drifting ever more into spiritual, cultural, and moral malaise.

  Throughout the last two active years of the pontificate, John Paul II tried to answer the question of whether the Church could be led from a wheelchair as well as from a throne. The mode of leadership would be different, to be sure: rather than exercise power the way the world usually understood the term, John Paul would govern by example, and that example would reflect the truth of Christ’s admonition to Peter in the twenty-first chapter of John’s Gospel, that he would be bound and taken where he did not want to go. Although the binding in this case was not a matter of chains and an inverted cross, but of a broken body that refused to obey the Pope’s will, the witness was manifestly Petrine. For as the French journalist André Frossard, a convert from the fashionable atheism of his professional class, had once put it, “This is not a pope from Poland; this is a pope from Galilee.”

  COSMOS AND CHAOS

  On his return from World Youth Day-2002 in Toronto and his brief stops in Guatemala City and Mexico City, John Paul II spent the rest of the summer at Castel Gandolfo. There, he resumed an old and cherished practice he had long thought a part of his past: writing poetry.

  For Karol Wojtyła, poetry had always been a way to ponder some of the deepest mysteries of the human condition and to express his questions and answers about those mysteries in a medium that seemed better suited to the material than discursive prose. He had written numerous poems as a teenager and young man; he had written poems during the debates of the Second Vatican Council; he had used poetry as a medium for reflecting on his challenges and experiences as a bishop.2 On his way to the second conclave of 1978, which would elect him pope, he worked on a poem, “Stanisław,” based on the life of his martyred predecessor as bishop of Kraków. In that poem, he said, he had “paid my debt to Kraków,” and for almost twenty-four years, that seemed to be it—leaving poetry aside, he recalled nineteen years later, was “not a decision, but a feeling.”3

  Evidently, in the late summer of 2002, he felt that he should take up his poet’s pen once again. After he had completed several poems and poem fragments, he asked his old friend, the Kraków poet and journalist Marek Skwarnicki, to come to Rome “to talk about poetry.”4 Skwarnicki came, made editorial suggestions, and John Paul II completed the work in the fall of 2002. The result, which was published on March 6, 2003, by the archdiocesan publishing house in Kraków, was entitled Roman Triptych.5

  As the title suggested, Roman Triptych was a three-panel meditation: “The Stream”; “Meditations on the Book of Genesis at the Threshold of the Sistine Chapel”; and “A Hill in the Land of Moriah.” As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said in presenting the book to the press in Rome, the first panel “mirrors the experience of creation, its beauty and its life,” which seems to suggest the existence of a benign Creator. Yet at the conclusion of the first panel’s second section, the poet-pope stops short of the act of faith: “Source, where are you?!” he asks. And then he prays—

  Let me wet my lips

  in spring water

  to feel its freshness, its life-giving freshness.6

  The second panel draws on John Paul’s multiple experiences of the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo’s astonishing frescoes, which had come to signify for him a
kind of axis mundi, the meeting of cosmos and chaos: God bringing the world out of chaos in the ceiling frescoes from Genesis, God bringing the cosmos to completion in the fresco of the Last Judgment over the high altar.7 Here, Karol Wojtyła had been through the intense human and spiritual drama of two conclaves. He had taken the bold decision to have the frescoes cleaned—a much controverted act at the time. And in April 1994, at its rededication after the completion of the entire cleaning project, he had preached a memorable homily about the Sistine Chapel as the “sanctuary of the theology of the human body,” a place where we are brought to recognize both “the beauty of man created by God as male and female” and “the hope of a world transfigured, the world inaugurated by the Risen Christ.”8

  Roman Triptych’s middle panel, the longest of the three, begins with the answer to the prayer at the end of the first panel, in the form of a meditation on God the Creator and God the Word as “the First to see,” the God who “found in everything a trace of his Being, of his own fullness,” of the “true and good and beautiful.” Perhaps, the poet-pope suggests, this stupendous vision of God creating all that is true, good, and beautiful through his Word could have been said “more simply,” as in the first chapters of Genesis; but no, “the Book awaits its illustration.—And rightly. / It awaited its Michelangelo.” More than in a book, it is here that we

  look and we see / the Beginning, which came forth from nothingness … / It speaks from these walls.

  But so, too, does “the End that speaks even more powerfully,” for judgment is the common destiny of all humanity. That, the second panel concludes, is why papal elections are held beneath the gaze of the Creator God and Christ the Lord—so that the cardinal-electors “see themselves in the midst of the Beginning and the End / between the Day of Creation and the Day of Judgments,” and are thus reminded to look for him whom God “will point … / out.”

  The third panel of the poem cycle was inspired by Abraham and Isaac’s journey up Mount Moriah—as Cardinal Ratzinger put it at the press presentation, “the mountain of sacrifice, of self-gift without reservation.” In God’s call to complete self-giving and God’s sparing of the son of Abraham’s old age, we recognize a “God who gives himself,” Ratzinger said, “who is simultaneously the beginning, way, and final goal.” Which is why the poet-pope ends his poem with the injunction, “Remember this place when you go forth from here, this place will await its day”—the day when the Son of God completely empties himself in obedience to the Father, so that all who believe in the Son “should have eternal life.”9

  The reference to a future conclave “after my death” in Roman Triptych’s second panel inevitably led to media speculations about an imminent papal succession and a flurry of ill-informed stories about the poem as a valedictory-in-verse from John Paul II. The Pope’s poetry was, rather, a “human testament,” in Marek Skwarnicki’s view: the Pope had some things he wanted to say and some emotions he wanted to express, and he couldn’t say or express these things in any way other than this particular way. Roman Triptych wasn’t a document of the papal magisterium, Skwarnicki told Catholic News Service; rather, “it’s a conversation with faithful brothers and sisters, lay and clerical, at the highest levels of spiritual intensity.”10 The triptych also confirmed the extraordinary role that the Sistine Chapel played in John Paul II’s religious imagination. In a perceptive review, the American poet and critic Joseph Bottum took Skwarnicki’s point deeper, pointing out that Roman Triptych was an effort to puzzle out answers to some very difficult questions—questions that might only have occurred to a man like Karol Wojtyła who was poet, philosopher, priest, and mystic:

  If God is one, then truth is one—and yet the experience of artistry, reason, and faith are so different, they do not feel one. All mystics reach eventually to the same peak, which may be why each mode of knowing produces, at its highest expression, genuine mystics: there is a mysticism of art, a mysticism of the mind, a mysticism of pure faith—and they are in the end the same. But short of the mystical vision, how can we be sure that the three divided paths will converge at the mountain’s top?

  Bottum’s conclusion was that the Pope’s poem did not supply an answer but a pathway: each of the panels, which reflects a different mode of human knowing, takes us “to the edge of something that the verse itself cannot reveal.” It is, to use a word much favored by John Paul II, poetry-as-threshold: “John Paul II takes us with him to the threshold—of his own impending death, of the mystical vision, of the ultimate unity of human experience, of the final fulfillment of the promise implicit in Genesis.” Thus, in the end, “Roman Triptych is not so much a poem as a doorway.”11

  As doorway, Roman Triptych “fit” within Karol Wojtyła’s long-standing interest in restoring the idea that beauty can be a pathway to God. Modern religious thought had grappled with two of the classic transcendentals, truth and goodness, but it had paid relatively little attention to beauty. John Paul’s interest in the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar—the Swiss thinker who made a bold attempt to read the entirety of Christian doctrine and practice through the prism of Herrlichkeit, “the glory of the Lord”—reflected the Pope’s conviction that to lose touch with the beautiful was to lose touch with the ultimate source of beauty, which is God himself. In that respect, Roman Triptych and its evocation of the beautiful in nature and in the human form was another facet of John Paul’s confrontation with modern Western nihilism—this time, in terms of nihilism’s corruption of the beautiful in defense of its soured conclusions about the meaninglessness of life. The recovery of beauty, the Pope believed, could lead to the recovery of an authentic humanism, which in turn would open anew the question he posed in the first panel of his poem: “Where are you? … Source, where are you?!”12

  Roman Triptych sold several hundred thousand copies in Poland during the first week of its publication. World translation and publishing rights were handled by the Vatican publishing house, the Libreria Editrice Vaticana; translations—some very poorly done, alas—were available in the major European languages by the summer of 2003.13

  THE EUCHARISTIC CHURCH

  John Paul II had underscored his devotion to the Rosary in the 2002 apostolic letter Rosarium Virginis Mariae. His first question on awakening from the anesthesia after the operation that saved his life in May 1981 had been, “Have we said Compline yet?”—a striking indication of his dedication to the Liturgy of the Hours, the daily sequence of prayers recommended to the entire Church and formally prescribed for all the ordained and for those in solemn religious vows. Yet the Holy Eucharist—the sacramental celebration of Christ’s presence to his people in his body and blood and the sacramental representation of the sacrifice at Calvary—was the epicenter of Karol Wojtyła’s spiritual life, and had been for more than six decades.

  By 2003, John Paul had celebrated Mass in a greater number and variety of venues than any priest in history. His altars had been overturned kayaks and great stone tables of sacrifice in the major basilicas of the Catholic world. He had summoned congregations in their millions to participate in the central act of the Church’s worship, and had somehow created a profound sense of ecclesial communion amidst remarkable human diversity. In his own celebration of Mass, he embodied “Jesus Christ, Priest and Victim,” the title of the famous litany recited daily during his brief seminary years in Kraków. John Paul II at the altar was, it seemed, somewhere else, in an intense experience of communion with the Lord, whose body and blood the words of consecration make present under the forms of bread and wine. The Church draws its strength and its evangelical vitality from the Eucharist, he was convinced, because every celebration of the Mass is a spiritual recapitulation of the central events of human history—the Paschal Triduum of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday.

  As his poet’s mind had adopted the form of the three-paneled altarpiece to think through some basic questions of God’s relationship to nature, humanity, and history in Roman Triptych, so the mind of John Paul, past
or and teacher, adopted the method of a documentary triptych in proposing to the Church the shape of its life “in the deep” of the twenty-first century and the third millennium. The 2001 apostolic letter Novo Millennio Ineunte was the center of this pastoral altarpiece. Rosarium Virginis Mariae was one flanking panel. The second flanking panel was John Paul’s fourteenth encyclical, Ecclesia de Eucharistia [The Church from the Eucharist], which was signed and issued on April 17, 2003—Holy Thursday, the day the Church commemorates the institution of the Eucharist and the priesthood at Christ’s Last Supper with the apostles.

  There was a nice historical symmetry here: Leo XIII, the pope whom John Paul was about to pass in papal longevity, had issued an encyclical on the Eucharist, Mirae Caritatis [Wondrous Love], in 1902, the twenty-fifth year of his pontificate. Ecclesia de Eucharistia was likewise given to the Church as a pontificate was completing a quarter century, and in some respects covered ground similar to that mapped by Leo XIII. For as John Paul II emphasized in Ecclesia de Eucharistia, the Church’s eucharistic doctrine was constant, settled, and unchangeable: in the Holy Eucharist, the bread and wine brought by the people to the altar are transformed substantially into the body and blood of Christ, in obedience to the Lord’s command at the Last Supper, “Do this in memory of me”—a command given after he had spoken the words that would be repeated in the act of eucharistic consecration for two millennia: “Take this, all of you, and eat it: this is my body which will be given up for you.… Take this, all of you, and drink from it: this is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all, so that sins may be forgiven.”14

  The solidity of the Church’s eucharistic doctrine should encourage, not blunt, what John Paul called our sense of “eucharistic amazement”; an amazement that “in this gift, Jesus Christ entrusted to his Church the perennial making present of the paschal mystery … and brought about a mysterious ‘oneness in time’ between that Triduum and the passage of the centuries.” Thus the Eucharist, he continued, has a “truly enormous ‘capacity’ which embraces all of history as the recipient of the grace of the redemption.” It was to “rekindle this Eucharistic ‘amazement’ ” that he had written Ecclesia de Eucharistia.15