The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  A certain recapturing of the amazement of the Holy Eucharist was, John Paul thought, already under way in the Church through the liturgical reforms of the post–Vatican II period, which had “greatly contributed to a more conscious, active, and fruitful participation” in the celebration of Mass by the laity. Then there was the recovery in some parts of the world Church of eucharistic adoration—silent or vocal prayer in front of Christ eucharistically present in the reserved sacrament. This recovery had revived “an inexhaustible source of holiness,” which took more public forms in public eucharistic processions such as those on the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi). Such processions had played an important role in Karol Wojtyła’s evangelical work in Kraków; they were doing so in many other venues in a new century and millennium.

  Yet amidst these signs of intensified eucharistic piety there were also what the Pope called “shadows”: the abandonment of eucharistic adoration in some parts of the Church; liturgical abuses of various sorts; an “extremely reductive understanding” of the Eucharist, which took the Eucharist to be “simply a fraternal banquet”; the loss of a sense of connection between the ministries of bishop and priest and the vitality of the Eucharist. Thus the Church needed some reminders about the full doctrine of the Holy Eucharist in order to regain a sense of eucharistic amazement.

  The first reminder was that the Eucharist is a true sacrifice. There is only one sacrifice of the New Covenant, as there is only one passion and one cross. Yet it is precisely that one sacrifice of Christ that is made present throughout history, day after day, at every Mass. To recover and appreciate the truth of the Eucharist as sacrifice is to recover the “universal charity” of the Eucharist, John Paul wrote. By saying that his body is “given for you” and his blood is “poured out for you,” the Lord “did not simply state that what he was giving [the apostles] to eat and drink was his body and blood; he also expressed its sacrificial meaning and made sacramentally present his sacrifice which would soon be offered on the Cross for the salvation of all.” For the Christian, therefore, to participate in the Eucharist is to be brought into the Son’s uniquely redemptive gift of himself to the Father—to be brought into the very life of the Holy Trinity.16

  The Church also needed to regain a sense of the “apostolicity” of the Eucharist, John Paul wrote: to recapture the full meaning of the fact that the Eucharist comes to us from the apostles, to whom it was entrusted by Christ and who in turn passed it down to the Church of all times and places. Thus the local bishop is the primary celebrant of the Eucharist in his diocese, in cooperation with priests whose ordination has conferred on them the power of eucharistic consecration. A deeper sense of the apostolicity of the Eucharist, the Pope continued, explains why full communion with the apostolic community of the Church is required for a true and valid Eucharist and for full participation in the celebration of the Eucharist. There can be no true Eucharist without apostolicity, without connection to the great apostolic chain that traces its origins to the Last Supper. That is why only a bishop or a validly ordained priest, ordained by a bishop whose own orders derive from that apostolic succession, can consecrate the Eucharist. That (and not some defect of hospitality or sensitivity) is why the Church does not admit to the reception of holy communion those who are not linked ecclesiastically to a member of the college of bishops in full communion with the Bishop of Rome, except in exceptional circumstances (primarily having to do with the Orthodox Churches). That is why those Catholics who are in a gravely defective state of communion with their own Church—because of mortal sin, canonically irregular marriage, or persistent public acts of defiance of the teaching authority of the Church—should not present themselves for holy communion. And that is why Catholics should not present themselves for communion in other Christian communities that “lack a valid sacrament of orders.”17

  Rediscovering the “amazement” of the Eucharist also required the Church to reimagine its celebrations of the Mass as a privileged participation in the liturgy of saints and angels around the throne of divine grace. The Church celebrates the Eucharist until the Lord comes again in glory. Thus the Eucharist, John Paul wrote, “is a straining toward that goal, a foretaste of the fullness of joy promised by Christ [cf. John 15.11],” for it is “in the Eucharist that we also receive the pledge of our bodily resurrection at the end of the world … [which] comes from the fact that the flesh of the Son of Man, given as food, is his body in its glorious state after the resurrection.” Thus, in the reception of holy communion, “we digest, as it were, the ‘secret’ of the resurrection,” which is why the early Church Father Ignatius of Antioch “rightly defined the Eucharistic Bread as ‘a medicine of immortality, an antidote to death’ ”18 At Mass, John Paul suggested, those who receive holy communion are time travelers, for the reception of the glorified body of Christ brings us into as close contact as is possible in history with the time-beyond-time, the time of God’s Kingdom come in its fullness.

  If the Eucharist is, in a sense, trans-temporal, it is also trans-spatial or, in John Paul’s preferred word, “cosmic.” Reflecting on the wide variety of circumstances and places where he had been privileged to celebrate Mass had given the Pope “a powerful experience of [the] universal and, so to speak, cosmic character” of the Eucharist:

  [E]ven when it is celebrated on the humble altar of a country church, the Eucharist is always in some way celebrated on the altar of the world. It unites heaven and earth. It embraces and permeates all creation. The Son of God became man in order to restore all creation, in one supreme act of praise, to the One who made it from nothing. He, the Eternal High Priest who by the blood of his Cross entered the eternal sanctuary, thus gives back to the Creator and Father all creation redeemed. He does so through the priestly ministry of the Church, to the glory of the Most Holy Trinity. Truly this is the mysterium fidei [mystery of faith] which is accomplished in the Eucharist: the world which came forth from the hands of God the Creator now returns to him redeemed by Christ.19

  Ecclesia de Eucharistia was the product of a convergence of motivations. Approaching the end of his life and Petrine ministry, John Paul II wanted to bear witness in an authoritative way to the centrality of the Eucharist for the Church. The great hopes of liturgical reform at the time of Vatican II had been partially realized, as John Paul acknowledged in the encyclical; but no one could reasonably say that the evangelical and pastoral jolt the liturgical reform was intended to produce had in fact happened with full intensity. On the contrary: the reform was followed rather rapidly, and surprisingly, by diminished Mass attendance throughout Europe and North America and a deteriorated sense of eucharistic “amazement” (due in part to poor catechesis based on dubious or inadequate Eucharistic theology). The Pope’s effort to rekindle a sense of awe and wonder at the gift and mystery of the Eucharist was based on a pastoral strategy he had followed throughout the pontificate: reminding the Church of the fundamental truths of faith, after a season of skepticism about or indifference to those truths, would lead, he believed, to a revival of Catholic practice.

  It would be a mistake, however, to think of Ecclesia de Eucharistia as primarily remedial, an encyclical aimed at correcting faults.20 Rather, Ecclesia de Eucharistia is best understood in the context of the Great Jubilee of 2000 and what the Pope hoped would be its enduring effects within the world Church. The Eucharist as the recapitulation and making-present of the Paschal Mystery of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection; the Eucharist as a kind of window into Kingdom come in its fullness; the cosmic Eucharist, in which all of creation is caught up in Christ’s sacrificial self-gift to the Father—these themes from Ecclesia de Eucharistia are very much jubilee themes.

  In the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, John Paul seemed to be saying, we meet in a unique way the God “who has gone before us and leads us on, who himself set out on man’s path, a God who does not look down on us from high but who became our traveling companion.”21

  WAR IN IRAQ


  John Paul II’s opposition to the war in Iraq that began on March 19, 2003, was determined, passionate, thoroughgoing—and, by comparison to that of some of his subordinates, carefully crafted. That opposition was based on a number of convictions and perceptions.

  At the beginning of a new millennium, the Pope believed it important to manifest in his own address to world affairs the hope he had expressed during the Great Jubilee of 2000—that humanity had learned from the horrors of the twentieth century that there were better ways to settle problems and assuage grievances than the resort to arms. Like his papal predecessors, John Paul was committed to strengthening legal and political alternatives to war as a means of resolving conflicts, which in practice meant deferring war-making powers to the UN system—although it should be remembered that even when the UN authorized the use of force to reverse the 1990 Iraqi invasion and annexation of Kuwait, the Pope and the Holy See’s diplomacy had opposed the use of armed force to the end.22 Grave concern for the embattled Christian communities in the Middle East, especially in the event of a general Middle Eastern conflagration, was never far from the Pope’s mind in the 1990s. And in the wake of 9/11, John Paul remained determined to do everything he could to demonstrate to the world the falsity of the jihadists’ claim that the war between Islamist terrorism and the West was a religious war.

  Taken together, these convictions, commitments, and perceptions set the foundation for the Pope’s steady and increasingly urgent stream of statements in late 2002 and early 2003 in opposition to the use of armed force against the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.23 The Pope was not fooled by Saddam, whom he knew to be a brutal dictator; John Paul would certainly have welcomed regime change in Baghdad as a way to relieve the suffering of the people of Iraq, to stabilize the politics of the volatile Middle East, and to vindicate the viability of the United Nations, which Saddam had defied for a decade. He was committed, however, to promoting such change through nonmilitary means.

  John Paul’s response to the Iraq crisis of 2002–3 was also shaped by his sense of the boundaries of his own role in addressing an international crisis such as that posed by Saddam Hussein’s defiance of UN disarmament resolutions. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, which he had authorized, taught that the responsibility for determining when the strict moral conditions for a morally justified use of armed force had been reached “belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.”24 In practice, this meant that the burden of moral judgment fell on statesmen, exercising the virtue of prudence. It was not the Pope’s role, in other words, to adjudicate between differing readings of what prudence dictated in a given situation; it was the Pope’s task to continue to press for nonmilitary solutions, even—perhaps especially—when such solutions seemed beyond the grasp of practical politics. Moreover, John Paul was aware that for him to declare any given military action “unjust” would place a heavy burden of conscience on Catholic members of the armed forces involved in that action, with potentially grave personal, political, and military consequences. Soldiers as well as statesmen bore the weight of moral responsibility for making judgments about the war in question and the means by which it was conducted. That responsibility could not be outsourced to the Pope; neither would it be usurped by John Paul II, the lifelong teacher of personal moral responsibility.

  John Paul’s response to the crisis in Iraq was both amplified and distorted in 2002 and 2003 by what often seemed an uncoordinated (and sometimes unintelligible) diplomatic and communications strategy on the part of the Holy See. In the months leading up to war, Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, the Frenchman who had served since 1990 as the Holy See’s secretary for relations with states (and who was usually referred to as “the Vatican’s foreign minister”), took an increasingly stringent line, repeatedly juxtaposing what he termed the “force of law” with a “law of force.”25 Tauran also argued that the only way to legitimate the use of armed force in Iraq, or in any other circumstance, was through the authorization of the United Nations—an authorization that Tauran and the rest of the Vatican senior bureaucracy did not believe had been granted by Security Council Resolution 1441 (which, on November 8, 2002, declared that Iraq was “in material breach” of the cease-fire terms agreed to in 1991, and which gave Iraq “a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations”).26 Later in the debate, Tauran went so far as to say that, absent such an authorization (which would have meant a new, post-1441 Security Council Resolution, something France had sworn to veto), military action against Saddam Hussein would be “a war of aggression and therefore a crime against humanity”—a moral judgment it was difficult to imagine John Paul II, who had personal experience of crimes against humanity, sharing. At the very end, in February 2003, Tauran approved a visit to the Vatican by Tariq Aziz, Iraq’s foreign minister, a longtime associate of Saddam Hussein’s and a Chaldean Christian. As Massimo Franco, a columnist for Corriere della Sera, put it, “The Iraqi’s visit was arranged by French-born Father Benjamin, a colorful former pop singer turned priest with long-standing Baghdad connections and an equally long history of anti-Americanism.… [The] visit … was Saddam’s last attempt to save himself and his regime by trying to engage the Pope on his side.”27 How this tacit alignment of the Holy See’s diplomacy with the passions of the European Left advanced either the cause of peace or the witness of John Paul II was never clear.28

  Dramatic statements in the months before the war were also forthcoming on a regular basis from the Holy See’s volatile and voluble permanent representative at the United Nations, the Italian archbishop Renato Martino, and from the Vatican’s semiofficial newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, which ran bloodcurdling banner headlines such as “The Madness of War.” The Jesuit journal, La Civiltà Cattolica, whose articles were vetted by the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, published a brutally anti-American editorial in its January 18 issue that was, according to Vatican analyst Sandro Magister, an “implacable indictment … of Bush’s America” for upsetting the world order, delegitimating the United Nations, “wounding” international law, fracturing the alliance between Europe and America, and stirring up jihadist sentiment in the Islamic world, all in pursuit of imperial “dominion.”29

  The commentary from the Vatican bureaucracy, from L’Osservatore Romano, and from La Civiltà Cattolica seems to have been shaped by casts of mind and judgments that John Paul II cannot simply be assumed to have shared. In those quarters, Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” analysis of the post–Cold War world was read as a prescription for U.S. foreign policy rather than as a description of world realities—a fundamental misunderstanding of Huntington’s thesis, which, among other things, was the first global analysis in decades in which a leading secular scholar took culture and religious conviction seriously as factors in world politics.30 European frustrations over Europe’s declining role in world affairs played a role in the more bitter commentary coming from Vatican sources, as did European concerns that the Bush administration’s declared policy of preemption in case of imminent threat risked completely disempowering the United Nations—the only forum in which European states still acted as major powers. Various European mythologies about George W. Bush’s evangelical religious convictions and general incompetence played a role, as when L’Osservatore Romano editorialized that Bush’s Iraq policy was gravely deficient in “the intelligence necessary at certain levels”—a charge the Vatican paper could never have imagined leveling at France’s Jacques Chirac or Germany’s Gerhard Schröder. European fears about the rising tide of immigration into the European Union from the Muslim world and the possibility of further terrorist attacks in Europe were also in play in the Vatican bureaucracy, at the Vatican paper, and at La Civiltà Cattolica, which took a consistently sympathetic line toward Islamic and Arab grievances even as it accused the United States of following “the law of the jungle.”31

  Over against this bombast, which reached one low point when Archbishop Martino a
nnounced that he had found U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell’s explanation of the administration’s case against Iraq at the UN Security Council “vague and unconvincing,” even though he had neither attended Powell’s presentation nor read it, John Paul II’s opposition to the war in Iraq reads as both convinced and measured. It reached a rhetorical apogee in the Pope’s January 13, 2003, address to the ambassadors accredited to the Holy See, when John Paul asked the “peoples of the earth and their leaders to have the courage to say ‘No’ … No to Death! … No to Selfishness! … No to War!”32 There can be no doubt that John Paul believed it his duty to bend every possible effort to find an alternative to war in Iraq. Yet as Sandro Magister wrote months later,

  John Paul II never pronounced the anathemas that his various collaborators were offering to the media. The Pope opposed the war in Iraq but he never condemned it as immoral or contrary to the Christian faith. He never affirmed that it was a “crime against humanity,” as Tauran and Martino, on the other hand, repeatedly did.…

  The Pope’s words distinguish themselves for their religious character. The peace that he preaches essentially “comes from God.” The passages he dedicates to concrete ways of building peace in the Gulf are rare and extremely measured—and they take the form of a discourse on method, not of precept. One example of his focus on method came on January 13, 2003, in a speech to ambassadors from around the world: “War cannot be decided upon, even when it is a matter of ensuring the common good, except as the very last option and in accordance with very strict conditions.” Another appeal for responsible decision-making came in the Angelus address of March 16: “We know well that peace is not possible at any price. But we all know how great is this responsibility.”33