The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  CONSTITUTING EUROPE

  That theme—that Europe could be itself only if the new European Union were something other than a pragmatic arrangement for mutual economic advantage—would preoccupy John Paul II for the rest of his pontificate. One specific focus of his concerns was the constitutional treaty being developed in 2003 to govern the expanding EU, which would grow to twenty-five member states on May 1, 2004. The Pope’s diplomats were primarily concerned with whether the new treaty would recognize the legal personality of the Church and other religious communities and institutions. John Paul II was worried that the treaty might accelerate Europe’s secularization by the way its preamble—its declaration of moral purpose—described the roots of contemporary European civilization.58

  The preamble to the draft constitutional treaty began by defining the sources of twenty-first-century European civilization and modern Europe’s commitments to human rights, democracy, and the rule of law as the continent’s classical heritage, the Enlightenment, and modern thought: 1,500 years of Christian culture were simply ignored, as if nothing of consequence for what was now “Europe” had happened between Marcus Aurelius and Descartes. John Paul II devoted weeks of his Sunday Angelus addresses in the summer of 2003 to this striking omission, warning that the Christian heritage of Europe “cannot be squandered.”59 On July 13, speaking at Castel Gandolfo, the Pope worried aloud that the continent’s loss of Christian memory and identity threatened the very commitments to human rights the constitutional preamble celebrated:

  A certain loss of Christian memories [in Europe] is accompanied by a sort of fear in facing the future: a widespread fragmentation of life often goes hand in hand with the spread of individualism and a growing weakness in interpersonal solidarity. We are witnessing, as it were, a loss of hope; at its root is the attempt to make a Godless, Christless anthropology prevail. Paradoxically, the cradle of human rights thus risks losing its foundation, eroded by relativism and utilitarianism.60

  The government of Poland (largely composed of ex-communists) supported the Pope’s campaign for a recognition of Europe’s Christian roots in Europe’s new constitutional framework, as did the governments of Italy, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Malta, Portugal, and Spain—although Spain revised its view after the government of José María Aznar was replaced in March 2004 by the radically secularist administration of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. But that was all. The head of the constitutional treaty’s drafting committee, former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, said that “Europeans live in a purely secular political system, where religion does not play an important role.”61 Incumbent French president Jacques Chirac stated that “France is a lay state and as such she does not have a habit of calling for insertions of a religious character in constitutional texts.” That fact, Chirac concluded, would “not allow … a religious reference” in the preamble, no matter what John Paul II said—or what the facts of history dictated.62 Others went further. One British Labour member of the European Parliament declared that any mention of the Christian roots of Europe would “offend those many millions of different faiths or no faith at all.”63 The Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet, Scandinavia’s largest newspaper, wrote in an editorial that mentioning Christian values in the Euro-constitution would be a “huge mistake” as it would “exclude groups and raise new walls.”64 A French Socialist member of the Chamber of Deputies, Olivier Duhamel, claimed that mentioning God or Christianity in the preamble or anywhere else in the Euro-constitution would be “absurd,” as doing so would exclude Muslims, atheists, and other non-Christians from the political community of the EU.65 How, was not specified.

  The ferocity of this debate suggested that something more than a combination of historic French laïcité, modern European secularism, and a passion for inclusivity was afoot. For as John Paul well knew, if mentioning Christianity’s contributions to Europe’s contemporary civilization “excluded” Jews, Muslims, and nonbelievers, then mentioning the Enlightenment meant “excluding” Aristotelians, Thomists, and postmodernists such as Jacques Derrida (then demanding that the new EU be “neutral toward worldviews”), all of whom thought that Enlightenment rationality was deeply flawed.66 The argument, such as it was, was absurd on its face. Something else must be at work.

  John Paul II defined that “something” in Ecclesia in Europa, the apostolic exhortation he issued on June 28, 2003, to complete the work of the October 1999 Synod on Europe. In addition to offering a penetrating analysis of contemporary Europe’s crisis of cultural morale, Ecclesia in Europa was John Paul’s most developed exposition of the twenty-first-century implications of Catholic social teaching since his 1991 encyclical, Centesimus Annus.67 As such, Ecclesia in Europa stands as John Paul’s last gift to the world Church of his distinctive reading of the cultural, social, economic, and political signs of the times in the developed world.

  Ecclesia in Europa candidly recognized that Europe was on the verge of becoming a post-Christian continent, in that the Gospel must now bring its “message of hope to a Europe that seems to have lost sight of it.”68 After coming safely through the seventy-seven-year trial that began with the guns of August 1914 and ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Europe ought to be experiencing a new springtime of the human spirit, as John Paul had put it to the United Nations in 1995. Yet Europe seemed beset by “grave uncertainties at the levels of culture, anthropology, ethics, and spirituality”: Europeans were uncertain about the worth of their own civilizational achievement, about the nature of the human person, about right and wrong, and about the relationship of the true, the good, and the beautiful to twenty-first-century life.69 A widespread experience of ambiguity, John Paul suggested, helped explain Europe’s loss of faith in the future. Thus at this crowning moment of European integration—a process the Catholic Church had vigorously promoted since the end of World War II—Europe’s greatest need was not for a new pan-European currency, a transnational budgeting system, continent-wide regulations, or even a new constitutional treaty, important as all those things doubtless were. Rather, “the most urgent matter Europe faces, in both East and West,” John Paul wrote, “is a growing need for hope, a hope that will enable us to give meaning to life and history and to continue on our way together.”70

  The signs of Europe’s loss of hope were readily at hand, and Ecclesia in Europa did not hesitate to describe them sharply:

  A kind of practical agnosticism and religious indifference whereby many Europeans give the impression of living without spiritual roots and somewhat like heirs who have squandered a patrimony entrusted to them by history … Fear of the future … [An] inner emptiness that grips many people … [A] widespread existential fragmentation [in which] a feeling of loneliness is prevalent … Weakening of the very concept of the family … Selfishness that closes individuals and groups in upon themselves … A growing lack of concern for ethics and an obsessive concern for personal interests and privileges [leading to] the diminished number of births.71

  The latter was perhaps the leading indicator of Europe’s loss of hope and fear of the future. For when an entire continent, richer, healthier, and more secure than ever before, stopped producing the future in the most elemental sense—by producing future generations—then something was awry in the realm of the human spirit. That was precisely what was happening in a European Union in which no country had a replacement level birth rate and several countries seemed headed into demographic winter.

  The determination to prevent any reference to Europe’s Christian roots in the basic document of Europe’s political future reflected, even as it compounded and exacerbated, all these problems, the Pope suggested: for “at the root of this loss of hope is an attempt to promote a vision of man apart from God and apart from Christ.… Forgetfulness of God has led to the abandonment of man.”72 Ideas had consequences, as ever, and the ideas that John Paul’s old friend the French Jesuit Henri de Lubac had bundled together under the rubric “atheist humanism” had had lethal consequ
ences in modern European history: first, by helping underwrite the trauma of 1914–91; then, by depriving Europe of a reason to create the future.73 The net result was a Europe in which men and women who should have been living vigorously in freedom were in fact being left alone in a guilt-wracked and existentially painful way: “One of the roots of the hopelessness that assails many people today … is their inability … to allow themselves to be forgiven, an inability often resulting from the isolation of those who, by living as if God did not exist, have no one from whom they can seek forgiveness.”74

  The “shadows” were not the whole reality of Europe, John Paul proposed. The twentieth-century martyrs, and the Christians of many denominations who had played such a key role in the Revolution of 1989, had demonstrated that the Gospel could still inspire men and women to build a “moral and societal life which honors and promotes the dignity and freedom of every person.” That freedom had triumphed in 1989 through the victory of spiritual courage over material force was surely a sign of hope, as was the reconciliation of countries that had been bitter enemies for centuries. Even the widespread, if often confused, “desire for spiritual nourishment” evident across the continent bespoke at least the possibility of a recovery of “ethical and spiritual values” in “creative fidelity to the humanist and Christian traditions of our continent.”75

  Making that possibility a reality, however, meant that the Europe of the twenty-first century could not read the history of freedom exclusively through the prism of the French Revolution and 1789, and still less through the prism of the cultural upheavals of 1968. These cataclysms were not, John Paul insisted, the sources of Europe’s historic commitment to the public goods the new constitutional treaty celebrated: democracy, human rights, civility and tolerance, the rule of law. Rather, it was from “the biblical conception of man [that] Europe drew the best of its humanistic culture, found inspiration for its artistic and intellectual creations, created systems of law, and, not least, advanced the dignity of the person as the subject of inalienable rights.”76 Moreover, if the historical truth were to be fully told, it was the Church that had given Europe the creative capacity to make this humanistic heritage the center of the world’s unfolding history: for it was “the Church, as the bearer of the Gospel, [that] helped spread and consolidate these values which have made European culture universal.”77 Had there been no missionary impulse, European civilization would likely have remained confined to a small peninsula jutting into the Atlantic from the vastness of the Eurasian landmass.

  The English author G. K. Chesterton had once observed that the crisis of modernity was one of “virtues gone mad.” John Paul seemed to agree, and warned that when “the great values which amply inspired European culture” were “willfully separated from the Gospel,” such virtues as tolerance and civility “[lose] their very soul and [pave] the way for any number of aberrations.” It was not difficult to imagine the Pope thinking that one of those “aberrations” would be the constitutional enforcement of a rigorous laïcité, a European public square bereft of religiously informed ideas, in the very name of civility, tolerance, and pluralism.

  As throughout his social magisterium, John Paul II was at pains in Ecclesia in Europa to stress that the Church had no interest in running either European states or the EU. In the apostolic exhortation, there is no hint of nostalgia for the days of the ancien régime, the days of altar-and-throne alliances. Those days were over. And from John Paul’s point of view, that was a good thing, for the entanglement with coercive state power had impeded the Church’s evangelical mission and had done its part to fracture Western Christendom. No, what the Church now had to offer Europe was a challenge: a challenge to “the moral quality of its civilization.” If the Europe of the future were to prosper in a genuinely humane way, it had to be, not simply a free society, but a free and virtuous society—a society in which “the moral structure of freedom” was well understood, such that European culture and society were safeguarded “both from the totalitarian Utopia of ‘justice without freedom’ and from the Utopia of ‘freedom without truth’ which goes hand in hand with a false concept of ‘tolerance.’ ” Both those Utopias, John Paul reminded his European readers, “portend errors and horrors for humanity, as the recent history of Europe sadly attests.”78

  To redeem the tears of that “recent history,” the new Europe could not be merely a geographical or administrative entity, soldered together politically by the public profession of certain values whose primary claim on Europeans’ allegiance was that they “worked.” For Europe was and is “primarily a cultural and historical concept,” in which Christian truth had been, and would continue to be, essential in helping create societies “capable of integrating peoples and cultures among themselves” in a “new model of unity in diversity.” The new EU would be a brittle shell, without substance, if it were to reduce itself to “its merely geographic and economic dimensions.” Therefore, John Paul wrote,

  Europe needs a religious dimension. If it is to be “new,” by analogy with what is said about the “new city” of the Book of Revelation [Revelation 21.2], it must open itself to the workings of God. The hope of building a more just world, a world more worthy of man, cannot prescind from a realization that human effort will be of no avail unless it is accompanied by divine assistance: for “unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain” [Psalm 127]. For Europe to be built on solid foundations, there is need to call upon authentic values grounded in the universal moral law written on the heart of every man and woman.79

  That was the moral law, he had told Croatia, that “Christianity [had] the merit of clearly identifying and proclaiming.” And so he ended his appeal to Europe—and beyond Europe, to all postmodern societies in the twenty-first century—with a familiar challenge, to open the doors to God:

  Do not be afraid! The Gospel is not against you, but for you.… The Gospel of hope does not disappoint! Throughout the vicissitudes of your history, yesterday and today, it is the light that illumines and directs your way; it is the strength which sustains you in trials; it is the prophecy of a new world; it is the sign of a new beginning; it is the invitation to everyone, believers and nonbelievers alike, to blaze new trails leading to a “Europe of the spirit,” in order to make the continent a true “common home” filled with the joy of life.80

  The end of Ecclesia in Europa was typically hopeful—but with a sting, even a warning. That the Pope chose the Book of Revelation as the biblical framework for his apostolic exhortation was not accidental. Written in the first century A.D., the Book of Revelation was initially addressed to the “seven Churches” of what is now called Asia Minor. Only one of those local Churches exists today as a living Christian community; the classical European civilization from which the seven Churches grew was eventually displaced. By choosing to highlight the Book of Revelation in Ecclesia in Europa, John Paul was suggesting that Europe is not guaranteed a future. Europe must choose to have a future. That would mean choosing to have children. That would mean choosing a firmer foundation for Europe’s human rights commitments than pragmatism or utilitarianism. That would mean, above all, a Europe reclaiming the spiritual and moral patrimony of its biblical and Christian heritage, a crucial and irreducible part of Europe being Europe.

  DARK NIGHTS

  When Cardinal Walter Kasper remarked on suffering being John Paul II’s “profession” during the Pope’s 2002 pastoral visit to Bulgaria, he was not far off the mark—although “vocation” might have been a more apt term than “profession,” for Karol Wojtyła had long understood suffering as part of his (and indeed everyone’s) Christian discipleship. He had known physical hardship and pain throughout his life: hunger and cold in Nazi-occupied Poland; having his shoulder broken by a German army truck and being left in a roadside ditch during the war; Agca’s bullet wounds, then the pain of infection and physical deterioration caused by the “auxiliary terrorist,” the cytomegalovirus, in 1981; a stomach tumor in 1992; a broken sho
ulder in 1993; a broken femur and an ill-fitted hip joint prosthesis in 1994; an appendectomy in 1996; the merciless Parkinson’s disease that was relentlessly wearing him down from the mid-1990s on. Whenever he could, John Paul treated his infirmities with the medicine of humor. After the 1994 hip replacement, when he had learned to walk again with the aid of a cane, he shuffled slowly down the aisle to the presider’s table in the Synod Hall before turning to the prelates assembled for a Synod meeting and wisecracking, “Eppur’ si muove” [Yet it moves]—Galileo’s sotto voce comment to his judges about the earth’s revolution about the sun. Still, for John Paul II, suffering was no laughing matter, but a reality at the heart of the Christian call to follow Christ.

  His suffering as pope was spiritual and moral as well as physical. Each day, the household sisters put prayer requests from around the world into the top of the prie-dieu at which he began his day, praying privately for an hour or ninety minutes before celebrating daily Mass. Thus every day, John Paul took upon himself and brought before his Lord the suffering of the world that came to him in microcosm through those notes—strained marriages, sick children, lost jobs, lethal disease, lost faith—as well as in macrocosm, as his mind’s eye surveyed the gravest needs of both the Church and the world during his personal prayer. Those who came to join the morning Mass and heard the Pope groaning on his prie-dieu had, in those moments, some sense of what St. Paul meant when he wrote that, while we do not know how to pray as we ought, “the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8.26). Then there was moral suffering: the pain inflicted on the Pope by priests who abandoned their vocations or abused the trust reposed in them by harming the young; the moral pain of his failure to prevent war; the moral suffering imposed on him by those who tried to use him politically, such as Yassir Arafat and Tariq Aziz; the moral horror of late modernity’s slaughter of the innocents, in the widespread practice of abortion.