The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  John Paul II knew that “evil” was no abstraction and that the world was an arena of spiritual and moral combat between light and darkness; for him, these were not biblical metaphors, but realities of everyday life. Modern psychiatry and psychology—in which he had long been interested—might explain some facets of the human propensity for wickedness; it could not explain the kind of evil he had encountered in Nazism and communism, or the kind of evil that had produced 9/11. Every Tuesday night, like every other Catholic who prayed the Liturgy of the Hours, John Paul read a brief biblical passage during Compline, the day’s last prayer: “Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith” (1 Peter 5.8–9a). The presence of the ancient adversary had been all too real to Karol Wojtyła for decades.

  So had been the faith through which he had met the mystery of evil and suffering. John Paul II may have displayed a certain stoicism in his personal response to suffering. But he was no Stoic in the philosophical sense; it was in Christian terms that he tried to understand suffering and unite himself to Christ through it. He had shared what he had learned from a lifetime of suffering and reflection upon suffering in a 1984 apostolic letter, Salvifici Doloris [Salvific Suffering], which he published a month and a half after meeting with Mehmet Ali Agca in Rebibia prison in Rome.

  Suffering, John Paul wrote, “seems to be particularly essential to the nature of man.” Animals feel pain; only men and women suffer. That suggested that suffering was, in perhaps a paradoxical way, a signal of transcendence: suffering is, he wrote, “one of those points in which man is in a certain sense ‘destined’ to go beyond himself.”81

  Suffering could be described psychologically, phenomenologically, clinically; but no description of suffering, however accurate, could get to the mystery of suffering as experienced by human beings. Nor could a rational explanation of suffering get us to the truth that “love is … the fullest source of the answer to the question of the meaning of suffering.” That required, not an argument, but a demonstration: a demonstration that God had given, in history, “in the cross of Jesus Christ,” whose suffering as the incarnate Son of God had had an “incomparable depth and intensity.”82 God’s answer to that incomparable suffering, which included humanity’s greatest suffering, death, came in the resurrection. Suffering in the world continued after the death and resurrection of Christ. But the suffering Christian could now identify his or her suffering with that of Christ, and thus enter more closely into the mystery of the redemption, which is also the mystery of human liberation. Thus suffering led to new insights into life lived as vocation.83

  During the late summer of 2003 and through the celebration of his silver jubilee as pope, John Paul II would draw on everything he had learned about physical, spiritual, and moral suffering from the time of his mother’s premature death in 1929 through his eighty-third birthday.

  He had hoped to have an operation that summer to relieve the increasingly harsh knee pain he was suffering from acute arthritis. But it was finally decided that it was too dangerous to put a man with advanced Parkinson’s disease under general anesthesia, so the surgery was called off, leaving the Pope crippled and in pain. There were changes in the medication regimen for his Parkinson’s. It was unusually and unbearably hot at Castel Gandolfo in August 2003, to the point where it made no sense to try to use the pool he had built on the villa grounds; moreover, the villa itself lacked air-conditioning. The Europeans didn’t seem to be listening to his pleas not to cut the new EU off from one source of its cultural heritage. His efforts to prevent war in Iraq had failed. Tales of priestly and episcopal infidelity continued to bear down on him. In that season of his discontent, John Paul II might well have lived through something akin to what his closest theological adviser, Joseph Ratzinger, had once written about the meaning of hell as understood by St. John of the Cross, one of John Paul’s spiritual masters, and by St. Thérèse of Lisieux, whom the Pope had named a Doctor of the Church:

  For [these] saints, “Hell” is not so much a threat to be hurled at other people but a challenge to oneself. It is a challenge to suffer in the dark night of faith, to experience communion with Christ in solidarity with his descent into the Night. One draws nearer to the Lord’s radiance by sharing his darkness. One serves the salvation of the world by leaving one’s own salvation behind for the sake of others. In such piety, nothing of the reality of Hell is denied. Hell is so real that it reaches right into the existence of the saints. Hope can take it on, only if one shares in the suffering of the One who came to transform our night by his suffering.… Such hope cannot, however, be a self-willed assertion. It must place its petition into the hands of its Lord and leave it there.84

  The summer produced another disappointment when a quietly discussed papal visit to Mongolia had to be abandoned because of the SARS epidemic. The Catholic population of Mongolia was very small, but that had not stopped the Pope from going to Azerbaijan. The strategic reason for the trip, however, was to create circumstances for a refueling stop in Kazan, where John Paul II could return the Kazanskaya icon to Russia. The government of the People’s Republic of China had invited the Pope to stop over in their country during any Mongolian visit, but the invitation was rebuffed by the Holy See on the grounds that since the regime was persecuting the underground Catholic Church in China it was not an auspicious time for a papal visit.85 Thus John Paul II was frustrated yet again in his efforts to get to Russia and China.

  John Paul carried his suffering from Castel Gandolfo into his pastoral visit to Slovakia in September 2003, where at the airport welcoming ceremony, he slumped down on the first day of the pilgrimage and couldn’t finish his opening remarks—a stirring call to bring Slovakia’s Christian heritage into the European Union. This set off another media frenzy, with networks that had previously deemed the trip uninteresting now rushing correspondents to Bratislava and Rome. Throughout the fall, bizarre and unfounded rumors circulated in the Roman press corps: that the Pope was to undergo dialysis; that he was being treated with a papaya-based wonder drug.86

  Amidst intensifying global concern about his health, John Paul II’s silver jubilee fell on October 16, 2003. Over the previous twenty-five years, he had been seen by more than 250 million people in the course of 700,000 miles of travels around the world (which did not count the tens of thousands of miles he had traveled in Italy). He had welcomed 16.6 million people to his Wednesday general audiences and 570 heads of state to the Vatican. He had canonized 476 saints and beatified 1,314 Servants of God—more than all his papal predecessors combined. He had created some two hundred cardinals. He had issued fourteen encyclicals, fifteen apostolic exhortations, twelve apostolic constitutions, and more than forty apostolic letters and other teaching letters—an exercise of the papal magisterium with which the Church would be grappling for centuries.

  The anniversary was marked by several events during which the Pope soldiered on, visibly in pain. At the silver jubilee Mass in St. Peter’s Square on October 16, John Paul signed and issued the apostolic exhortation Pastores Gregis [Shepherds of the Flock], to complete the work of the 2001 Synod of Bishops on the episcopate in the twenty-first century. The liturgy began with the Litany of the Saints; Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger greeted the Pope on his anniversary on behalf of the vast crowd assembled; the Gospel reading chosen was Christ’s description in John 10 of the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep. In his homily, John Paul said that, twenty-five years before, he had “had a special experience of divine mercy” as he heard “echo in my soul the question addressed to Peter … ‘Do you love me? Do you love me more than these?’ [John 21.15–16]. Humanly speaking, how could I not have been apprehensive? How could so great a responsibility not burden me? I had to turn to divine mercy in order to answer the question, ‘Do you accept?’ with confidence.”

  Every day since, “that same dialogue between Jesus and Peter takes place in my heart.” From the beginn
ing of the pontificate, “my thoughts, prayers, and actions were motivated by one desire: to witness that Christ, the Good Shepherd, is present and active in his Church.… That is why, from the very first day, I have never ceased to urge people: ‘Do not be afraid to welcome Christ and accept his power!’ ” So, on this silver jubilee, he wished to say it one more time, forcefully: “Open, indeed open wide the doors to Christ! Let him guide you! Trust in his love!” He closed by thanking everyone for upholding him in prayer, and asked that that special form of help continue: “I implore you, dear brothers and sisters, do not stop your great work of love for the Successor of Peter. I ask you once again: help the Pope, whoever wants to serve Christ, to serve man and all humanity!”87

  The Gloria, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei of the silver jubilee Mass were taken from the Gregorian Missa de Angelis, which young Father Karol Wojtyła had taught to his university students in the choir loft of St. Florian’s Church in Kraków, more than fifty years before. As a gift to the cardinals who had come to Rome for the occasion, John Paul II had had prepared boxed replicas of the Bodmer VIII papyrus of the First Letter of Peter—the first papal encyclical, as it were.

  On October 19, the silver jubilee celebrations continued with another solemn Mass in St. Peter’s Square, during which John Paul II beatified a woman with whom he had shared a remarkable spiritual friendship: Mother Teresa of Calcutta. The last public meeting between the two, who had met numerous times during the pontificate, had taken place a few months before Mother Teresa’s 1997 death, when the fragile, Albanian-born nun, herself in precarious health, had insisted on attending the Mass for the Solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul in St. Peter’s Basilica, and was seated in a wheelchair to the right of the altar. At the end of Mass, John Paul II hobbled over to greet her, and, as Mother Teresa’s successor, Sister Nirmala, remembered, “Mother with great effort and the support of his [trembling] hand stood up and kissed his ring.… The Holy Father bent down and kissed her head.”88 Her death shortly afterward, John Paul II had commented to lunch guests, had “left us all feeling a little orphaned.”89

  St. Peter’s Square was filled to overflowing for the beatification Mass, with the vast crowd spilling down the Via della Conciliazione and filling the piazza itself bright with flags: Albania and India, Mother Teresa’s native land and her adopted home; Portugal, France, Poland, Argentina, the United States, and others. A large banner from Wadowice congratulated the Polish town’s most famous son on his silver anniversary. John Paul made a valiant effort to force his voice to do what he wanted it to do, but after a few phrases, his breathing problems would take over; every time he got through a prayer or a phrase, waves of applause rippled through the great crowd, as if to support and encourage him. At the Canon of the Mass, John Paul began Eucharistic Prayer II, which was then picked up and carried by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and the other principal concelebrants. Ratzinger, in his beautifully pronounced, sonorous Latin, led the parts of the Mass between the Great Amen and the Agnus Dei. At the end of the ceremony, John Paul got into the Popemobile and did a circuit of the piazza, tilted over but waving to the enormous congregation.

  John Paul’s homily described Mother Teresa as “an icon of the Good Samaritan” who had gone “everywhere to serve Christ in the poorest of the poor.” Her beatification on World Mission Sunday “reminds everyone that the evangelizing mission of the Church passes through charity, nourished by prayer and listening to God’s word.” As her spiritual journals had revealed, she, too, had experienced dramatic dark nights of the soul—decades in which God seemed absent from her life. Yet “in her darkest hours she clung even more tenaciously to prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. This harsh spiritual trial led her to identify herself more and more closely with those whom she served each day, feeling their pain and, at times, even their rejection. She was fond of repeating that the greatest poverty is to be unwanted, to have no one to take care of you.”

  She had won the Nobel Peace Prize (and had made an impassioned plea for the right to life of the unborn during her acceptance speech). She had befriended Diana, Princess of Wales, and had received the homage of the world’s great and good. Still, the truth about Mother Teresa, John Paul concluded, was that she had become “one of the most important figures of our time” and “a tireless benefactor of humanity” because she was “a humble Gospel messenger … in love with God”—a tiny woman of immense courage who had taken with utmost, life-expending seriousness the Lord’s injunction: “Whoever would be first among you must be the servant of all!” (Mark 10.44).90

  The third and final major event of John Paul II’s silver jubilee was a consistory held on October 21, 2003, for the creation of thirty-one new cardinals, one of whose names was reserved in pectore. Among the thirty receiving red hats that day were Jean-Louis Tauran and Renato Martino, along with several other curial officials, and five of the Church’s most impressive young scholar-bishops: Philippe Barbarin, the archbishop of Lyon; Péter Erdő, the archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest; Marc Ouellet, P.S.S., the archbishop of Québec; George Pell, the archbishop of Sydney; and Angelo Scola, patriarch of Venice. One of the new cardinals, Keith Michael Patrick O’Brien of St. Andrews and Edinburgh, had made several curious comments about priestly celibacy in the past, and was asked to make a public profession of faith in his cathedral before coming to Rome for the consistory; Cardinal O’Brien subsequently became a fierce defender of the Christian conception of marriage and the right to life in Scotland. The longtime theologian of the papal household, Georges Cottier, O.P., became a cardinal, as did three other elderly theologians: Belgium’s Gustaaf Joos (whom Karol Wojtyła had first met at the Belgian College in Rome in 1946); the Czech Jesuit ecumenist Tomáš Špidlík; and Poland’s Stanisław Nagy.91 Justin Rigali, archbishop of Philadelphia, was the lone American in the cardinalitial Class of 2003.

  John Paul II was visibly exhausted by October 21, and did not impose the red biretta on his new cardinals’ heads; rather, they knelt in front of him and he handed them the biretta, which they then placed on their heads themselves. Two of the new cardinals, Gabriel Zubeir Wako of Khartoum and Australia’s Pell, were very tall men. On exchanging the kiss of peace with his new brother cardinals, Pio Laghi greeted Pell with the remark, “Ah, the greatest [of the new cardinals]!” “No, Your Eminence,” Pell replied, “only the largest.” The new cardinals were given their rings at a Mass on October 22, 2003—the twenty-fifth anniversary of John Paul’s inaugural Mass and its signature challenge, “Be not afraid!”

  By December 2003, John Paul II had bounced back from the physical and emotional difficulties of the late summer and fall, thanks to a combination of a new medication regimen, some physical therapy, and his own determination to carry on. Given a copy of the collected poems of T. S. Eliot by a pre-Christmas dinner guest, John Paul immediately responded, “Eliot. Murder in the Cathedral.”92 Asked whether he would write any more poetry, the Pope responded, “No, e finito!” [No, that’s over!], at which Archbishop Dziwsz (as he had been since September 29) muttered, “Si, per oggi …” [Yes, for today …]. Dziwisz himself was showing signs of wear, which was entirely understandable in someone almost sixty-five years old who was caring constantly for an incapacitated man and likely getting fewer than five hours of sleep a night in the process. Yet the Pope’s secretary retained both his utter devotion to the man he had served for four decades and his own good humor.

  Those closest to John Paul were increasingly aware that they were witnesses to something quite dramatic: the outpouring of a life in service to God and the world, by a man who was beyond caring what anyone thought about how he looked in his illness. Some might have wished for a different kind of ending; but as Archbishop James M. Harvey, the prefect of the papal household, put it at the end of 2003, “Isn’t that a sign of his greatness? That he’s willing to submit himself to public humiliation daily out of dedication to the mission?”93

  Longtime Vatican aides weren’t the only ones to understand; some journalists understood,
too. Writing shortly before the Pope’s silver jubilee, New York Times columnist David Brooks commented on the fact that the man “who has had a more profound influence on more people than any other living human being” was never going to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Brooks was right in observing that the Pope didn’t care about being passed over time and again by the Norwegian Nobel Committee. But Brooks was even more acute in noting that John Paul II was “too big and complex” for what the world imagined to be one of its highest accolades. His main achievement, Brooks continued, had been “to remind us—Catholics and even us non-Catholics—that you can’t pare people down.… The Pope is always taking us out of our secular comfort zone and dragging us toward ultimate issues. You can’t talk about politics, economics, science, philosophy, or war, he argues, while conveniently averting your eyes from God and ultimate truth.”

  “When history looks back on our era,” David Brooks concluded, “Pope John Paul II will be recognized as the giant of the age, as the one individual who did the most to place … freedom at the service of the highest human goals.”94