THE LONG-DISTANCE PONTIFICATE
Simon, son of John, also known as Peter, a man whose friendship with Jesus of Nazareth brought him from an obscure Galilean fishing village to the center of the world imperium, died according to tradition in either 64 or 67 A.D., crucified upside down in Nero’s Circus, which was located in what is now Vatican City, quite near the site of the basilica named for him. But no one really knows how long Peter lived with the power of the keys. The longest pontificate since Peter was that of Pope Pius IX, who was elected on June 16, 1846, and died on February 7, 1878. The cardinal-electors who chose the successor to Pio Nono (or, as the irreverent had it, “Pio No-No”) probably imagined that they were taking out an insurance policy against another such lengthy pontificate when they elected sixty-eight-year-old Cardinal Vincenzo Gioacchino Pecci as Pope Leo XIII two weeks later. Leo then proceeded to live the second-longest pontificate in reliably recorded history, expiring at the ripe age of ninety-three on July 20, 1903. During that twenty-five-year reign, Leo XIII created the modern papacy as an office of moral instruction and witness, launching Catholic social doctrine into the deep of the industrial age and its immense social problems, and creating the intellectual framework by which the Catholic Church finally worked its way through to a Catholic theory of religious freedom and the modern constitutional state at the Second Vatican Council.
No pope since Leo XIII had done more to enrich the Church’s social thought over the next century than John Paul II, who passed Leo on the roster of papal longevity on March 14, 2004, becoming the second-longest-serving pope in reliably recorded history—or, to pay Peter the deference owed him, the third-longest-serving Bishop of Rome in the two millennia of the Catholic Church’s history. According to some stories, Leo XIII began to show signs of intellectual diminishment in the last few years of his pontificate. That could not be said of John Paul II, whose mind remained sharp even as his body continued to betray him throughout 2004.
The year began with an unfortunate flap over comments the Pope was said to have made after viewing in December 2003 a prerelease screening of Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ—that “It is as it was.” The comment, which had been made privately, was picked up by those promoting the film (not without encouragement from some in the Vatican), which landed John Paul II, unwittingly, in the middle of the controversy the movie had generated over its alleged anti-Semitic undertones. Conflicting signals from the Holy See Press Office and the papal apartment added to the confusion, which finally dissipated, leaving a bad taste in many mouths.95
On January 26, the Sala Clementina of the Apostolic Palace witnessed something it had never seen before: a performance of break dancing, accompanied by music from a boom box, by a Polish troupe that worked with disadvantaged young people in the Pope’s homeland. As one report put it, “one dancer … planted his head on the inlaid marble floor of the Vatican and spun to loud applause from his group and from Vatican officials.” Whatever he might have thought of break dancing, John Paul applauded the performance and commended the troupe’s work with the poor.96 Sixteen days later, on the evening of February 11, the liturgical commemoration of Our Lady of Lourdes, the Pope paid a surprise visit to the Discalced Carmelite nuns then living in the house of contemplative prayer he had established in 1994 in the Vatican, behind the Governatorato, the main administration building of Vatican City. After greeting each of the startled sisters personally, John Paul, his two secretaries, and the sisters sang the Latin Marian hymn Tota Pulchra Est [Thou Art All-Beautiful], before the Pope was taken back to the Popemobile for the drive back to the Cortile Sesto Quinto and the elevator ride up to the papal apartment on the terza loggia of the Apostolic Palace. The surprises were not yet over for the Carmelites, though. A half hour later, their doorbell rang again, and a messenger brought gifts from John Paul to the sisters: chocolates; a cake; a wax bas-relief of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein), the Carmelite martyr of Auschwitz; and a large candle, which was immediately lit and placed in front of the convent’s statue of Mary.97
John Paul did not begin Lent as usual in 2004, by going to the Basilica of Santa Sabina on the Aventine Hill, the first of Rome’s Lenten stational churches, to receive ashes. Instead of going to the Aventine on February 25, Ash Wednesday, the Pope received ashes in the Paul VI Audience Hall of the Vatican, in a ceremony at which those attending the weekly papal general audience were also invited to be marked with the age-old sign of Lenten repentance and penitential resolution. Three days later, John Paul resumed his visitations of Rome’s parishes, which had been suspended in the last months of 2003 because of his illness. At this stage of the pontificate, there had to be a change in the normal visitation routine: now, the parishes came to celebrate Mass with the Pope in the Vatican, rather than the Pope going out to celebrate Mass in the parishes. On February 28, the parishes that were present were from the rapidly expanding southern part of Rome: St. Anselm, St. Charles Borromeo, St. John Baptist de la Salle, and St. Mary Star of Evangelization. None had its own facility yet; the Pope urged the congregation, consisting principally of young families, to “make your parishes genuine spiritual buildings, which rest on the cornerstone that is Christ.” In his homily, John Paul also asked the parishioners not to forget “the affection that unites me more intensely to you,” for this was the portion of the Lord’s flock “entrusted, in a special way, to my pastoral care.” His homily, like many of his public addresses in this phase of his Parkinson’s disease, may have been difficult to hear at some points. But there was no doubt in the Romans’ mind of the truth of what the man they called “Pope Wojtyła” said when he told them that “I carry you in my heart.”98 Two weeks later, on March 11, jihadist terrorists exploded ten bombs in and around four Madrid railroad stations, killing 200 Spaniards, wounding 2,000 more, and leaving bloody body parts strewn over station platforms and commuter railway lines. John Paul condemned the “execrable crimes” in his March 14 Angelus address for the Third Sunday of Lent.99
Despite fears of further jihadist slaughter in Europe, young people flooded St. Peter’s Square on Palm Sunday, April 4, the twentieth anniversary of John Paul II’s initiation of diocesan and international world youth days, and the Pope challenged the young people to proclaim Christ crucified to a skeptical world: “Do not be afraid to swim against the tide!”100 The Pope was able to preside at all the major Holy Week liturgies, although accommodations were made because of his condition; thus on Holy Thursday, it was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger who conducted the Mandatum, the traditional washing of feet in imitation of Christ’s act of humility at the Last Supper. John Paul did not walk the evening Via Crucis at the Colosseum on Good Friday, but he did offer a brief reflection, praying at the end that the “mystery of the Way of the Cross of the Son of God … [may] comfort and strengthen us when our own hour arrives.”101 Earlier in the day, the Pope had presided over the Solemn Liturgy of the Lord’s Passion in St. Peter’s, during which, according to custom, the preacher to the papal household, the Italian Capuchin Raniero Cantalamessa, gave the homily. At the Great Vigil of Easter on Holy Saturday evening, the Pope both presided and preached in St. Peter’s, and did the same the next morning outdoors in the piazza, before giving his Urbi et Orbi greetings in sixty-two languages. In the free-form verse that had become customary for the Urbi et Orbi message, John Paul prayed in particular that humanity might find the courage and solidarity to
face the inhuman,
and unfortunately growing, phenomenon of terrorism,
which rejects life and brings anguish and uncertainty
to the daily lives of so many hardworking and peaceful people.
May your wisdom enlighten men and women of good will
in the required commitment against this outrage.102
The year 2004 was one of those rare years on which the Western and Eastern Christian calendars coincided on the date of Easter, and the Pope concluded the Urbi et Orbi with greetings to “the venerable Patriarchs, the Bishops,
and the faithful of the Eastern Churches” and prayed to the Risen Lord that “all of us who are baptized may soon come to relive together on the same day every year this fundamental feast of our faith. Surrexit Christus. Alleluia!”103
HEROIC VIRTUE IN DEFENSE OF LIFE
On May 16, the Fifth Sunday of Easter, John Paul II led what would be his last canonization ceremony in St. Peter’s Square, honoring four religious founders; a Lebanese Maronite monk; and a young Italian wife, mother, and pediatrician, Gianna Beretta Molla, who had become the icon of the pontificate’s promotion of the right to life of the unborn.
Born on October 4, 1922, in Magenta, a town in Lombardy, Gianna Beretta was the tenth of thirteen children, five of whom died in infancy or childhood. At age twenty-eight, having earned degrees in medicine and surgery at the University of Pavia, Dr. Beretta opened a clinic in Mesero, near her hometown, before returning to the University of Milan for a specialist’s certification in pediatrics in 1952; after that, her medical practice focused on the care of mothers and their young children, the elderly, and the poor. Á skier and mountain climber, she was also engaged in Italian Catholic Action, working particularly with very small children. She married another Catholic Action member, Pietro Molla, on September 25, 1955, at the basilica of St. Martin in Magenta. She gave birth to three children—Pierluigi, Mariolina, and Laura—between 1956 and 1959, each time experiencing a difficult pregnancy. Her medical practice and charitable activities continued along with her blossoming family life until September 1961, when, two months into her fourth pregnancy, a fibrous ovarian tumor was discovered that threatened both her life and that of her unborn child. There were three medical options: remove the uterus and the affected ovary, which would spare her life but kill the unborn child; remove the tumor alone and terminate the pregnancy, which would likely result in her being able to bear more children later; or remove the tumor while trying to save the pregnancy, a procedure that posed immediate risks to the mother and promised a dangerous delivery. Dr. Molla told the surgeon to take the third option. Throughout the remaining seven months of her pregnancy, she told both her physicians and her husband that, were it to come to a choice between her life and that of the child, they should choose to save the child. “Do not hesitate. I insist on it. Save the baby.”
Gianna Beretta Molla entered St. Gerard’s Hospital in Monza on Good Friday, April 20, 1962, where Gianna Emanuela was born the following day. Shortly after the birth, the new mother began to suffer excruciating pain from septic peritonitis, and died a week later, on April 28, 1962, at the age of thirty-nine. Her last words were “Jesus, I love you! Jesus, I love you!” The grave of Gianna Beretta Molla soon became a place of prayer and pilgrimage, and her cause for beatification was recognized by Pope Paul VI in 1973. Beatification followed on April 24, 1994, with Gianna Emanuela, herself a doctor, present.
John Paul II delivered the homily at the canonization Mass in Italian, Spanish, and French, seated in front of the altar on the sagrato in front of St. Peter’s and leaning his text on the small portable desk he now used on such occasions. “The extreme sacrifice” which Saint Gianna Beretta Molla had “sealed with her life testifies that only those who have the courage to give of themselves totally to God and to others are able to fulfill themselves.” It was a theme that Karol Wojtyła had been developing since his 1974 lecture, “The Personal Structure of Self-Determination,” given at an international congress on St. Thomas Aquinas: there is a Law of the Gift, or law of self-giving, built into the moral structure of the human person, such that we only come to the fulfillment of ourselves by making our lives into the gift to others that our own life is to each of us.104 As a young bishop at Vatican II, Karol Wojtyła had seen the Law of the Gift inscribed in the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.105 Now, before the world Church, he lifted up the example of Gianna Beretta Molla, the last saint he would canonize, as the embodiment of the Law of the Gift lived in its most radical and dramatic form—and did so in the presence of a now frail, ninety-one-year-old Pietro Molla; Gianna’s children; a grandchild; her surviving siblings; former patients of the young pediatrician; and Elisabeth Acomparini Arcolino, a young Brazilian mother, whose fourth pregnancy was miraculously saved through what the Congregation for the Causes of Saints concluded was the intercession of Gianna Beretta Molla.
There was a fitting symmetry in the fact that a pro-life witness to radical charity—charity lived to the ultimate degree—would be the last of the 482 saints John Paul II canonized. Yet the Pope’s pro-life convictions were sometimes misunderstood as the very opposite of charity—they were mistaken for a form of Catholic misogyny by some, and deplored by others as an example of the impossibility of the Catholic Church’s sexual ethic. For John Paul, however, abortion was not a matter of the sixth commandment and its injunction to chastity but of the fifth commandment and the injunction not to do murder. Moreover, as he put it at Mount Sinai in 2000, the truth that had been inscribed on the second tablet of the law, that one must not take innocent human life, had first been inscribed in the human heart, as a moral truth of the human condition that could be known by reason.
John Paul also insisted that the Church’s defense of life did not violate any proper understanding of the separation of Church and state, for in defending the right to life of the unborn, the severely handicapped, and the elderly, and in insisting that the state not declare entire classes of human beings outside the protection of the laws, the Church was appealing to moral truths that could be known by any thinking person willing to work through an argument—moral truths that were part of the cultural foundations of democracy. The Catholic defense of the right to life was not some arcane bit of Catholic doctrine, accessible only to the initiate. It was based on first principles of justice that every human being of democratic sensibility should intuitively grasp. As always, however, demonstrations were likely to be more effective than arguments in moving hearts and minds. Thus the canonization of Saint Gianna Beretta Molla put a fitting capstone on John Paul II’s quarter-century-long effort to lift up moral heroism in the defense of life through examples drawn from the contemporary world.
A BISHOP REMINISCES
In April 2004, the bishops of the United States began their ad limina visits to Rome, as all bishops do in a quinquennial cycle of meetings, organized nationally or regionally. For more than two decades, the ad limina schedule put maximum demands on the Pope, who received each bishop individually for a talk that might last from fifteen minutes to a half hour, hosted a group lunch in the papal apartment for the visiting prelates, celebrated Mass with them as a group, and delivered a formal address to them after the Mass. In the postjubilee years of the pontificate, John Paul’s declining health dictated that this schedule be reduced. Thus he still met each bishop individually, but more briefly; the lunch was eliminated; Mass might or might not be celebrated together, depending on the Pope’s condition; and the papal discourse to the group was not read to them, but was given to the bishops as a kind of personal letter from the Pope. Bishops’ reactions to their private sessions with John Paul in 2004 varied, depending on his health, medication cycle, and general level of energy. Some found him relatively robust; others worried that his energies were flagging at long last. Different bishops within the same regional or national group could bring away dramatically different impressions, depending on the day of the week and time of the day they met the Pope. Some bishops were even more concerned with the listlessness they found during their meetings with the Roman Curia (another important part of the ad limina process), for, like most bureaucracies in similar situations, the Curia in 2004 was in fin de régime mode, with careerists jockeying for endgame position and unwilling to take initiatives that might not sit well with the next pontificate.
The Pope may have been displaying declining energy during ad limina visits, but he had more to say to his brother bishops beyond the apostolic exhortation Pastores Gregis, which he had signed on the occasion of his silver jubilee. He d
id so by adding another book to his personal bibliography when, on May 18, 2004, the Italian edition of Alzatevi, andiamo! [Rise, Let Us Be on Our Way!] was published.106 In the book’s introduction, John Paul explained that his new book, a memoir of his life as a bishop, was a kind of autobiographical complement to Pastores Gregis, as Gift and Mystery, his 1996 memoir of his priestly vocation, had been a personal complement to Pastores Dabo Vobis, the 1992 apostolic exhortation on the priesthood, priestly formation, and seminary reform.107
By most critics’ lights, the book would have been improved by more stringent editing. As it is, Alzatevi, andiamo! rambles, in the voice of a reflective elder telling stories whose meaning he has long pondered. Yet those with the patience to work through it could find much interesting material, some of it surprising.
John Paul began with the story of his having to leave a July 1958 kayaking trip to go to Warsaw at the summons of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński.108 There, along with three other priests, he was told of his appointment as a bishop by Pope Pius XII. The bare facts of the incident were already on the public record; now, John Paul added a detail that may have been one of the only public demonstrations that the formidable “Primate of the Millennium” had at least something of a sense of humor. When Wyszyński told him that the Pope had named him auxiliary bishop of Kraków, Wojtyła said, “Your Eminence, I am too young. I’m only thirty-eight.” To which the Primate replied, “That is a weakness which can soon be remedied.” Wyszyński asked that the young priest not “oppose the will of the Holy Father,” Wojtyła accepted, and then the Primate concluded the proceedings with a practical suggestion: “Then let’s have lunch.”
Wojtyła went from Warsaw to Kraków in order to speak with Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak about the appointment. Baziak, another stern personality, met him at the door of the episcopal residence and walked him through a waiting room where priests were sitting, saying, “Habemus papam” [We have a pope]. “In the light of subsequent events,” John Paul wrote, “one might say that these words were prophetic.” Baziak, having made his little joke, initially said that the bishop-elect’s return to the kayaking trip would not “be appropriate”; but when Wojtyła persisted (after going across the street to pray the Stations of the Cross at the Franciscan basilica), Baziak conceded and then had his second smile of the day: “Please come back in time for the consecration.”109
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