The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  Karol Wojtyła’s admiration for the heroism of Cardinal Adam Sapieha, the “unbroken prince,” was well known; in Alzatevi, andiamo! he added to his list of heroic episcopal role models his two co-consecrators in 1958, Bishop Franciszek Jop of Opole (a former Kraków auxiliary who had held the archdiocese together during Stalinist times), and Bishop Bolesław Kaminek of Wrocław, whom the communists forbade from living in his diocese for a period and whom Paul VI had named a cardinal. These men, in addition to Sapieha and Wyszyński, offered him a “heroic spiritual heritage” in which “personal greatness” grew from “faithful witness to Christ and to the Gospel.”110 Wyszyński, the Pope recalled, had defined the type of the bishop-hero, and its distinctive Christian texture, on the day before his own episcopal consecration in 1946: “Being a bishop has something of the Cross about it, which is why the Church places the Cross on the bishop’s breast. On the Cross, we have to die to ourselves; without this, there cannot be the fullness of priesthood. To take up one’s Cross is not easy, even if it is made of gold and studded with jewels.” Later, the Primate would remark that “lack of courage in a bishop is the beginning of disaster” and that “the greatest weakness in an apostle is fear.… Fear in an apostle is the principal ally of the enemies of the cause.”111 Courage, John Paul seemed to be reminding his brothers in the episcopate, was not an optional accessory—it was of the essence of the bishop’s vocation to speak and defend the truth.

  Alzatevi, andiamo! also added to the world’s knowledge of Karol Wojtyła’s experience of the Second Vatican Council. The author slipped as close as he ever did to a public expression of irony when he wrote of his “Italian colleagues” at Vatican II “who took charge, so to speak, of the Council proceedings,” but it was his contacts with African bishops that remained most striking in his memory. John Paul remembered being especially impressed by Archbishop Raymond-Marie Tchidimbo of Conakry in the west African country of Guinea, a man persecuted by his country’s communist president and eventually exiled. Other Africans with whom Wojtyła had “cordial and frequent contact” were two future Francophone cardinals, the Senegalese Hyacinthe Thiandoum and Paul Zoungrana of Burkina Faso, then known as Upper Volta. John Paul mentioned, in addition, his Council-based friendships with the Frenchman Gabriel-Marie Garrone, the German bishops Alfred Bengsch and Joseph Höffner, and two eminent theologians: Henri de Lubac, S.J., and Joseph Ratzinger, whom the Pope described as a “great man who is a trusted friend”—a striking break from the usual papal protocol of never commenting on the work of a collaborator.112

  Finally, Alzatevi, andiamo! contained some interesting self-criticism, touching on the author’s “reluctance to rebuke others”:

  Another responsibility that certainly forms part of a pastor’s role is admonition. I think that in this regard I did too little. There is always a problem in achieving a balance between authority and service. Maybe I should have been more assertive. I think this is partly a matter of my temperament. Yet it could also be related to the will of Christ, who asked His Apostles not to dominate but to serve.113

  Critical reaction to Alzatevi, andiamo! was lukewarm and the book’s sales outside Poland were not particularly strong. For those with the patience to work through its ellipses and side trips, however, and to read carefully between some of its lines, Alzatevi, andiamo! was a valuable, and at points touching, window into various aspects of Karol Wojtyła’s spiritual life, his work, and his relationships.

  SOLDIERING ON

  On June 4, John Paul received U.S. president George W. Bush in their first meeting since the Iraq War had begun. The Pope did not mince words about the “unequivocal position of the Holy See” in regard to the “situation of grave unrest in the Middle East, both in Iraq and in the Holy Land,” but he also praised the Bush administration’s “great commitment … to overcoming the increasingly intolerable conditions in various African countries, where the suffering caused by fratricidal conflicts, pandemic diseases, and a degrading poverty can no longer be overlooked,” and Bush’s own “commitment to the promotion of moral values in American society, particularly with regard to respect for life and the family.”114 The Pope spoke in English, got through all but one paragraph of his text, and while he was sometimes difficult to understand, twice interjected a perfectly clear “God bless America!” into his formal remarks. Bush presented the Pope with the highest civilian award bestowed by the United States, the Medal of Freedom. The debate continued between U.S. and Vatican officials on the first use of force, international law, and the UN’s authority, but both sides remained agreed on the necessity for the coalition forces to remain in Iraq until stability was achieved.115

  The next day, John Paul left for what seemed likely to be a difficult pastoral visit to Switzerland, where forty-one prominent Catholic personalities had signed a public petition asking him to step down as pope. Things turned out better than expected. As the spokesman for the Swiss bishops’ conference, Marc Aellen, put it, “at the beginning, for the meeting in the Bern Arena, we did not expect more than 3,000 to 4,000 young people; there were 14,000. On Sunday, we didn’t dare to hope for the figure of 40,000—and 70,000 people attended Mass.”116 That was 25,000 more than had attended the closing Mass in Sion, on John Paul’s first Swiss visit in 1984. The Pope challenged the outdoor congregation on Sunday to “pass from a faith of habit to a mature faith, which is expressed in clear, convinced, and courageous personal choices.”117

  Father Michael Sherwin, an American Dominican theologian working in Fribourg, described the events and the atmosphere, and his surprise, in an on-site report:

  The Mass on Sunday was the most impressive. There is only one word for it: joy, two and a half hours of joy. That is not a [word] that one uses often in reference to the Swiss, so this made it doubly remarkable. People just had a wonderful time together in a real spirit of celebration and prayer. And 70,000 people—the largest religious gathering in Switzerland for over fifty years.

  On Saturday night the Pope was virtually unintelligible in each of the three languages he spoke to us in, but the youth responded anyway. They especially loved seeing him forcefully reject two different attempts to get him off the stage before he was ready to go. During the Mass, he was in much better form.118

  One Catholic news agency wrote of the Pope’s “magic” with the young, which was certainly on full display in Bern. Still, the fact remained that the pontificate of John Paul II had had a particularly rough reception in the German-speaking world, and most particularly among German theologians. There were numerous reasons for this, including the extraordinary sense found among many German Catholic intellectuals that they bore a special responsibility for the Catholic theological enterprise in the twenty-first century, as they had in the twentieth. The 1993 encyclical on the reform of moral theology, Veritatis Splendor [The Splendor of Truth], had hardened attitudes in the German-speaking intellectual world, as two of its most prominent figures, Josef Fuchs, S.J., and Bernard Häring, C.SS.R., were among those whose moral theological method was rejected in the encyclical, although neither man was named.119 There were certainly legitimate scholarly issues being contested in these debates, as well as dramatically different readings of the meaning of modernity, but it was difficult not to think that at least some part of the poor reception of the pontificate in Germany, Austria, and the German-speaking parts of Switzerland had to do with certain unexamined (and false) assumptions prevalent in those regions about Poles living outside the mainstream of European intellectual life.

  On June 8, John Paul II sent a telegram of condolence to Mrs. Nancy Reagan on the death of former president Ronald Reagan, who had succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease on June 5: “I recall with deep gratitude the late president’s unwavering commitment to the service of the nation and to the cause of freedom, as well as his abiding faith in the human and spiritual values which ensure a future of solidarity, justice, and peace in our world.” The language was that of the Vatican Secretariat of State, but the sentiments o
f “deep gratitude” were wholly those of John Paul II, who gave a further indication of his regard for Reagan by sending Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the secretary of state of the Holy See, to President Reagan’s funeral as a special papal envoy.120

  Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I came to Rome on June 29 for the Solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul, in part to mark the fortieth anniversary of the meeting in Jerusalem in 1964 of Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras. John Paul and Bartholomew both preached at the Mass in St. Peter’s Square, with John Paul deferring to his guest for the first homily, and Bartholomew speaking cordially of the “Sister Church of Rome.” The two men then signed a “Common Declaration” that took note of the progress that had been made in ecumenical dialogue over the past forty years; the obstacles that remained; the necessity of Europe recovering its Christian roots; the imperative of rejecting terrorism and building a new interreligious dialogue with Islam; the duty to defend the right to life; and the preservation of the beauties of the earth against environmental degradation (the last being a particular interest of Bartholomew). Five months later, on November 27, 2004, the Patriarch came to Rome for another ecumenical celebration at which John Paul returned to the Church of Constantinople relics of two great Eastern Fathers of the Church, Gregory Nazianzen and John Chrysostom, which had been kept in Rome since being taken from Constantinople centuries before. In his message to Bartholomew for the transfer of the relics, John Paul wrote that he would “never tire of searching out, steadfastly and with determination … communion between Christ’s disciples,” and signed the message “in the patience of Christ and the charity of God, with fraternal love, Johannes Paulus II.”121

  “A SICK MAN AMONG THE SICK”

  John Paul spent his summer holidays in the first half of July in Les Combes, in the Italian Alps, where he could sit outdoors and read at the foot of Mont Blanc. It was “an enchanting place,” in which the exceptional Alpine scenery made visible the “omnipotent providence” of God, he told local officials on July 17, the day of his departure.122 What John Paul II could not make visible any longer was his own laughter, as the Parkinson’s disease had virtually destroyed his ability to make his face convey what he wanted to convey. Knowing that, for John Paul, the circus clown with bulbous red nose was a kind of archetype of something that always makes for laughter, Joaquín Navarro-Valls, the papal spokesman, had bought a red nose at a novelty store and brought it to the Val d’Aosta. Camera in hand, he then tried to surprise the Pope, who was reading, by putting on the clown’s nose, jumping in front of the pontiff, and saying, “Holy Father, look at me!” John Paul managed as much of a laugh as the disease would allow; and here, Navarro remembered later, was “the drama: the face refused to express what was in the heart—laughter.”123

  The Pope spent the rest of July and early August at Castel Gandolfo before leaving on August 14 for what would be his last foreign pilgrimage, to the Marian shrine at Lourdes in the French Pyrenees, where he would celebrate the Solemnity of the Assumption the following day. It was his second visit to Catholicism’s premier healing shrine, and he made it the occasion to demonstrate in an unmistakable way his conviction that his physical suffering was part of a providential plan for his Petrine ministry.

  Wearing his patriotism and his laïcité on different sleeves, as it were, French president Jacques Chirac welcomed the Pope at the airport at Tarbes and praised Bernadette Soubirous, the visionary of Lourdes, as “a source of comfort and inspiration for Catholics the world over,” but studiously declined to mention the apparitions of the Virgin that Bernadette had received or the miraculous cures that had made Lourdes world-famous. John Paul was not about to let Chirac’s commitment to secularism in the European public square go completely unremarked. In his formal reply to Chirac’s words of welcome, the Pope said that “the Catholic Church wishes to offer society a specific contribution towards the building of a world in which the great ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity can form the basis of social life.” The key word was “specific,” for Chirac had long insisted that the Church had something to say in the public arena only insofar as what it said reflected “universal values.”

  The Pope drove into Lourdes through flag-waving crowds whose enthusiasm seemed to hearten him. At the Grotto of Massabielle, he was lifted to a prie-dieu for a moment of prayer, but then seemed to fall back; caught by his aides, he was then pulled into a chair, wet-eyed—whether from pain or emotion, no one knew. But the planned service quickly resumed, with the Pope drinking a glass of Lourdes water and handing the basilica’s rector, Father Raymond Zambelli, a golden rose as a gift to the Virgin. Cardinal Roger Etchegaray read the Pope’s prayer for him, which began with a greeting to the sick: “I share a time of life marked by physical suffering, yet not for that reason any less fruitful in God’s wondrous plan.”

  The Pope returned to the grotto Saturday afternoon for the daily recitation of the Rosary, which he began by saying that, “when kneeling here before the Grotto of Massabielle, I feel with emotion that I have arrived at the end of my pilgrimage.” In a voice cracking under the strain of his effort, John Paul then compared the Grotto to the cave of Mount Horeb, where the prophet Elijah had listened for the “still small voice” of God (1 Kings 19.12), and noted that Lourdes had become a “unique school of prayer” where one could come to Mary and learn “an attitude of docility and openness to the Word of God.”124

  The Mass for the Solemnity of the Assumption on Sunday morning, held outdoors in temperatures close to 90 degrees Fahrenheit, was marked, as British correspondent Austen Ivereigh put it, by “the Pope’s frailty and dogged determination.”125 Some 300,000 people were present to mark the Assumption and the 150th anniversary of Pope Pius IX’s dogmatic definition of the Immaculate Conception. Two thousand malades were present in wheelchairs, cared for by the volunteers who make Lourdes a global synonym for loving care—a place where, as a longtime Lourdes confessor put it, “It’s the sick people who are real; it’s the rest of us who are unreal.”126 Fourteen cardinals, 120 bishops, and over 1,000 priests concelebrated the Mass with John Paul. During his homily, the Pope began to gasp for breath and whispered to an aide in Polish, “Help me.” He was brought a glass of water and then whispered, once more in Polish, “I must finish!” Which he did, the crowd applauding and encouraging him. The homily concluded with a plea to respect life “from conception to its natural end,” and to recognize that life was a sacred gift of which “no one can presume to be master.”127

  John Paul II’s 104th and last pastoral pilgrimage outside Italy ended on the afternoon of August 15, when the Pope returned one last time to the Grotto, where he prayed for eight minutes, his eyes focused on the statue of the Virgin who had told Bernadette Soubirous, “I am the Immaculate Conception.”

  At Lourdes, John Paul II described himself as “a sick man among the sick.” That was certainly true, but something else transpired at Lourdes on two hot summer days in August 2004. Vatican reporter John Allen caught it nicely: at Lourdes, John Paul II somehow completed “his transformation from ‘the supreme pastor of the Catholic Church,’ to quote the formula in the Code of Canon Law, into a living symbol of human suffering, in effect, an icon of Christ on the cross.”128 He remained the pastor, of course. But now his pastorate would be defined by his witness to the power of redemptive suffering. There was in fact an essential theological and spiritual clarification being played out here, and French cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger summed it up well:

  The Pope, in his weakness, is living more than ever the role assigned him of being the Vicar of Christ on earth, participating in the suffering of our Redeemer. Many times we have the idea that the head of the Church is like a super-manager of a great international company, a man of action who makes decisions and is judged on the basis of his effectiveness. But for believers the most effective action, the mystery of salvation, happens when Christ is on the cross and can’t do or decide anything other than to accept the will of the Father.129


  Or, as John Allen concluded his report on Lourdes, “One simply can’t watch the Pope these days and not think about the final things, about the meaning and purpose of life. That, indeed, is a legacy.”130

  NO DISPOSABLE HUMAN BEINGS

  The remainder of 2004 had something of the character of an anticlimax after the high drama of Lourdes, albeit an anticlimax in which a failing but determined Pope still took significant initiatives.

  It was now abundantly clear—and in fact had been for some time—that the recalcitrant Patriarch Aleksy II of Moscow would never concede to a papal visit to Russia. So John Paul II characteristically went the extra mile himself, and dispatched Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, on a mission to return the Kazanskaya icon to its homeland. The icon had come into the Pope’s possession after a lengthy global peregrination following the Russian Revolution, and at one point was lodged in Fátima; for several years, John Paul had kept the priceless Kazanskaya and its heavily jeweled frame in the papal chapel in the Apostolic Palace, or in the chapel in Castel Gandolfo when he was in residence there.131 Now that Aleksy had made it impossible for the Pope to fulfill his desire to bring the Kazanskaya home to Russia as an expression of his respect for Russian Orthodoxy, the time had come to send the icon home—but with a message.