The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  This, Wojtyła was convinced, was the primordial key to the proper interpretation of Vatican II. The rest of his magisterium of conciliar interpretation revolved around it, as his pontificate sought to embody Christian humanism in action.

  “1989”

  John Paul II’s pivotal role in the events leading to “1989” and the collapse of European communism is now broadly acknowledged by historians.24 How, though, should that role be understood within the larger landscape of his pontificate and its evangelical objectives?

  The Dynamics of History. From his youthful immersion in Polish history and literature, Karol Wojtyła came to a distinctive view of history that had parallels in other Slavic thinkers such as Vladimir Soloviev and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. His nation, Poland, had survived when the Polish state was erased from the map of Europe in 1795: it survived through its language, its literature, and its religious faith—in a word, through its culture. The lesson? That culture, not political power, economic power, or other forms of material power, is the most dynamic force in history, over the long haul. And at the heart of culture is cult—what men and women cherish, honor, and worship; what men and women are willing to stake their lives, and their children’s lives, on.

  Wojtyła thus brought to the papacy a different understanding of the dynamics of history than that typically found in London, Paris, Berlin, Washington, Moscow, Beijing, or certain circles in the Vatican. Culture is the key to history, and thus the key to political change. Change or reform a culture—give it new energy by helping it recapture and re-express the truths about the human condition that it embodied—and you had an Archimedean lever with which to move the world. That is what John Paul did in the Nine Days of June 1979: by giving back to the people of Poland their authentic history and culture, and thus their true identity, he gave them tools of resistance that communism could not match or counter.

  At the same time, his accomplishment in 1979 and throughout the 1980s taught the rest of the world a lesson about two of modernity’s great fallacies: the Jacobin fallacy, set loose in the French revolution, according to which history is driven by the quest for power, understood as my capacity to impose my will on you; and the Marxist fallacy, according to which history is the exhaust fumes of impersonal economic forces. In challenging these two fallacies, both conceptually and in effective action, John Paul II gave the West the opportunity to recover one of the salient truths inscribed in its cultural foundations: politics is an extension of ethics; politics is a realm of “ought” as well as “is”; politics, even world politics, takes place within the ambit of moral judgment. That was no minor lesson for Karol Wojtyła to have taught, and embodied, in the second half of a twentieth century that had run knee-deep in blood because the world had forgotten it.

  True Liberation. John Paul II’s role in “1989” also challenged the Marxist-Leninist domination of the global vocabulary of “liberation.” The first and most urgent liberation, the Pope insisted, was liberation into the moral truth about the human person—a truth that could be known by reason as well as revelation. Every other truth about liberation from oppression, and about life lived in freedom, flowed from that central truth about the inalienable dignity and inestimable value of every human life. Politics and economics that were built on the foundation of that understanding could lead to genuine human flourishing; politics and economics that ignored the truth about man would create new shackles, all the more dangerous in the twenty-first century because they would be more subtle than the shackles of the totalitarians.

  The atheistic humanism analyzed by John Paul II’s friend Henri de Lubac, S.J., taught that the God of the Bible was the enemy of human freedom—a notion with considerable cultural traction beyond the borders of the communist world.25 The role of the Polish pope in “1989” demonstrated on a twentieth-century global stage the truth of what had been first revealed in the Exodus, 1,300 years before the Christian era: the God of Abraham comes into the world and into history as a liberator, and his commandments are a moral code intended to keep liberated men and women from reverting to the habits of slaves.

  That moral code, as John Paul said at Mount Sinai in 2000, had been inscribed on human hearts before being engraved on tablets of stone. And this, too, was one of the lessons of John Paul’s “1989”: there is a universal moral law that can be known by reason; all are accountable to that moral law by reason of their humanity; that accountability is the moral foundation of human equality. That was the message John Paul took to the United Nations in 1995: the Pope’s distinctive role throughout the 1980s gave him the moral authority to stand before the world and defend the universality of human rights at a moment when the very notion of human rights was being decried by postmodernists, Islamists, east Asian autocrats, and the world’s remaining communists as a Western imperial imposition. It was that same role in the events leading up to “1989” that gave weight to the Pope’s suggestion that the universal moral law could be a grammar by which the world turned cacophony into conversation. The weight came from the fact that he had embodied the truth he proposed in his own public witness and in his diplomacy, by defending and promoting the rights of all, not simply the rights of the Church and its members.

  Europe Restored. For John Paul II, “1989” also marked the end of the artificial division of Europe into two warring camps, separated by vastly different claims about the nature of the human person, human community, human history, and human destiny, and physically separated by the Iron Curtain. When the Wall and all it represented came down, thanks in no small part to John Paul’s inspiration and leadership, Europe had a chance to be itself again after a century of division and bloodletting. What Europe would make of that chance was not something the Pope could determine, but that he was one of those most responsible for a whole Europe recovering control of its own destiny, few serious students of contemporary history could doubt.

  A New Model? Finally, “1989” for John Paul II suggested the possibility that modernity’s usual method of effecting large-scale social change—mass slaughter—was not the only option. Communism had fallen for many reasons; the power of aroused consciences, which created new forms of nonviolent political power, was among those reasons. Might this template be applied to other, seemingly intractable situations? It was not to be, as the first Gulf War and Europe’s inability to manage the deconstruction of Yugoslavia soon demonstrated. That was John Paul’s hope, however, and the hope was a noble one.

  The Free and Virtuous Society and the Priority of Culture

  The social magisterium of John Paul II, and particularly the encyclical Centesimus Annus, pointed the century-long tradition of Catholic social doctrine firmly into the twenty-first century, absent any whiff of nostalgia for the premodern social, political, and economic order and with a clear vision of the dangers that awaited democratic polities and free economies that cut themselves loose from sturdy moral-cultural moorings.26

  John Paul’s social teaching stressed the priority of culture in building and sustaining the free and virtuous society. He insisted that democratic politics and market economies were not machines that could run by themselves; rather, both democracy and the market required a vibrant public moral culture to discipline and direct the tremendous human energies let loose by freedom. Thus the goal was to build and sustain not simply free societies, but free and virtuous societies; the two adjectives were always linked in his mind, as he was convinced that freedom and virtue were linked in the moral order.

  John Paul II’s social doctrine described the free and virtuous society as composed of three interlocking parts: a democratic polity, a free or market-centered economy, and a robust public moral culture. The third component part, he insisted, was the key to the proper functioning of the political and economic sectors. It took a certain kind of people, possessing certain virtues, to make democracy and the market work so that human beings were ennobled by their participation in free political and economic life. Here was an important challenge to the political science
functionalists and economic libertarians who taught that the only thing that mattered was getting the machinery of governance, or of productivity and exchange, properly designed and built. Moreover, the Pope wedded this teaching about the priority of moral culture to a realistic and empirically sensitive grasp of postindustrial economic life and a sober but hopeful analysis of democracy.

  In the encyclical Centesimus Annus, in which he taught that the wealth of nations resided primarily in human creativity and entrepreneurial skills, John Paul II sought to cure Catholic social doctrine of the curious materialism that had often characterized it. He also aimed to recenter the Catholic discussion on aiding the poor, giving primary attention to the inclusion of the poor in the networks of productivity and exchange where wealth was created and shared, rather than to schemes of wealth redistribution. Thus with Centesimus Annus, the Catholic Church’s social doctrine abandoned the quest for a “Catholic third way” that was somehow between or beyond capitalism and socialism. John Paul’s encyclical, looking at the empirical facts, recognized the economic truths on which market economies were built, but also insisted that those truths were not the only truths relevant to economic life: there were moral truths that ought to guide markets, moral truths that could be embodied in legal regulation of economic activity. As always, recognition of the truth about the dignity of the human person was the key to the ultimate success of any human activity. Thus John Paul II’s affirmation of free economies was not fundamentally a question of their relative superiority in terms of economic efficiency; it was based on the conclusion that markets allowed for the exercise of human creativity and responsibility in the economic world.27

  That same conviction about the dignity of the human person and its relationship to social structures applied to democratic politics as well as market economies. Karol Wojtyła had a remarkably keen grasp of the problems and prospects of twenty-first-century democracy, informed by a Burkean sense that the health of society’s “little platoons”—its voluntary associations, beginning with the family—was crucial in securing a sound democratic polity. As the pontificate moved through the 1990s, however, John Paul frequently expressed his concern that democracies that declared wrongs to be rights were in grave peril of becoming “tyrant states,” as he put it in the 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae [The Gospel of Life].28 Here, the experience of Weimar Germany loomed large in his historical imagination: a beautifully constructed democratic system that eventually produced a tyrant state, because its moral and cultural foundations were insufficiently strong.

  John Paul II’s social magisterium also accelerated the process by which the Catholic Church reevaluated its concept of the state and of political authority. Although the Church had once thought of political authority, and particularly royal authority, as reflecting divine authority, John Paul’s concept of the state seemed, at times, to reduce the state to a set of limited and defined legal and political tasks (or, as Russell Hittinger put it, John Paul II “de-ontologized” the state). At the same time, the Pope insisted that the modern constitutional state, born from a commitment to protect basic human rights, hold fast to this promise, particularly in its approach to the life issues of abortion and euthanasia. This tension between Catholic thinking about the state as a set of discrete and constitutionally circumscribed tasks, on the one hand, and the state as an entity required by its nature to uphold certain fundamental moral truths about the human person, on the other, is a legacy of the social teaching of John Paul II certain to provoke serious thought, and perhaps controversy, in the future.29

  The Ecumenical Imperative

  Considerable ecumenical ardor had been ignited by the Second Vatican Council. The participation of Orthodox, Anglican, and Protestant observers at all four sessions of Vatican II, and the solicitude shown them by Cardinal Augustin Bea’s Secretariat for Christian Unity; the historic meeting in Jerusalem in 1964 between Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople; the Council’s 1964 Decree on Ecumenism, with its statement that all who believe in Christ and have been baptized are in a real but imperfect communion with the Catholic Church, albeit in different degrees; the Council’s affirmation of a hierarchy of truths within the deposit of faith, which seemed to suggest that some differences ought no longer be regarded as church dividing; the mutual lifting of the excommunications of 1054 by the Pope and Ecumenical Patriarch on the day before the Council ended; the post-conciliar institutionalization of the Catholic Church’s ecumenical commitment in a new organ of the Roman Curia, which continued the work of Bea’s conciliar Secretariat—all this seemed to presage an ecumenical golden age as the warmth of the Council rapidly melted the deep freeze of centuries.30 Yet within a decade of the Council’s conclusion, ecumenical enthusiasm had waned, as it became clear that substantive doctrinal issues dividing the component parts of what had once been Christendom remained, and in some cases were becoming more aggravated.

  Ecumenism was not a pastoral priority in Poland, given the country’s religious demographics, but Karol Wojtyła, faithful to the Council’s ecumenical mandate, did what he could to foster new patterns of dialogue with his Protestant and Orthodox neighbors in Kraków. Yet despite his lack of extensive pre-papal ecumenical experience, John Paul II expended more effort on the quest for Christian unity than any pope since the formalization of the East/West fracture in 1054 and the subsequent disintegration of Western Christian unity in the sixteenth century.

  By the Pope’s instructions, every papal pilgrimage included an ecumenical meeting, which was often accompanied by an ecumenical prayer service or Liturgy of the Word. John Paul hosted hundreds of Christian leaders at the Vatican over more than a quarter century, inviting Orthodox hierarchs, Anglicans, and Lutherans to share with him in leading worship, and in some cases preaching, in St. Peter’s. He participated in several prayer vigils at the Vatican basilica sponsored by the ecumenical monastery at Taizé in France, visited Taizé in 1986, and became a friend of Taizé’s founder, Brother Roger Schutz.31 He concluded formal Christological agreements with the heads of the Assyrian Church of the East, the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Coptic Orthodox Church, and the Syrian Orthodox Church, while acknowledging a common faith in Christ when meeting with the patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and the patriarch of the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church; these agreements and affirmations healed doctrinal breaches that sometimes went back fifteen centuries.32 The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification signed by the Holy See and the leaders of the Lutheran World Federation on October 31, 1999—Reformation Sunday in the Lutheran liturgical calendar—had a difficult gestation, but notwithstanding those difficulties, the declaration’s theological achievement was no small one, as the official statement of the Holy See and the LWF made clear: “The teaching of the Lutheran Church presented in this Declaration does not fall under the condemnations of the Council of Trent. The condemnations of the Lutheran Confessions do not apply to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church presented in this Declaration.” What had originally precipitated the crisis of 1517 and the subsequent division of Western Christianity—the doctrine of justification—was no longer to be regarded as a church-dividing issue.33

  Orthodoxy. Ecumenism ad orientem was a priority for John Paul II, who hoped that the breach between Rome and Constantinople could be closed so that Catholicism and Orthodoxy could cross the threshold of the third millennium in full communion, reunited at the eucharistic table of the Lord. The Pope made his commitment to this dramatic goal clear in his first visit to the Ecumenical Patriarchate in November 1979, telling the Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I that he hoped the day was “very near” when they could concelebrate the Eucharist together. Dimitrios came to Rome in December 1987 for an extensive round of engagements, including Solemn Vespers at the Basilica of St. Mary Major and a Mass in St. Peter’s on December 5. On both occasions, the services were described as being celebrated “with the participation of the Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I,” and while it was n
ot concelebration, Dimitrios preached in the Vatican basilica before John Paul’s homily and jointly blessed the congregation with the Pope at the end of Mass. The same courtesies were extended to Dimitrios’s successor, Bartholomew I, on his several visits to Rome, as they were to the leader of Romanian Orthodoxy, Teoctist, in 2002. Every year the Pope sent a senior Vatican delegation to Istanbul to participate in the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s celebration of the patronal feast of St. Andrew; Orthodox representatives were always prominent guests at the annual Roman celebration of the patronal feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, save when they declined to attend.34

  An Unprecedented Offer. John Paul II’s Ut Unum Sint [That They May Be One], issued in 1995, was the first encyclical ever devoted exclusively to the ecumenical imperative. In this groundbreaking exercise of the papal magisterium, John Paul first addressed the Catholic Church: the ecumenical commitment made at Vatican II was irreversible, he taught his fellow Catholics, and the quest for Christian unity ought to be reignited, both internationally and in the local churches. He then focused on the situation ad orientem. Despite the Orthodox opposition he had faced throughout the 1990s, John Paul continued to press in Ut Unum Sint for a full communion between Rome and Constantinople based on the experience of the first millennium, in which the See of Peter was acknowledged as the final reference point on matters of doctrine but the popes made no jurisdictional claims in the East. As for Western Christianity, the encyclical could not be so bold in addressing the fractures of the sixteenth century, given the doctrinal chaos in much of the Anglican and Protestant worlds in the latter decades of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, John Paul asked Orthodox, Anglican, and Protestant leaders alike to help him find a way of exercising the papal primacy that could serve all Christians in the future: “Could not the real but imperfect communion” already existing among Christian communities set the foundation on which Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant theologians and leaders could explore together a Petrine ministry that served everyone’s needs, he asked?35 John Paul’s offer was perfectly serious. Few of those to whom the offer was made were prepared to take it up seriously, however.