The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  The Galileo crisis had challenged the credibility of the Catholic Church’s grasp of the truth of the cosmos. The sexual revolution challenged the Church’s credibility in some of the most sensitive dimensions of the human microcosm. John Paul II was determined not to reprise the errors of the past in confronting the new moral and cultural challenges symbolized by (and in some respects created by) the invention of the oral contraceptive—a scientific development that, with atomic fission and the breaking of the genetic code, dramatically changed the human world of the late twentieth century and beyond. A new situation required a new account of ancient truths; that is what John Paul proposed in the Theology of the Body, a work of theological adventure that took our human embodiedness as male and female with utmost seriousness and sought to find in sexual differentiation and complementarity an ethic of interpersonal communion capable of expressing the nobility of human love. At the same time, the Pope pushed the Catholic sacramental imagination—the conviction that the extraordinary lies just on the far side of the ordinary, through which the extraordinary manifests itself—to new heights through his teaching that the self-giving love of sexual communion within the bond of marriage is an icon of the interior life of God the Holy Trinity. To the advocates of the sexual revolution, John Paul’s dramatic combination of body language and God-talk offered a bold challenge: Who takes human sexuality more seriously? Those who imagine sexual love as another contact sport? Or those who think of it as revelatory of the interior life of God? To Catholic moral theologians obsessed with rules—either rigid and strict or flexible and lax—the Theology of the Body proposed a reading of the drama of human moral choosing in matters of the heart that revitalized an ethics of virtue and happiness, or beatitude.

  The striking reception of the Theology of the Body among younger Catholic intellectuals in the last decade or so of John Paul’s pontificate suggested that the old battles between “progressive” and “conservative” moral theologians were fading into irrelevance. Five years after the Pope’s death, that process seemed likely to be extended by a global network of theological centers, the John Paul II Institutes for the Study of Marriage and Family, centered at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome and with outreach on every continent. In addition to the scholarly analysis of the Theology of the Body, these institutes were engaged in helping prepare a responsible secondary literature by which the complexities and subtleties of John Paul’s thought could be brought in accessible form to a more general pastoral audience by bishops, priests, deacons, and pastoral counselors. Parish-and diocesan-based marriage preparation programs were already one venue in which such materials were widely deployed.

  The Theology of the Body also contained some of the seeds of John Paul II’s distinctive papal feminism, another facet of his intellectual legacy likely to be under discussion in the Church and in world culture for a long time. John Paul’s feminism had four focal points: the defense of the legal and political equality of women in civil society; the explication of a distinctive “feminine genius,” manifest in women’s uniquely maternal embodiment of the Law of the Gift; the critique of theories of priestly ordination that regarded Holy Orders as a question of power rather than of iconography; and the Pope’s theology of Mary as the primary model of Christian discipleship.65 The last, into which the first three were incorporated, was brought to a finely sharpened point of development during the 1987–88 Marian Year in the encyclical Redemptoris Mater [The Mother of Redeemer] and the apostolic letter Mulieris Dignitatem [The Dignity of Women], but with perhaps special force in John Paul’s 1987 Christmas address to the Roman Curia.

  Speaking to men who understood themselves to be working at the center of the world Catholic reality in Rome, the Pope reminded his curial collaborators that the Petrine Church of authority and jurisdiction they embodied, like the Pauline Church of proclamation and evangelization and the Johannine Church of contemplation and prayer, takes its purpose and meaning from the prior and even more fundamental Marian Church: the Church formed in the image of a woman, Mary, whose assent to Gabriel’s message in Luke 1.38 was the first act of Christian discipleship, in that it made possible the incarnation of the Son of God. In fact, John Paul told the Roman Curia, their work had no other purpose “except to form the Church in line with the ideal of sanctity already programmed and prefigured in Mary.”

  These various images of the Church drawn from the great New Testament figures—Peter, Paul, John, and Mary—were mutually reinforcing and complementary. But the Marian image or “profile,” as John Paul termed it, was “preeminent,” not only in time but in its meaning for every Christian’s vocation to discipleship. Authority and power in the Church—even the awesome sacramental power to bind and loose sins—were always in service to the deepest realities of the Church: discipleship and sanctity, lived in communion with Mary’s son, Jesus, and with the fellowship of believers throughout the world. Thus John Paul made his own, and then gave to the world Church, the teaching of the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, who had once written that “Mary is ‘Queen of the Apostles’ without any pretensions to apostolic power: she has other and greater powers.”66

  In his 1987 Christmas address to the Curia, John Paul II deployed his distinctive, Marian feminism to fill out Vatican II’s theology of the Church as communion, to explain the Council’s abandonment of a monarchical model of the Church, and to set one of the theological foundations for understanding the Catholic Church’s conviction that it could ordain only men to the ministerial priesthood. In 1999, John Paul lifted up striking examples of sanctity among great women of the Church, naming St. Bridget of Sweden, St. Catherine of Siena, and St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) as co-patrons of Europe with St. Benedict and Sts. Cyril and Methodius.67 None of this resolved the Church’s debate over the meaning of the feminist revolution for Catholic life. Thanks to John Paul’s papal feminism, however, the Catholic discussion had been located in its properly theological context and the world had been offered a model of the feminine genius that did not turn women into imitation men. Thus both theology and public policy seemed likely to be touched by John Paul’s Marian feminism for the foreseeable future.

  The Restoration of Christian Humanism. Speaking to leaders of American Catholic higher education in New Orleans in 1987, John Paul II noted that “religious faith itself calls for intellectual inquiry, and the confidence that there can be no contradiction between faith and reason is a distinctive feature of the Catholic humanistic tradition as it has existed in the past and as it exists in our own day.”68 The entire intellectual project of John Paul II, which grew, of course, from the pre-papal intellectual project of Karol Wojtyła, was in some sense summed up here. As the rescue of the Western humanistic tradition from its decay into skepticism and nihilism had seemed to him a fitting task for Vatican II, so the re-presentation of Christian doctrine through the prism of a thoroughly humanistic Christian analysis of the human person seemed to him a useful, and perhaps imperative, papal contribution to the Church and the world on the threshold of the third millennium—and at the end of a century in which false ideas of who and what human beings are had made an abattoir of history. Thus, toward the end of the Pope’s life, the American theologian and cardinal Avery Dulles suggested that the heart of John Paul II’s message, and the key to unlocking his uniqueness as an intellectual, was to be found in his steady focus on the mystery of the human person, his philosophical analysis of the Law of the Gift or law of self-giving inscribed in the human heart, and his explication of the entire doctrinal heritage of the Church through the prism of his Christian personalism.

  Personalism was thus the ground on which John Paul could insist that “Christianity is not an opinion” or a set of propositions, but rather “Christianity is Christ! It is a Person!” Personalism shaped John Paul’s presentation of the Kingdom of God as an encounter with the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the image of the invisible God. As for the Church itself, it was a privileged embodiment in history
of the communio personarum, the communion of persons, that is both a longing of the human heart and a sign of the interior life of God the Holy Trinity. Thus, for John Paul, the Trinity is the first “model of the Church,” precisely in its personalist dynamism. So, too, with the Church’s sacraments, which for John Paul II were encounters with “the risen Jesus [who] accompanies us on our way and enables us to recognize him, as the disciples of Emmaus did, ‘in the breaking of the bread’ [Luke 24.35].” Christian personalism shaped John Paul II’s theology of the priesthood, which stressed the ordained priest’s sacramental ministry at the altar and in the confessional as a ministry conducted in persona Christi, “in the person of Christ.” A personalist conviction about the human yearning for truth and the human capacity for genuine dialogue underwrote John Paul’s ecumenism, his approach to interreligious affairs, and his lifelong conversations with the sciences and the humanities. Personalism and the development of Christian humanism shaped the Pope’s teaching on Catholic higher education, which “enables people to rise to the full measure of their humanity, created in the image of God and renewed in Christ and his spirit,” as John Paul put it in the 1990 apostolic constitution on Catholic higher learning, Ex Corde Ecclesiae [From the Heart of the Church]. Christian personalism was also evident in John Paul II’s social doctrine: from his teaching in the encyclical Laborem Exercens on work as humanity’s participation in God’s ongoing creativity, to his proclamation of solidarity as the most authentic of human stances toward society, and on to his defense of the human right of economic initiative, his critique of the initiative-stultifying welfare state, and his teaching in Centesimus Annus on human creativity, imagination, and skill as the sources of the wealth of nations.69 Christian personalism and the development of a humanism capable of sustaining nobility in the twenty-first century were also, and obviously, at the root of John Paul II’s papal feminism, his sexual ethics, and his defense of the prerogatives of reason.

  The Christian personalism of John Paul II was not, Dulles concluded, without its tensions with earlier explications of the Church’s faith. Could a “rigorous and convincing proof” of God’s existence be “erected on a personalist foundation”? Dulles asked. And if so, was that kind of proof preferable to the traditional philosophical arguments for the reality of God? How does Christian personalism, with its stress of Christ’s lordship as a lordship of humility and service, understand Christ the King, Christ the lawmaker, Christ the judge of the living and the dead? How does Christian personalism account for the traditional, penal aspects of Purgatory and for the possibility that some men and women may be lost for eternity? How could John Paul’s personalist ethics (in which the Pope spoke “far more of the human person than of human nature”) be integrated with classic understandings of the natural moral law? Could a personalist ethic account for the morality or immorality of acts in themselves? Does Christian personalism and its stress on dialogue as an expression of human dignity risk blunting the Church’s voice when the condemnation of injustice is required? Did John Paul’s personalism run into intellectual difficulties when questions of state power—such as the state’s authority to execute a capital sentence, or the state’s capacity to wage a just war, or the international community’s moral obligation to “humanitarian intervention” in cases of genocide—were engaged?70

  In the final analysis, Dulles concluded, John Paul’s intellectual legacy was built on the foundations of his twin commitments to Christ and to human freedom. The Pope avoided “threatening words” because he believed that “fear … diminishes the scope of freedom and makes only a poor Christian.” Preferring to hold up “the more perfect motives of hope, trust, and love” as the grounds for belief, for living a righteous life, and for sustaining free and virtuous societies, John Paul bent his intellectual project to the service of the call with which he began his pontificate: “Be not afraid!”71

  Lives Transformed

  There was something entirely appropriate about the fact that several dozen members of Karol Wojtyła’s Środowisko were seated directly behind the heads of state and government at John Paul II’s funeral Mass. The liturgy of the funeral Mass made clear that the man in whose memory the powers of the world were gathered was a Christian disciple; the presence of Środowisko was a vivid reminder that one striking characteristic of Karol Wojtyła’s discipleship during the almost fifty-nine years of his priesthood, the forty-six years of his episcopacy, and the twenty-six years of his papacy was his capacity to inspire others to new depths of faith—faith in God, faith in Christ, faith in the Church, and faith in themselves.

  The archbishop of Glasgow, Thomas Winning, described this Wojtyła effect with humility and precision when speaking to a full house at St. Andrew’s Cathedral in 2001: “I’m grateful to John Paul II,” Winning said, “not so much because he made me a cardinal, but because he made me a better Christian.”72 Karol Wojtyła could make men and women better Christians because he had a marked capacity to get inside others’ lives—not to manipulate them but to offer them, out of the font of his own discipleship, the possibility of encountering the “more excellent way” of Christian love. He had first displayed that gift in his early priesthood at St. Florian’s in Kraków, when this unknown young cleric of provincial background drew the respect, affection, and loyalty of some very demanding members of the Kraków Catholic intelligentsia. He had been a magnet for the conversion, the metanoia, of others in his roles as university professor and diocesan bishop. One of the remarkable things about his papacy was that he continued to touch the interior lives of others from what had previously seemed the virtually unapproachable distance of the papal throne.

  Three and a half years before his own death in 2000, New York’s Cardinal John J. O’Connor, no mean personality in his own right, marveled at John Paul II’s capacity to exude “presence” and to shape the world’s conversation through that personal and spiritual trait. And by “presence,” O’Connor meant “not just physical presence—I mean that the world knows it has a pope. It’s [the] very powerful, radiating presence … of a man who is listened to whether heeded or not; a man whose positions and potential positions are of concern to governments all over the world.” John Paul II’s “presence,” O’Connor continued, created an “influence that goes beyond the quantifiable. Even the people who reject what he has to say, or the governments that reject what he has to say, are moved by it, restricted by it. They know that limits have been set, boundaries have been set.” Yet even more important, in Cardinal O’Connor’s judgment, was John Paul II’s magnetism in the microcosm of intimate personal contact: “He has this almost hypnotic effect on people. Every individual he meets feels at that moment that he or she is the only person in the world.… [That reflects] his sense of the sacredness of the human person, but … it [also] … springs from his philosophical position. He watches; he listens; he looks—it’s almost as if he’s reflecting on the whole phenomenon” of the individual before him.73 Massimo D’Alema, a secular man of the Italian political Left, came to appreciate John Paul II from a dramatically different political and theological position than that of Cardinal Winning or Cardinal O’Connor. Yet he, too, was struck by John Paul’s powerful impact on individuals, in this case individuals who might never have previously imagined paying attention to a pope. As D’Alema put it in 1997,

  I think the personality of [John Paul II] has a relevance that goes beyond the borders and the imprints of the Catholic Church.… [John Paul] has highlighted a spiritual dimension that is not only Catholic but that cuts across the different religions. From this perspective I don’t think that to read or understand the Pope you have to proceed from inside the Catholic faith. I think the Pope is looked on as a leading figure by other cultures as well, not just by Catholicism. His influence is greater than the influence of the Church. It’s not always been like that; there have been popes who have had less influence than the Catholic Church. But in the case of John Paul II we have a universality that moves beyond the borders of t
he Catholic Church.74

  The universal appeal of John Paul II was widely commented on at his death. Yet contrary to the expectations of secular modernity and its suspicions about the cramping effects of particular commitments, John Paul II’s universality, as Massimo D’Alema described it, grew from a very intense and specific particularity: Karol Wojtyła’s Christian faith. Willing to acknowledge the genuine truths that others had discovered in their own journeys through life, he nevertheless engaged those other truths through the prism of Catholic faith, which he understood to be the truth of the world and which he wished to share with others. His Christian faith was neither cloying nor aggressive; but neither was it hidden or muted. In a season of Christian timidity, John Paul II’s unapologetic Christian witness explained no small part of his transformative impact on individuals from an extraordinarily wide variety of backgrounds.

  Baylor University professor Francis Beckwith found his way back into the Catholic Church of his youth through the example of John Paul II; Beckwith and his wife were particularly impressed by the Pope’s way of “living the truth of Christ’s Lordship and the intrinsic dignity of the human person,” and by John Paul’s “defense of a culture of life [which] revealed an understanding of political liberty and the intrinsic value of the human person that had a philosophical power that was [also] deeply biblical.” As an intellectual, Beckwith was also struck by the Pope’s teaching on the nature of higher education, which “persuasively offered an understanding of what it means for a university to think of its theological beliefs as knowledge: that, for example, the Apostles Creed is just as normative for theology as the periodic table is for chemistry.” In a world skeptical of its grasp on any truth, John Paul had shown that “faith and reason are like two eyes, each of which can function well, but on its own incompletely; when they work together, they provide [us] with a richer and more complete vision of the world.”75