The transformative impact of John Paul II on Francis Beckwith took place in the robustly if confusedly religious culture of the United States. The late Pope’s dramatic influence on the life of Nina Sophie Heereman, a bright and beautiful young German lawyer, unfolded at the intersection of the arid secularity dominant in contemporary European high culture and what Baroness Heereman experienced as the empty Catholicism in which she grew up: “Catholicism hollowed out … a shell with no serious sin and therefore no state of grace [and] no encounter with Christ.” Struggling with the meaning and import of a powerful experience with the eucharistic Christ at World Youth Day-1997 in Paris, Nina Heereman attended the Pentecost 1998 meeting of Catholic renewal movements and new Catholic communities in Rome. There, on seeing the Pope, a thought occurred: “Suppose John Paul II had said ‘No’? What a disaster that would have been for the world.… So I thought I’d better say ‘Yes’ ”—“yes” to the invitation to a deep personal relationship with Christ that she had first sensed in Paris. In Nina Heereman’s case, it was the challenge of the Christian life as embodied by John Paul II—a life of heroism built on friendship with Jesus Christ—that broke open everything else and gave focus to her personal, religious, and vocational yearning. As she once put it, if you accept that the truth of Christian faith and life will “set you free, then you want to learn everything you can about it.” So Nina Heereman dedicated her life to the new evangelization as a consecrated laywoman in the world.76
Sister Mary Karol Widomska, O.P., a Dominican nun of the Congregation of St. Cecilia in Nashville, Tennessee, discovered her religious vocation and took her religious name from the man who had written and spoken for decades about the importance of consecrated religious life, both for the Church and for the salvation of the world. As she put it, “My decision to enter religious life was supposed to be a gift to John Paul II … I was getting ready to [enter] the Nashville Dominicans as a direct answer to his frequent messages, talks, or letters on the splendor of the encounter with Christ in religious life. I heard those talks [and] read the letters, but the witness of his life given totally and unconditionally to the Son of God drew me even more to desire that same commitment.… In this constant gift of self to Christ, in this constant spending of himself, he seemed to gain a new vigor and his life … spoke of the exhilarating joy and freedom of such a total commitment.”77
It was John Paul II’s analysis of the dark underside of late modernity and its misconception of freedom that began to make sense of the carnage Nicholas Fernandez saw in the concrete jungle as a New York City police officer—and that subsequently redirected Fernandez’s life plans: “I came across concrete examples of what Pope John Paul II called the ‘culture of death’—suicides, homicides and domestic situations” to which Fernandez could offer “no external solution” as a policeman. “There needs to be a change of heart on the inside, and that’s where a priest is needed.” So Nicholas Fernandez left the police force and entered the New York archdiocesan seminary at Dunwoodie to prepare for a different life than what he might have imagined for himself, absent the thought and inspiration of
John Paul II.78
Such stories could be multiplied over and over again, in a kaleidoscope of human experiences: the story of actor Cary Elwes, who came to a new appreciation of the Catholic faith in which he had been reared by getting “inside” Karol Wojtyła while playing him in a film; the story of actress Sophia Loren, who told the office investigating the possible beatification of the late Pope that “I jealously keep the memory of John Paul II in my heart,” and who “went to the tomb of John Paul II in the Vatican to pay homage to him and to pray, in order to show my great admiration and devotion.”79 Then there was one of Fidel Castro’s sisters who, on meeting John Paul II privately during the papal pilgrimage to Cuba in January 1998, told John Paul that she had “dreamed about embracing the Pope”—who replied, “Well, why not now?” and drew the sister of the Cuban dictator into a hug, at which point she began sobbing like a child.80
Václav Havel, welcoming John Paul II to the free Czechoslovakia that had emerged out of the choking smog of communist lies, confessed that he was not sure he knew what a “miracle” was—but that he knew he had witnessed something miraculous as he, the former jailed dissident playwright, welcomed to his liberated country a fellow dramatist, the Pope, who had himself been the target of communist hatred and fear. That same sense of the miraculous might be suggested by the fact that there are schools and seminaries named for a son of Wadowice in such diverse venues as Campbell’s Bay, Québec; Hendersonville, Tennessee; and Lome, Togo; or that, in the years after his death, letters from all over the world arrived at the office in charge of investigating his possible beatification, addressed simply to “Pope John Paul II, Heaven”; or that a man like Henry Kissinger could describe Karol Wojtyła, at the Pope’s death, as the singular embodiment of the trials, tragedies, and triumphs of humanity in the second half of the twentieth century. None of this was expected on October 16, 1978, when the man “from a far country” presented himself to the Church and the world from the loggia of St. Peter’s.
Men and women who have bent the course of history in unexpected directions are rarely the best witnesses to the source of their accomplishment. Yet here, too, John Paul II might be granted something of an exception. For, if asked, he surely would have said that his influence on others, and on history, reflected the grace of God at work in his life. The simplicity, and profundity, of that conviction within him is the best explanation of his impact on the lives of others—and through others, on history and on the human future.
THE CONTEXTS OF A LIFE
As those whose lives he touched came to recognize, Karol Wojtyła was a human singularity, a kind of once-in-a-lifetime personality. John Paul II, for his part, did not think of himself that way. Rather, he thought of his papacy as an expression of the Catholic Church and the Catholic priesthood in the distinctive circumstances of the mid-twentieth century. Thus in marking the accomplishment of Pope John Paul II, the historian does no disservice to the man or his memory by acknowledging the contexts that produced the conditions for the possibility of Pope John Paul II.
There was, at the beginning, the Polish context. The modern historical experience of the Polish nation and its struggle for freedom was the wellspring from which Karol Wojtyła drew his understanding of the dynamics of history, which he then deployed to change the history of the world. The Polish context of his life and accomplishment was also informed by the unique twentieth-century experience of the Catholic Church in Poland. Considered a backwater (and often a reactionary backwater) by many in the North Atlantic world, Polish Catholicism was in fact a fighting Church that had important lessons to teach the world Church—lessons about self-sacrifice and martyrdom, which shaped Wojtyła’s thinking about the Law of the Gift inscribed in the human heart; lessons about a heroic exercise of the offices of priest and bishop, which left a profound imprint on his own ministry; lessons about the liberating power of popular piety and its capacity to coexist with authentic Catholic reform, which shaped John Paul II’s interpretation of the Second Vatican Council.
Then there was the mid-twentieth-century Catholic theological context. Many of the signature themes and initiatives of the pontificate of John Paul II were drawn from the renewal of Catholic theology that took place, primarily in continental Europe, in the decades prior to the Second Vatican Council. John Paul II’s teaching that the Church is a mission, and his concept of the “new evangelization,” reflected, even as it stretched and developed, the kerygmatic theology pioneered by Josef A. Jungmann, S.J., in Innsbruck in the pre–World War II years.81 John Paul’s ecumenical initiatives would have been difficult to imagine, and impossible to execute, absent the intellectual foundations of Catholic ecumenism laid by theologians such as Yves Congar, O.P., by the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, and by the personal efforts of Pope John XXIII, Cardinal Augustin Bea, S.J., and Pope Paul VI.82 John Paul’s II social doctri
ne assumed, even as it extended, the thinking of theologians dating back to Augustine, Aquinas, and Suárez; the thought of such modern exponents of Catholic social theory as Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, Heinrich Pesch, Oswald von Nell-Breuning, S.J., Jacques Maritain, and John Courtney Murray, S.J.; and the social magisterium of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI. The twentieth-century renewal of Catholic biblical studies and the mid-twentieth-century liturgical movement, both of which were ratified at Vatican II, had obvious impacts on the teaching and ministry of John Paul II, as did the speculative theological work of such preeminent twentieth-century Catholic thinkers as Henri de Lubac, S.J., and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Karol Wojtyła, in other words, was a great learner as well as a great teacher, and his teaching was, in some respects, the culmination of processes that had been at work in Catholic intellectual life for over a century.
Finally, there was the personal context. Karol Wojtyła was a man of conversation and a leader who thought through his decisions with the help of others. Yet he was also a man who trusted his own instincts because those instincts had been refined by prayer. Thus some of the signature accomplishments of John Paul II—World Youth Days and the revitalization of youth ministry; the revivification of the priesthood and the consecrated life; the open dialogue with science—reflected the distinctive pastoral experience of Karol Wojtyła, priest and bishop, whose confidence in the providential guidance of his life led him to think that there was something of use in his pre-papal experience for the exercise of the Office of Peter. Similarly, the dynamic synthesis of twentieth-century Catholic thought expressed in his magisterium and his papal ministry was distinctively his. The understanding of the third millennium as a privileged moment of grace in which the Church could reexperience itself as a communion of disciples called to a new evangelization of the world; the personalist Christology according to which Jesus Christ reveals both the face of the merciful Father and the truth about our humanity; the notion of a Law of the Gift, built into the structure of moral choice and action, as the royal road to human fulfillment; solidarity as the key to living freedom nobly in free and virtuous societies; the revelatory iconography of our embodiedness and complementarity as male and female—these signature themes of the pontificate reflected a uniquely Wojtyłan synthesis of Catholic thought and practice, and a crucial set of keys for interpreting the event at which the twentieth-century Catholic renewal reached its dramatic watershed, the Second Vatican Council.
These three contexts—the Polish, the theological-historical, and the personal—often intersected. Wojtyła brought a distinctively Polish and intensely personal devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary to the papacy; he refined his thinking about Mary’s unique role in salvation history with the aid of Balthasar’s theology; he then deployed that thinking to propose a profound shift in the self-understanding of the entire Church. Because of the distinctive circumstances of the Church in Poland under communism, Wojtyła had not been embroiled in the theological controversies of the post-Vatican II period; he was himself a world-class intellectual, however, with particular competence in philosophical anthropology and ethics, and thus he could bring the best of pre–and post-conciliar theology to bear in his papal magisterium; in seminal documents such as his inaugural encyclical, Redemptor Hominis; his encyclical on the moral life, Veritatis Splendor; and his Theology of the Body. He was a man who had fought a distinctive kind of fight at the barricades of freedom’s cause; thus his criticism of deficiencies in the theologies of liberation did not arise from any fondness for the ancien régime, but from his commitment to the truth of Catholic faith and his development of a more profound theory of human liberation through the Polish struggle for religious freedom, his philosophical work, and his reading of the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on the Church in the modern world (which he had helped formulate in 1964–65).
The connecting thread that bound these three contexts together in the singularity of Pope John Paul II was the Christian radicalism of Karol Wojtyła: the depth and intensity of his belief in the liberating power of Christ’s love was the deepest taproot of his papal accomplishment, because it was the deepest wellspring of his life and his thought.
FRUSTRATIONS, FLAWS, FAILURES
The pontificate of John Paul II was subject to intense criticism from late 1979, when the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith declared that Swiss dissident Hans Küng “could not be considered a Catholic theologian,” until the Pope’s death on April 2, 2005.83 The criticism came from all points along the spectrum of Catholic and secular opinion, but by conventional reckoning, the criticism from inside the Catholic Church tended to cluster into two categories: a liberal or progressivist critique, and a conservative or restorationist critique.
The progressivist critique, which readily found a platform in the global media, was influenced by an interpretation of Vatican II that held that the Council marked a decisive break with Catholic tradition and the beginnings of a new, modernity-friendly form of Catholicism.84 According to this line of critique, John Paul II conducted an authoritarian pontificate that betrayed, retarded, or at the very least diminished the achievements of Vatican II. In more than a few instances, this alleged betrayal was thought to be a by-product of the Pope’s Polish background. For some in the progressivist camp, the principal manifestations of John Paul’s “authoritarian style” were the Pope’s alleged centralization of power and his degradation of the Council’s teaching on the common responsibility of the world episcopate for the Church’s governance.85 For others, John Paul’s alleged authoritarianism displayed itself chiefly in what was regarded as a campaign of repression against speculative theologians and progressive bishops. Still others charged that the pontificate abandoned the “spirit of Vatican II” in what they described as John Paul II’s misogyny; this was not infrequently regarded as a function of the Pope’s defense of classic Catholic sexual ethics, which many Catholic progressives considered indefensible.
The conservative or restorationist critique came from those who hoped that John Paul II would restore a Catholic golden age, which they imagined to have reached something of an apogee in the pontificate of Pius XII. It is important to note that the restorationist critique was not identical with the position of the French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and his followers in the Society of St. Pius X, whose skepticism about Vatican II’s teachings on religious freedom, on church and state, and on Christianity’s relationship to Judaism bordered on, when it did lapse over into, radical rejection of the Council.86 Rather, restorationist Catholics criticized John Paul II for not acting more vigorously as a papal disciplinarian. On this view, a pope from a disciplined Church like Polish Catholicism ought to have brought order out of the ecclesiastical chaos the restorationists perceived as having followed the Council (whose basic teachings they accepted, if sometimes grudgingly). Restorationists argued that John Paul II’s commitment to dialogue within the Church jeopardized the Council’s legitimate achievements, continued the trivialization of the liturgy, failed to reverse a collapse of catechetics, intensified a breakdown of discipline in the clergy and among women’s religious orders, and reinforced the tendency of bishops to think of themselves as discussion-group moderators rather than as authoritative teachers of the truth of Catholic faith and guardians of the integrity of the sacraments.87
While both of these critiques are worth engaging in light of the enduring achievements of John Paul II’s papacy outlined above, they are, in the final analysis, unsatisfactory as analytic frameworks for identifying and understanding the undoubted frustrations, flaws, and failures of the pontificate.
Both the progressivist and the restorationist critiques share an assumption with the global media: all tend to assume a model of the papacy in which the pope is understood as someone akin to a local governor, prime minister, or president—that is, someone who can change “policy” as he wills (and if policy doesn’t change, the unacceptable status quo must reflect a defect of the leader’s intelligence or will). This is to misund
erstand both the nature of the papacy and the relationship between the stable and dynamic elements in the Church, however. The papacy does not create “policy” in matters of doctrine or morality the way political leaders create social welfare policy, education policy, health care policy, and so forth. Rather, the pope is the guardian and, in communion with the College of Bishops, the authoritative interpreter of what classic theology called the deposit of faith. Moreover, what is fixed and stable in the Catholic Church (like the canon of Scripture, the creeds, the sacraments, the Church’s structure of authority, and certain moral teachings) exists in order to foster a dynamism and a creativity that are faithful to the Church’s one supreme rule of faith, the living Christ.88 Thus the creativity with which John Paul II sought to proclaim the truth of Catholic faith through the prism of his Christian personalism was a creativity within boundaries. Those boundaries were set by the Catholic tradition, not by the imagination or will of Karol Wojtyła.
A more apt framework for grasping and understanding the frustrations and flaws in the pontificate of John Paul II, and wherein John Paul failed, comes from inside the Catholic tradition itself.
According to the Church’s doctrine, all baptized Christians are empowered by the Holy Spirit to grasp the truth and proclaim it, to worship God truly, and to serve others. Thus every baptized Christian exercises three missions, which Catholic theology refers to as the munus docendi (the mission to teach), the munus sanctificandi (the mission to sanctify), and the munus regendi (the mission of governance, or servant leadership). These three munera, or missions, are a reflection in each Christian’s life of the triple mission of Christ himself, into whose Mystical Body the baptized are incorporated. According to the Catholic doctrine of Holy Orders, the bishops of the Church exercise the fullness of these three missions of Christ as priest, prophet, and king. The Office of Peter, as Catholics understand it, is a gift of Christ to the Church for the sake of the Church’s unity in truth, in worship, and in service. Thus the frustrations, the flaws, and the failures of any pontificate can be thematically organized and analyzed through the prism of this tripartite scheme.
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