The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  Munus Docendi: The Mission to Teach

  The pontificate of John Paul II was one of the great teaching pontificates in history, in both the breadth and depth of the Pope’s magisterium. John Paul’s exercise of the munus docendi in the broadest sense of the term was not without its frustrations, its misapprehensions, and its insufficiencies, however.

  Europe. At the Spanish shrine of Santiago de Compostela, one of the great pilgrimage destinations in medieval Christendom, John Paul II challenged Europe during World Youth Day-1989 to rediscover itself as a “beacon of civilization and a force for progress in the world” as it crossed the threshold of its impending post–Cold War reunification.89 During the 2003–4 debate over the new constitutional treaty to govern the expanded European Union, the Pope passionately urged the people and the leaders of Europe to reject a constitutional abandonment of the Christian roots of European civilization, which he regarded as crucial to Europe’s capacity to be a protagonist of freedom in the twenty-first century. Both pleas fell on deaf ears, in the main. A Europe committed to the pursuit of what Jean-Louis Tauran, John Paul II’s longtime “foreign minister,” once described as “happiness without constraints” was not prepared to listen to John Paul’s teaching on the law of self-giving as the key to authentic human liberation, or to see in the Pope’s teaching on solidarity the remedy for its culture of solitary individualism.90

  Hostility to John Paul II’s understanding of true freedom, to his interpretation of the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, and to his method of papal governance was most pronounced and widespread in German-speaking Europe: Germany, Austria, and the Germanic cantons of Switzerland. In Germany itself, the pontificate’s difficult reception was due to several factors, not least of which was John Paul’s Polishness.91 Ethnic stereotypes and resentments die hard, and in the case of the German Church, which was typically led by theologians convinced that German theology had a special, leading role to play in post-conciliar Catholic life (as it had in shaping Vatican II), the idea that a Polish intellectual might have a deeper grasp of the Council’s teaching and a firmer grip on the dynamics of modern and postmodern Western culture did not go down easily.92 In many cases, it did not go down at all. And despite a certain sympathy in German Catholic circles for John Paul II’s human warmth, and for his ecumenical and interreligious initiatives, the Pope’s magisterium was ill received, and in some instances flatly rejected, in German-speaking Catholicism, except among a scattering of intellectuals, a few bishops, and the younger members of various renewal movements and new Catholic communities.93 Whether this would change in the decades after John Paul’s death, such that German-speaking Catholicism would actually engage the magisterium of Karol Wojtyła rather than peremptorily dismissing it, could not be predicted. According to Cardinal Joachim Meisner of Cologne, if change came, it might come because German-speaking Catholicism discovered that its twentieth-century martyrs—many of whom had been beatified by John Paul II—and not its intellectual accomplishments were its greatest modern heritage and its noblest gift to the Catholic future.94

  Toward the end of the pontificate, some German Catholic leaders were reconsidering their situation. One of them, Cardinal Karl Lehmann of Mainz, Germany, sensed the possibility of new intuitions among his countrymen: that it was impossible for human beings to “live with the silence,” and that solitary individuals incapable of making and living “permanent commitments” were dooming themselves to serial unhappiness and their nations to demographic oblivion.95 Whether this latter intuition would open up the possibility of the German-speaking world reconsidering Karol Wojtyła’s Law of the Gift remained, at the Pope’s death, an open and urgent question for the German Church and for German society.

  The frustrations of John Paul’s exercise of the munus docendi in Europe were paralleled by some modest successes. John Paul II’s challenge to Italian Catholicism to redefine itself in more culturally assertive terms led to a modest but nonetheless real revival of Catholic practice in Italy, and a new evangelical self-confidence among at least some members of the Italian episcopate.96 Moreover, John Paul’s articulate and passionate defense of the right to life over more than a quarter century reshaped the public debate, such that certain key right-to-life positions were successfully defended in an Italian national referendum conducted shortly after the Pope’s death.

  Despite the election of an aggressively secular government led by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in 2004, the Spanish Church, according to Madrid archbishop Antonio María Rouco Varela, had rediscovered “the rich meaning of ‘evangelization’ as a matter of both urgency and hope”—and had displayed a willingness to live out that rediscovery in large-scale public opposition to the Zapatero government’s redefinitions of the family. Cardinal Rouco Varela attributed both accomplishments to the teaching and witness of John Paul II, whose Spanish strategy mirrored his culture-first understanding of the dynamics of history: John Paul challenged Spanish Catholics to stop acquiescing in the secularists’ proclamation of Catholic marginality, and called Catholics to recover their national cultural memory—and through that recovery, to develop a new Catholic will to build a genuinely humanistic future on the foundations of what was noble in Spain’s Catholic past.97 Nonetheless, the pace of Catholic reform in Spain remained slow, and the Zapatero government was reelected three years after the Pope’s death.

  Thanks to John Paul, similar stirrings of a new Catholic self-consciousness were also discernible in France. According to Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, the archbishop of Paris from 1981 until 2005, John Paul II was already a keen student of the French Catholic scene at the time of his election to the papacy. That is, the Pope knew that the ecclesiastical civil war between Lefebvrists and progressivists that had crippled French Catholicism since the Second Vatican Council was, as Lustiger put it, a “quarrel from the nineteenth century, and that’s finished.” France in the last quarter of the twentieth century was not a Catholic society riven by two rival parties, rooted in two bitterly opposed understandings of French history since 1789. Rather, it was a “pagan society,” in which the first task of Christians was to rediscover the mystery of divine election. Prior to John Paul II’s teaching and witness, Lustiger argued, even practicing French Catholics were evangelically complacent and imagined that “faith … coincided with culture and society”: which meant that Catholics were “not used to [giving] testimony.” Then came John Paul II, who was “ready to give to Christian self-consciousness a renewal of the sense of God’s call, of God’s gracious gift” The result, the cardinal concluded, was that the Pope had “made it easier for people to be witnesses.” At the same time, John Paul II’s analysis of the tensions and contradictions within contemporary European high culture challenged the “conformism to certain Marxist orthodoxies” that had long characterized French intellectual life; the Pope did this by embodying “a humanistic and realistic, rather than political, opposition to communism” and by his ability to speak in ways that displayed a philosopher’s familiarity with the various currents at work in twentieth-century European thought.98 Lustiger’s own intellectual and pastoral witness during his twenty-four years as archbishop of the French capital were no small part of whatever transformations were under way in French Catholicism during the pontificate of John Paul II; but Lustiger would not have had the platform from which to make the witness he did if John Paul had not had the courage to appoint the son of emigré Polish Jews as bishop of Orleans and then archbishop of Paris.99

  Poland’s reception of the pontificate was, obviously, unique, and was shaped by the powerful emotional bond between the Polish people and the native son whose election to the papacy seemed to redeem Poland’s terrible sacrifices during the twentieth century. The tremendous crowds that came out for every one of John Paul’s Polish pilgrimages; seminaries filled to overflowing and abundant religious vocations; a high level of Catholic practice for a decade and a half after the Revolution of 1989—all of these measurable factors confounded the exp
ectations of those who thought Poland would follow the path of Ireland, Spain, and Portugal into rapid secularization after a delayed encounter with modernity, and bore witness both to the firm grip John Paul II had on the loyalties of his fellow countrymen and to their determination to keep faith with him. In the wake of John Paul’s death, the challenge for Polish Catholicism was to look forward, not back; to grapple with and absorb the magisterium of John Paul II, as well as bask in the spiritual glow of his Polishness and his sanctity; and to find a public voice that mirrored the late Pope’s ability to engage society and culture through the arts of reason and persuasion. Five years after John Paul’s death, there was serious debate in Polish Catholicism as to the degree to which these challenges were being met—a debate that was itself a reflection of the Pope’s continuing influence.

  Thus the European reception of the teaching of John Paul II was decidedly mixed. Without precluding the possibility of dramatic change over the long haul, however, it must be conceded that John Paul’s extensive efforts to re-evangelize Europe and lead it out of the twenty-first-century version of John Bunyan’s Slough of Despond achieved only modest short-term results. One of the causes of Europe’s crisis of civilizational morale, the Pope believed, was western European Catholicism’s acquiescence in its own cultural marginalization, to which the Church had become too accustomed; thus his extensive efforts to shake European Catholicism out of the doldrums, by appealing to both its mind and its heart. To the end, John Paul II remained a man of the long view and a man of hope. But within a few years of John Paul’s death, Europe’s unprecedentedly low birth rates had become an unmistakable empirical fact, as the continent’s demographic self-destruction cast a long shadow over its cultural, fiscal, and political future. At least some of those aware of the gravity of the situation understood, with the late Pope, that one of the roots of this crisis was Europe’s postmodern insouciance about the human capacity to know the truth of things—an insouciance that John Paul II had bent every effort to shake, but without transformative success.

  The Anglosphere. The European Anglosphere in Great Britain and Ireland, and its offshore expression in English-speaking Canada, may have been less vociferously resistant to John Paul II’s exercise of the munus docendi than were its German cousins. Still, it cannot be said that John Paul’s ideas were as thoroughly engaged and debated in these parts of the English-speaking world as they were in the United States. Nor did the reception of John Paul’s magisterium in the European Anglosphere and in Canada lead to the kind of institutional renewal that was visible in the U.S. Church in the latter years of the pontificate: in the episcopate, the priesthood, religious life, seminaries, Catholic intellectual life, and some Catholic institutions of higher education. As elsewhere, John Paul II was taken seriously by Catholic renewal movements and new Catholic communities in England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and Canada, and by some of the younger members of the clergy and hierarchy; there was even evidence that John Paul’s teaching had had an effect on some bishops who were previously inclined to share in the progressivist critique of the Pope’s magisterium. In the last period of the pontificate, for example, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor of Westminster tried to bring the teaching of Veritatis Splendor to bear in a United Kingdom where, in the cardinal’s view, “we have no idea today of absolute moral norms,” particularly in reference to issues posed by the new biotechnologies.100 But, as a general proposition, the reception of John Paul II’s teaching in the Anglosphere outside the United States reflected the stance of the London-based Tablet, which, while open to occasional defenses of the Pope’s magisterium, far more frequently reflected the fixed positions of the progressivist critics of the pontificate, especially on questions of morality. As for Ireland, neither the witness nor the teaching of John Paul II could slow its rapid transformation into one of the most thoroughly (and, in media terms, aggressively) secularist countries in Europe—a transformation later intensified by revelations of the sexual abuse of the young in Irish Catholic institutions and the cover-up of abuse by Irish bishops, which came to light a half decade after John Paul’s death.101

  In the farther reaches of the Anglosphere, John Paul II’s teaching had as difficult a reception in New Zealand as it did in the United Kindgom. The exception in the Antipodes was Australia, where, in the last eighteen years of the pontificate, Cardinal George Pell led a powerful movement in support of vibrant Catholic orthodoxy that drew explicitly on John Paul’s teaching to change dramatically the reference points in the Australian Catholic debate, which were once as monolithically shaped by the progressivist critique of the pontificate as were those in Germany.102

  Ecumenical Logjams and Interreligious Impossibilities. The ecumenical and interreligious frustrations and failures of the pontificate of John Paul II cannot be fairly laid to deficiencies in the Pope’s exercise of the munus docendi, despite charges to the contrary from progressivist critics (who sometimes seemed to imagine Christian ecumenism as a negotiation in which both sides bargained over nonessentials in order to arrive at mutually agreeable compromises) and restorationist critics (who misread aspects of the Pope’s Assisi initiatives and his expressions of respect for Muslim piety). On the other hand, John Paul’s readings of the ecumenical signs of the times and the nature of certain interreligious conflicts were not flawless.

  Orthodoxy was not prepared for a restoration of full communion between Constantinople and Rome on the basis of a return to the status quo ante 1054, as John Paul seemed to propose in the 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint. That unpreparedness likely reflected a historical fact that was not reckoned with in the encyclical’s analysis: that the mutual excommunications between Rome and Constantinople in 1054 were the culmination of a drifting apart between Eastern and Western Christianity that had been under way for centuries, and that had been shaped by powerful linguistic, philosophical, and political forces. The events of 1054, in other words, did not take place in a historical vacuum; the status quo ante 1054 to which John Paul proposed a return was far shakier and more roiled than the Pope seemed prepared to acknowledge. That fact of history continued to shape Orthodox ecumenical attitudes and approaches a millennium later.

  As for the post-Reformation fractures within Western Christianity, the theological and doctrinal confusions of liberal Protestantism in the last decades of the twentieth century made any achievement of full communion unlikely in the extreme, it being impossible to achieve a consensus on faith and practice with Christian communities that were unable to define their doctrinal and moral borders—communities that were also willing to change those borders without significant reference to apostolic tradition. None of this was, of course, John Paul II’s fault, but it was a source of disappointment nonetheless, particularly in terms of the Anglican and Lutheran dialogues. As for the new ecumenism that ran along various (and usually informal) axes of discussion between Catholics and evangelical Protestants, it was not altogether clear that John Paul II completely grasped the considerable differences between those American evangelical Protestants who embraced aspects of his magisterium and who eagerly entered into serious theological dialogue with Catholics, and those Pentecostalist “sects” of whose proselytism in Latin America his Curia frequently complained. Nor was the Pope willing to acknowledge, at least publicly, that one reason that Latin American evangelicalism was making serious inroads into formerly Catholic countries was because it inculcated moral habits of sobriety, male financial responsibility, and male marital fidelity that Latin American Catholicism had failed for centuries to teach effectively.103 On the other hand, John Paul’s insistence that the 1997 Synod be styled the “Synod for America” rather than “for the Americas” (which reflected a concern that the component parts of the New World open themselves to mutual enrichment) suggested a papal recognition of the possibility that the new Catholic-Evangelical ecumenism in the United States might have salutary effects in reshaping ecumenical relations in Central and South America—a recognition the Pope expressed in private c
onversation.104

  John Paul’s most significant achievements in interreligious dialogue were in the field of Catholic-Jewish relations; the solidity of those accomplishments was evident during certain difficult moments in the first years of the pontificate of Benedict XVI—another pope with a profound sense of Jewish election, and of the divinely mandated entanglement of Christians and Jews. One might ask, however, whether the theological adventure for which John Paul II called at the Great Synagogue of Rome and elsewhere—an adventure in which faithful Jews and faithful Catholics reconvened the conversation about election, covenant, and messianic expectation that had broken off about A.D. 70—was heard in Jewish religious and intellectual circles beyond a few North American enclaves. As important as civility and good manners are, it would mark something of a failure of John Paul II’s teaching on Jews and Judaism if the Christian-Jewish dialogue of the twenty-first century devolved into an ongoing negotiation about the meaning of civility and good manners in the public square.