The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  In the wake of the events of September 11, 2001, John Paul II made significant efforts to ensure that the Catholic Church did not tacitly or overtly reinforce Osama bin Laden’s claim that his war against the West, and that of his fellow jihadists, was a religious war. This was important, for it underscored the falsity of the jihadists’ argument while keeping open lines of communication that might otherwise have been shut down. Yet it was not clear, in the last three and a half years of the pontificate, that John Paul had grappled conceptually with the intra-Islamic causes of the Islamic civil war that had spilled out of the Islamic world to engage virtually all humanity, often violently. Nor was it clear that the Pope had reckoned in detail with the meaning of the new Islamic demographics of Europe, or with aggressive Islamist political and legal claims in Europe, for the European future.105 These insufficiencies were not the result of any papal misunderstanding of the theological flaws of Islam from a Christian point of view, which the Pope had clearly identified in Crossing the Threshold of Hope. Rather, they may have reflected the difficulties of John Paul’s personal situation in the last several years of the pontificate, in which his energies were being consumed by his valiant efforts to sustain as much of his ministry as possible. (The Holy See’s approach to these post-9/11 and European questions was also, and undoubtedly, shaped by the determination to be nonconfrontational that dominated thinking about Catholic-Islamic relations in the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue.)106

  Catholic International Relations Theory and the Just War Tradition. A soldier’s son who honored the soldier’s vocation, John Paul II nevertheless displayed little interest in exercising the munus docendi to facilitate the intellectual development of the Church’s moral theory of just and limited war, which, as it had evolved since the fourth century, constituted an entire way of thinking about international relations.107 At the end of the pontificate, the Holy See enjoyed full diplomatic relations with over 170 states; under John Paul’s leadership, the Holy See had shown itself on occasion an effective international “player”; the Pope’s teaching on the universality of human rights was a significant factor in shaping the rights debate globally, as his personal intervention had been decisive in a number of events over the previous quarter century; yet John Paul II made no serious or sustained attempt to revive the intellectual tradition once known as Catholic International Relations Theory.108 Nor did he effect significant change in the analytic default positions in the Section for Relations with States of the Vatican Secretariat of State (the papal “foreign ministry”) and the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. There, the ingrained institutional instincts remained far more reflective of the default positions found in western European chancelleries than of John Paul II’s thought about the cultural dynamics of history.109

  This failure to develop and inculcate a different and distinctively Catholic way of thinking about the moral exigencies of world politics in the relevant offices of the Roman Curia was of little account in those instances in which John Paul took the conceptual and operational lead—as in his 1979 and 1995 speeches to the United Nations, his 1978–79 initiative in avoiding a war between Argentina and Chile over the Beagle Channel, his witness and diplomacy in the years leading up to “1989,” his support for the 1993 Fundamental Agreement with Israel, his public campaigns prior to the 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and Development and the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women, and his 2003–4 appeals for a non-Christophobic European Constitutional Treaty.110 But the Pope’s disinclination to initiate, and then institutionalize, a reform of the default positions in the Vatican foreign ministry and at Justice and Peace left the Holy See ill equipped to play the role of moral counselor effectively in the roiling worlds of twenty-first-century global politics. This was a loss for both the Church and the world, as new and grave problems at the intersection of morality and world politics were being raised by history at precisely the moment when the papacy enjoyed unparalleled global moral authority and a unique capacity to shape the terms of global moral argument.

  Thus, in the years immediately following John Paul II’s death, the default positions in those Vatican offices responsible for the Holy See’s international engagement tended to remain where they had been at the end of the pontificate of Pope Paul VI: a fulsome embrace of international organizations as inherently superior to the bilateral politics of nations; a willingness to appease authoritarians (in this case, Islamic authoritarians), rather than boldly defend religious freedom and other fundamental human rights; a functional pacifism that, while holding on to the theoretical husk of the just war tradition, seemed unable to imagine the just and limited use of armed force in the defense of justice and freedom and that effectively assigned moral competence de guerre to the United Nations; an unwillingness to face the facts of global ideological challenge (Islamist, rather than communist); a disinclination to name Third World corruption for what it was, and a concomitant instinct to blame all Third World conflicts on injustices of underdevelopment caused by the developed world; and a lavish use of the language of “human rights” to describe virtually every conceivable social good.

  These curious gaps in a pontificate that did not hesitate to address virtually every other grave moral issue on the human agenda at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first may well have reflected an over-reading of the meaning of “1989” by John Paul II, and by his diplomats and his Justice and Peace bureaucracy. That “1989” contained important lessons for achieving progress in international relations (as John Paul insisted), few could deny. But for the Pope’s diplomats and his Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, the vindication of nonviolent resistance in the Revolution of 1989 tended to become an intellectual crutch: rather than thinking through the morality of world politics (including the morality of the use of limited armed force) in the post–Cold War world, it was simpler (and more in keeping with western European instincts) to universalize the experience of “1989” and imagine that there were, in reality, political and diplomatic solutions to virtually every conflict in the world; one had only to try hard enough to find them. Thus the Holy See was left conceptually adrift when men like Saddam Hussein, the butchers of Bosnia and Kosovo, and Osama bin Laden took center stage and tried to bend history to their wills.111

  During the pontificate of John Paul II, the Roman pontifical universities, once incubators of new ideas for the Roman Curia, did not take seriously the necessity of reconceptualizing the just war tradition to meet the moral and political challenges of the post–Cold War world that quickly followed the collapse of communism. Rather, those intellectual centers, like the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace (which they influenced, and which influenced them), tended to interpret John Paul II’s Assisi meetings of world religious leaders, and especially the 1986 meeting, as occasions on which the Church tacitly bade farewell to the just war tradition as the normative Catholic way of thinking about morality and world politics—and did so in the name of “dialogue.” That is not what John Paul II intended by the Assisi meetings, to be sure. But it was what many in Rome learned. And it must be conceded that John Paul’s inattention to developing and explicating the Church’s thinking about the morality of international politics (as he had, for example, developed and explicated the Church’s sexual ethic) played its part in that diminishment of intellectual vigor.112 Thus the irony of this facet of the pontificate: the most diplomatically and politically consequential pontificate in modern history, led by a pope whose magisterium developed Catholic thought in a host of fields, did little to advance the Church’s thinking about the distinctive moral problems of the politics of nations.

  Temptations, and Some Topics Unaddressed. Creative thinkers who extend the boundaries of thought and culture risk the vulgarization of their thought, often by their disciples. That is one risk that John Paul II’s Theology of the Body faced in the last years of his pontificate and the years immediately following his death. Still, with John Paul I
I Institutes for marriage and family studies at work on every continent, that risk, while real, seemed less threatening to the truths involved in the Theology of the Body than did the vulgarization of Catholic thinking about “1989.” There was another difference, though. Enthusiasts for the Theology of the Body were so eager to bring this fresh way of thinking to the Church and the world that they sometimes vulgarized it in the name of making it more accessible; moreover, they did so in the face of fierce resistance from the forces unleashed by the sexual revolution. Those who inappropriately universalized “1989” and made it into an all-purpose template for the moral analysis of world politics seemed to do so, at least in part, to avoid thinking through some hard questions, and their defense of Catholic functional pacifism drew the plaudits of postmodern progressive opinion in Europe and North America. In both instances, however, hard work was going to be required to secure the intellectual legacy of John Paul II.

  The Pope’s creative exercise of the munus docendi in developing his distinctive papal feminism was, like the Theology of the Body, sure to be the subject of discussion for a long time. Catholic feminist defenders of John Paul II’s magisterium sometimes wondered, though, when the Pope was going to develop a theology of masculinity; or as one such feminist, a philosopher, once put it, “Tell the Pope that we’re not the problem, men are”—by which she meant that John Paul ought to address, in a systematic way, the abandonment of responsibility that many men had readily indulged as a result of the feminist revolution.113 John Paul’s 1980 encyclical on God the Father, Dives in Misericordia [Rich in Mercy], might be considered the beginning of the contemporary papal magisterium’s reflection on the Christian understanding of paternity, which was then developed further in the 1989 apostolic exhortation on St. Joseph, Redemptoris Custos [Guardian of the Redeemer]. In developing a theory of true Christian masculinity, there is also material to work with in John Paul’s analysis of the meaning built into our human complementarity as male and female “in the beginning,” which he discussed in the Theology of the Body. But far more work is needed to develop a reflection on maleness and the “masculine genius” that can match the insight and depth found in John Paul II’s thinking on femaleness and the “feminine genius.”

  As indicated above, John Paul II’s social doctrine included a more constrained view of the state and its role in the human drama than that articulated by any of his papal predecessors from Leo XIII through Paul VI—a view that was in some tension with traditional Catholic understandings of the nature and sources of state authority, and that raises questions about the claims John Paul II made about the modern state’s human rights responsibilities. While this papal reduction in what might be called the metaphysical cash value of the state made considerable sense in light of the twentieth century’s experience of state power, as a reflection of the Pope’s culture-first theory of the free and virtuous society, and as an implication of his Christian personalism, intellectual work is going to have to be done to fit the twenty-first-century state into the social doctrine of the Church as developed by John Paul II—and to do so without giving tacit aid and comfort to those who imagine the democratic state to be devoid of substantive moral commitments.

  This is, in fact, a major issue for the development of all post–Vatican II Catholic social thought, for the tensions suggested here antedate the magisterium of John Paul II. The Council disenthroned the state in its Declaration on Religious Freedom, which declared governments incompetent in theological questions. How, then, are we to understand the origins and nature of the modern, limited, constitutional state’s moral competence and responsibility? From whence derives the modern state’s moral responsibility to defend fundamental human rights, including the right to life? The beginnings of an answer to these questions might be found in the teaching of Centesimus Annus on the moral foundations of democracy, in John Paul II’s 1995 UN address and its teaching on natural law as a universal moral grammar, and in the Pope’s criticisms of thin theories of democracy in Ecclesia in Europa. Much work remains to be done, however, to ensure that the sturdiness of John Paul II’s vision of the tripartite free and virtuous society does not dissipate.

  Munus Sanctificandi: The Mission to Sanctify

  John Paul II was elected pope at a time of some turmoil in Catholic sacramental theology, a time also marked by a dramatic decline in Catholic sacramental life throughout much of the world. John Paul addressed various late-twentieth-century problems of Catholic eucharistic theology in the 1980 apostolic letter Dominicae Cenae [The Lord’s Supper] and the 2003 encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia [The Church from the Eucharist], both of which, like the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church, affirmed the Church’s classic understanding of the Mass as both sacrament and sacrifice. John Paul also addressed a certain weakening of the Church’s eucharistic self-consciousness and its effects on the priesthood in the 1992 apostolic exhortation, Pastores Dabo Vobis [I Will Give You Shepherds], as well as in his 1996 memoir Gift and Mystery. The decline in the practice of auricular confession in post–Vatican II Catholicism was addressed by the Pope in his 1984 apostolic exhortation, Reconciliatio et Paenitentia [Reconciliation and Penance]; there, John Paul characteristically reframed the entire issue of sacramental confession in personalist terms, describing the relationship between the sacrament of penance or reconciliation and the human drama of freedom.114 John Paul II also strove to revitalize Catholicism spiritually through his teaching on consecrated religious life, through his promotion of the Divine Mercy devotion, and by his 2002 reform of the Rosary.

  These exercises of the papal munus docendi to strengthen the Church’s mission to sanctify the Church and the world were complemented by John Paul’s beatifications and canonizations. John Paul II was determined to provide examples of sanctity for the people of the Church to emulate, and by doing so in a global fashion, to demonstrate the universality of the Holy Spirit’s sanctifying gifts. The Pope also believed that the Church’s invocation of those whom he beatified and canonized opened new channels of grace in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Thus the extensive roster of Christian heroes whom John Paul raised to the honors of the altar ought to be considered an aspect of his exercise of the papal munus sanctificandi, the mission to sanctify the Church and the world.

  So, too, should the continuous personal example he gave of a deep and life-shaping Catholic piety, embodied during his travels, in his Masses, and in his ecumenical prayer-services, as well as in his personal pastoral work in Rome: his parish visitations, his hearing confessions in St. Peter’s every Good Friday, his baptisms, his priestly and episcopal ordinations, his monthly recitation of the Rosary on Vatican Radio, and his weekly recitation of the Sunday Angelus (during the year) and Regina Coeli (during the Easter season). That his last hope was to be able to give his blessing vocally from the window of the papal apartment at Easter 2005 was powerful testimony to the seriousness with which Karol Wojtyła took his priestly and episcopal responsibility to be a vessel of God’s sanctifying grace.

  The Liturgy. Criticism of John Paul’s exercise of the munus sanctificandi, especially in the last half of the pontificate, centered on what critics perceived as a lack of papal attention to the continuing trials and tribulations of post–Vatican II Catholic liturgical life. Some critics charged that those problems were exacerbated by innovations in papal liturgies created by the longtime master of pontifical liturgical ceremonies, Piero Marini; the use of a ritual of Hindu origin involving smudge pots during the 2003 beatification Mass for Mother Teresa of Calcutta was perhaps the most dramatic (and most criticized) example.115

  John Paul II was undoubtedly aware that there were liturgical abuses throughout the Catholic world. These were addressed at length in a 2004 instruction from the Holy See’s Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Redemptionis Sacramentum [The Sacrament of Redemption]. Critics replied that it was too little too late, and that absent strict enforcement from the Vatican, the world’s bisho
ps would prefer to maintain peace within their dioceses rather than enforce a measure of liturgical discipline. In this regard, at least, the critics were often right.

  Karol Wojtyła’s reverence for the liturgy and convictions about the truth of Catholic sacramental doctrine were obvious; thus the question of why, as pope, he did not do more to correct liturgical abuses throughout the world Church is not easy to answer, perhaps because there are no easy answers. Wojtyła had had a positive experience of post–Vatican II liturgical reform in Poland, where many of the abuses that beset the Church in western Europe, North America, and parts of the Third World were unknown. On assuming the papacy, he seemed to think problems of liturgical abuse were at bottom theological, and he set out to address those. Yet the fact remains that the Holy See under John Paul II’s leadership seemed reluctant to enforce liturgical discipline throughout the world Church except in the most egregious cases of abuse.

  Did this constitute a default in John Paul’s exercise of the munus sanctificandi (and the munus regendi, or mission of governance), as conservative and traditionalist critics suggested? The Pope was aware that liturgical issues were extremely neuralgic throughout the Church, and he may have determined that a long-term approach to a reform of the liturgical reform, rooted in a deeper understanding of the mystery of Christian worship as our participation in the divine liturgy of heaven, was required for both the unity of the Church and the eventual vindication of the Second Vatican Council.116 John Paul II’s respect for the legitimate prerogatives of local bishops was also a factor in his approach to liturgical abuse and reform. It was not the pope’s job, as he understood it, to conduct a global liturgical policing operation; preserving the integrity of the sacraments and the liturgy was first and foremost the responsibility of the local bishop, and it was neither possible nor desirable for the pope to monitor the liturgical disciplinary zeal of every bishop in the world. Here, the inability of national conferences of bishops to discipline their own members loomed large. The same problem beset the question of faithful and appropriate translations of the liturgy from Latin into vernacular languages, which was particularly difficult in the English-speaking world. It was the U.S. bishops’ conference, not the papacy or the Vatican, that was the most significant obstacle to the reform of the English translation of the Church’s liturgical books.117