Lessons in Hope

by George Weigel

  Had anyone told me that, some thirty years later, I would write books in which Władysław Gomułka’s complex role in postwar Polish history figured prominently, I would have thought the prognosticator mad. Yet there it is. And please don’t tell me those weeks of Lenten prayer in 1960 for Comrade Gomułka’s conversion—seemingly unanswered—didn’t have something to do with planting in me a seed that would finally flower in a passion for Polish history and literature—and a determination to tell the story of a then-forty-year-old auxiliary bishop of Kraków whom Gomułka and his associates foolishly thought a mystically inclined intellectual they could manipulate.

  FIRST STEPS IN PHILOSOPHY

  BALTIMORE, 1969–1973

  THE FIRST FULL-SCALE BIOGRAPHY OF JOHN PAUL II IN ENGLISH, written by veteran journalist Tad Szulc, suffered from numerous defects, one of which was a marked lack of interest in John Paul’s intense intellectual life. But perhaps Szulc, who died in 2001, should be granted a measure of posthumous absolution on this point: Karol Wojtyła, the philosopher, was not easy reading, and getting inside his philosopher’s mind was virtually impossible for someone without some formal training in the discipline. Which brings me to St. Mary’s Seminary College, the liberal arts undergraduate division of St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore, where I studied from 1969 to 1973, taking a philosophy degree on graduation.

  I wasn’t enthusiastic about studying philosophy when I entered the college in the fall of 1969. But I was a seminarian, philosophy was a prerequisite to the graduate study of theology, and in any case a degree in philosophy was the only degree St. Mary’s offered when my parents drove me to 711 Maiden Choice Lane in Baltimore’s Catonsville neighborhood to begin my baccalaureate studies. So, for better or worse, philosophy it would be.

  For better, as it turned out.

  It took me about two weeks in the required introduction to philosophy course taken by all freshmen—Philosophy of Man, as it was known in that politically incorrect age—to discover the intellectual excitement of abstract thought. There were two texts in the course, both written by a Dutch Augustinian priest, Father William Luijpen, who would not rank, then or now, as a great philosopher. (Some of his more exuberant and grating phraseology sticks in my mind more than four decades later, eruptions such as “Ah, the call of the Absolute Thou!”) To his credit, though, Fr. Luijpen, who was in close touch with contemporary currents in philosophy, never lost a tether to the conviction that reason could get at the truth of things. Out of that heady mix of the classical and the modern, Luijpen created what he called “existential phenomenology”: a way of getting at the truth not from the top down, as classical philosophers had done, but from, so to speak, the bottom up.

  Whatever his rank among modern Catholic thinkers, his impact on me was like an intellectual electric jolt. Were I to reread them today, I might laugh, at least discreetly behind my hand, at his books. But it would be a friendly chuckle, not a mocking one, for Fr. Luijpen opened up to me a world of adventure I had never before imagined: the adventure of disciplined abstraction. That excitement was stoked by some fine teachers, for the study of philosophy at St. Mary’s Seminary College, which closed a few years after my graduation, was like a light bulb that glowed most brightly at the end.

  Father Thomas “Butch” Leigh, SS, one of the sweetest of men, led us neophyte philosophers through Luijpen, thereby getting me hooked on philosophy. James Anderson took us into, and out of, Plato’s cave and into the bright, sunlit uplands of Aristotle. A freshman-year seminar in the philosophy of mathematics made me enjoy math in a way I had thought impossible since getting befuddled by Algebra II in high school.

  Two men stand out as teachers whose work on me, and for me, yielded major dividends when it came to drilling into the mind of Karol Wojtyła.

  Francis Kane introduced me to the modern Continental thinkers who had such an impact on Wojtyła, including Edmund Husserl, the founding father of phenomenology. His teaching ranged all over the history of philosophy, though, so it was Kane with whom I read the British empiricists, the contemporary linguistic analysts, and political philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel, Marx, and Mill, with pit stops along the way at Augustine, Hobbes, and Rousseau. His metaphysics course also introduced me to the “pleasures” of reading Immanuel Kant.

  John Donovan taught me Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, but above all he got me acquainted with Thomas Aquinas, who was rapidly being jettisoned in many post–Vatican II philosophy programs as impossibly old hat. In my senior year, Donovan gave me a good grounding in the thought of the Angelic Doctor, a lifelong respect for Thomas’s intellectual achievement, and thus some understanding of the foundations on which John Paul II’s philosophical project rested.

  While I was getting intellectually excited by philosophy, the same thing was happening in theology, which I chose to pursue in graduate school as a layman on deciding that my vocation lay elsewhere than the priesthood. These two intellectual interests were connected, I came to understand. There are theologians who write as if they never studied philosophy at all—and it shows, usually in confusion. I was fortunate enough to learn as a young man that philosophy is the essential prerequisite to doing theology seriously, and has been since the first synthesis of biblical and Greek thought was forged in the late second century AD. Then there are theologians who are indeed formed, although ill-formed, by philosophy—and their attraction to inadequate (or false) philosophical approaches or systems also shows up in their theology, to bad ends.

  Understanding this linkage between philosophy and theology—between sometimes unarticulated presuppositions and theologizing—was more than a matter of good intellectual hygiene for me. For there is no way to understand John Paul II’s magisterium—his teaching as pope—without understanding the rudiments of his philosophical position and his general philosophical instincts. Nor is there any way to grasp John Paul II’s critique of certain modern and contemporary theologians without grappling with his philosopher’s critique of the philosophical positions that underwrote what he thought were their defective theologies. This was obviously true, for example, in John Paul’s challenge to those forms of liberation theology he thought dependent on a Marxist philosophy of history. But it was just as true in his critique of certain trends in post–Vatican II Catholic moral theology, which he thought false philosophically before they led to trouble, theologically and pastorally.

  None of these applications of what I had learned at St. Mary’s could have been imagined when Cardinal Lawrence Shehan handed me my bachelor’s degree on May 20, 1973. But the foundations had been laid. And looking back, I am immensely grateful that my adolescent skepticism about philosophy and its utility in the contemporary Church was overcome so quickly in September 1969, and so decisively in the four years that followed.

  CONTESTING THE COUNCIL

  TORONTO, 1973–1975

  MY GRADUATE STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ST. MICHAEL’S College in Toronto, from the fall of 1973 through the spring of 1975, took place when the Second Vatican Council and its immediate implementation were regarded as insufficiently radical by most of the principal personalities in theology in Western Europe and North America.

  I don’t believe we ever read a document of Vatican II in my Toronto classes; the Council was regarded as a good thing but an incomplete thing, thanks to what most of my colleagues thought was Pope Paul VI’s timidity. According to the prevailing view, that timidity then overflowed into disaster in the 1967 encyclical Sacerdotalis Caelibatus (which reaffirmed Latin-rite Catholicism’s commitment to a celibate priesthood) and in the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae (which reaffirmed the Church’s classic teaching on marital chastity). There were some reverberations along Lake Ontario of the 1972 split among prominent theologians that led Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, Joseph Ratzinger, and others who would play large roles in John Paul II’s pontificate to found the journal Communio as an alternative to what they deemed a rigidly enforced progressive Catholic par
ty line in Concilium, the journal they had helped establish during Vatican II. But this effort to maintain pluralism in Catholic theology was largely dismissed as irrelevant, even craven, in the world of Toronto theology.

  Thus the idea that there was an alternative view of Vatican II—that the Council was a good thing but John XXIII’s intention to dialogue with the modern world for the sake of converting the modern world had too often become a wholesale surrender to an increasingly incoherent modern world—was notably absent in Toronto. As for the possibility that the Council might be getting its most thorough pastoral implementation in an ancient diocese in the south of Poland, well, that was quite unimaginable.

  Despite this hothouse atmosphere of progressive or liberal Catholic self-certainty, I learned important things in Toronto, especially from a gifted teacher, Father Daniel Donovan. I read a lot of what was known as “Transcendental Thomism” with Fr. Donovan, especially the Christology of Karl Rahner, on which I wrote my master’s thesis. And if I later came to understand the limits of Rahner’s theological project, that dissertation taught me something important for a then-unimagined future: that philosophical anthropology—the idea of the human person that animates a theologian’s work—has a lot to do with how that theologian does theology.

  The most famous and mediagenic member of the St. Michael’s faculty in those years was Father Gregory Baum, the Berlin-born son of a Jewish mother and a Protestant father, a war refugee who had made it to Canada in the nick of time, a multilingual scholar who had become a Catholic, then an Augustinian priest. During Vatican II, Baum was recruited to the staff of the conciliar Secretariat for Christian Unity, the liberal counterbalance to the more conservative conciliar Theological Commission. Thus “Gregory,” as everyone called this friendly and gregarious man, was at the epicenter of the internal struggles of Vatican II.

  Gregory was a man of pyrotechnic intellectual dexterity who discovered one new disciplinary interlocutor for theology after another: different forms of philosophy, psychology, and so forth. I was his teaching assistant in a 1974–75 undergraduate course on the sociology of religion, then his newest fascination. He was a brilliant lecturer, if not the deepest of thinkers, and I enjoyed working with him. But what sticks in my mind from our time together is a casual remark he made at a party while regaling us with tales of Vatican II intrigue—secretly printing documents and covertly distributing them; lobbying the bishops (assumed by the progressive periti, or Council theologians, to be a little dull); battling the retrograde Roman theologians and their intransigent ways. All in all, Gregory smiled, “it was a theologian’s paradise.” The implication was that, were we lucky, we nascent theologians would have a similar opportunity in the future.

  Over time, however, I came to understand that what Gregory Baum was referring to that night was not the clash of great ideas in the service of great causes; he was talking about power. And by that I don’t mean to suggest something necessarily dishonorable. Gregory and those like him truly believed that the power they wielded—especially over those sometimes-dim bishops—was in aid of noble objectives: ecumenical reconciliation with other Christian communities, a new dialogue with Judaism, an openness to modern intellectual culture, an intensified focus on work for justice in the world. The point, though, is that they really liked that power and the purposes to which it could be put. And they were not hesitant to use the whip hand to keep the theologians’ guild in line. In their view, the ratchet of theological and ecclesial history turned only one way, and they were prepared to enforce that conviction by exercising their power to quell deviations from the guild’s line.

  Shortly before I left St. Michael’s there was a North American challenge to this liberal theological hegemony in the 1975 Hartford Appeal for Theological Affirmation—quickly dubbed (and dismissed) by many in Toronto as the “Hartford Heresies.” The Concilium versus Communio fracas was an intra-Catholic affair. The Hartford challenge to the dominant liberal way of doing late-twentieth-century theology was thoroughly ecumenical. It began one night over the kitchen table at Peter Berger’s home in Brooklyn, when that eminent sociologist of religion and Richard John Neuhaus, then a Lutheran pastor, spent a postprandial evening smoking cigarillos and sketching on a pad of paper the things that most annoyed them about contemporary theology. That list of dubious propositions became the basis for a much more considered exploration of what was afoot in North American theology, held at Hartford Theological Seminary in January 1975. Among the signatories of the refined Hartford statement, which was a frontal challenge to much of what was in the Torontonian air in my days there, were men with whom I would work closely in the years ahead: the two instigators, Berger and Neuhaus; Father Avery Dulles, SJ; philosopher Ralph McInerny of Notre Dame; patristics scholar Robert Wilken; and moral theologian Stanley Hauerwas.

  As I later discovered, the Hartford Appeal spoke to many of the discontents I began to experience in Toronto as one theological fad followed another: liberation theology, then the black theology subset of liberation theology, then feminist theology, and so forth and so on, in each case the guild following the lead of the ambient public culture. It took me some time to figure out just what was wrong with all that. But in time, I, too, would become a “Hartford Heretic,” if of the second generation. Doing so prepared me to encounter the thought of John Paul II, which was not so much against the dominant liberal consensus of the post–Vatican II years as it was far beyond the progressive Catholic versus conservative Catholic civil war.

  One more image from my Toronto years sticks in my mind as remote preparation for understanding a man who spent thirty-two years as priest and bishop battling communism in Poland. It was the night of April 29, 1975—the twenty-fourth anniversary of my baptism—and after having supper with some friends who were living in a convent near St. Michael’s, I went with them to the convent’s common room to watch the evening news. There I saw the helicopters of Operation Frequent Wind lift off from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon, frantic refugees hanging onto the landing skids and even more desperate men and women abandoned on the roof below. Something, it seemed to me, was very, very wrong here.

  Like most of my college and graduate school classmates, I thought the war in Vietnam a grave mistake, although I understood that the heirs of Ho Chi Minh were unlikely to bring a workers’ and peasants’ paradise to Vietnam. The full awfulness of the American scuttle shocked me that night, however: this was not how a great nation treated those who had trusted it, callously leaving them to what they believed would be a terrible fate. It would be another five years or so before the anticommunism with which I had grown up reemerged in mature form, shaped by readings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s epic The Gulag Archipelago and his gripping novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, James Billington’s Fire in the Minds of Men, and Leszek Kołakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism. But once those readings sank in, I entered the lists in what would turn out to be the last decade of the Cold War, working for human rights in communist lands while battling the anti-anticommunism then rife in liberal American political circles. That work was another brick in the foundation of my study of the life of John Paul II. It began to be forged in Toronto on that terrible evening, watching my country dishonor itself and asking how such a thing could happen.

  APPRENTICE WORDSMITH

  SEATTLE, 1975–1984

  MY WIFE JOAN AND I, NEWLY MARRIED, MOVED ACROSS THE country in the summer of 1975. I had been offered a job as a very junior faculty member at St. Thomas Seminary School of Theology, located just outside Seattle in Kenmore, Washington; I would also teach adult education courses for the Religious Education Office of the Archdiocese of Seattle. Joan, who had earned a master’s degree in education, was offered a position at Forest Ridge School of the Sacred Heart, where in addition to her teaching she would create an innovative community service program for high school students. The two years I spent at St. Thomas were its last, as the bishops of the Pacific Northwest decided in 1977 to close the s
chool. It was a shock at the time, yet it turned out to be a crucial turning point in my life, with major consequences for my becoming John Paul II’s biographer.

  At St. Thomas, I was the faculty’s utility infielder, teaching everything from Introduction to Systematic Theology to Introduction to the Old Testament to Catholic Social Ethics to something called Critical Thinking (a meager substitute for the philosophy requirement the Northwest bishops ignored in their program of priestly formation). In the archdiocese, I was a roving catechist, offering various adult education courses—most of them having to do with overviews of the faith or US Catholic history—in parishes from Tacoma to Bellingham and at numerous points in between. It was a bit of a scramble, but looking back on it I can see that I was being taught an invaluable lesson: you really don’t know what you think about something until you try to teach it, persuade others of it, or engage others in it. And what I discovered was that the theological approach in which I had been immersed in Toronto didn’t make much of an impression on seminarians or adult laypeople. It didn’t translate, so to speak, that Rahnerian theology; it left my seminary students and the people who attended my adult education courses cold.