Lessons in Hope

by George Weigel

  During this period I also read David Tracy’s seminal essay, “A Social Portrait of the Theologian: The Three Publics of Theology—Society, Academy, Church,” and realized that the dominant forces in contemporary theology thought like some of the critters on George Orwell’s fictional farm: there may have been three publics, or audiences, for theology, but some publics were more equal than others, and the really important public was the academy. Where this would lead had been identified by the “Hartford Heretics”: to theology being held prisoner in an academic hothouse often characterized by boredom with the very mystery of being, skepticism about the human capacity to know anything with certainty, and moral relativism.

  That those who occupied the commanding heights of North American theology refused to recognize this Babylonian captivity was another important lesson for me, and later helped me embrace John Paul II’s view that theology is always an ecclesial discipline that learns from the Church and ought to serve the Church, even as it ought to take seriously its duties to the world and the canons of genuine scholarship.

  With the seminary’s closing in June 1977, I found myself three thousand miles from my Baltimore roots and without a job—for the Archdiocese of Seattle, perhaps sensing the beginnings of my dissent from the progressive consensus that then ruled the roost, declined to offer me a position when the seminary was shut down. Fortunately, though, the archdiocese was not my only professional option when St. Thomas shut its doors. During the 1976–77 academic year I had come into contact with the Seattle office of an improbably named organization, the World Without War Council, whose executive director, Stephen Boyd, proposed that we apply to the Washington Council on the Humanities for a grant that would fund me as WWWC’s Seattle scholar-in-residence. Just as improbably—although, as I now see it, providentially—the grant came through.

  And so I definitively left the world of the academy (and Church bureaucracy) for the world of think tanks and, eventually, the world of the scribes, journalistic and scholarly. In those interconnected worlds, I was taken under the wings of two men who left an indelible mark on my life and, without realizing what they were setting in motion, spiffed me up intellectually and stylistically and set me on the course that led to John Paul’s II dinner table.

  The first of these extraordinary mentors-become-friends was Robert Pickus, who died at ninety-two in 2016 after a life that could only have happened in America. Born in the Midwest of Jewish immigrant parents, he studied under Hans Morgenthau at the University of Chicago in its glory days before serving in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. Returning to Hyde Park and Robert Maynard Hutchins’s university after postwar study on a Fulbright scholarship at the London School of Economics and a trek through the Middle East and India, he worked with Mortimer Adler on the latter’s Syntopicon, which purported to be an index of all the world’s great ideas. While he never finished the dissertation that would have gained him a doctorate, Pick, as he was known to one and all, took from the University of Chicago a profound reverence for classic liberal learning, a thorough grasp of political theory from Plato through the moderns, and a vocational commitment to work for peace, which he defined as work for a law-governed world safe for democracies.

  That commitment took him first to the American Friends Service Committee. But when the Quakers’ principal peace organization took a hard left turn into anti-anticommunism, which he regarded as a violation of historical Quaker pacifism and elementary political common sense, he struck out on his own, founding a variety of organizations, of which the most substantial was the World Without War Council. The Council was more think tank than activist agency, and, over time, it became a sign of contradiction in the world of “peace organizations” for several reasons: Pick’s unapologetic patriotism and his belief that the US should play a large role in world affairs, which challenged the regnant post-Vietnam left-wing isolationism of the peace movement; his anticommunism, which infuriated the anti-anticommunists; his stress on law as an alternative to mass violence in settling conflict, which few took seriously; and his devotion to human rights and democracy, which made the anti-anticommunists nervous because it made the communists nervous.

  The intellectual and moral framework Pick created for the Council made a lot of sense to me, so I fit readily into the basic cast of mind that shaped WWWC work around the country. But beyond offering me an institutional base in Seattle, the Council, meaning primarily Pick, became my personal doctoral program. I was unrewarded by a degree, but his tutelage was crucial in the development of my thinking—and, in time, to appreciating John Paul II in greater depth.

  It was Pick, whose Judaism was idiosyncratic but serious, who reminded me, the Catholic, that Catholicism had long thought of peace as the product of law and politics: in Augustine’s fine phrase, peace is tranquillitas ordinis, the “tranquillity of order.”

  It was Pick, a pacifist, who showed me, a Catholic in the just war tradition, how these two ways of thinking and these two moral commitments could work together when “work for peace” was focused on developing legal and political alternatives to war in resolving international conflict—a perspective that eventually led me to look closely, if with an occasionally critical eye, at Vatican diplomacy.

  It was Pick who, by insisting that peace and freedom were inseparable, helped me to think about human rights in a disciplined, precise way, and who first showed me what John Paul II and Václav Havel later confirmed: that the robust defense of human rights behind the iron curtain was one crucial key to bringing down the Berlin Wall and liberating what Pickus understood full well were “captive nations.”

  It was Pick who invited me to fill in my theoretical anticommunism from literary sources—Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Ignazio Silone’s Bread and Wine, André Malraux’s Man’s Fate—and thus helped me understand the human texture and context of Karol Wojtyła’s life from 1946 through his election as pope.

  It was through Pick that I came to know, and befriend, the first-and second-generation leaders of what came to be known as “neoconservatism,” a largely Jewish network of thinkers who intersected at key points with Catholics and about-to-be-Catholics who had also broken with the American political left for a variety of reasons—including two men with whom I would later be closely identified, Richard John Neuhaus and Michael Novak. It was a heady mix, and while the polemics could get fierce, the relationships were warm and supportive as the first neocon generation was remarkably open to guiding and encouraging a successor generation, irrespective of formal academic credentials or former cast of mind.

  Finally, it was Pick who suggested that I apply for a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in order to write a major study of American Catholic thought on war and peace. I thought the thing impossible: how could a thirty-two-year-old without a doctorate hope to win one of the most prized sabbatical positions in American academic life? But he insisted it could be done, and with some encouragement from Max Kampelman (an old friend of Pick’s, then serving as the Wilson Center’s board chairman), I won a full-year fellowship and moved back east in the summer of 1984 for a year at the Wilson Center, to be followed by establishing a WWWC sister organization, the James Madison Foundation, in the nation’s capital.

  The second large figure in my Seattle period, and the man who shaped me into an author, was David Brewster. The mid to late 1970s and early 1980s were the golden years of alternative journalism in the United States, when weekly newsmagazines in tabloid newspaper format—like the Village Voice in New York, the Boston Phoenix, and the Figaro in New Orleans—developed a generation of writers who were encouraged to break new ground in reporting and commentary. The Seattle iteration of this phenomenon was the Weekly, which became the unanticipated launchpad for several internationally known writers—including one of the world’s premier espionage novelists, Alan Furst, and the biographer of John Paul II.

  David Brewster was a dynamo of energy who came to Seattle with his wife Joyce a
fter they had both done doctoral studies in English at Yale. Deciding that teaching at the University of Washington was not to his taste, David put his considerable talents into journalism, eventually launching the Weekly in 1976. We met by chance in late 1978, and shortly thereafter Brewster asked me if I wanted to do “sermon reviews” for his paper—a first hint that this was not your ordinary editor. David’s idea was that religion was an important part of any cityscape and that a city’s cultural health could be measured in part by the quality of the preaching its people heard; I thought that the local clergy, among whom I numbered many friends, would not take kindly to having their homiletic skills dissected the way David, the most respected and feared restaurant critic in the Pacific Northwest, analyzed the merits and defects of various chefs. So I told him that, while I was interested in writing, I thought it advisable that I stick to foreign policy matters, thus combining my day job at WWWC with some journalism.

  David agreed, but it wasn’t long before he had me on the religion beat, if in a different way than first proposed. John Paul II had created something of a media storm in the United States with his speech to the bishops of Latin America at Puebla, Mexico, on January 29, 1979; there, he had critiqued politicized forms of liberation theology that, as their proponents put it, used Karl Marx the way Thomas Aquinas used Aristotle. The Pope’s critique was given the usual thrashing from the usual progressive Catholic suspects, one of whom wrote in the Washington Post that the Pope’s address had given comfort to the Latin American regimes that were persecuting Catholic liberation theologians for their political dissent. I knew enough about the Polish-born pope at this early stage of his pontificate to know that this was rubbish. And so with David’s editorial pencil hovering over my shoulder (much to my benefit, and our readers’), I tried to explain that the difference between using Marx as a theological interlocutor and using Aristotle lay in the fact that Marx was wrong and Aristotle was right on more than a few crucial points. I also used that March 1979 article to unpack key themes of Christian personalism in John Paul’s first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis (The Redeemer of Man), which had just been published and which I found very exciting.

  My debut as a public intellectual/theologian/columnist in the Weekly had several effects. As I continued to write about John Paul in favorable terms, the gap between my thinking and the anti–John Paul II consensus rapidly emerging among Catholic progressives soon became something akin to a chasm, which deepened when the Seattle archdiocesan newspaper, the Catholic Northwest Progress, offered me a slot as a regular columnist. Thus even as I was learning the journalistic parallel to what I had learned from teaching—that a good way to figure out what you really think about something is to try to write about it in a coherent way—I was also learning that H. L. Mencken’s description of the exposed position of the magazine editor—“a man who lives on a sort of spiritual Bataan, with bombs of odium taking him incessantly from the front and torpedoes of obloquy harrying him astern”—was also true of the columnist. And while I didn’t much like the brickbats at first (why couldn’t these people see how reasonable I was?), I became more or less inured to them over time, thanks in part to the example of David Brewster, who caught his own share of flak and handled it with aplomb.

  Even as I was writing myself into Catholic neoconservatism in the Weekly, David remained an honest, old-fashioned liberal, committed to open discussion conducted with civility and whatever measure of elegance was to be found in journalism. I don’t think I was an awful writer when he began to whip me into shape, but I certainly retained some of the unpleasant traits of graduate school writing, especially among those influenced by German theology. David firmly and kindly sharpened my authorial steel, let me write about whatever I wanted (including baseball, one memorable summer), and never once suggested that I modify my views to accommodate the nascent political correctness of a Seattle that was moving steadily to the left.

  Two other Weekly moments in the early 1980s were crucial mileposts on my path to writing John Paul II’s biography. In December 1981, I penned an elegy for the Solidarity movement, which I had celebrated in the Weekly’s pages since the first Solidarity Congress in September 1980, and which the Polish communist regime had just tried to bludgeon to death via martial law. The Weekly pieces I wrote in those days were the first in which I explored John Paul II’s grand strategy for the victory of freedom in Central and Eastern Europe: the robust defense of human rights, anchored in religious freedom, as a nonviolent weapon that communism could not match.

  Then there were the murders of Mike Hammer and Mark Pearlman. Both men worked for the AFL-CIO–sponsored American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), and through WWWC connections I met Mike Hammer in Washington in late December 1980. Three weeks later he and Pearlman, a Seattle native, were gunned down in a San Salvador hotel along with a Salvadoran colleague, Rodolfo Viera. I wrote a memorial piece in the January 14, 1981, Weekly, “Our Martyrs for Democracy,” which AIFLD reprinted and distributed nationally. It was my first, but not last, immersion in the bloody politics of Central America in the 1980s, which John Paul II would later confront and try to temper.

  FRONT ROW SEAT

  NEW YORK AND BALTIMORE, OCTOBER 1979

  IF ACADEMIC LIFE OFFERED THE SECURITY OF A STEADY SALARY AT the price of department meetings, paper-grading, and other forms of tedium, life in the world of think tanks and journalism, while not so financially secure, offered a lot more freedom. It was a freedom I thoroughly enjoyed, and one of my first exercises of it took me to New York and Washington in October 1979 to write about John Paul II’s first papal pilgrimage to the United States for the Weekly and the Catholic Northwest Progress. The logistical circumstances under which I worked—writing my stories and columns longhand and dictating them over the phone back to Seattle—seem almost primeval in a world of laptops, cell phones, text messages, and e-mail. But I was twenty-eight years old and it was all a great adventure—despite such hassles as the US bishops’ conference press office misplacing my credentials on three separate occasions.

  I skipped Boston, the starting point of John Paul’s US tour, and began my work in New York. Amazingly, the credentialing process worked well at the UN and it was a breeze to walk into the great Secretariat Building on First Avenue and pick up a set of credentials that gave me the run of the whole UN headquarters. I was a rank amateur as a journalist but some inner voice told me that, as I could go anywhere in the complex, I ought to scout out the fastest route to where the Pope would enter the General Assembly building and the shortcuts from there to the balcony of the General Assembly Hall, where he would be speaking.

  That intuition stood me in good stead the day John Paul II arrived at the UN. I quickly found my way to the foyer through whose doors he entered—and suddenly there he was, striding purposefully a foot or so away from me. There was no opportunity for a word, but I vividly remember my first impression of Karol Wojtyła, the man: he was a little shorter than I expected and he walked with a slight tilt to his shoulders and head, but his robust physique and powerful stride struck me as not dissimilar to those of an NFL linebacker. It was thrilling to be up close and personal, but there was no time to dawdle; the Pope’s entourage and the UN bigwigs swept him away to meet-and-greets that preceded his address to the General Assembly, and I hightailed it to the General Assembly Hall balcony along the route I had traced the day before.

  Remarkably, it was all open seating, and as I was an hour early I planted myself in the front row—later to look behind me and wave to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who, if memory serves, was escorting Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis into seats far less desirable than mine.

  John Paul gave a stunning speech that I would analyze in detail twenty years later. And I like to think I remember the uncomfortable looks on the faces of the delegations from communist Central and Eastern Europe when the Pope made his powerful plea for religious freedom as the first of civil rights; but any such memory may be influenced by reading Pat Moyniha
n’s comments to that effect later. In any event, it was an unforgettable morning, and after I left the UN I walked down First Avenue to the home of Richard John Neuhaus, then Pastor Neuhaus, to get his take on the speech. He was, as usual, lucid and eloquent in what would be our first conversation about the proper interpretation of a John Paul II text: the keys, he insisted, were the Pope’s locating human rights at the center of any humane world politics, religious freedom at the center of human rights, and a biblically informed notion of human dignity as the foundation of the whole edifice. In addition to giving me numerous quotes for my stories and columns, Richard and I shared a laugh—the first of what must have been hundreds—over the fatuousness of the New York Times, which involved a headline to the effect that “Trip Will Determine Whether Pope Is a World Leader.”

  In the Washington phase of the visit, the US bishops’ conference credentials, which I had finally acquired, got me onto the North Lawn of the White House, where I watched in fascination as the born-again Southern Baptist president of the United States warmly welcomed the Polish-born Bishop of Rome. The Pope’s encounter with religious sisters in the vast National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception was another event for which I was in the press pool. That meeting was later remembered for Sister Theresa Kane’s challenge to John Paul on the ordination of women; what sticks in my mind, though, is that the sisters who stood in protest during the Pope’s formal remarks were often the ones climbing up on the pews to take pictures of him when he made his way out of the Shrine down its long center aisle. Then there was the papal Mass on the National Mall later that Sunday afternoon: it was a windy day and the visual takeaway was the Pope’s green chasuble whipping around him in the brisk breeze as he preached a stirring homily, during which he cited Thomas Jefferson in defense of the primordial right to life.