Lessons in Hope

by George Weigel

  As John Paul II made brief stops in Philadelphia, Des Moines, and Chicago, I played hooky and went to Baltimore, where I managed to get to the first game of the 1979 American League Championship Series, in which my beloved Orioles were playing the California Angels. That postseason would end in grief for the O’s, thanks to Willie “Pops” Stargell and the “We Are Family” Pittsburgh Pirates, but the first game of the ALCS couldn’t have been better for a lifelong Orioles fan and a rising John Paul II fan. I ended my coverage of the papal trip for the Weekly on that note:

  Will this remarkably gifted man make a difference, not only to his Church, but to the world? My hunch that the answer is yes came into focus… in Memorial Stadium.… As I sat there… and later watched John Lowenstein’s pinch-hit home run slither over the corner of the left field fence to send 54,000 maniacs into an uproar, I suddenly thought to myself, “The Pope ought to be here.” Somehow… I knew he’d enjoy it. That curious thought gives me confidence that, in time, John Paul II may just be the kind of religious leader we’ve all been instinctively awaiting for, a man who thoroughly enjoys being alive, who believes unabashedly that there is greatness in us—and who could eat crab cakes and drink beer on Wednesday night in Baltimore.

  Later experience taught me that among John Paul’s few cultural lacunae was a marked lack of interest in baseball. The intuition that John Paul II would relentlessly summon his Church and the world to live more nobly than many imagined possible turned out to be correct, however. And the nascent desire to know him better, born in those few seconds when he strode by me in the UN General Assembly building on October 2, 1979, full of purpose and confidence, would lead me into relationships and adventures I wouldn’t have thought possible when I was a newbie columnist on the fringes of the papal media tsunami in October 1979.

  IN THE CASTLE

  WASHINGTON, 1984–1985

  CONGRESS ESTABLISHED THE WOODROW WILSON INTERNATIONAL Center for Scholars in 1968 as the official national memorial to the twenty-eighth President of the United States. Today, it’s one among many Washington think tanks, with no particular focus or character. Things were different in 1984–85, when I spent a year there. The Wilson Center was then housed in the old Smithsonian Castle on the National Mall; the Castle had been modeled on a medieval Norman monastery by that gifted architectural copycat, James Renwick, and under the direction of James H. Billington, later the Librarian of Congress, the Wilson Center had a certain monastic quality about it.

  Part of that had to do with the fellows’ small offices, reminiscent of monastic cells, and the refectory-like dining room. The greater part of the monastic ambience was created by Jim Billington, though. This distinguished historian of Russian culture and twentieth-century revolutionary thought had the singular ability to walk into any discussion and ask the one question that got almost everybody thinking about the matter at hand in a new, fresh way. Thus, without making a big deal about himself, Billington fostered something resembling a true academic community: a fellowship that reverenced the truth. Jim Billington was also a man of deep Christian faith, and he quietly made it his business to put a little leaven into the Wilson Center mix by offering fellowships to scholars with theological and religious interests. Thus one of my predecessors as house Catholic was none other than the great Fr. Avery Dulles.

  During my first month as junior subaltern in this gathering of the far-more-credentialed, I befriended five men who would decisively shape my future thinking and work.

  Bohdan Bociurkiw from Carlton University in Ottawa was the world’s leading expert on the world’s largest illegal and underground religious community, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. Bohdan had survived the Flossenbürg concentration camp and after emigrating to Canada had taken his doctorate at the University of Chicago. With significant contacts behind the iron curtain, he was well-informed about his underground Church, which the Soviet secret police tried to liquidate in 1946 with the connivance of the Russian Orthodox Church. We became fast friends, and he gave me a yearlong tutorial in Ukrainian Catholic history that later proved invaluable.

  Menahem Milson, a native-born Israeli scholar who specialized in Arabic language and literature, served in Ariel Sharon’s famous Unit 101, and, after the Six-Day War, was briefly civil governor of the West Bank, where he tried to implement an imaginative plan to develop a Palestinian political leadership with which Israel could make peace. Three years after we became friends in the Castle, Menahem invited me to Jerusalem, where I gave a few lectures at Hebrew University and made a host of contacts who later became important in helping me get inside the dramatic story of John Paul II’s efforts to establish full diplomatic relations between the Holy See and the Jewish state, and in facilitating my writing on John Paul’s epic Holy Land pilgrimage of March 2000.

  Father Joseph Komonchak’s work on Vatican II helped hone my understanding of the Council in which Karol Wojtyła played a significant role and that John Paul II would spend his entire pontificate trying to explicate. Komonchak’s view of Vatican II and mine did not always coincide, but he made me think through the Council, its effects, and its implementation at a deeper level. Joe was also a great collector and retailer of hilarious clerical stories, and we spent more than a few lunches together swapping tales of ecclesiastical folly.

  Then there was Columbia historian István Deák, another émigré scholar, in this case from Hungary. One afternoon he floored me by climbing into my cell in the Castle tower (which had a great view of the Mall on three glass-paned sides) and showing me a court-martial record he had unearthed in the Library of Congress. István was writing a book about the Austro-Hungarian army’s officer corps as the world’s first true multinational organization—a book I read with great interest when sketching a portrait of Captain Karol Wojtyła, father of the future pope, in Witness to Hope. But that payoff wasn’t on my radar when he gleefully showed me the court-martial record of a Lieutenant Augustin Weigel (no relation, fortunately), who had been cashiered from the Habsburg army: not for being blind drunk, and not for getting into a brawl with a peasant while blind drunk, but for failing to redeem his officer’s honor by killing said peasant in said brawl.

  Finally, there was James Childress of the University of Virginia, a distinguished ethicist whose work helped me understand how the just war tradition had become distorted in the hands of certain theologians, with powerful impacts on the US Catholic debate on war and peace and on Vatican thinking about world politics and the pursuit of peace. Jim Childress certainly disagreed with my take on his take on just war thinking, but he was a true gentleman and friendly interlocutor with whom I enjoyed interacting during that year in the Castle.

  My year at the Wilson Center also saw the beginning of my friendship and collaboration with Congressman Henry Hyde, which was entirely accidental but nonetheless providential. In September 1984, I went up to the Capitol to have lunch in the House dining room with Joel Pritchard, a Seattle-area congressman with whom I had worked on arms control issues in my WWWC days. Joel was recovering from chemotherapy, and Henry, walking through the dining room, came over to ask how he was feeling. Joel introduced me and Henry politely asked what I was doing in town. I explained that I was at the Wilson Center, studying Catholic thought on war and peace.

  Hyde smiled and went off to his own lunch. A few minutes later, he came back to our table and asked me whether I’d written anything on Church-state issues, then a hot topic in the 1984 presidential campaign. I said that I had and would arrange to get copies of those articles and columns to him. A few days after that, Henry called and asked me to stop by his Rayburn Building office. It seems that he had been asked by the Thomas J. White Center at the Notre Dame Law School to come to South Bend and deliver an address on the Church-state debate as a response to New York governor Mario Cuomo’s recent disquisition on that subject. Would I draft a speech for him to consider? I said I’d be delighted to do so.

  That was the beginning of a twenty-two-year collaboration, during w
hich I did most of Henry’s major speechwriting. Fascinating in itself, that experience also had important consequences for my work on John Paul II. The first was that working with Henry deepened my understanding of the ideas of the pro-life movement, to which I had always been committed but, pre-1984, in a friendly-bystander sort of way. Now I found myself working with the undisputed congressional leader of the pro-life community, helping craft arguments for both Congress and the public debate. So by the time I came to write about John Paul’s pro-life teaching and his 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae (which Henry himself influenced, if indirectly), I was well schooled in the intellectual architecture of the pro-life cause and experienced in trying to explain its reasoning to a secular audience.

  The second effect of my collaboration with the remarkable Henry Hyde on my John Paul II work would involve the impeachment and trial of the President of the United States. But that is a tale for later.

  During my year at the Wilson Center I wrote a very fat manuscript on a Kaypro 4 computer that I didn’t realize I ought to back up until after I had ground out something like eight hundred pages of copy. Luckily there were no crashes, and with the able editing of Cynthia Read of Oxford University Press, my first major book, Tranquillitas Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Thought on War and Peace was published in September 1987.

  The book made three large arguments: that there was in fact a tradition of US Catholic thought on war and peace, inherited from Augustine, Aquinas, and other just war theorists and developed in a distinctive way in America; that this tradition had been largely forgotten in the post–Vatican II years; and that, reclaimed and developed, this tradition could help shape a more morally and politically coherent public discussion of international security issues. John Paul II’s rich, subtle, and complex thinking about the human person and human rights, I suggested, would be at the center of any such reclamation and development.

  Writing the book was my first experience in making an extended set of arguments over hundreds of pages, which stood me in good stead when it came to telling John Paul II’s story. I also learned that giving books Latin titles in late-twentieth-century America was asking for trouble, in that most of those who interviewed me about the book had no idea of how to pronounce tranquillitas ordinis, much less grasped how those two words encapsulated the main motif of my proposal: that what Augustine had called the “tranquillity of order” in The City of God could be “translated” in modern terms into a compelling idea of peace—peace as the fruit of freedom and the democratic political process. In retrospect, I should have called the book Peace Through Freedom: US Catholics and World Politics, but Bob Pickus insisted that the Latin title was perfect, and as I was dedicating the book to him (along with the late American Catholic theologian and political theorist John Courtney Murray, SJ) I took his advice—for the last time, in the matter of titles.

  Tranquillitas Ordinis was perhaps the first book to suggest that John Paul II’s robust, evangelically grounded defense of human rights might provide a key for resolving the Cold War in peaceful terms. That point was, I think, vindicated by the events of late 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe. And my fascination with the idea and experience of societies liberating themselves by “living in the truth” would lead me in short order to a deeper exploration of how that had happened—and into the company of John Paul II, who had begun to come into clearer focus as a radically converted Christian disciple who could not be pigeonholed on some conventional liberal-conservative spectrum.

  COLD WAR ENDGAME

  WASHINGTON, 1985–1989

  I SPENT THE FOUR YEARS AFTER MY WILSON CENTER SABBATICAL launching and leading WWWC’s sister organization, the James Madison Foundation, which involved me in enterprises that would shape my work on John Paul II.

  The first of these, which involved prying Lithuanians out of the gulag, was made possible in part by a Seattle friend, John Miller, who had won Joel Pritchard’s old seat in the US House of Representatives in 1984 and who, like me, thought that effective human rights advocacy on behalf of dissidents behind the iron curtain was a key to resolving the Cold War in favor of the forces of freedom. John asked me to do part-time consulting work with him, and I suggested that we focus on his human rights concerns. Here, another seeming happenstance in my Baltimore upbringing turned out to be providential.

  When I was a boy, Baltimore had a small but vibrant Lithuanian-American population, whose communal life was centered on St. Alphonsus Church, a few blocks from the Cathedral School. The leading figure in the Lithuanian-American community in those days was Father Casimir Pugevicius, who served the parish at St. Alphonsus while working on the archdiocesan newspaper, the Catholic Review. I first met “Father Cas,” as he was universally known, in the 1960s, and he must have planted in me a seed of interest in Lithuanian affairs. That seed would flower twenty years later, when I convinced a Jewish congressman that he should try to do something about Lithuanian Catholic priests and nuns doing hard time in Siberia.

  With the six hundredth anniversary of Lithuania’s conversion to Christianity on the horizon in 1987, I suggested to Congressman Miller in 1985 that we put together a Lithuanian Catholic Religious Freedom Caucus in the US House of Representatives. The object was to provide congressional support for Lithuania’s Catholic Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights, whose heroic work I had become familiar with since the Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania, the longest-running samizdat publication in the history of the USSR, began to circulate in the United States—thanks to the work of Fr. Casimir Pugevicius, who was by then working full-time with Lithuanian Catholic Religious Aid, a nongovernmental organization headquartered in Brooklyn.

  With John Miller’s encouragement, I met with Father Cas for the first time in years and told him of our hope to get a caucus in support of religious freedom in Lithuania established in the US House of Representatives. Father Cas was enthusiastic, so the next step was to find a Democratic partner for Congressman Miller in establishing the group. A quick study of voter demographics suggested that a Cleveland-area congressman named Edward Feighan might be naturally sympathetic. So after John Miller called Ed Feighan and outlined the plan, I met Feighan’s chief of staff—a then-obscure young Democratic activist named George Stephanopoulos. George agreed to assign someone to work with me, and the Lithuanian Catholic Religious Freedom Caucus was born.

  At the time, three of the principal figures in the Lithuanian Catholic Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights were behind barbed wire in, if memory serves, Perm Camp 36: Sister Nijolė Sadūnaitė, Father Alfonsas Svarinskas, and Father Sigitas Tamkevičius, SJ. So the caucus focused some of its attention on giving visibility to their cases in the Congress and urging the Reagan administration to pressure the Gorbachev regime in the USSR for their release—a goal that was achieved before the collapse of the USSR. Congressmen Miller and Feighan also sponsored, and I drafted, House Resolution 192, on “the denial of freedom of religion and other human rights in Soviet-occupied Lithuania.” H.Res.192 was cosponsored by forty-four members of the House of Representatives and was passed in time to mark the six hundredth anniversary of Lithuanian’s conversion. On that occasion, the caucus sponsored a large reception and rally in the US Capitol; various congressmen and senators spoke in defense of Lithuanian religious freedom and Lithuanian independence, and the entire program was broadcast to Lithuania by Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe.

  A decade later, with Lithuania self-liberated from the collapsing Soviet Union, I came to understand how influential John Paul II had been in inspiring the Lithuanian Catholic Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights, which was formed shortly after his election. It was a piece of the John Paul II story virtually ignored by others. But it was crucial in grasping just how significant an impact John Paul’s election had had on what had been the “Church of silence,” and how a no-longer-silent local Church could reassert itself as the safe-deposit box of national memory an
d identity—and in doing so, help give Lithuania a new birth of freedom. I doubt that I’d have been alert to this when I was preparing Witness to Hope, had not another “happenstance” made me into an advocate for these heroes of modern Catholicism.

  Then there was the 1988 millennium of Christianity among the eastern Slavs, during which the Soviet Union and the Russian Orthodox Church intended to highlight the changes inaugurated by Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika while rewriting (and in some cases airbrushing) the history of Christianity in today’s Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. Blunting that intention, putting pressure on the Gorbachev regime to realize its promise of openness and restructuring, and providing ideas for President Ronald Reagan’s summit meeting with Gorbachev in Moscow seemed to me worthy goals for the James Madison Foundation to pursue. Thus was born the Appeal for Religious Freedom in the Soviet Union on the Occasion of the Millennium of Christianity in Kievan Rus’.

  I drafted the Appeal, which was addressed personally to Mr. Gorbachev, with an invaluable assist from my Wilson Center fellow fellow, Bohdan Bociurkiw, who knew the relevant parts of the Soviet constitution, pan-union Soviet religious law, and the criminal codes of the various Soviet “republics” inside and out. The Appeal was both discursive, describing what religious freedom in full in the USSR would look like, and quite specific, identifying what should be changed at the various levels of the complex Soviet legal system—including the legalization of the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine, then in the forty-second year of its underground existence. Jim Billington, by then the Librarian of Congress, made some useful suggestions, and the Appeal was translated into Russian and Ukrainian. With the help of WWWC and Madison Foundation colleagues around the country, and my Madison Foundation program officer, Amy Sherman, we rustled up signatories, and by the time we finished the Appeal was signed by virtually every major religious leader in the United States and a plethora of scholars, activists, journalists, businessmen, labor leaders, and public officials: Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim; liberal and conservative (theologically and politically); Democrat and Republican.