Lessons in Hope

by George Weigel

  Ten thousand copies of the Appeal were distributed in North America and on both sides of the iron curtain in Europe; more than a few pilgrims to the USSR during the millennium celebrations took copies with them to circulate privately. We also got word that the Appeal, having penetrated the USSR, was being copied and distributed in samizdat form. The Appeal was sent to John Paul II through the Vatican embassy in Washington, and on April 25, 1988, I presented a copy to President Reagan in the Oval Office. Themes from the Appeal would later resonate in the president’s May 30 address at the Danilov Monastery in Moscow, and in others of his speeches in the USSR.

  At the time, I thought of the Appeal as the culmination of the work for religious freedom in communist lands that I began in Seattle in the late 1970s. That turned out to be quite wrong, for the Appeal also helped prepare me to understand in greater depth the circumstances in which Karol Wojtyła had worked as priest and bishop in communist-dominated Poland, the lengths to which communist legal systems went to circumscribe religious activity, and the role of communist bloc intelligence services as agents of state-sponsored atheism. The project also accelerated my study of Mikhail Gorbachev, which began in another unexpected “happenstance” at a Wilson Center dinner on March 10, 1985.

  A visiting delegation of Soviet scholars was in town; Jim Billington hosted a dinner for them in the Smithsonian Castle and, in addition to the usual congressional and executive branch types, invited those of the Wilson Center fellows he thought might ginger things up a bit at the dinner tables scattered throughout Renwick’s great hall. I spent the evening probing my Soviet dinner companions’ sensibilities and views on religious freedom and other human rights matters. Then, around dessert, there was a flurry of comment in Russian, within and among tables. Suddenly, the entire Soviet delegation got up, left, and boarded buses to be transported back to the Soviet compound on Mount Alto in northwest Washington. This weirdness, it quickly became clear, had to do with the unexpected death that night of Konstantin Chernenko and the imperative of getting these Soviet academics and officials out of circulation while the official line on What It All Meant and Who Was Coming Next was worked out.

  The next afternoon, after Mikhail Gorbachev had been named General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, I asked Jim Billington what difference he thought Gorbachev might make. The difference, he said, was generational. Unlike his three predecessors—Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Chernenko—Gorbachev hadn’t seen his friends dragged into the basement of the Lubyanka and shot in the back of the head, as had happened during Stalin’s 1930s purges. “They all had that cold-blooded, reptilian look,” Jim recalled, “and that’s why: they saw their friends liquidated.” The conclusion: Gorbachev had not been permanently dehumanized by such an experience, and he’d be different because of that. It was another insight on my long list of debts to Jim Billington. And that image of a “cold-blooded, reptilian look” was in my mind when, a dozen years later, I was putting together the pieces of another great Cold War puzzle, the assassination attempt of John Paul II on May 13, 1981.

  EPPC, DIPLOMACY, AND CENTESIMUS ANNUS

  WASHINGTON AND COPENHAGEN, 1989–1991

  ON JUNE 1, 1989, I BECAME THE SECOND PRESIDENT OF WASHINGTON’S Ethics and Public Policy Center, succeeding the founding president, Ernest Lefever. EPPC had a well-deserved reputation for serious public policy research that fit well within the neoconservative consensus. I enjoyed my seven years at EPPC’s helm, working with an ecumenical and interreligious group of colleagues who shared my conviction that John Paul II was the religious figure of consequence on the world stage. In those years, EPPC sponsored conferences and symposia on the history of Catholic social doctrine and on the thought of John Paul II. From those conferences, we published a book of commentaries on the social encyclicals, another book on John Paul’s 1991 encyclical, Centesimus Annus, and yet another on the future of public Christianity in the United States in the last years of the twentieth century.

  In those conferences I insisted that EPPC try to re-create a real dialogue across the usual ideological divides; it was not easy going, given the passions of the day, but it seemed worth the effort. Alas, that effort was rarely reciprocated, further confirming my judgment that something had gone wrong with progressive Catholics (and Protestants, and Jews): a certain intellectual brittleness that made it impossible to understand John Paul II in anything other than the tired left/right terms in which he couldn’t be understood. At the same time, however, EPPC brought me into much closer contact with evangelical Protestant and Jewish thinkers about Church and society, many of whom had keen insights into John Paul.

  The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was celebrated with satisfaction at EPPC, for we believed that our defense of human rights and our insistence on the moral superiority of imperfect democracies over pluperfect tyrannies had been vindicated. A month and a half later, I was having lunch with my friend Charles Krauthammer, who asked, “What are we going to do with the rest of our lives?” I told him that I imagined there would be plenty to keep us occupied, as I didn’t buy Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis and was confident that “history” had a few surprises left in her pocket. In my case, the immediate impact of the wall coming down was my first and only experience as a diplomat of sorts.

  The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe was established by the 1975 Helsinki Final Act to periodically review the condition of, well, security and cooperation in Europe, east and west of the Berlin Wall. In the last decade of the Cold War, CSCE conferences were occasions to hold the Soviet Union’s toes to the fire on the human rights commitments it undertook in 1975. But with the Cold War over, what was CSCE to do, especially in terms of securing democracy in the old Warsaw Pact countries?

  Max Kampelman, who was helpful in getting me to the Wilson Center and who had a lot of CSCE experience under Presidents Carter and Reagan, was appointed by President George H. W. Bush as head of the US delegation to the first post–Cold War CSCE review conference, to be held in Copenhagen in June 1990. Max invited me to become a public member of the US delegation: meaning, essentially, that I would pay my own way but be fully a part of the US team. I agreed and spent two weeks in the Danish capital, writing speeches for Max, acting as US liaison to the Vatican delegation, listening to hour after hour of diplomatic rhetoric, and observing Max’s skill in handling both his diplomatic interlocutors and his bosses in the State Department. The US goal at the meeting was to get the strongest possible agreement on what the “rule of law” meant in the post–Cold War world. We largely succeeded, although we made no headway on getting the Soviet delegation to concede that the Baltic states deserved the independence that Stalin had stolen from them in 1941. And when we left, there were still unresolved issues about certain Soviet prisoners of conscience, whose cases I had tried to press.

  It was quite a scene, that conference. Several of the delegations from the new democracies east of the Elbe River were composed of men who had served the old communist regimes and were clearly lost, substantively and rhetorically—a good experience, for me, of Homo sovieticus and, in retrospect, another unanticipated bit of learning that would serve me well in understanding the world from which Karol Wojtyła had emerged to become Pope John Paul II. Many of these delegates spent hours shopping: discounted consumer goods were available in one section of the vast conference center where the CSCE meeting was held, and I saw dozens of TVs, stereos, VCRs, and other electronic goodies being carted out by the ex-comrades. Some of these boys were also laggards in moving beyond communist-era self-presentation and haberdashery; one head of delegation always had a suspicious bulge under his jacket, while another wore business suits that looked as if they had been dry-cleaned in vichyssoise.

  Our hotel was on one of Copenhagen’s many quays and one evening I spotted a huge yacht tied up there. On inspection it turned out to be Freedom, owned by my friend and benefactor William E. Simon, former secretary of the treasury. I w
rote him a note and a few days later received an invitation for drinks aboard Freedom the following evening, accompanied by Max Kampelman and John Evans, our deputy head of delegation. So there we were, sitting on the fantail, sipping gin and tonics, when an unmistakable voice accosted me from below decks: “What are you doing here?” Up the stairs bounced William F. Buckley Jr., who was crewing Freedom with his friend Bill Simon. The two Bills, Max, John, and I had a serious conversation for the next hour about the post–Cold War situation in Europe before the three landlubbers left Freedom (which was larger than any Danish navy vessel we saw in the harbor) and returned to diplomacy.

  Ten months later, John Paul II issued his greatest social encyclical, Centesimus Annus, and I took another step along the path to becoming the Pope’s biographer.

  I had continued to write steadily about John Paul since that first Weekly piece in March 1979, and by 1991 I was likely one of the pope’s principal interpreters in North America. John Paul had an efficient personal intelligence network and was aware of what I was doing in trying to explain him to an American audience. None of this made my stock rise higher among those who insisted that Karol Wojtyła was a conservative Pole with a premodern mind, but I had come to the settled view that he was a thoroughly modern intellectual with a very different read on modernity—one that deserved serious attention. That judgment was amply confirmed when Centesimus Annus was published at the beginning of May 1991.

  That there would be a social encyclical commemorating the centenary of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum—the first of the modern papal social encyclicals—was obvious. The real question was, who would help shape the draft with which the Pope would work? John Paul, I later learned, was still dissatisfied with the work done on his previous social encyclical, the 1987 document Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, and was even more unhappy with the draft for a centenary encyclical that Justice and Peace composed—especially after the Italian philosopher Rocco Buttiglione reviewed the Justice and Peace draft and told the Pope, in so many words, “This is not the way the economy works today and it isn’t the way it will work tomorrow.” Rocco then helped John Paul, who never had a bank account and had long lived outside everyday economic life, understand that there might be economic laws roughly analogous to the natural moral law: meaning that some things worked economically because those things cohered with human nature, and some things didn’t work economically because they cut against human nature.

  Discarding the Justice and Peace draft, John Paul crafted an encyclical that brilliantly described the threefold free and virtuous society of the future as one composed of a democratic political community, a free economy, and a vibrant public moral culture. And, he insisted, the culture was the key to all the rest, because it took a certain kind of people, culturally tutored in certain virtues, to make the machinery of free politics and free markets work so that the result is genuine human flourishing. Truth, he argued, and especially the truth about the human person, had everything to do with living freedom well and building prosperous economies. And the central truth that the free societies of the future had to own was the truth about the human person, which we can know by both revelation and reason.

  There was a lot more in Centesimus Annus, of course, including a crisp analysis of the communist crack-up, a sharp critique of dependency-inducing welfare states, and a plea for social-welfare programs that stressed the empowerment of the poor. But what shocked the Justice and Peace bureaucracy in the Vatican, much of the world press, and the liberal Catholic establishment was the Pope’s endorsement of what he called the “free economy”: markets regulated by law and a robust moral culture. I was less interested in that than in his analysis of the Revolution of 1989 and his insistence that democracies had to recognize certain moral truths about the human person if they were to survive; so less than a quarter of my article on the encyclical, “The New ‘New Things,’” was dedicated to questions of the economy. But it was the economic stuff that caused the first of many Centesimus Annus flaps, as the liberal establishment, gobsmacked by the encyclical, kept insisting that the Pope had not written what the Pope had, plainly, written (one Jesuit in Rome claimed that the kind of regulated market the Pope endorsed could only be found in fantasy or in textbooks).

  I was given an advance copy of the encyclical in English by the US ambassador to the Holy See, Thomas Melady, and sent copies of it to my colleagues Richard Neuhaus and Michael Novak. The pieces we published immediately on the encyclical’s release—in the Wall Street Journal (Richard), the Washington Post (Mike), and the Los Angeles Times (me)—framed its immediate reception and upset those who were eagerly anticipating something other than what John Paul II had delivered. Thus Richard, Mike, and I were accused for the first time, but certainly not the last, of expropriating the Pope for our partisan purposes, ecclesiastical and political—an accusation that any sensible person would recognize was false from the fact that John Paul, no fool, maintained close contact with the three of us until his death, wrote one of his oldest friends of his appreciation for our interpretation of his work, and encouraged one of us to write his biography, none of which seems very likely if he had thought we were distorting the meaning of his teaching.

  Whatever the slings and arrows of opprobrium that came flying my way over Centesimus Annus, they were minor irritants compared to the exhilaration of learning from and writing about a pope whose teaching, it seemed to me, had brilliantly scouted the terrain on which the battle for the twenty-first century would be fought in the West—a man I thought I would like to know better.

  NEW WORLDS

  In early September 1990, I received a letter from the editor of the Washington Quarterly, the journal of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which had published my first major article on John Paul II and what I had begun to call “the Catholic human rights revolution.” Brad Roberts quickly got my attention: “Now that you’ve unpacked your bags from Jerusalem, how about repacking them for Moscow?”

  I had made my second visit to the Holy City the previous month to participate in the last meeting of the Jerusalem Committee, an international advisory board to the Jerusalem municipality created by Mayor Teddy Kollek. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on August 2, a few weeks before we were to meet, and tourists fled Israel in droves. Teddy, however, was of the view that “we don’t arrange our meetings according to the whims of totalitarians”; the committee agreed with this democratic tough-mindedness, so we met for several days in a Jerusalem deserted by just about everyone but its residents and us. The tourist scuttle made it possible for me to tour Masada virtually alone, accompanied by my friend Yigal Carmon, former adviser on counterterrorism to two Israeli prime ministers. The only other visitors exploring that striking memorial to Jewish courage on September 1, 1990, were about a dozen fundamentalists from the up-hollows of the old Confederacy; they had stayed in the Holy Land, evidently thinking that, with war on the short-term horizon because of Saddam, they had just won a front-row ticket to the Battle of Armageddon.

  During that week in Jerusalem I deepened the conversations I’d begun in Israel in 1988, which would later play a large role in facilitating my research on John Paul II’s efforts at Catholic-Jewish reconciliation and his drive to establish full diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Israel. Now, Brad Roberts was inviting me to fill in for Harvard’s Samuel Huntington at a three-day seminar CSIS was sponsoring on democratization in the Soviet Union, right in the belly of the beast. I quickly accepted and another remarkable week ensued, which would decisively bend my work toward an ever more intense study of John Paul II and his impact on contemporary history.

  As our group flew back to New York from Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport on October 10, I tried to sleep, but the extraordinary experiences of the previous five days swirled through my mind. After years of fighting communism from outside, there I had been, in the middle of the Soviet capital, fomenting nonviolent revolution in a series of discussions
with men and women who called themselves the democratic opposition to Mikhail Gorbachev, whom none of them considered much of a democrat. It was exhilarating and frustrating, appalling and encouraging, the entire exercise given a sharper edge by the self-evident fact that we were under KGB surveillance from the time we arrived at Sheremetyevo until the moment we left the country.

  As I turned the experiences of Moscow over in my mind, the same question kept recurring: How had this happened? How was it that American scholars and human rights activists were in the capital of Lenin’s and Stalin’s communist empire, discussing with Russians the intellectual, cultural, and institutional prerequisites for its replacement by a democracy? What had happened to the communist project, and why was it crumbling right before my eyes, at its epicenter?

  Then the thought occurred: “The Pope and the Church must have had something to do with this.”

  The next day, I called my editor at Oxford University Press, Cynthia Read, and as we met over drinks that evening I made a proposal: John Paul II and the Catholic Church must have had something to do with the communist crack-up; I wanted to figure out what that something was; and I thought it would make a good book for OUP. Cynthia was sold on the spot.

  Thus a late-night thought on a plane returning to America from a place I’d never imagined I’d visit launched me on fifteen years of work that would eventually lead to a two-volume biography of John Paul II. In order to pursue that life-transforming thought, though, there were new worlds to learn, and that recent Muscovite experience to ponder more deeply.