Lessons in Hope

by George Weigel

But there were also subtle warnings. Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Casaroli’s successor, had once said (in the Spaniard Navarro’s presence) that the stranieri, the foreigners, really don’t “fit in well” at the Vatican, and I could expect to find that attitude replicated—which it was. This was not a matter of rascality, Joaquín insisted, but the “human framework” of Vatican life. That I should try to work with that rather than against it was a good lesson, first taught me by Msgr. James Harvey, that Navarro reinforced.

  Sodano’s remark was instructive in another way: it confirmed that the traditional managers of popes were still in shock over the demise of the Italian papacy. Moreover, they had yet to appreciate John Paul II’s approach to world politics. Many Vatican diplomats still thought of the Holy See as a third-tier European power, which meant they were still thinking in terms of the old Papal States. This led to the assumption (or pretense) that the Holy See had serious diplomatic leverage (which it didn’t). Unburdened by these Italianate fantasies, John Paul II was free to craft a more pastoral and evangelical approach: let’s try to change things (like the Cairo world population conference) through an appeal to conscience and, over the long haul, by changing political cultures.

  Some of this came into clearer focus six days later, on September 10, when I had dinner with John Paul at Castel Gandolfo and we began to work through a six-page single-spaced memorandum I had prepared over the summer: dozens of questions I proposed to get answered over the next sixteen months, before I started writing. It was three weeks before his appendectomy, but he seemed in good form, having just come in from a long walk in the gardens of the papal villa.

  He would mark his golden jubilee as a priest on November 1, so I began by asking him about his vocational struggles as a young man. He told me that he’d learned about the heroic priestly self-sacrifice of Maximilian Kolbe in the Auschwitz starvation bunker “very shortly” after the war; survivors of the concentration camps were among those who most strongly pressed for Kolbe’s canonization, he recalled. Contrary to stories floating around that he had once considered leaving the world for a cloister, the Pope said he didn’t think he had “a very strong vocation to the Carmelites,” but he did stress how interested he was in St. John of the Cross. He was full of praise for Cardinal Sapieha, “a real pater patriae [father of the nation] during the occupation: a great moral, religious, and national authority” (the papal voice rising on the last word). “It was so important at that time to have a man like that at home.” He described the aristocratic Sapieha as a man with whom his seminarians could converse freely, and seemed to enjoy reminding me that he hadn’t had “a normal seminary experience; it was clandestino.” He also spoke of his debt to the lay mystic Jan Tyranowski, who introduced him to the classics of Carmelite spirituality and to the Marian theology of St. Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort during the war. It was from Tyranowski, the Pope said, that he “learned the principles of the spiritual life, not so much from seminary.”

  His predecessor as archbishop, Eugeniusz Baziak, was reputed to have been a formidable and cold man, but John Paul described him as “a tragic figure, expelled from his diocese” by the Soviets as part of their postwar clampdown in what had become the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. “Sapieha,” the Pope said, “found it easy to be a prince,” meaning that he was at ease with everyone; but Baziak, while “a good man,” had “been more difficult to talk with,” feeling that he had to make a stern impression during the early 1950s, the worst period of Stalinism—“the most radical oppression, a very difficult period.”

  This led us to the question of whether his confrontation with the communists had intensified in his last years as archbishop. The Pope replied, with some force, that “it was a continual confrontation; they thought they could divide the cardinal of Kraków from the primate.” Dziwisz then jumped into the conversation and said, in Italian, that one couldn’t think about these things as episodic confrontations triggered by one incident or another—like the struggle to build a church in Nowa Huta, or a speech Wojtyła had given. It was always them and us, and everybody understood the situation in those terms. Here, the Pope interjected, also in Italian, “Si, erano loro e noi” (Yes, it was them and us). John Paul then continued: “The communists tried to be accepted, not just as a political authority but as a moral authority, as an expression of the Polish nation” (the papal voice rising again). “The communists tried to pretend that we did not exist.” None of this could be understood in Western political terms, by analogy to a government and its opposition, they both said. It was entirely different.

  Listening to John Paul and Dziwisz on this point and sensing the passion still there after many years, I got an experiential confirmation of the judgment I had formed long ago about the battle between Catholicism and communism: This was not something adjudicable. There was no fifty-yard line of coexistence between two utterly opposed views of the human person, human community, and human destiny. Someone was going to win, and somebody had to lose.

  We discussed his first social encyclical, Laborem Exercens, which “was very important to me personally” because “the first part is based on my personal experience” as a manual laborer during the occupation. When I later measured the distance he said he had walked from his Kraków apartment to the chemical factory where he worked, I discovered that his memory of the length of that trek, some four kilometers, was accurate to within a tenth or two of a kilometer.

  He obviously missed the academic life he had managed to continue in a constrained form while archbishop of Kraków. When I asked him whether he still read dissertations, he said, rather wistfully, “I kept reading them at the beginning…” (of the pontificate), but couldn’t anymore.

  THE INDISPENSABLE MAN

  ROME, 1996–1999

  CARDINAL AGOSTINO CASAROLI MAY HAVE BEEN “THE MEMORY,” AS Joaquín Navarro described him with reference to the first decade of John Paul II’s pontificate. And Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Casaroli’s successor as Vatican secretary of state, never tired of reminding people that he was “il primo e più importante collaboratore del Santo Padre” (the first and most important collaborator of the Holy Father)—a self-appellation whose repetition perhaps reflected some anxiety on the point. But as my research progressed, it became unmistakably clear that the indispensable man in the pontificate of John Paul II was the theologian he called to Rome from Bavaria to become Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

  They were something of an odd couple: a Pole and a German of the same World War II generation; a philosopher and a theologian; a former actor and a man one couldn’t imagine on stage; a thinker-sportsman-mystic who became a compelling public personality and a learned but shy scholar who was likely happiest when reading or playing the piano by himself. Yet they worked in harness for over twenty-three years, one succeeding the other as pope. And between them, they gave the Second Vatican Council what it lacked until October 16, 1978—a coherent, comprehensive, and authoritative interpretation that pointed the Church into a third millennium of evangelical mission, which was what John XXIII had hoped for in summoning Vatican II.

  In preparing Witness to Hope, I met with Cardinal Ratzinger five times over more than seven hours between September 1996 and December 1998. Rather than spreading out the story of Ratzinger’s contributions to Witness to Hope conversation-by-conversation, gathering them together will better capture the texture of my interaction with the man who became Pope Benedict XVI.

  From the very beginning, Ratzinger insisted that John Paul II was a man with an acute sense of the human dilemma in late modernity. It was “the problem of man,” Ratzinger said—and then laughed and corrected himself, “the human person”—that drove both Wojtyła’s philosophical work and his pontificate. This “passion for man,” as the cardinal put it, was at the root of Wojtyła’s confrontation with communism and later with secular liberalism: different philosophical anthropologies yielded different ideas of what “history” is and wh
at “redemption” is. And at the bottom line, what was missing from the Marxist and secular liberal views of the human person, history, and redemption was God: God, without whom “man” makes no sense, or can only make sense against himself and against his fellows.

  This passion for real men and women and the dilemmas of life in late modernity was at the center of John Paul II’s thinking and preaching, his mysticism, his pastoral work, his social doctrine, his approach to world politics, and his intellectual work. Or as Ratzinger once put it in his scholarly way, “Beginning with anthropology and searching for an answer to what is human existence, he comes to God—to the Trinitarian God of love—and returns from this to man, because his Trinitarian vision is not… a meditation on what is God in himself, but makes us understand how God is God-in-history. In the deepest mystery of the Trinitarian existence, we are also encountering the concrete possibilities that God, who is himself relation and dialogue, can create history, can be present in history.”

  This meant that, for John Paul, “Christianity [is] not an idealism, outside of concrete historical reality, but is creating community, creating solidarity.… Stalin asked how many divisions has the pope. But he has another power, the power of truth. It is very significant for [John Paul II] that he knew and understood the very different but very real power of truth in history.” And over time, Ratzinger suggested, people would come to understand that John Paul II had “made [the world] recognize once again the spiritual dimension in history”—or, to put it another way, the Pope had “made visible the fact that faith in God can be transformative in the world.”

  Above all, Ratzinger said repeatedly, John Paul II was a radically converted Christian disciple for whom prayer was the reactor core of his life, thought, and action. “His personal dialogue with God is decisive.… The deepest source of what he says is that, every day, he is, for an hour, alone with his Lord, and speaking, at least now as pope, about all the problems of the world. But he is also seeking the face of God.… In his meditations he is in personal contact with the Lord… this dialogue with God is the central element in his spiritual and intellectual life.”

  On three different occasions, Ratzinger asked John Paul II to let him resign and return to what was left of his intellectual work. Three times, the most consequential pope in hundreds of years asked his indispensable man to stay: saying, in so many words, “I can’t—or certainly don’t want to—do this without you.” And three times, Ratzinger bent his will to John Paul’s. Why was this?

  In part because John Paul, a man of strong convictions and equally strong will, also knew what he didn’t know, recognized in Ratzinger a deeper, broader theological intelligence than his own, and understood that a theologically uninformed pope was likely to get himself and the Church into serious trouble. From Ratzinger’s description of their modus operandi, John Paul listened closely to Ratzinger, who was comfortable enough with their relationship to push back when he thought something was theologically or prudentially inadvisable, while recognizing where the buck stopped, which was not with him.

  They lunched regularly for years, for, as Ratzinger put it, the Pope liked to hold working lunches that were quasi-seminars. Thus the dining room table in the papal apartment was the place where John Paul thought through the weekly audiences addresses he liked to structure thematically; it was a way, Ratzinger said, for this intellectual-turned-pope to have a “continuous work to do” amid the unavoidable fragmentation of his schedule. Major encyclicals were also hashed out over lunch, as were the two responses to liberation theology that John Paul II commissioned and Ratzinger’s congregation produced. So was the apostolic letter, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, on the Church’s inability to admit women to the ministerial priesthood.

  It was, in a phrase, all conversation all the time—a constant dialogue with serious intellectual collaborators that belied the charge that John Paul II was an authoritarian imposing a personal (and Polish) view on the Church.

  Cardinal Ratzinger knew that he played another role in the pontificate: he was the lightning rod, the man on whom opprobrium would fall when critics thought it imprudent to attack the Pope directly. By the time he came to Rome, though, he was pretty well inured to press criticism, having absorbed his share of it in a Germany where the press treated the tong wars among Catholic theologians as a gift that never stopped giving. What did aggravate Ratzinger, though, was what he regarded as the unfairness, even duplicity, that surrounded the ongoing debate over liberation theology.

  He was always the courtly gentleman when we met, another attribute he shared with John Paul II. The only time I heard his voice get steely was when I asked him to comment on the charge that there had been a second CDF instruction on liberation theology because John Paul II was displeased with the first one. When I posed the question, the cardinal looked at me and said, forcefully, “It is not true.”

  He explained the extensive consultation process that had gone into the first liberation theology instruction, which had to begin from, and deepen, the criticisms of this new theological method that John Paul II made in Mexico in 1979. But at the end of the process of developing the first instruction, and “having clarified what cannot be,” it was “clear to us and also to the Holy Father that in a second statement we had to indicate… a positive way.” That second statement, far from being a “correction,” was intended to deepen the Church’s reflection on freedom, which, in a luminous sentence I have to believe issued from Ratzinger’s own pen, taught that “God wishes to be adored by people who are free.”

  The other thing that seemed to aggravate and puzzle the cardinal was the recalcitrance of the Catholic left in recognizing that Marxism was an exhausted intellectual project that had done enormous damage in history. “It is incredible” would be his standard response when I asked him to comment on one or another theologian’s infatuation with Marxism. As for his own political views, they seemed far from the reactionary caricature that prevailed in the world press. He was, rather, a mainstream Bavarian Christian Democrat, which would put him on the moderate center left of the American political spectrum on certain issues of political economy. Ratzinger was probably a notch or two to the right of John Paul II—another European Christian Democrat, if such labels make any sense—but the cardinal laughed aloud when I told him that one papal biographer described John Paul as the last great democratic socialist.

  In these hours of conversation, Cardinal Ratzinger came across as a man of good humor who liked to laugh and was not averse to being kidded but rarely was because of the esteem in which he was held. So I tried to begin our interviews with an amusing story or anecdote, shocking him once with the fact that an American sister with whom his congregation was having some serious problems was once my wife’s ninth-grade algebra teacher: which led him to smile and suggest that things would have been simpler if the sister in question had stayed with math rather than venturing into moral theology.

  He always smiled or chuckled at his own political incorrectness, but also at the silliness of so much convoluted PC-speak when it came to philosophical and theological terms and concepts. He could also be rather dry. I once suggested that the difference between the Pope’s intuition of a new springtime of evangelization and Ratzinger’s sense of a European Church becoming smaller and purer had to do with the fact that the Bavarian Church of his childhood had been thoroughly destroyed while the Polish Catholic culture in which Wojtyła grew up was still more or less intact; the cardinal smiled, rather slyly, and said, “Well, we shall see…” The scholar was never far from the surface, though, and when I mentioned having seen a picture of young Father Ratzinger in a wide necktie shortly after the Council, he laughed and said, “You see, this illustrates the truth that the Holy Father taught in Veritatis Splendor, about the need to go from ‘phenomenon to foundation.’”

  While I don’t think Joseph Ratzinger cared a fig what anyone thought of his political views, the Panzerkardinal caricature of him as a ruthless, vindictive doctrinal enforcer was vicio
us and unfair, and may have hurt him more than he ever let on. Odium theologicum is a nasty vice in which his enemies indulged freely. It took its toll on this quintessentially gentle man and may have had something to do with his inability as pope to dispense with the services of men who betrayed his trust and served him badly.

  SPIRAL STAIRCASE

  ROME, DECEMBER 1996

  IN MID-DECEMBER 1996 ANOTHER MEMBER OF THE JOHN PAUL II inner circle became a regular part of my conversations with the Pope and a valuable intermediary with others: Bishop Stanisław Ryłko, a Kraków priest then serving with my old friend and former tennis foe, Cardinal J. Francis Stafford, at the Congregation for the Laity. Ryłko called on the afternoon of December 11, 1996, said that we were having dinner in the papal apartment at 7:30 that evening, and picked me up at the Sant’Anna Gate to the Vatican. We drove through the Belvedere Courtyard of the Apostolic Palace to the small and secluded Cortile Sesto Quinto, where we took what I came to call the “family elevator” up to the papal apartment.

  In the months since our last dinner conversation, I had been reading extensively in John Paul’s dense philosophical essays and wanted to make sure that I’d cracked the code. After we sat down I took two breadsticks from the table, held them about a foot apart, and said, “I’ve been reading your philosophical essays and I think I’ve figured out the method. Most philosophers begin here”—and I indicated one breadstick—“make a series of arguments, and end up here”—the other breadstick. “Your mind doesn’t work that way.” The Pope started smiling and I continued, having put down one of the grissini: “You see a problem or a question and start walking around it, looking at it from different angles. When you get back to where it seems you began, you’re in fact one level deeper. So you start walking around it again, only deeper this time. You get back again to that starting point, but now you’re two levels deeper, so you start going around the subject again, in a more profound way.… It’s not a linear journey, it’s like walking down a spiral staircase to get where you want to go.” At which point the Pope said, with emphasis, “Yes,” meaning “You’ve got it.”