Lessons in Hope

by George Weigel

  Perhaps the most interesting part of our conversation on the Catechism was his description of how it challenged the contemporary cultural situation. Modern intellectual life says that we have no real link to historical sources and our origins; the Catechism says that “the origins are present in a living way, because the fountain, Christ, is present” in the Church. Contemporary culture says that plurality is absolute; the Catechism speaks “in a very convinced way” about the unity of faith through time and space—“the Church speaks with one mouth, from one heart.” Late modernity is convinced that there is “your truth” and “my truth” but nothing properly called “the truth”; the Catechism says that “truth is necessary food for the human soul,” that “we die without truth.” And the culture tells us that intellectual life is ineluctably incoherent—that the various bits and pieces of the human experience can’t be fitted together—while the Catechism “solemnly and joyfully confesses the coherence of faith.” The archbishop also found it interesting that only the Catholic Church thought it important to say, on the threshold of the third millennium of Christian history, “Here is what we believe, here is how we worship, here is how we think we should live,” and in a comprehensive, coherent way. Thus a project that had begun in 1985 in an attempt to stop the bleeding in postconciliar catechetics turned out to be a unique, millennial confession of faith and a robust challenge to the shibboleths of a late modernity heading toward the intellectual quicksand of postmodernity.

  Archbishop Schönborn thought that the grave difficulties of Catholicism in the German-speaking world had a lot to do with his fellow academics. The German-speaking professoriate seemed determined to stand outside the Church and judge its doctrine from an “external [intellectual] standpoint.” But, Schönborn said, “this is not Christian. We are called, we have received a vocation, but we have not received a universal understanding.” Christ is not Archimedes: “Belonging to Christ, we understand—but it is his understanding we ‘put on,’ not ours.” The “deep difficulty of the German-speaking world is to surrender, intellectually and emotionally, and to bow the knee of the intellect before revelation.” The archbishop then said, a little sheepishly, “Maybe this is too Freudian,” to which I could only reply, “Well, we are in Vienna.”

  The day I got back to Rome from the Austrian capital, Msgr. Dziwisz called with an invitation to lunch the following day. After I’d arrived and absorbed some good-natured chaff from the papal secretary, John Paul came in at 1:40. After we shook hands he poked me with his cane, saying, “The Synod for America is over—are you proud to be an American?” Laughing, the five of us—John Paul, Dziwisz, Bishop Ryłko, the newly promoted Monsignor Mokrzycki, and me—walked into the dining room for risotto con funghi porcini and veal cutlets, followed by a sesame seed tart that the Pope, true to form, ate to the very last crumb.

  John Paul asked how my project was going and I told him that the “architecture”—the outline—was done and I would get down to writing after Christmas. As we discussed my conversations in Vienna, I got the impression that the Pope was quite concerned about the Catholic situation in the German-speaking world. Then we got back to working through the memorandum of questions with which we’d begun more than a year ago.

  There was the question of Padre Pio and the story that, when young Father Wojtyła had gone to confession to him, the Franciscan stigmatic and thaumaturge had told him that he would become pope. I asked the Pope whether he had ever met Padre Pio, and he said, “Yes, I met him when I was a student here in Rome, in 1947. I found him a very simple man. I went to confession to him. He was a very simple confessor: clear and brief. But my greatest impression of him was at Mass. He had the stigmata, you know, and he physically suffered at Mass.” Nothing was said about any predictions, and the Pope’s description of Padre Pio the confessor as “clear and brief” seemed to tell against the legends.

  I had wanted to get some things straightened out about John Paul’s interactions with longtime Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, as several of my predecessor biographers had written things that didn’t seem quite right. So I asked John Paul point-blank whether he had raised the question of religious freedom in the USSR with Gromyko at their first meeting, and if so, what was Gromyko’s response. There was no hesitation: “Of course, I raised it the first time—and every time. I saw him three times, and each time I spoke about religious freedom and the liberty of the Church. The first time he said that he was a deputy from Byelorussia and knew how full the churches were there”—meaning that this consummate liar was, in effect, asking the Pope what he was making such a fuss about. “The last time I saw Mr. Gromyko he was very worried about the American Strategic Defense Initiative; he was looking for the Church’s help against the United States.” Which, of course, he didn’t get. I then recounted the old saw about why the dour Gromyko never smiled: he had been told by Stalin in 1933 that smiling was counterrevolutionary and was still waiting for the order to be rescinded.

  Gorbachev, he said, was “of a new generation.… He thought that perestroika could save the Soviet Union.… He wanted to save communism ‘with a human face’”—a metamorphosis and goal that the author of Centesimus Annus, with its sharp analysis of the anthropological root of communism’s failure, obviously thought doomed because it was a contradiction in terms.

  I then switched to the beatifications and canonizations that were a hallmark of the pontificate: why? After speaking of John Henry Newman as someone “who merits being a Doctor of the Church,” he said he was simply following the teaching of the Second Vatican Council on “the universal vocation to sanctity.” As for the beatifications of the martyrs of the Spanish Civil War and the Cristero Rebellion in Mexico, which Paul VI had put on hold so as not to ruffle political feathers, John Paul was crisp and to the point: “I am convinced that this century needs a new martyrology. There are so many martyrs because of the Nazis, the communists…” Dziwisz added, “And Mexico,” and I said that the martyrdom of Father Miguel Pro, SJ, during the Cristero revolt may have been the first in Christian history of which we have a photo of the martyr at the moment of death, as Fr. Pro, dressed in his civilian “disguise,” exclaimed “Viva Cristo Rey!” (Long live Christ the King!) as the firing squad’s bullets hit him. The Pope seemed to find the notion intriguing.

  This led to a discussion of Edith Stein, whom the Pope would canonize the following year as a martyr. She was, John Paul said, “a paradigmatic figure”: in her period of doubt, she embodied the twentieth-century crisis of faith; her work with Husserl was part of the turn to new philosophical methods; she was an early feminist; and she was a modern martyr. As we talked about her, it seemed that the Pope was determined to make the Church understand that we were living through the greatest period of martyrdom in Christian history, which ought to have a positive effect on the living Church rediscovering its vocation to mission. Bishop Ryłko suggested that I pray to Edith Stein to get the book done.

  We talked a bit about his work with old Cardinal Tomášek in Prague and his admiration for Václav Havel, and then turned farther east. I noted that the Pope had made a generous offer to Orthodoxy in the 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint (That They May Be One): that Eastern Christians not in full communion with Rome help him think through an exercise in papal primacy that could serve them, too. Yet there had been consistent problems since, especially with Russian Orthodoxy. “They’re not so easy to work with,” the Pope replied—and then suggested that I get in touch with Mrs. Irina Alberti, his personal envoy to Russia and Russians. I promised I would and the Pope kept pressing the point: “That’s a very big chapter—Russia, Orthodoxy.” I asked him whether he had read Vladimir Soloviev and he said that he had, confirming my sense that Karol Wojtyła and Soloviev had a lot in common: spiritually, intellectually, and in their sense that the future of a world threatened by militant secularisms depended on the reestablishment of full communion between Catholicism and Orthodoxy.

  An inquiry about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whom the P
ope said he’d met “once or twice,” started a free-for-all between Dziwisz and Ryłko about the relative merits of Solzhenitsyn’s novels, with both finally agreeing that Cancer Ward was the best of them. I suggested that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich ought to be read by every high school student in the world and the 264th Bishop of Rome agreed.

  Two days later, Msgr. Dziwisz gave me a behind-the-scenes tour of the papal apartment. John Paul, who cared nothing for his physical surroundings, had changed “very little” since moving into the apartment, Dziwisz said. The Pope’s formal office had only one photograph, of Cardinal Sapieha. There was an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe on his desk, presumably because of the recent Synod for America; the desk itself faced a large icon of the Black Madonna. The Pope’s bedroom was similarly spare, and the only photo in it was a small, simply framed portrait of his parents, taken shortly after their wedding. The small table on which that photo was displayed also had several large photo books of nature scenes; Dziwisz said John Paul like to look through books like these, I expect because they fired his poet’s imagination. On the back wall was a map of the Diocese of Rome, indicating all its parishes; the ones the Pope had visited were marked with a pin.

  I was then taken up to the solarium on the roof of the Apostolic Palace, built by Paul VI and constructed in such a way that tourists in the square below can’t see anyone walking up there on a sunny day. John Paul had added a modern set of Stations of the Cross, which he prayed every Friday and every day during Lent, when weather permitted. The view was quite fantastic and on a clear day the Pope could look out to the Castelli Romani and see Castel Gandolfo.

  THE ISLAND PRISON

  CUBA, JANUARY 1998

  ON JANUARY 2, 1998, I WENT TO MASS AT MY PARISH, HAD A QUICK breakfast, sat down at the desk my wife had designed for easy access to my working materials, said a brief prayer—and began writing.

  I’d been much impressed with the narrative drive of Edmund Morris’s book The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and wanted my biography to begin with the kind of gripping prologue Morris had written. So I began with a story from the long dark night of occupation in Kraków, briefly summarized the drama of Karol Wojtyła’s life and what could seem the paradoxes in it, and then laid down the book’s basic assertion: John Paul II, a radically converted Christian disciple, could only be understood from inside the convictions that were the source of his personality, his thought, and his action.

  It was good to be actually writing after a year and a half of research. Two and a half weeks later, however, I abandoned my desk for eight days in Cuba with John Paul II.

  Getting there was not entirely easy. I had an anti-Castro paper trail behind me and there were some problems with my visa until it was quietly explained to the Cuban authorities that blocking the Pope’s biographer from entering the country would not set a good tone for the papal pilgrimage. With that resolved, I flew to Havana from New York with the group accompanying Cardinal John O’Connor, which included such other friends as Mario Paredes, the Chilean-born director of the Northeast Hispanic Catholic Center; Fr. Richard Neuhaus; and my former vice president at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Robert Royal. We got to the Cuban capital in the early evening of January 20, where there was one instructive moment. Mario Paredes waited until the rest of our group had gotten through immigration so that he could handle any problems that might arise. Then he went through, carrying a large case. The Cuban official couldn’t recognize what was in it from the X-ray, so he asked Mario to open the case. Inside was a large gold chalice that Cardinal O’Connor intended to leave in Cuba as a gift for the Church there. The Cuban official, thinking it a trophy, asked what soccer team it had been awarded to.

  The next morning, Neuhaus, Paredes, Royal, and I walked through Old Havana, which showed the telltale signs of communist economic catastrophe: government office windows held together by duct tape; streets and sidewalks crumbling; pharmacy shelves bereft of even aspirin. There was an array of American cars from the late 1950s, which inventive Cubans kept running by cannibalizing parts from other cars that had fallen to pieces. But if you subtracted the old DeSotos and Dodges and added some bottles of aspirin to the pharmacy shelves, it wasn’t entirely unlike some of the rougher patches of Warsaw in 1991. What was appalling about Havana was the ubiquity of crude, cartoonish propaganda, displayed on innumerable billboards and posters, most of which mocked the awful Yanquis. The ne plus ultra of this juvenile idiocy was the Museum of the Revolution; its most obscene object was the burlap bag in which Che Guevara had been carried through the Bolivian jungle after his execution, displayed in obvious imitation of the Shroud of Turin.

  The Pope arrived that afternoon and went to Santa Clara the following day; the detail from that Mass for families came later in the evening from another old friend, Luis Lugo, who had been born in the city and once played baseball on the field where the Pope celebrated Mass. While Luis was revisiting his childhood haunts, Fr. Neuhaus, Father Robert Sirico, Mario Paredes, and I went to lunch at La Terraza de Cojimar, a Hemingway hangout near the cove where Papa’s old man set off for the sea. A creaky black-and-white TV in the restaurant was showing the conclusion of the papal Mass in Santa Clara when we arrived. The proprietor heard the four of us speaking English, came over, and asked whether we were in Cuba for the papal visit. We said that we were and he began weeping. He had tried to hold his family together as Catholics for almost forty years of communism; to hear the Pope preaching in Cuba about the importance of the family made it all seem worthwhile, and he just had to tell people he thought would understand.

  Later that afternoon, I went to the Miramar neighborhood where my parents spent their honeymoon in 1949 and found the house in which they stayed, which in those days belonged to the family of a cousin of my mother’s who had married a Cuban; the family later lost everything in the Revolution and came to Baltimore. When I showed my Cuban-American cousins a photo of the building after I returned to the US, they barely recognized it for the decay.

  At 5 a.m. the next morning, I left for the airport to fly with Cardinal O’Connor and two dozen or so others to Camagüey, in central Cuba, where the Pope was celebrating the visit’s designated Mass for young people. A generous benefactor from Buffalo had arranged for the cardinal to use what was called a “Cuban executive jet.” It was no Gulfstream, however, but a Russian junker known as a Yak-40. The door into the passenger compartment didn’t close flush with the fuselage; the bulkheads were made of linoleum; the seats were wretched, even by airline standards; half my seat belt came off in my hand when I tried to fasten it. But it got us to Camagüey, where Mass would be held at a sports complex fronting onto a vast open field a fifteen-minute bus ride from the airport.

  There was a jury-rigged sacristy near the large raised platform on which the Pope would celebrate Mass, and I found myself carried in there with the cardinals, bishops, and priests in our group. It was a hot day with a high sun, so I had the honor of anointing the head of my archbishop and friend, Cardinal James Hickey, with suntan lotion before he joined the procession of clergy forming up before Mass. I was hanging out with Jerry Costello, Cardinal O’Connor’s guardian, who was taking personal time off from the New York Police Department, and I suggested to Jerry that we work our way to the front of the Mass platform (which featured concrete bas-reliefs of El Jefe in his trademark fatigue hat) so we could watch both the Pope and the crowd during Mass.

  The roar when the Pope arrived was deafening, with some of the youngsters chanting, “Juan Pablo, amigo, take Fidel back with you!” The Mass and papal homily were moving and all seemed to be going well—until I got separated from Jerry Costello in the chaotic scrum after Mass and couldn’t get back to the makeshift sacristy, where I was to meet the rest of the O’Connor party to be bused back to the airport for our return flight to Havana. After forty-five minutes I was getting nervous, so I decided to start walking back down the dusty and barely paved road toward the airport, figuring that someone would notice I was
missing and turn the bus around to fetch me. I had gotten about a mile down the road when up over a small rise and heading towards me came the Popemobile, with John Paul and Msgr. Dziwisz in the back. They drove right past, pointing at me and laughing. Several weeks later, in Rome, I said, “Thanks for the ride in Camagüey.”

  My absence from the bus was eventually noticed and I made it back to Havana on the Yak-40, only to get up at 4:30 the next morning for a flight with Cardinal O’Connor and his guests across the entire island prison to Santiago de Cuba in Oriente Province: the romantic heart of the Castro cult. There, for the first time in almost forty years, the small statue of Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre, Cuba’s national icon, would be publicly venerated. It was a three-hour-plus flight, and when we got to the outdoor venue for the Mass, the Caribbean sun was even hotter than it had been the day before in Camagüey.

  The Mass venue was hard by a memorial to the Castro revolution composed of gargantuan steel beams thrust into the ground at weird angles, reminding me of the “asparagus” that Erwin Rommel planted all over Omaha Beach to obstruct the D-Day landings. Mario Paredes and I decided to watch the Mass from a building a hundred yards or so away from the papal altar; the half-finished structure had a veranda and some shade. There we heard the courageous Archbishop of Santiago, Pedro Meurice Estiù, welcome John Paul with an address that severely criticized the Castro regime’s assault on religious freedom. Raúl Castro was sitting in the front row of the congregation, arms crossed and scowling; later that evening, I heard, the electricity in Archbishop Meurice’s residence mysteriously cut out and the house was electricity-free for several days. After Mass, the statue of Our Lady of Charity was processed around the site on the back of a pickup truck, to the enthusiastic response of a huge crowd.