Lessons in Hope

by George Weigel

JERUSALEM, MARCH 2000

  THE JUBILEE PACE SLOWED A BIT AFTER MY RETURN FROM ROME. In mid-March, I went to Mexico City for a presentation of the Spanish edition of Witness to Hope arranged by Mario Paredes: my first opportunity to be amazed by the beauty of the miraculous tilma of Juan Diego and its image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The book presentations in the Mexican capital went well and I was happy to get to know the able archbishop of the city, Norberto Rivera Carrera, a bold John Paul II appointment: a man of Indian heritage who had broken the racial and class patterns of previous Mexican primates. The one slightly odd note was struck during the press conference, which produced the strangest question about John Paul I had yet encountered. The brief dialogue went as follows: Q. “What does he eat?” A. “Food.”

  In December 1998, Joe Alicastro, a senior producer at NBC News Specials, invited me to become the network’s Vatican specialist. After some preliminary conversations about what this might entail, I decided to accept—and thus began a very satisfying professional relationship and a host of new friendships.

  Given my general public profile, I doubt that many people would have been surprised I had been invited to be the “Vatican analyst” of EWTN. But NBC?

  Talking with Joe and others at the network, I came to the view that the people I would be working with were professionals; that they respected expertise, which was what I was being hired to provide; and that my expertise would be useful in framing NBC’s coverage of Vatican affairs and John Paul II. It also seemed to me that this was a major catechetical opportunity that should not be ignored just because I viewed American politics through a different lens than most of my colleagues at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. On NBC, I’d be talking to people who weren’t already convinced about the Catholic Church and indeed might be hostile to it, and I might be able to clear up things that had previously been misunderstood, about both the Church and the Pope.

  My previous experiences with the mainstream media had taught me that a lot of its coverage of the Catholic Church and John Paul II was driven less by ideological bias than by a lack of real information. So my approach would be to provide real information, and my information would be based on real contacts with real knowledge, not on the niblets put out to uninformed American journalists by Vatican monsignori who would talk about anything, including matters of which they were wholly ignorant, over a cappuccino or two. And I would put that real information into an ecclesial context, not a political one—which meant that I wouldn’t be parsing everything Catholic in liberal-versus-conservative terms.

  Everyone at 30 Rock knew that John Paul II’s jubilee pilgrimage to the Holy Land was going to be an epic event, so I was brought to Jerusalem to provide background information for the entire NBC family as well as to do on-air commentary for NBC, MSNBC, New York’s WNBC, and other local NBC affiliates. On the flight over, I reread Evelyn Waugh’s experimental novel Helena, which was good preparation for what was to follow: Waugh’s novel is about the gritty reality of salvation history, and that’s what John Paul was going to the Holy Land to affirm. He was not just satisfying a deep desire of his own heart, although he was certainly doing that; he was reminding the world that the God of the Bible (as he once put it) “does not look down on us from on high, but… became our traveling companion.” This was a pilgrimage, and its primary purpose was to invite the world to look, hard, at the stuff of its redemption.

  It was also a personal triumph. John Paul had wanted to spend his first Christmas as pope in the Holy Land; the traditional managers of popes said it wasn’t possible, and for once he bowed to their lack of imagination. Throughout the pontificate, he asked his diplomats, time and again, “Quando mi permeterrete di andare?” (When will you let me go?) He finally got tired of the excuses as to why it couldn’t be done and simply announced, as part of the run-up to the Great Jubilee of 2000, that he was going.

  The very fact of his doing so made history. As I was being driven into Jerusalem on Sunday, March 19, 2000, there were two flags on virtually every lamppost, the papal flag and the Israeli flag: something many never expected to see; something some would have been happy never to see.

  I hadn’t been in Jerusalem in over nine years, but, with an NBC colleague who’d never been to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and wanted to visit it, I managed to find the way there on Sunday afternoon, through Jaffa Gate and the rabbit’s warren of streets in the Old City. The usual cacophony prevailed in what for Christians is the world’s holiest site. As before, though, I found it the easiest place in the world to pray: and not “pray” in the sense of reciting prayers but in the sense of practicing the presence.

  The next day, while the Pope was in Amman, was full of television. It was my first experience working with Chris Jansing, who would become a good friend; Chris understood that what was afoot during this papal visit couldn’t be dumbed down into sound bites, so we had a real conversation during our segments together, not just an exchange of one-liners. That evening I went over to East Jerusalem with my Toronto classmate Father Michael McGarry, a Paulist priest then running the Tantur Ecumenical Institute on the border between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The Palestinian restaurant at which we ate, Philadelphia, had an excellent kitchen and its people couldn’t have been friendlier. On the way out I saw a poster in which John Paul had been Photoshopped together with Yasser Arafat; the two of them were superimposed on Jerusalem and the poster proclaimed, “Welcome to the Palestinian Holy Land”—a variant on the “Palestinian Jesus” theme that Arafat had been retailing. Some people, it seemed, were going to do politics, whatever John Paul II did or didn’t do.

  The meetings I had in and around the television work were fascinating, if also occasionally puzzling and even disturbing. Over breakfast one morning, I described John Paul II’s efforts to get the Jewish-Catholic dialogue on a sound theological basis with a learned and kindly rabbi, a friend of Phil Alongi, one of the NBC producers; but I also sensed that alarm bells were going off in the rabbi’s head. When I asked him if that were so, and if so why, he smiled sadly and answered, “Because your sacred text is anti-Semitic.” I asked what that meant and he cited the gospel of John. When I replied that the polemics against “the Jews” in John’s gospel were the result of a bitter family quarrel and couldn’t be read as if they were the ancient equivalent of a 1928 blackballing at a New York men’s club, he said he found my formulation intriguing; but surely the way I read the New Testament was not the way the majority of Catholics read it?

  This intelligent man’s misinformation about the Catholic Church and its people was widely shared by his countrymen, unfortunately. One poll reported that 56 percent of Israelis had no idea that the Catholic Church publicly condemned anti-Semitism and worked against it. Thus it was clear, if depressingly so, that the sea change in Catholic-Jewish relations since the Second Vatican Council, which had been deepened and broadened by the Polish pope who called the Jews of Rome his “elder brothers” in the faith of Abraham, had not sufficiently registered in the Jewish state—in part, I suspected, because of the palpable anti-Zionism (and worse) of many of the Holy Land’s non-Israeli Catholics.

  The high drama of the visit was expected to center on the papal visit to the official Israeli memorial to the Holocaust, Yad Vashem. What would the Pope say? I already knew the answer to that hotly debated question, because on Tuesday night, March 21, I had walked through the rain to the Notre Dame of Jerusalem Center near New Gate, where the papal party was being housed. There, a friendly Vatican official slipped me a diskette containing all the prepared papal texts. I read them back at the Jerusalem Hilton, and while I was used to John Paul’s ability to seize a moment and say precisely the right thing, the remarks prepared for Yad Vashem were so striking, and so appropriate, that I felt chills go down my spine.

  Two days later, the Pope walked slowly and with difficulty toward the Eternal Flame in Yad Vashem’s Hall of Remembrance—and I remembered something Joaquín Navarro-Valls once told me: he asked the Pope whether he ever cried, and John
Paul responded, “Not outside.” He was certainly crying inside as he bent his head in silent prayer over the flame, no doubt seeing the faces of his boyhood friends who became victims of Nazi genocide, and no doubt hearing again the jackboots on the streets of Kraków. Then, having quoted Psalm 31 (“I have become like a broken vessel… But I trust in Thee, O Lord”), he slowly and softly spoke the words that put a stop to the previous caterwauling about what-would-he-say, as he taught the entire world an unforgettable lesson: “In this place of memories, the mind and heart and soul feel an extreme need for silence. Silence in which to remember. Silence in which to try to make some sense of the memories [that] come flooding back. Silence because there are no words strong enough to deplore the terrible tragedy of the Shoah.”

  Our newsroom felt the impact of those words, spoken with the weight of history bearing down on John Paul and on all who heard him: normally a place of bedlam, the newsroom fell completely silent. No one spoke a word.

  A few days later, I got a call from my old Wilson Center friend Menahem Milson, who had seen a lot in his life as soldier and scholar. “I just had to tell you,” he said, “that Arnona [his wife] and I cried throughout the Pope’s visit to Yad Vashem. This was wisdom, humaneness, and integrity personified. Nothing was missing; nothing more needed to be said.”

  The next flap involved papal vesture: would John Paul II wear his bishop’s pectoral cross when he went to the Western Wall? Some were demanding that he not wear it, to avoid offending those for whom the cross was a symbol of Christian anti-Semitism. It seemed time to clear that up, and I thought I had the man for the job: Rabbi James Rudin of the American Jewish Committee, a friend from the Jewish-Christian dialogues that Richard Neuhaus’s center in New York regularly sponsored. I called Rabbi Rudin and invited him to come on MSNBC and address the controversy. He was perfect. In “real interreligious dialogue,” he said, “we respect the other for what he is and we begin the conversation from there.”

  Then, off camera, Jim told me a story I’d have given gold and frankincense to have known when writing Witness to Hope. It seems that the Great Synagogue of Rome has a strict rule against crosses in the sanctuary, to the point that ushers with sticks will rap the knees of anyone crossing their legs. Rabbi Elio Toaff, the chief rabbi of Rome, was being bombarded by requests from his congregation that he ask the Pope not to wear his pectoral cross on the historic papal visit to the synagogue that Toaff was negotiating. So Toaff went to see the Pope and told him what was afoot. To which John Paul replied, in so many words: “Look, if I were coming to your synagogue as a tourist I’d be happy to wear jeans. But I’m coming as the Bishop of Rome and the universal pastor of the Catholic Church, and to make that and all that it means unmistakable I have to dress the way I always do.” Toaff went back to his congregants and announced that he and the Pope were completely agreed: the Pope would wear his pectoral cross. Small wonder that John Paul loved Elio Toaff—who, five years after the Jerusalem visit, would be thanked for his friendship in the Pope’s last testament.

  John Paul was scheduled to leave from Ben Gurion Airport on the evening of March 26; Chris Jansing and I were sitting on a balcony outside NBC’s Jerusalem Hilton newsroom with the Old City and the Dome of the Rock at our backs, ready to cover the departure ceremony live. We could see the papal helicopter leave the city and head toward Tel Aviv, so we settled down, ready to begin our coverage—and were informed that MSNBC would be cutting away to Seattle, where the Kingdome, a vast concrete mushroom of a stadium and one of the worst places to play major league baseball ever built, was about to be imploded. Satisfying as it was to see the brutalist horror in which I had once watched (and covered) the Seattle Mariners reduced to dust and ashes, it did seem an odd editorial choice: collapsing Kingdome trumps Pope. Happily, the explosive charges were well placed, the lucky soul who won the lottery to push the detonator did the job with panache, and down went the Kingdome—just in time for MSNBC to cut to Lod, the airport, and John Paul’s departure from a historic pilgrimage during which, as one NBC colleague put it, the squabbling children of the Middle East saw how an adult behaved.

  BACK HOME IN POLAND

  WARSAW, GDAŃSK, POZNAŃ, WROCŁW, AND KRAKÓW, MAY 2000

  ON RETURNING FROM JERUSALEM I WENT BACK INTO BOOK-promotion mode, with some interesting encounters along the way. In Miami on April 1, I had a lovely conversation with my second-grade teacher (then Sister Mary Francis Borgia, SSND, transformed by Vatican II into Sister Corinne Gmuer, SSND). Three days later, I met the senior religion majors at hyperfeminist (but, in those days, still rational) Smith College for an engaging discussion on John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. There were two trips to Rome in April and May to work on the documentary being made from Witness to Hope, four commencement addresses, and my first designation as Doctor Divinitatis. Then came the most moving of the overseas book presentations, during a whirlwind tour of five Polish cities between May 19 and 26.

  After a signing at the Warsaw Book Fair and a book presentation at the Dominican priory in the Old Town, I went to Gdańsk. The presentation at the Basilica of St. Nicholas included a splendid concert by the Cappella Gedanensis (singing Handel chorales and a Bruckner motet I once sang as a choirboy) and a dramatic reading of excerpts from the Polish edition of the book, Świadek Nadziei. A bit overwhelmed, I spoke with feeling about the spiritual link I felt between my seaport hometown, Baltimore, where Catholicism in America was born, and the Baltic seaport that gave birth to Solidarity. There were presentations and signings as well in Poznań and Wrocław (where the ladies in charge of the cathedral bookstore baked me a cake, so that we had tea-and-signing). In Wrocław, I had a chance to visit briefly the sites associated with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Edith Stein, both of whom once lived in the German Breslau.

  Then came Kraków.

  The book presentation and signing were held in the medieval chapter house of the Dominican priory, over the bones of seven hundred years of Polish Dominicans, and was covered by radio and television. By this point I had done dozens of Witness to Hope events, but the Cracovian presentation was the only one at which I teared up a bit, when I thanked my “third home” for its hospitality, its cooperation, and its gift to the world of its greatest son, John Paul II. Many of those who had helped me get to the “inside” of Karol Wojtyła were there, including a large Środowisko contingent, Halina Kwiatkowska, and Msgr. Stanisław Małysiak.

  Alas, Kraków was also the site of the only public protest of the book, staged by a gang representing the hypernationalist and deeply conservative Radio Maryja, who presented me with a letter condemning the book (and me) for what were alleged to be its (and my) misrepresentations of John Paul’s attitude toward Radio Marjya during his 1997 pilgrimage to Poland; the letter was signed by four academics, three of whom held the habilitation degree. I knew exactly what the Pope’s attitude toward Radio Maryja was because we’d discussed it: he understood the importance of the radio’s religious services for shut-ins and elderly people but was deeply concerned about its politicization and the more-than-faint whiff of anti-Semitism that the radio’s politics occasionally conveyed. So he decided to ignore Radio Maryja during the 1997 pilgrimage, not criticizing it but not mentioning it, either, while commending virtually every other pastoral initiative in the country.

  I reported all this in Witness to Hope (well sourced from those who had prepared the Pope’s 1997 Polish texts); the Radio Maryja people, who displayed some of the characteristics of a cult, were unhappy; and they wanted me (and everyone else) to know it. Their attempt to take over the Kraków presentation until I acknowledged the error of my ways was politely rebuffed by my Dominican hosts, who eventually escorted the protesters out of the chapter house. It was a first sign that ancient Polish animosities and passions remained just below the crust of democratic public life—a hint of what was to come, a decade or so later, in a rather uglier form that would have deeply saddened John Paul II.

  That unpleasantness notwithstanding, it was
a wonderful evening, ending with dinner at Kraków’s most notable—all right, only—Corsican restaurant, Paese, hosted by Henryk Woźniakoswki on behalf of the Znak publishing house, and including both Dominican friends and the Maleckis, Piotr and Teresa.

  On my return home, I wrote John Paul II a long letter about the Polish book presentations and mentioned an interesting contrast: whereas in Italy many reporters had begun by asking, “Why is an American doing this?” that question wasn’t raised once in Poland.

  LUSITANIA AND OZ

  PORTUGAL AND AUSTRALIA, JUNE AND OCTOBER 2000

  THE PORTUGUESE EDITION OF THE BOOK, Testemunho de Esperança, was published by Bertrand, a company that began as a bookstore in 1732 and later grew into a publishing house. Portuguese rights were acquired by Zita Seabra, the first European instantiation of a type I had known from neoconservative political circles in the US: the intellectually convinced Marxist who gets sobered up by hard political reality and becomes a committed democrat. Zita was the only woman in the higher echelons of the Portuguese Communist Party in the days when Henry Kissinger feared that Portugal would become a communist dictatorship. But she was so offended by the comrades’ behavior when power was in their grasp that she broke ranks and, at no small personal risk, became a supporter of Mário Soares, the Social Democrat who saved Portugal from communism just before communism collapsed in Europe.

  In the course of this political drama Zita rediscovered her Catholicism and became a passionate partisan of John Paul II—thus as a senior editor at Bertrand she insisted on their acquiring the book and then saw that a Portuguese translation was done in jig time. I was only able to be in Lisbon for three days in late June 2000, but the book launch there was well organized, Zita became a friend with whom I would do two other books—and I told Irving Kristol, back in Washington, that certain kinds of conversions were not only gestated at CCNY in the 1930s battles between Stalinists and Trotskyists.