Several months later, I called another New York neocon friend, Norman Podhoretz, and asked, “What’s a great long novel you think I haven’t read?” I was facing a flight to Australia and wanted to be prepared. Without missing a beat, Norman said, “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.” When I asked him what the heck that was, he said it was Franz Werfel’s best book and that I’d love it as a study of character. So I duly got it and between Los Angeles and Sydney I read two-thirds of Werfel’s novel, which I finished Down Under and have been recommending to friends ever since—all of whom, without exception, ask me what the heck The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (a novel of the Armenian genocide during World War I) is.
Thoughtful questions were raised during the book presentations in Sydney and Melbourne, but I had more fun with the media work. Australian television and radio are, like other things Australian, contact sports. And when I discovered that the prevailing local media mores dictated that I give as good as I got, I had a fine time, saying things I likely wouldn’t have dared say in a US, Canadian, or British context. This was particularly true of my exchanges with John Paul’s chief (and relentless) Aussie critic, Paul Collins, a former priest whose book title, The Modern Inquisition, rather telegraphed his punch. Collins was a fixture on the radio service of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, attacked me (and the Pope) with gusto, and seemed a bit taken aback when I riposted, at one point, “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard”—after which I demonstrated from the facts precisely what I meant, in the kind of pushback he’d evidently not received before. A notable exception to the monochromatic portside tilt of the Australian media was Sydney-based columnist Miranda Devine, with whom I had an enjoyable conversation that produced a thoughtful article about John Paul II.
It wasn’t all media combat in Oz. In Melbourne, I reconnected with my oldest friend, George Pell, then the city’s archbishop and shortly thereafter to become Archbishop of Sydney and a cardinal. In another providential “coincidence,” Pell had come to my Baltimore parish as a newly ordained priest, heading for graduate studies at Oxford, in the summer of 1967 and over a few months became close to my entire family. George’s sister Margaret, then a violinist with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, accompanied the two of us on a visit to the Healesville Sanctuary, where the strange and wondrous local fauna were on full display. I rather liked the wallabies and platypuses, didn’t see much in the wombats, was informed by the Archbishop of Melbourne that all those cute koalas were stoned by midmorning from chewing coca leaves—and could only imagine what Darwin would have written about the striking evolutionary accomplishments of the proto-rat on the island-continent.
ERASMUS, THE ETHEREAL SPANISH PYRENEES, AND A REPORT TO THE POPE
NEW YORK, PAMPLONA, AND ROME, NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2000
TWO WEEKS AFTER RETURNING TO THE US FROM AUSTRALIA VIA Singapore and Rome—having flown to Oz via Los Angeles, I thought I might as well make the complete circuit—I gave the fourteenth Erasmus Lecture at the Institute on Religion and Public Life in New York, at the invitation of Richard Neuhaus. It seemed an appropriate occasion to expand some of the arguments I had made in Witness to Hope about John Paul II’s approach to world politics into an appraisal of the Holy See’s role in the world, and the twenty-first-century papacy’s.
In my lecture, I argued that the only real power that the Bishop of Rome wields in twenty-first-century global affairs is moral power: the power of moral argument and moral witness to bend the course of events in a more humane direction, through the work of individuals (and not only Catholics) who are persuaded by those arguments and moved by that witness. The recent examples of this form of exercising moral power with real effect seemed obvious. First and foremost, there was John Paul’s role in the Revolution of 1989, which had nothing to do with Vatican diplomacy in the conventional sense and everything to do with planting the “forest of awakened consciences” that Józef Tischner (who died five months earlier) had celebrated. Then there was John Paul’s impact on the 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and Development and the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women: there, the traditional instruments of Vatican diplomacy were deployed with effect after a global campaign of moral argument and witness, blunting efforts by the Clinton administration and the UN to get abortion on demand defined as a fundamental human right.
There was a tension here, though. The Holy See’s exchange of diplomatic representation with more than 170 states was a long-sanctioned feature of international law and diplomatic practice and a useful tool in safeguarding the interests of the Church and its people in circumstances where Catholics were under cultural or political pressure. Moreover, in protecting its own the Church was protecting civil society and building barriers against the totalitarian temptation. Yet in this exchange of diplomatic recognition, was there a tacit pressure to play by the normal, worldly rules of the game, a pressure that cut against the new form of papal power as moral suasion and witness? That, arguably, was one cautionary lesson to be learned from the Ostpolitik of Paul VI and Agostino Casaroli: playing by the world’s rules could make matters worse. How could the “post-Constantinian” papacy emerging from Vatican II and the pontificate of John Paul II be both a player in the game of power and a moral witness?
No successful resolution of this ambiguity was foreseeable, I concluded. The power of papal moral witness ought to be deployed whenever possible. Yet the Holy See ought to remain engaged in the grubby business of world politics, not for its own sake but for the world’s. And to what end? Not to be a player but to keep alive the notion that “politics,” rightly understood, means mutual deliberation about the oughts and the goods of our common life, thus ensuring—or at least trying to ensure—that politics does not completely degenerate into an exercise of the will to power.
The day after Thanksgiving, I flew to Spain to give a lecture at the University of Navarra in Pamplona and hold a press conference for further discussion of Witness to Hope. My host, Dr. Alfonso Nieto of the university’s faculty of communications, was the soul of hospitality, meeting me at the airport in Bilbao, driving me to San Sebastián for an exquisite lunch overlooking the Bay of Biscay, and then taking me to Pamplona, the city of the running bulls, where I spent two days. On Sunday, we drove up to Roncesvalles, one of the starting points for the pilgrimage road to Santiago, where I saw the tomb of King Sancho el Fuerte and was given an extensive tour of the Royal Collegiate Church by its pastor after we attended Mass there.
Alfonso and I then drove further up into the Spanish Pyrenees, toward the Franco-Spanish border. The ethereal quality of those forested mountains made it seem as if one could hear Roland sounding his horn through the mists. Franz Werfel and his wife, Alma Mahler, had trekked through these mountain passes to escape Vichy France after leaving Lourdes—where Werfel was inspired to write The Song of Bernadette. Yet the extraordinary combination of forest, mountain, and mist seemed to make Roncesvalles and the territory north of it a perfect place for an epic poem—which, of course, it was.
On November 27 I gave a press conference in the auditorium of the University of Navarra; the university president breezily informed me on the way in that, although the Basque separatists of ETA had set off a bomb in the room not too long before, no trouble was expected this time. During the presser, the inevitable question of John Paul II’s possible abdication at the end of the jubilee year came up. My response was that the Pope thought of his office as a form of spiritual fatherhood and paternity wasn’t something you resigned, so it didn’t seem likely to me.
From Spain I flew to Rome to give papers at conferences sponsored by the Pontifical Council for the Laity and the Pontifical Council for the Family. Bishop Dziwisz invited me for lunch with the Pope on Wednesday, November 29, after the weekly General Audience. No sooner had we gotten into our seats than Dziwisz turned to me and said, “That was an interesting interview you gave in Spain on Monday—one doesn’t ‘resign paternity.’ A good point.” I thanked him for the compliment
and said, “That’s a nice intelligence operation you’re running.” The point in Pamplona, which I had made many times before, was that the Church wasn’t a corporation but a family, and the Pope wasn’t a CEO but a father. This somehow struck Dziwisz as fresh; John Paul gave me a whimsical look while this to-and-fro was going on.
With the US election still hanging from chads, as it were, the conversation inevitably turned in that direction. I said the important thing to ponder was not the Florida shenanigans but the fact that the country was split down the middle on moral-cultural issues; thus the Pope had been “unfortunately right,” as I put it, in his Centesimus Annusanalysis of where the next challenges lay for the democracies. I don’t think John Paul heard this with any satisfaction, for he still hoped that America would be different from what he already saw as a morally and culturally disintegrating Western Europe, thus providing an alternative model for the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. We talked about the “Catholic vote,” which I explained had far more to do with frequency of Mass attendance than any other factor, and discussed which bishops had been strong leaders in framing the moral issues during the campaign.
I brought the Pope a signed copy of Crisis and Reform, my friend Father Borys Gudziak’s book on the history of the Union of Brest (which brought the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church into full communion with Rome) and briefly described Gudziak’s remarkable work in launching the Ukrainian Catholic University in L’viv. After we spoke about the book and the university a bit, I asked John Paul what he hoped to achieve in Ukraine the following June. “We’ll see what can be done,” he replied. He was obviously looking forward to the trip, told us that he had been rehearsing the Byzantine liturgies he would celebrate, and spoke at some length about intellectual life in Galicia, especially L’viv (then Lwów), during the interwar period. A true son of his father, he kept referring to L’viv by its Austro-Hungarian name, “Lemberg,” or the even older “Leopolis.” When I suggested that, given Ukrainian sensibilities, he’d better avoid “Lemberg” and “Leopolis” when he was in L’viv, he smiled and suggested that old habits were hard to break. Fr. Maciej Zięba, who was also at lunch, threw in the suggestion that the Pope do a drop-by in Kraków while he was in the Galician vicinity; that drew an alas-it-isn’t-possible shrug from the Pope and a melodramatic groan from Dziwisz, imagining the mob scene he would have to manage under such circumstance.
Then we turned to the Great Jubilee. I asked whether it had met his expectations and John Paul replied, “It has exceeded my expectations completely.” He was particularly pleased with the massive turnout for World Youth Day in Rome, where, Dziwisz noted, there had been ninety thousand French youngsters: an obvious outgrowth of World Youth Day 1997 in Paris.
John Paul was happy with the recent and quite positive statement on Christianity by several Jewish scholars, Dabru Emet (Speak the Truth); I explained the connection between that striking sign of a new theological seriousness in the dialogue and the work of Fr. Neuhaus and First Things. The Jewish-Catholic connection put Bishop Dziwisz in mind of Baltimore’s Cardinal William Keeler, a leader in that conversation, and Dziwisz asked whether I was familiar with a “very interesting lecture on religious freedom” that Keeler had recently given in Lublin. When I replied, “Well, er, yes…” Dziwisz said that he “thought [he] recognized a few phrases.”
John Paul had long since finished Witness to Hope. He asked about sales in the various language editions and said, once again, “It is so big,” to which I replied, as always, “That’s your fault, not mine.” I mentioned that the English-language paperback edition that would be published in the spring of 2001 included a section on the jubilee. I also noted that I’d been in Jerusalem during the jubilee Holy Land pilgrimage and the Pope started joking about my “becoming a Vaticanista,” to which I replied in mock horror, “That’s the first unkind thing you’ve ever said about me.”
I was the last one out of the dining room. John Paul gave me a long hug, we spoke of getting together in the spring, and he asked to be remembered to Joan and the children. As we were leaving the apartment, I noticed that, as usual, he was back in the chapel.
VIA CRUCIS
On the evening of October 12, 2003, the Sala Clementina of the Apostolic Palace became the “studio” for a silver jubilee salute to Pope John Paul II, hosted by Poland’s public television channel, TVP1. Some 150 invited guests formed the studio audience: senior members of the Roman Curia, diplomats accredited to the Holy See, men and women from the Roman Polonia. The Sala Clementina was video-linked to sites in Poland: Warsaw, Kraków, Wadowice, Częstochowa. TVP1’s host, Piotr Kraśko, was joined at the anchor position in the Sala Clementina by Professor Rocco Buttiglione; Cardinals Angelo Sodano, Achille Silvestrini, and Roger Etchegaray; and me. We were told that John Paul would watch the program on a closed-circuit link to the papal apartment.
Plans changed, however, as the Pope, through the open windows of his chapel, heard the Polish children’s choir entertaining the studio audience one floor below and decided to greet them. So fifteen minutes or so before the program was to go live, John Paul II was wheeled into the Sala Clementina on a large mobile chair to greet and bless the children. He then asked to meet Piotr Kraśko and those with him at the front of the Clementina, so we queued up and walked to the rear of the hall, with me at the end of the line. When I got to John Paul and took his hand, his face was so frozen by his Parkinson’s disease that he couldn’t even smile. As he drew me into an awkward embrace, he looked straight into my eyes and without uttering a word seemed to say, “Look what has happened to me.”
I found it hard to say anything. Walking back to the front of the hall, I saw my friend Hanna Suchocka, the former Polish prime minister then serving as Poland’s ambassador to the Holy See; I pointed to my wet eyes, she started to weep, and I had to get a firm grip on myself before the program began in a minute or two.
The last four years of my conversation with Pope John Paul II unfolded along a Via Crucis, a way of the cross. There were the serious discussions and moments of gaiety to which I was accustomed. But there were also times of tension, suffering, and pain: in the aftermath of 9/11; during the Long Lent of 2002, when revelations of the sexual abuse of the young ripped through the Church in the United States; in the months before the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003; when the Pope learned that Ronald Reagan had no memory of ever being President of the United States; as John Paul went through his own dark night of suffering from the combined effects of Parkinson’s and severe arthritis in his knees; when my father died. During these moments, I saw Karol Wojtyła become ever more the Carmelite he once imagined he might be: the Christian disciple who conforms his life, not without difficulty, to the crucified Christ—and who finds in the embrace of the Cross the key that unlocks the door to the Father’s house.
UNDER THE GOLDEN DOME
NOTRE DAME, FEBRUARY 2001
I N LATE 2000 I GOT AN INVITATION FROM FRIENDS ON THE UNIVERSITY of Notre Dame faculty to come to their campus for what they hoped would be a debate about John Paul II with Father Richard McBrien, the former chairman of the Notre Dame theology department and a stringent critic of John Paul and his pontificate. Fr. McBrien and I had played dueling columnists in the Catholic press for years, frequently matched on the same op-ed page. But things were cordial on the rare occasions we met; I thought it might be fun to debate him and accepted the invitation.
Dick McBrien had other ideas. He didn’t want to debate me, he said. Rather, he suggested that we both make opening statements, with a chance to respond to each other, after which the floor would be open for questions. That was fine by me, and during the preliminary chat before the event, held in the library auditorium with former Notre Dame president Father Theodore Hesburgh, CSC, in the front row, Dick and I talked more about baseball than anything else.
The auditorium was packed, and McBrien and I said what we had to say from two lecterns on the stage. It was quite civil, perhaps even a little dull.
Then came the questions, which illustrated something important about what was beginning to be called the “John Paul II Generation.” Virtually all the queries were directed to me, every question was friendly to the Pope and the pontificate, and some were quite searching. It got sufficiently awkward that I suggested, at the end of several of my answers, “Perhaps Father McBrien would like to comment on this?…”
Then there was the book signing. Tables had been set up in an adjacent room so those in attendance could buy Witness to Hope and have it autographed, or McBrien’s Lives of the Popes and have it autographed, or both. The line in front of my table was out the door, and the line in front of Dick’s table was… not. Dick eventually left while I was still signing, and one of my former students walked him out. He later told me that McBrien asked him, “Who were all those people?” “Most of them were the theology students,” my friend replied, quelling what was evidently Dick’s suspicion that ringers had been bused in.
Ted Hesburgh came up after the un-debate and said, “That was wonderful. It’s exactly the kind of thing a Catholic university should do.” I wasn’t about to challenge Ted, whom I’d always liked, on his own turf. But to my mind the evening underscored the failure of the approach to Catholic higher education that he and Dick McBrien embodied—and that serious students, formed by the pontificate of John Paul II, were beginning to reject. The students wanted to explore John Paul II’s magisterium in depth and get to know the Pope from the inside; they weren’t interested in Catholic Lite.
I felt sorry for McBrien, one of the most prominent of the theologians who had gone into a kind of psychological schism after Humanae Vitae, maintaining a formal connection to the Church but convinced that its supreme pastors were teaching untruths. Things just hadn’t turned out the way he expected; the ratchet of ecclesiastical and theological history didn’t work in only one direction—another example of the John Paul II Effect.
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