Lessons in Hope

by George Weigel

  After the rough cut had been honed down to the final product, all that remained was to dub in the script, which I worked over extensively with Judy. René Auberjonois, whom I remembered as Dago Red (the chaplain, Father Mulcahy) in the movie M*A*S*H, agreed to be the narrator, and I prepared for him a phonetic pronunciation guide to the Italian, Latin, and Polish terms and names in the film. Still, Cathy and Judy thought I ought to be in the studio in New York when René did the job, so up to the Big Apple I went.

  René was sitting on a couch outside the recording studio when I arrived and I couldn’t help myself in greeting him: “Dago Red!” He took it in good humor and was a pleasure to work with during a session that lasted far longer than the film’s two hours, as René, a true professional, went back over the pronunciations and other ticklish bits time and again. The result was a film I thought could be shown and seen with pride.

  The one skeptic about the film had been Bishop Dziwisz. Cathy and Judy wanted an interview with John Paul; Dziwisz nixed that and told me more than once that the project made him “nervous.” I assured him it would turn out fine but his skeptical nervousness continued: until, that is, he saw the film, after which he became a great enthusiast. So much so that, when Bishop Harvey and I walked to the pontifical board for lunch on May 30, the documentary was already showing, with sound muted, on the DVD player attached to the TV set in the dining room—and the Pope was about to be driven into St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981. Knowing what was coming next and thinking this was not the way John Paul II ought to begin his lunch, I said, twice, “Don’t you think we can skip this part?” But on it went, papal valet Angelo Gugel serving fettuccine carbonara while the Pope was being shot in front of us on the small screen. Neither John Paul nor Dziwisz seemed to find this odd. Spiritual detachment? Polish sangfroid? Probably both.

  We spoke again about the problems with getting a German edition of Witness to Hope done and the Pope suggested that I try for a Japanese edition, too; I said I’d look into it, but that the Japanese likely to be interested were probably English-capable. John Paul, Dziwisz, and Bishop Ryłko, who was also at the table, said that they’d appreciated the new paperback English edition with the material on the Great Jubilee of 2000, after which Dziwisz kept joking about “new chapters still to come.” It was interesting that, whenever Dziwisz, Ryłko, or both began their “new chapters” routine, John Paul listened with an almost plaintive look on his face, as if asking, “How long, O Lord?” When the two bishops quieted down, John Paul turned to me and confessed that he’d read Witness to Hope twice—first in English, then in Polish.

  There was some discussion about an approach to President Bush in the matter of stem cell research, an issue the administration was then considering; Dziwisz and Ryłko also said they’d appreciated the speech the president had made at the dedication of the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington. From the textual evidence, Ryłko thought that I had written it, but I explained that it was the work of Michael Gerson, the president’s principal speechwriter, who had studied Witness to Hope closely.

  We talked about what Maciej Zięba and Richard Neuhaus were up to, and then Dziwisz, out of the blue, started asking about my background. For what must have been the fourth or fifth time I spoke of Baltimore as “the Gniezno of America,” but as Archbishop John Carroll’s episcopate in Baltimore had been a mere two hundred years before and Gniezno (the traditional birthplace of Polish Christianity) had been a metropolitan see since 1000, I don’t think my historical analogy made much of an impression. Then Dziwisz wanted to know if I’d ever been in the seminary. I said yes, I had, in high school and college, before studying theology in graduate school as a layman. The good bishop then asked, whether jokingly or seriously I couldn’t tell, “Do you think you should have been a priest?” Deciding to keep it light but also wanting to make a point, I said, “Well, if I had become a priest, the Holy Father wouldn’t have his biography, would he?” I then spoke briefly about what had been a challenging discernment, at the end of which I concluded that God had other things than the priesthood in mind for me—a point I followed up with a letter to Dziwisz, who wrote back thanking me for sharing my story with him.

  The conversation then turned to the impending papal pilgrimage to Ukraine, and I asked the Pope whether he expected the local Orthodox leaders to replicate what he’d experienced in Greece: a lot of criticism beforehand, then a changed situation once he arrived and they sensed his respect. He simply replied, “Speriamo” (Let’s hope). This got Dziwisz going and he went on a mini-jeremiad in his straightforward Vatican Italian: “La chiesa Cattolica è sempre aperta, e gli Ortodossi sono sempre chiusi. Noi li chiamiamo ‘una chiesa sorella,’ e loro ci chiamano ‘eretici.’” (The Catholic Church is always open and the Orthodox are always closed. We call them “a sister Church” and they call us “heretics.”) It was obviously a sore point with Dziwisz, whose many fine qualities did not always include the forbearance of his master. In this case, I completely agreed with him and said so.

  We then talked about my experiences of the press after Witness to Hope and everyone seemed to enjoy the story of the “stupidest question” in Mexico City—“What does he eat?”—and my answer, “Food”—which I amplified in the telling to include “… especially dolce.” The conversation became more serious when I described the interesting discussion of the Theology of the Body that I’d had at Smith College (explaining why that was a surprising venue for such a conversation), and the constant questions about John Paul’s prayer life and daily routine. When I got through with the Theology-of-the-Body-at-Smith story, Dziwisz asked, “Is the Church demanding that people be heroic?” I said that I thought one of the Holy Father’s attractive qualities to young people was precisely his challenge to moral grandeur and nobility—no matter how often you fail, seek reconciliation but try again and never lower the bar of expectation.

  While Dziwisz went off to fetch some gifts, the Pope sighed and said, “Day off!” He certainly looked like he could use one, and with Ukraine on the horizon, I hoped he was physically up to a grueling schedule, working in multiple languages and liturgical rites in a diplomatic and ecumenical minefield. Dziwisz gave me a 2001 proof of the Vatican’s five-thousand-lire coin and Ryłko asked, “What is that in euros?” To which I replied, “Well, with this and another twenty thousand lire I can go out and buy my book.”

  At the Sesto Quinto elevator I showed Dziwisz, who immediately showed the Pope, the galleys of my new book, The Truth of Catholicism; Dziwisz looked at the title page and the table of contents and cracked, “There is no need for a nihil obstat!” (an official certification of a book’s orthodoxy). John Paul asked me to send him a copy as soon as the book was published and I promised to do so. On the elevator ride down, Dziwisz thanked me again for the film and the book, and, indeed, “Grazie per tutto.” I replied in kind and was off to the North American College for the Roman premiere of Catherine Wyler’s Witness to Hope film—which was being shown on the same screen as the Roman premiere of William Wyler’s Ben-Hur, for in 1960 the college had the most technologically advanced screen in the city where the movie had largely been made.

  NEW WORLD DISORDER

  ROME, OCTOBER–NOVEMBER 2001

  THE EVER-HELPFUL MARIO PAREDES ARRANGED LECTURES ON Witness to Hope for me at the Pontifical Xavierian University and the Universidad de La Sabana in Bogotá in early September 2001. Elliott Abrams, my successor as president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, had recently joined the senior staff of President Bush’s National Security Council; on hearing I was going to the Colombian capital, he remarked that it was “the most dangerous city in the world” and gave me the phone number of the US ambassador, just in case. The city was in fact riddled with security; every office building seemed to have private armed guards, as did the religious house where Paredes and I stayed.

  Mario and I spent an interesting ninety minutes with the papal nuncio, Archbishop Beniamino Stella, who opened the conversation by n
oting that I was “the one who made all the trouble with President Castro.” When I asked Stella, the nuncio in Cuba before his transfer to Colombia, what that meant, he referred to El Jefe’s denunciation of Witness to Hope in late 1999, told me that Fidel was angry at Joaquín Navarro-Valls for being so candid with me about their interactions, and said that Castro was using all this as an excuse for foot dragging on several issues involving the Church. I responded that such foot dragging was “the pathetic response of a paranoid personality.” Stella did not disagree.

  Stella also told us that Archbishop Giovanni Battista Re had had a fit when Archbishop Pedro Meurice had challenged the Castro regime, in front of Raúl Castro, in his welcoming remarks to the Pope in Santiago. Re evidently took Meurice aside later and said, “There was nothing wrong with what you said but this was not the occasion.” To which Meurice responded, “What other occasion do you think I will have?” Game to Meurice; and it occurred to me that Re, for all his efficiency, was nonetheless the Casaroli-style papal diplomat when it came to speaking truth to power.

  And there was more. Three months after John Paul was in Cuba, Stella was back in Rome and had lunch with the Pope and Bishop Dziwisz. John Paul asked, “Why did Fidel Castro invite me to Cuba?” Stella answered that it was a complicated business: Fidel respected the Pope (or what he imagined John Paul to be); he was a complex personality with a Catholic background; there were strategic considerations and there was the matter of the embargo. The Pope listened carefully and then said, “I still don’t understand why he invited me to Cuba…”—that is, if Castro wasn’t going to follow up on his commitments to open things up. It was not a statement of naïveté but of sadness and disappointment.

  The lectures at the universities went well, and I got some sense of the layout of colonial Bogotá, capital of the Viceroyalty of New Granada in Spain’s Latin American empire. As in other South American venues, I was struck by the rapid transition in this megalopolis between wealth and dire poverty, shanties cheek by jowl with wealthy neighborhoods. And I wondered again what it was about Iberian Catholicism, translated to Latin America, that had failed to set the cultural foundations for stable, responsible governance and the sustained economic growth that raised all boats. Might it have had something to do with the close linkage between the Church and state power embodied in the proximity of the vice-regal palace and the cathedral in Old Bogotá?

  There were direct flights to Bogotá from Newark, so I had driven to Newark International and left my car there on September 6. When I was driving out of the airport in the late afternoon of September 9, I saw the Twin Towers in the gloaming and, having taken my son to the top of the Empire State Building a few months before, thought, “I’ll have to take Stephen to Windows on the World the next time we’re in New York.”

  Thirty-six hours later, I was typing up the interview notes from my visit to Colombia when the phone rang. It was Fr. Scott Newman asking with some urgency, “Have you got your television on?” When I asked why, he simply said, “Turn it on now.” I did so, just in time to see the second plane fly into the South Tower, which collapsed a half hour later. Shortly after, there were reports of something terribly wrong at the Pentagon, so I called the EPPC office and, as none of the senior staff were yet in, I had the receptionist tell everyone to leave calmly and go home, and put a message on the answering machine saying we would be back in business as soon as circumstances permitted. We were back the next day, with the DC National Guard stationed in front of our building, a few blocks from the White House.

  On October 1, immediately after celebrating my father’s eightieth birthday, I flew to Rome for five weeks. John Paul II had wanted to include a meeting of the world Synod of Bishops in the Great Jubilee of 2000, to consider the role of the bishop in the Church of the Third Millennium; but the scheduling proved impossible so the Synod was rescheduled for October 2001. I hoped to use the occasion of Synod 2001 to continue old conversations and begin new ones, with an eye to the inevitable transition beyond John Paul II and the completion of what I had begun in Witness to Hope.

  On October 29 I had my first conversation in some time with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who thanked me for The Truth of Catholicism, saying “we need apologetics,” and then continued with a typically lucid and insightful survey of the world Catholic scene at the beginning of the new century. When I asked him what the key theological issues of the next two decades would be, he had an intriguing answer. In the West, he said, the “first problem” was a radical moral relativism born of a deep skepticism about the human capacity to know anything with confidence; that relativism also reflected a hostility to the very idea of truth, thought by the high culture to lead to intolerance and exclusivity because there was only “your truth” and “my truth.” Ratzinger then made the connection to 9/11: How was a West saturated in skepticism and relativism going to defend itself against people with a profound if distorted sense of religious “oughts”? Was happy hedonism defensible? Who would sacrifice or die for this?

  The cardinal was also concerned about the state of Christology, the Church’s reflection on Christ himself. If Jesus is “one of the illuminators of God” but not the Son of God, “then God really is at a great distance from us”—so perhaps the West’s sense of the “absence of God” was really a by-product of the “absence of Christ.” On the other hand, Ratzinger continued, “if we see this Christ crucified for us, then we have a much more precise idea of God, who God is and what God does”—and this was crucial for the post-9/11 dialogue with the Islamic world, which is really over the question, “Who is God?”

  Dealing with these challenges, the cardinal suggested, would mean putting the historical-critical reading of the Bible in its place as a useful tool but not an all-purpose guide: “The historical-critical approach is necessary but not sufficient,” he said, and if the Bible was not read with faith, the result would be the dissection of a corpse, not an encounter with the living Word of God. Ratzinger also spoke of the need to ground the renewal of moral theology in Christology, for Christ is the model of “man fully alive.” But he didn’t see any theological renewal coming from his native land. “Organized Catholicism [in Germany],” he said, “is a task force for the old ideas.”

  Joseph Ratzinger was virtually without peer as an intellectual analyst of the contemporary Catholic scene, but my five weeks in post-9/11 Rome were also full of interesting comments about John Paul II’s grand strategy for the future—the New Evangelization—from churchmen of various backgrounds.

  Peruvian archbishop Héctor Miguel Cabrejos Vidarte was one of several Synod fathers who told me that the New Evangelization would be energized by saints more than by anything else, and that those saints were most likely to come from the ecclesial “margins”—renewal movements and new forms of Catholic community—rather than from the Church’s formal structures.

  Cardinal Desmond Connell of Dublin, like Ratzinger, thought that 9/11 marked a watershed in the history of the West, forcing urgent questions on the global agenda: Could a “world without oughts” respond to the challenge of a “world of distorted oughts”? And if the West could respond, how could it do so in a way that didn’t turn “us” into “them” by violating our concept of human dignity and morality?

  My old friend Cardinal Francis George of Chicago had some pungent comments on the Synod’s discussion of whether the Church in the West should, following the Orthodox model, adopt a more “synodal” model of governance. Synodal governance, he said, was governance without headship; governance without headship was governance by committee; and “Jesus didn’t intend his Church to be governed by a committee.” Cardinal George also spoke bluntly about his first four years in Chicago, an archdiocese with a notoriously cranky presbyterate: “It’s not so much that they don’t want me as their bishop; they don’t want a bishop, period.” Evidently, he had found a note from his predecessor, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, who had written that Chicago was “ungovernable.” The cardinal also said that the recently
elevated Cardinal McCarrick of Washington, known for his Democratic political sympathies, had told him on the Synod sidelines that the only way to “restore American credibility in the world” was to elect Hillary Clinton president in 2004 with Wesley Clark as her vice president—to which His Eminence of Chicago had responded, “Are you out of your cotton-pickin’ mind?”

  Cardinal Lubomyr Husar, Major Archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, filled in some interesting details of John Paul’s recent visit to his country: the continuing recalcitrance of Orthodox leaders; the positive impression the Pope had made on many ordinary Orthodox laity; John Paul’s saying “I never expected anything like this” when he saw the crowds, ten deep, lining the road into L’viv from the airport; the “very strong” impact of the Pope’s deliberate use of old Slavic imagery and terminology to foster reconciliation and unity.

  Cardinal Joachim Meisner of Cologne argued forcefully that too many Germans “want to make the German-speaking world the norm… for the whole Church.” Meisner also thought that there was Teutonic snobbery involved in the German disinclination to take John Paul II, a Pole, seriously as an intellectual; yet Meisner said that John Paul knew German literature better than many Germans and was always quoting Schiller and Goethe to him. He also gave me one great story, which nicely illustrated the barbed wit that John Paul II was capable of. Polnische Wirtschaft—“Polish stuff” or “Polish business”—had become a popular if definitely snarky put-down in Germany, and the Pope was aware of this when the Archbishop of Cologne and several other cardinals were called to Rome to sort through a gruesome financial mess. John Paul drew Meisner aside on the way to lunch and said, “So, Eminence, do you think we have some polnische Wirtschaft in the Vatican finances?” Meisner was speechless; when the others asked what the Pope had said, Meisner told them, “It can’t be translated.”