I wrote back on May 5, thanking Dziwisz for his understanding and his kind words but reiterating my concern that the nuncio in Washington, Archbishop Gabriel Montalvo, did not “grasp the magnitude of the problem, its origins, or the great effort at reform that must be made if this crisis is in fact to become a moment of opportunity.” In a recent address, the nuncio had described the crisis as one caused by a few disturbed and aggressive people looking for money and by media hostility toward the Church. There were elements of both in play, I wrote, but to read the situation primarily through those lenses was “deeply flawed.”
On June 4 I delivered the annual Alexis de Tocqueville Lecture at the Catholic University of Portugal in Lisbon, speaking on “two ideas of freedom”—Isaiah Berlin’s and St. Thomas Aquinas’s—at the invitation of my friend João Carlos Espada. The following morning, João arranged for me to discuss John Paul II’s social doctrine with what he described as “two-thirds of the country’s GNP” at a luncheon meeting. The timing was not optimal, for Portugal unexpectedly lost to the United States in World Cup soccer that morning—a true shame, I told my shocked and depressed audience of Portuguese business and political leaders, because not that many people in America cared about the World Cup. It was intended as consolation and I hope received as such.
Joan arrived that evening, and after I did a little press work to help promote The Truth of Catholicism in its Portuguese edition, we explored Lisbon with Zita Seabra, a knowledgeable guide, before renting a car and heading out to see what could be seen in three days. The Fátima basilica site was a bit too much Tiananmen Square for my tastes, but it was striking to see the crown on Our Lady in which John Paul II had put the bullet recovered from Agca’s assassination attempt. Most impressive were the earthen huts outside the city in which the young Fátima visionaries had lived: small one-story homes preserved as they were at the time of the apparitions in 1917. There was a palpable sanctity about the place that had been less tangible at the basilica.
On our last day in Lisbon, we spent some time on the waterfront along the Tagus, with its colossal monument to Henry the Navigator and other Portuguese explorers who set off from that river, not knowing where they were heading but believing they had a religious and patriotic duty to do so. I was already wondering whether any of that moral energy was left in Old Europe; so, evidently, was John Paul II, who was preparing an apostolic letter asking the same question.
The 2002 Tertio Millennio Seminar on the Free Society in Kraków gave Richard Neuhaus, Maciej Zięba, and me the opportunity to fly to L’viv and the Ukrainian Catholic University for three days. On Saturday, July 13, we drove with Fr. Borys Gudziak to a summer camp the university sponsored so that interested high school students could spend two months immersed in English; I thought of my old friend Bohdan Bociurkiw, who had died in 1999, and wished that he could have lived to see the sight. The following day, before we returned to Kraków, we visited several historical sites in L’viv that kept alive the cultural patrimony first preserved by the great twentieth-century leader of Ukrainian Greek Catholicism, Metropolitan Andrey Sheptits’kyi, at whose grave in St. George’s Cathedral we had prayed shortly after our arrival.
The day after the seminar concluded I did one of Karol Wojtyła’s favorite treks, up Leskowiec in the Beskid Mały Mountains, with Piotr and Teresa Malecki. In the clean, bracing air of the Carpathians, the Long Lent of 2002 seemed far away. But it wasn’t, as I was returning to the US and the publication of the book in which I tried to make sense of it all from a religious and theological point of view. More happily, there was also World Youth Day 2002 in Toronto, where I worked with NBC throughout the papal visit.
There were many memorable moments in WYD 2002, including a showing of Witness to Hope, the film, as part of the program, but the real drama came on Sunday. The weather in the early morning was vile, with rain and high winds. Up at 4 a.m., I was driven to the Mass site, Downsview Park in the northern part of the city, by an NBC car. The network television crews were stashed in a four-story-tall tubular steel structure with a clear view of the massive field and the papal altar, and the NBC section of this not-altogether-reassuring platform was on the top floor. Keith Miller and I were the NBC team, and at one point everything almost came to grief. There was plastic sheeting on the side of the platform behind the cameras and similar sheeting behind Keith and me, theoretically protecting us from the elements as we stood with our backs to the site. Someone decided to open the sheeting behind Keith and me to improve the shot, just as a gust of wind blew into the platform. The sheeting behind the cameras acted like a plastic sail, and the whole thing started tilting ominously. Keith and I continued our on-air conversation while technicians and cameramen with box cutters ripped open the “sail” behind the cameras before the platform crashed to the ground, taking us with it.
Providentially, the weather began to clear just as John Paul II arrived. He was driven into the Mass site from the nearby helicopter landing pad by Popemobile, with Bishop Dziwisz, as usual, in the car with him. The muddy roadway took them just beneath our platform and I leaned out and waved, looking rather soggy from the rain. As in Camagüey three and a half years before, John Paul II and his secretary looked up, pointed to me, and laughed.
Thanks to the hard work of Dr. Manfred Spieker of the University of Osnabrück and translation subventions from the German cardinals, Witness to Hope was finally published in German in the fall of 2002. Cardinal Joachim Meisner wanted me to do a book presentation in Cologne before I did press work at the annual Frankfurt Book Fair, so I spent October 7 and 8 in the Rhineland’s largest city. After arriving and getting settled in an archdiocesan guest house, I asked for directions to the convent where Edith Stein spent her first years as a Discalced Carmelite. A brisk walk got me to the Cologne Carmel in time for evening Mass; afterwards, I knocked on the convent door and asked if the Mother Superior was available. Sister Ancilla a Maternitate Mariae was, and after I introduced myself and we established that my surname did not indicate fluency in German, she called in another of the sisters, Sister Verina a Corpore Christi, who had impeccable English. We had a fine talk for a half hour or so about Edith Stein’s experiences in Cologne and John Paul II’s sense of her importance; then the Mother Superior excused herself for a moment. She returned with several books on Edith Stein and the Cologne Carmel—and completely bowled me over with the gift of a relic.
There are no first-class relics of the martyr, whose ashes were scattered at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, but the Carmelites had found the wedding dress in which St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross made her final vows, almost miraculously preserved after the city’s destruction during World War II. Half the dress was used to make the chasuble worn by John Paul II when he beatified Edith Stein in Cologne in 1987; the other half was cut into very small patches that were then framed in glass reliquaries, one of which has rested in my study, with an icon of the saint, ever since.
The only two translations of Witness to Hope for which I wrote special forewords were the Polish edition, for obvious reasons of gratitude, and the German edition, because I wanted to make some points—chiefly, that the German-speaking world was missing John Paul II’s intellectual significance because it peremptorily dismissed him as a premodern mind, when in fact he was a thoroughly modern thinker with a distinctive critique of modernity. That foreword ought to have been the basis for the press work I did in Cologne and Frankfurt, but with the exception of a few Catholic journalists, the scribes were more interested in my views on whether John Paul should retire, on the Long Lent in America, and on George W. Bush.
After another month of talks about The Courage To Be Catholic—including a memorable evening at Boston College at which one prominent Jesuit theologian frankly admitted that he and others thought the magisterium of the Church taught falsely on issues like contraception and the ordination of women to the priesthood—I flew to Rome to follow up on my work there in February and April, to brief John Paul on the German presentation of W
itness to Hope, and to see what I could do to keep the lines of communication open between the Vatican and the Bush administration on the deepening crisis in Iraq.
The last was greatly facilitated by the friendship I had formed with the US ambassador to the Holy See, R. James Nicholson, and his wife, Suzanne. Jim was a West Point graduate who, after active-duty military service, studied law and became a successful real estate developer in Colorado; Suzanne was a talented painter whose charming watercolors graced the Nicholsons’ Christmas card every year. Jim and Suzanne came to Rome after Jim’s term as chairman of the Republican National Committee and quickly set the gold standard for the work of future US representatives at the Vatican.
Throughout the fall of 2002 and the spring of 2003, Jim bent every effort to prevent the breakdown of communication between Vatican and White House that had occurred before the 1990–91 Gulf War. This was neither easy nor simple, for at both ends of the telephone line there were misperceptions and flawed assumptions. But things would have been worse without Jim’s persistent efforts to keep the principals in conversation with each other so they could at least know and understand, if not agree with, each other’s positions.
My conversations with curial officials over nine days suggested that the learning curve on the Long Lent remained far too shallow. The Boston drama came to a first point of resolution while I was in Rome, when the Pope finally accepted the resignation Cardinal Law first offered in April. But I was told by knowledgeable officials that several key curial superiors, including Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, and Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, still didn’t grasp the nature and magnitude of what was afoot and continued to blame the mess on the media and the lawyers; one of Re’s collaborators described the atmosphere at the highest level of the congregation as “ecclesiastical denial”—an idée fixe that all these things can’t be true. That continuing incomprehension, plus the usual bureaucratic torpidity, meant that Cardinal Law’s successor was not named immediately, so a new beginning for the long-suffering archdiocese was delayed again.
On the night of December 19, Bishop Dziwisz called Bishop Harvey and asked him to invite me to the papal apartment for lunch the next day. Dziwisz also wanted to know what Harvey thought about my public commentary on the Long Lent thus far. Harvey told him about The Courage To Be Catholic, said he agreed with it, admitted that it included criticism of some bishops, but added that numerous other bishops supported my position. Not knowing what to expect, I arrived at the Portone di Bronzo at 1:10 on December 20, only to run into an incompetent porter, unshaven and glassy-eyed, who snickered when I told him that I was there for lunch with the Pope and called a Swiss Guard, presumably to throw me out. Fortunately, an elderly porter I’d gotten to know over the years came in and straightened things out, so I got to the apartment on time. Dziwisz greeted me warmly, joking about a recent Daily Express photo of what he called the “priceless” Pope surrounded by the millionaire soccer stars of Real Madrid, and took me into the usual waiting parlor. There I found Bishop Ryłko, who told me that he’d bought a copy of The Courage To Be Catholic in the United States in September, read it immediately, and thought it well done.
This was a great help at the table, as Ryłko proceeded to give John Paul and Dziwisz a brisk summary of the book, its analysis, and its prescriptions, in Polish, while I added detail. No one balked at the analysis, with the Pope listening intently and Dziwisz asking probing questions. One of the most controversial sections of the book was its linkage of the breakdown of clerical discipline to the “culture of dissent” that had taken hold in some US Catholic quarters after Humanae Vitae; I told the lunch company what had recently happened during the discussion after my lecture at Boston College, which rather illustrated the point. I then said that, while my friends and I would continue to defend the Church’s teaching, and the current generation of seminarians and younger priests had remained strong throughout the crisis, we simply had to have more bishops capable of articulating what John Paul had called, in his April meeting with the US cardinals, “the fullness of Catholic truth.”
There was agreement that too many bishops had fallen into the habit of talking about these terrible crimes and grave sins in excessively psychological terms; I said it was crucial that bishops speak the Church’s language, and thus “change the context of the conversation.” To drive home the point one more time, I concluded by saying that, while there were things that I and others could do—I mentioned Richard Neuhaus’s commentaries in First Things, which Dziwisz always read carefully—“only you can give us the bishops we need.” This led to Dziwisz musing that perhaps Richard should be made a bishop. I said Richard certainly would say what needed saying; Ryłko chipped in that “he is very courageous; he writes what he believes is true no matter what the cost.”
We talked a bit about my experiences in presenting Witness to Hope in Germany, and I promised to send John Paul the special foreword I had written to the German edition. The Pope then pressed me on whether there would be a Chinese edition of the book: I explained some of the difficulties but said I’d keep working on it. John Paul certainly knew by then that he wasn’t going to get to China, given his health and the recalcitrance of the government. Perhaps he thought getting the book there would be a kind of literary embassy to a place in which he badly wanted to bear witness, strengthen the persecuted Church, and do what he could to advance a reconciliation between the underground Church and the officially recognized Church, many of whose bishops had privately declared their fidelity to the Successor of Peter.
The conversation then turned in an unexpected direction, with the Pope asking me how President Ronald Reagan was doing. I said that friends of the former president had told me that Mr. Reagan simply had no memory of being President of the United States for eight consequential years. Hearing this, John Paul II looked stricken, and the sorrow on his face seemed to suggest he was imagining something even worse than his own infirmity—a situation in which he couldn’t reflect on his life because he had no memory of it. A long silence was broken by the Pope asking me to get a message to Nancy Reagan, assuring her of his prayers, which I promised to do.
We also spoke about the mounting crisis with Iraq, and while John Paul, Dziwisz, and Ryłko were clearly not persuaded that Saddam Hussein had to go, there was no resistance to my assertion that President Bush was a morally serious man who would take whatever decision he took with the proper sense of responsibility.
We then returned to the Long Lent, with the Pope saying that he wanted to read my book; having brought two copies with me, I inscribed one to him and the other to Dziwisz as lunch was finishing. There were Christmas presents for the family, including a strange, highly modernistic German pectoral cross (without chain) for me. After the usual baci e abbracci, John Paul went to his chapel and Dziwisz, wanting to talk more, walked me out of the apartment the long way, through the formal library. The Long Lent, he said, was a “horrible situation,” and I repeated my mantra about the imperative of strong bishops. When the papal secretary asked me, of the American hierarchy, “Who are the leaders?” I mentioned Cardinal Francis George of Chicago and Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver. At the door I got a bear hug that almost crushed my glasses on Dziwisz’s shoulder.
THE IRAQ CRISIS
WASHINGTON AND ROME, JANUARY–APRIL 2003
MY ROMAN CONVERSATIONS IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH OF 9/11 convinced me that the cast of mind I dubbed “functional pacifism” now dominated the Holy See. The Vatican formally accepted the just war tradition as the normative framework for a Catholic analysis of war and peace. But there was little serious just war thinking inside the Leonine Wall, and the results of that conceptual vacuum were not encouraging. The just war tradition itself was regularly misconstrued and misrepresented by Vatican officials, adding to confusion among politicians and in the media. The urgent just war questions being raised by the rise of global jihadism were not
being explored, and the issue of what might constitute a “just cause” for the proportionate and discriminate use of armed force under twenty-first-century circumstances was never seriously examined. Moreover, Vatican diplomats and other senior Catholic officials seemed locked into the conviction that the United Nations had exclusive moral as well as legal compétence de guerre, which was something the UN didn’t even claim for itself.
What this meant in practice was that senior officials of the Holy See had become “functionally pacifist”: to their minds, a just war under modern circumstances was virtually unimaginable. That this thought had not occurred to the jihadists, or to various bloody-minded dictators around the world, made no discernible difference to the analysis of the new world disorder one heard in many Roman circles—which was not so different from what one heard in Western Europe as a whole. For there, as Joaquín Navarro-Valls had warned, the immediate post-9/11 commitment to resist jihadism quickly melted away.
In the world media and on the Euro-left, this had led to something else Navarro feared: John Paul II was being interpreted as a kind of trophy chaplain to what styled itself a “peace movement” but was in fact an anti-American-power coalition, whose raucousness I had observed on the streets of London in mid-February. As Navarro rightly insisted, John Paul understood his role in world politics in different terms than those hollering “No blood for oil.” His task, as he saw it, was to keep pressing all parties toward a diplomatic resolution of their differences while recognizing that the decision as to when those efforts were futile, even counterproductive, was not his to make. That struck me as exactly right, as I tried to explain to friends in the Bush administration who sometimes read the Pope exclusively through the prism of his diplomats’ statements.
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