Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  When Wojtyła entered this debate in the third session, the proposed declaration on religious freedom was an appendix to what would eventually become the Council’s Decree on Ecumenism. The archbishop of Kraków’s first intervention on the subject, on September 25, 1964, addressed religious freedom as an ecumenical issue as well as a Church-state question. Weaving back and forth between the ecumenical and public policy sides of the question, he laid out a sophisticated position, most elements of which would find their way into the Declaration on Religious Freedom the following year.

  Religious freedom, he began, touched the heart of the dialogue between the Church and the world, because religious freedom had to do with how the Church thought about the human person and the human condition. It was important, therefore, to understand freedom in all its complex richness, and not reduce it to a neutral, indifferent faculty of choice. Freedom, the archbishop of Kraków argued, was freedom for, not simply freedom against. And what freedom was for was truth. It was only by living in the truth that the human person was set free.

  This understanding of freedom led, in turn, to two conclusions about society. The first was that the state was incompetent in theology and had no business either authorizing or proscribing religious institutions. The second conclusion was that the communist claim that religion was “alienating,” and thus a legitimate target of state animus, was nonsense. The Council “ought to proclaim the full and integral truth about man, who is in no respect alienated by religion, but brought to completion by it.”46

  At the time Wojtyła entered the religious freedom debate, the argument was stalled at the level of Church-state theory—between proponents who were primarily interested in disentangling the Church from altar-and-throne arrangements, and opponents who were convinced that religious freedom was the opening wedge to religious indifferentism and subsequent governmental hostility. By putting the question in a personalist context and by showing how the transcendence of the human person, manifested in freedom, “faces” toward God, the archbishop of Kraków demonstrated that religious freedom could be vigorously defended without reducing “freedom” to a matter of indifference between opinions.

  Backstage maneuverings by the opponents resulted in the vote on religious freedom being blocked at the end of the Council’s third session. Thus the fourth and final session of Vatican II began in September 1965 with a showdown on religious freedom. Archbishop Wojtyła, as one of the proponents of a new Declaration on Religious Freedom (now styled, in Latin, Dignitatis Humanae), spoke in the first days of debate, sharpening the point he had made in the third session on the relationship between freedom and truth. It was not sufficient, he argued, to say simply, “I am free.” Rather, “it is necessary to say… ‘I am responsible.’ This is the doctrine which is based on the living tradition of the Church of the martyrs and confessors. Responsibility is the necessary culmination and fulfillment of freedom.”47

  Then, perhaps concerned that its opponents would, in defeat, claim that the only “authority” behind the declaration was that of human reason, Wojtyła submitted a written intervention urging that the document make an even stronger case for religious freedom as a matter of God’s revealed will for the world and for human beings. The declaration, he proposed, should present religious freedom “substantially as revealed doctrine, which is entirely consonant with sound reason.” It was the Council’s job to teach divine truth. If that truth was also clear to human reason, as seemed to be the case in states that protected religious freedom, “so much the better.” The world expected something more from the Church than what the world already knew itself: “The world is waiting for the doctrine of the Church, that is, revealed doctrine, about these matters….”48

  The Council Fathers evidently agreed. The final text of Dignitatis Humanae, which would help change the history of the twentieth century, reads as follows:

  The Vatican Council declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. Freedom of this kind means that all men should be immune from coercion on the part of individuals, social groups, and every human power so that, within due limits, nobody is forced to act against his convictions in religious matters in private or in public, alone or in association with others. The Council further declares that the right to religious freedom is based on the very dignity of the human person as known through the revealed word of God and by reason itself. This right of the human person to religious freedom must be given such recognition in the constitutional order of society as will make it a civil right.49

  Dignitatis Humanae included several points that had been urged by Archbishop Wojtyła, among others. Human dignity involves a “moral obligation to seek the truth, especially religious truth.” Knowing the truth involves an obligation to live according to that truth. This obligation to seek the truth cannot be fulfilled unless men and women “enjoy both psychological freedom and immunity from external coercion,” for it is by a free “personal assent that men must adhere to the truth they have discovered.”50

  The Declaration then took up Wojtyła’s challenge to ground religious freedom as securely as possible for Catholics, in the revelation of God which was the foundation of the Church’s life:

  One of the key truths in Catholic teaching, a truth that is contained in the word of God and constantly preached by the Fathers, is that man’s response to God by faith ought to be free, and that therefore nobody is to be forced to embrace the faith against his will. The act of faith is by its very nature a free act. Man, redeemed by Christ the Savior and called through Jesus Christ to be an adopted son of God, cannot give his adherence to God when He reveals Himself unless, drawn by the Father, he submits to God with a faith that is reasonable and free.51

  Finally, the Council took aim at the kind of regime under which Archbishop Wojtyła and other east central European proponents of religious freedom were forced to live, denouncing governments that “strive to deter the citizens from professing their religion and make life particularly difficult and dangerous for religious bodies.”52 In a parting shot at groups like “Pax” in Poland, which were urging that “secondary” matters such as religious freedom be subordinated to the cause of world peace, the Council Fathers concluded that it was essential, “to establish and strengthen peaceful relations and harmony in the human race,” that “religious freedom must be given constitutional protection everywhere….”53 There could be no genuine peace without freedom. Karol Wojtyła, longtime critic of the division of Europe under Yalta, heartily agreed.

  THE CHURCH AND THE MODERN WORLD

  While he did important work on religious freedom and, to a lesser extent, on the theology of the laity, Archbishop Karol Wojtyła’s primary contribution to the Second Vatican Council involved what eventually became the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. Schema XIII, as it was known during the first three sessions, was intended by Pope John XXIII and two of its principal promoters, Cardinal Leo-Jozef Suenens of Belgium (one of the four Council Moderators) and Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini of Milan (who was elected Pope Paul VI between the Council’s first and second sessions), to demonstrate that what the world aspired to and what the world suffered were “the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the followers of Christ as well,” as the final text put it. The Church lived in the world and for the world because “nothing that is genuinely human fails to find an echo” in Christian hearts.54 That the Council should affirm this seemed not only reasonable, but urgently necessary, to Karol Wojtyła, who had begun his suggestions for the Council’s agenda with an analysis of the crisis of modern humanism.

  Schema XIII, which would be known after the Council as Gaudium et Spes, from the “joy and hope” in its first sentence, had almost as rocky a passage through the Council as the Declaration on Religious Freedom. By the time the Council’s third session was in its fourth week, in October 1964, members of the Roman Curia were trying to get Schema XIII removed from the Council’s agenda altogether. Their efforts failed, although even Schema
XIII’s friends admitted that the draft needed a lot of work. Thus, with the strong support of Pope Paul VI, debate on “the Church in the modern world” began on Tuesday, October 20, after Archbishop Wojtyła had celebrated the daily Mass for the Council Fathers.55

  Speaking the next day, Wojtyła, who had previously been involved in preparing two major Polish Bishops’ Conference memoranda on Schema XIII, defended the idea of such a document in the name of a Polish episcopate convinced that Schema XIII had a “special timeliness.” Men and women of good will were eagerly anticipating what the Council had to say to them. The Council could not disappoint them. There were also those who claimed that the Church had nothing to say to modernity, and they, too, had to be addressed. But the schema had to take account of the many “worlds” that composed “the modern world,” which could not be limited to the advanced industrial societies of Western Europe and North America.

  Then there was the crucial question of approach. The “‘ecclesiastical’ mentality” with its “lamentations on the…miserable state of the world” should be shunned, as should any sort of magisterial “soliloquy.” The document had to reflect a commitment to “dialogue with the world,” and had to speak in such a way as to make clear that “the Church is seeking with it the truth and the just solution of the difficult problems of human life.” The document should take a cue from good teachers, he argued, adopting a “‘heuristic’ method [that permits] the disciple to find the truth almost on his own.” The Church had a proposal to make to modernity, and it should make that proposal through “the power of arguments” rather than by “moralization or exhortation.”56 In support of just such a revision of Schema XIII, Archbishop Wojtyła, in the name of the Polish bishops, submitted more than eighty proposed changes to the draft text during the third session.57

  By the time the Council reconvened for its fourth and final session on September 14, 1965, yet another draft of Schema XIII had been prepared. This final working draft, the foundation of Gaudium et Spes, had been hammered out in three lengthy drafting sessions in early 1965 by a subcommission involving key bishops and periti (among them, Professor Stefan Swiezawski of KUL).58 Archbishop Wojtyła actively participated in all three meetings, working in the subgroup that included Archbishop Gabriel-Marie Garrone, the Dominican theologian Yves Congar, and the Jesuit scholars Henri de Lubac and Jean Danielou.59 De Lubac, reminiscing about the “arduous birth of the famous Schema XIII,” remembered that he had “worked side by side” with the archbishop of Kraków and that “it did not take long to discover in him a person of the very highest qualities.”60 The regard was mutual. Work on Schema XIII was the beginning of a “special friendship” between Wojtyła and de Lubac, the young archbishop being encouraged by the support of the venerable theologian, who prior to the Council had been the object of severe criticism in Rome.61 But it was the French Dominican, Father Congar, also under suspicion throughout the 1950s for his writings on the nature of the Church and on ecumenism, who left a striking written recollection of Karol Wojtyła as a partner in drafting Gaudium et Spes. Congar kept a diary, and its entry for February 2, 1965, describes Wojtyła’s work at a meeting in Ariccia, outside Rome:

  At the afternoon meeting, which was devoted to discussion of the second chapter, Bishop Wojtyła made a few remarkable comments. “One exclusively considers here,” he said, “the problems and questions that have arisen from the new situation of the world…. However, the contemporary world also gives some answers to these questions, and it is necessary for us to consider these answers as well, because they conflict with the Church’s answers. In the text that has been presented to us, there is no reference to the answers that the contemporary world is offering, and no discussion about the problems that are created because of these conflicting answers.”

  Wojtyła made a remarkable impression. His personality dominates. Some kind of animation is present in this person, a magnetic power, prophetic strength, full of peace, and impossible to resist.62

  The debate on Gaudium et Spes opened on Wednesday, September 22,1965. The following Tuesday, September 28, Archbishop Karol Wojtyła gave what some would consider his most memorable speech at the Second Vatican Council. The new “Pastoral Constitution,” he suggested, was “more of a meditation” than a statement of doctrine.63 Which was exactly right, since “its principal concern is the human person,” considered in himself, in community, and “in the scheme of all things.”

  The Church made a unique proposal to the world and its distinctive angle of vision should be more carefully identified in the document: the Church, in dialogue with the world, always looked at history through the prism of the redeeming Cross of Christ. That God had entered the created world to redeem it, Wojtyła continued, has “fixed once and for all the Christian meaning of ‘the world.’” The world was not something external to the Church, nor were “creation” and “redemption” somehow extrinsic to the world, its history, and its aspiration. The story of creation and redemption is the world’s story, properly understood. Telling the world’s story as that kind of story, and thus bringing the world to conversion, was the greatest service the Church could do for the world.

  Wojtyła agreed with those who argued that the secular world had a legitimate autonomy. From his intense dialogue with scientists back in Kraków he knew, for example, that there was no such thing as “Catholic chemistry” or “Christian physics.” There was chemistry, and there was physics, and the truths of these things were true in their own right. These truths, he insisted, always had to be related to the truth which the Church knew: the truth of humanity’s redemption and its transcendent destiny. Wojtyła thus anticipated and implicitly rejected the notion that a dialogue between the Church and the modern world was one in which “the world sets the agenda for the Church,” as the World Council of Churches would soon put it. Genuine dialogue was a two-way street. As the Church opened its windows to the modern world, it ought to call the modern world to open its own windows to the possibility of transcendence.64

  Archbishop Wojtyła then took up the question of atheism as a pastoral issue, as a part of the Church’s “dialogue with everyone.” The atheist was totally alone. Solitude from God led to a deep personal solitude, indeed a profound loneliness, that forced men and women “to seek a kind of quasi-immortality in the life of the collective.” The Church’s dialogue with atheism should begin not with arguments or proofs about the existence of God, but with a conversation about the human person’s “interior liberty.” In that kind of conversation, the Church might be able to show the atheist a path beyond the radical loneliness and radical alienation that came from rejecting God in the name of liberation from alienation.

  The Moderator, Cardinal Döpfner of Munich, interrupted: “Excellency, please finish, your time is up.”

  With a bow to the Moderator, Archbishop Wojtyła concluded with his personalist principle in its most condensed form—the closer human beings come to God, the closer they come to the depth of their humanity and to the truth of the world. Christian faith is not alienating; Christian faith is liberating in the most profound sense of human freedom. That was what the Church should propose to “the modern world.”65

  Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, would retain a privileged place in the thinking and affections of Karol Wojtyła for the rest of his life. He had worked very hard on the development of the text. He had defended the necessity of such an innovative document and its singular synthesis of Christian doctrine and reflection on the pressing problems of the late twentieth century. Thus it is no surprise that two of its sections are among the most quoted citations from the Second Vatican Council in his papal teaching.

  In Wojtyła’s interpretation of Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes 22 was the theological linchpin of the entire Council: “It is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear… [and] all this holds true, not for Christians only, but also for all men of good will in whose hearts grac
e is actively present.” This was the treasure the Church had to offer to the modern world: a humanism enriched by the human encounter with Christ, who, far from alienating humanity, reveals to it the full truth of its dignity and glorious destiny.

  Gaudium et Spes 24, the Council’s philosophical and moral linchpin, was the essential complement to the Christ-centered anthropology proposed in GS 22: “Man can fully discover his true self only in a sincere giving of himself.” The Law of the Gift was the fundamental dramatic structure of the human condition. Living in that drama, rather than by self-assertion, was the road beyond alienation and the path to human fulfillment. This was the truth of the human condition that the Church wished to explore with the modern world—a truth that, for Christians, was confirmed in a definitive way by Christ.

  FROM PETER TO STANISŁAW

  For Karol Wojtyła, participation in the Second Vatican Council was a public responsibility, not a personal privilege. From the first session of the Council on, he worked hard to keep Kraków informed of what was happening at Vatican II and to give Poles a sense of connection to a great, international Catholic event. After each session of the Council he gave public lectures and conferences on what had been happening in Rome to the priests of the archdiocese, to intellectuals, to seminarians and students. He also wrote letters during the Council to his priests, keeping them in touch with his thinking. Prior to his departure for Rome for each session, he celebrated a public Mass and preached on the Council’s agenda. (On September 10, 1964, he confessed in Wawel Cathedral that he felt a “certain suspense” about the fate of Schema XIII.66)