Meanwhile, a crisis in Catholic elites, influenced by the cultural upheaval of the sixties, followed hard on the heels of Vatican II. Large numbers of priests left the active ministry. Convents, monasteries, and seminaries emptied in the developed world. Catholic universities took a markedly secular turn. The Church in Holland seemed irreconcilably split between the two theological parties, and less bitter but still serious divisions festered in France and the United States. The Church in Latin America was divided along political lines. One faction, accustomed to an alliance with authoritarian governments, was being challenged by another, its politics formed in part by the conviction that Karl Marx could do for Catholic theology in the twentieth century what Aristotle had done for Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth.
These divisions in the Church were frequently described in political categories and did, in fact, often mirror different economic and political positions. Perhaps without the full awareness of some of the combatants, though, deeper issues of doctrine and theology were being engaged across the ecclesiastical spectrum, involving both what is commonly perceived as the “Catholic Left” and the “Catholic Right.”
The distinctive nature of the Church, its mission, its sacramental life, and its ministry were all at stake in the post-conciliar debates over collegiality, papal authority, priestly celibacy, the future of women’s religious orders and other forms of consecrated life, and the question of ordaining women to the priesthood. Whether and how doctrine develops was at issue between the Lefebvrists and the defenders of religious freedom. Whether there are absolute moral norms that permit us to say that some acts are always “intrinsically evil” was a core issue between the “Majority Report” of the Papal Commission studying fertility regulation and the teaching of Humanae Vitae. In all of this, the Church’s long-delayed wrestling with modern intellectual life was being played out.
A Church that Pope John XXIII had hoped to revitalize for mission and service was thus investing extraordinary amounts of energy internally, in a form of ecclesiastical civil war. Concurrently, the political expression of militant atheism, the Soviet Union, took an increasingly vigorous role on the world stage. To churchmen accustomed to thinking in terms of civilizations as well as nation-states, gloomy predictions about the decline of the West, coupled with the drift and division within world Catholicism, made for a very disturbing picture.
Pope Paul VI was a man of deep faith, profound compassion, and acute intelligence. Yet some of his finest personal qualities rendered him incapable of setting a firm course for the post-conciliar Church. As early as 1964, he had struck Archbishop Wojtyła, who esteemed him, as a man “fatigued by love.”4 In the last years of his pontificate, other aspects of his complex personality came into clearer focus.
Giovanni Battista Montini’s “infinite courtesy” and magnetic personality were readily displayed in one-on-one conversation.5 But he lacked a compelling public presence, appearing in large settings and on camera as someone reserved, vaguely uncomfortable, and even tentative. Although he had read seriously in modern French thought, what he found there seemed to reinforce a tendency to worry an issue to death. Paul VI’s intelligence led him to see every side of a question simultaneously, and the tension between the certainties in which he was intellectually formed and the ambiguities he had learned from life and from his widespread reading frequently led him into a tar pit of uncertainty. There, he would tie himself in knots over a decision, wanting, as Cardinal Franz König of Vienna observed, to make the best of everything.6
He was a man of intense piety, yet the comfort he drew from his deep life of prayer did not seem to offer him assurance or comfort in the conduct of his office. His close aide, Agostino Casaroli, remembered him as “tormented” by some situations and decisions.7 He publicly berated God for not answering his prayer that his friend, the Italian Christian Democratic leader, Aldo Moro, be spared by the Red Brigades in 1978. Toward the end of his life, he worried that he had not been prudent in some of his judgments as Pope. This was an “agony for him,” Cardinal William Baum recalled, for he loved the Church with passionate devotion and was painfully aware that he would have to render an account of his stewardship.8 This agony included a concern that, in his Ostpolitik, he may not have been sufficiently vigorous in defending the persecuted. In any case, the strategy of salvare il salvabile was, by definition, an attempt to make the best of a terrible situation in which he could see no good alternatives.
It is sometimes said that Paul VI was a misplaced pope historically—that he would have been perceived as far more successful and that he would have suffered far less personally had he succeeded Pius XII rather than John XXIII.9 His unalloyed personal decency, combined with a certain frailty that had dogged him throughout life, made him especially vulnerable to the contentiousness, sometimes rising to bitterness, of the post–Vatican II period. A man dedicated to the Council, he felt the acrimony that followed Vatican II personally.10 In another historical moment, he might have been a man who could have bent history to his purposes. In the time in which he was destined to be pope, he became the kind of man who is consumed by history.11 He knew himself to be that, and in his faith, he thought of it as Christian self-sacrifice. From the first day of his pontificate, the papacy was a Calvary for him.12
The fifteen-year pontificate of Giovanni Battista Montini raised a hitherto unthought question. Could anyone—and particularly anyone formed in the typical pattern of post-Reformation popes—do this job in the extraordinary internal and external circumstances of late twentieth-century Catholicism? From the Italian, and specifically curial, point of view, Montini was the perfectly prepared pontiff.13 He was the son of a good Catholic family, members of the professional class who had remained loyal to the Holy See after the unification of Italy. He had been trained in the Vatican diplomatic service, was experienced in the ways of the Curia, and had serious intellectual and artistic interests. He had been the successful archbishop of a major Italian see. This was, as Cardinal König put it years later, the “more-or-less normal way” one became a pope.14 The troubled pontificate of Pope Paul VI thus raised the question of whether the “normal” way worked anymore.
Toward the end of Paul’s pontificate, more than one churchman had begun to think that the answer to that question was “No,” that the next conclave had to look beyond the hitherto “normal” pattern, and that one man whose combination of personality and accomplishment might promise a revitalized papacy was the archbishop of Kraków, Karol Wojtyła. By 1978, Wojtyła, despite his relative youth, had become one of the most widely respected senior leaders in Roman Catholicism. He was known to be an intellectual of considerable voltage, a man eager to engage contemporary culture and to make the dialogue between Catholicism and modernity a genuine two-way street. He had grappled with and understood modern intellectual life but he was not an ambiguist. Indeed, he probably understood the complexities and ambiguities of real human lives better than most academics, and on the far side of ambiguity he had discovered a new, more securely grounded certainty.15
In addition to his intellectual gifts, Wojtyła was a warrior, and a happy one. He was living under increasing pressure from the Polish communist regime. His experience of the Synod of Bishops and his travels had shown him the depth of the divisions within the Church and the threats posed to Christian humanism by other, noncommunist forms of exploitation and cultural decay. Yet he was energized, not paralyzed, by the challenges ahead, even if it seemed that they would last his lifetime and beyond. As he wrote his friend, Henri de Lubac, in 1969, “we have firmly hoped, we will always hope, and we are and will be happy.”16
This was not a man consumed by history. This was a man determined to shape history through culture. His conviction that “we are and will be happy” was an act of will, indeed an act of faith, made through, not around, suffering, pain, and humiliation at the hands of evil. The combination was very attractive—a man of deep interiority and acute intelligence with an exceptional public personality. But
a pope? The common wisdom on that, in the Vatican and among the speculators in the world press, was firmly set: impossible. Fifty-eight-year-old Polish bishops are not elected pope.
THE “SEPTEMBER PAPACY” OF PAPA GIANPAOLO
Giovanni Battista Montini, Pope Paul VI, died at the papal summer residence at Castel Gandolfo, on August 6, 1978. After receiving the sacrament of the sick and his last Holy Communion (the Viaticum, or “food for the journey”), he said his last words in this world, the Lord’s Prayer. At the moment of his death, the inexpensive alarm clock young Father Montini had brought back from Poland in 1923 and had used ever since rang spontaneously.17
The ritual surrounding the death of a pope followed its usual course. Cardinal Villot, whom Pope Paul had appointed Camerlengo [chamberlain] of the Church, officially certified the Pope’s death in the presence of three witnesses and the papal master of ceremonies. Paul VI’s seals of office—the Fisherman’s ring and the lead seal under which his most formal documents had been dispatched—were broken and the papal apartment in the Apostolic Palace sealed. The Dean of the College of Cardinals, the eighty-five-year-old Carlo Confalonieri, former secretary to Pius XI, notified his brother cardinals of the Pope’s death and summoned them to Rome. The dean also gave official notification to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See and to heads of state throughout the world.18
Pope Paul’s body, vested in gold-and-white miter and red chasuble, lay in state at Castel Gandolfo for three days. On August 9, a motorcade bore the deceased Pope to Rome in a plain wooden casket. The cortege stopped briefly at the Basilica of St. John Lateran, the pope’s cathedral as Bishop of Rome, where Cardinal Ugo Poletti recited prayers for the deceased with the communist mayor of the city standing beside him. The black Mercedes hearse then drove into St. Peter’s Square, stopping just beyond the obelisk, perhaps the last thing that the dying St. Peter (whom tradition says was crucified upside down in Nero’s circus) had seen on this earth. Twelve men who had once carried the Pope on his sedia gestatoria, the portable throne whose use he had revived after arthritis made it impossible for him to walk in lengthy processions, took the casket from the hearse and bore it into St. Peter’s Basilica. It was placed on a bier before the confessio, the tomb, of Peter, in front of the papal high altar. Tens of thousands of mourners filed past the Pope’s remains in the next two days. On August 12, the funeral Mass was held in St. Peter’s Square, the Book of the Gospels resting on top of the cypress casket. Thirteen interfaith and ecumenical delegations attended, in addition to representatives of more than one hundred countries and international organizations. After the Mass, the wooden coffin was placed inside a lead casket, which was placed inside a third, oak casket, and then buried as Pope Paul had specified—not in a sarcophagus, but in the ground in the crypt of the basilica, a few dozen yards from the tomb of Peter.19
Cardinal Karol Wojtyła was on vacation when Paul VI died, and returned to Kraków on August 8. Before leaving for Rome on August 11, he wrote to Father Andrzej Szostek, a brilliant philosophy student at KUL, whose doctoral dissertation he had agreed to review and which he praised highly in his letter. He sent a copy of the same letter to the Faculty of Philosophy at KUL asking that, under the circumstances, it be allowed to substitute for his presence at Szostek’s defense of his doctoral dissertation.20 On August 19, in the interregnum between the funeral and the opening of the conclave, Cardinal Wojtyła spoke on Vatican Radio about his memories of Paul VI, recounting the Pope’s intense interest in the battle for the church at Nowa Huta and Paul’s gift of a piece of St. Peter’s tomb for the Ark Church’s foundation. On the bier in St. Peter’s, Wojtyła said, Paul VI was “in another dimension. He looks at another face.”21
Because of Pope Paul’s age and ill health, his death was not a surprise to the College of Cardinals. Conclave speculation had long been in the air, and by the time the cardinals had gotten through almost two weeks of daily meetings or “congregations” between the funeral and the opening of the conclave on August 25, a consensus had begun to form about the kind of new pope needed. Although a few members of the College thought that Vatican II had been a serious mistake, the overwhelming majority believed that the Council was a great achievement whose promise had not been fulfilled because mistakes had been made in its implementation. What was needed now was a stock-taking to see how implementation of the Council could be improved. As that conversation continued, a further consensus emerged. The Church needed a pope of dialogue, a man of vibrant public personality who would embody Catholicism’s openness to the world, and a pope who would set a clearer theological and pastoral direction. This latter concern was not confined to elderly men who found it difficult to adjust to the post-conciliar Church. It was among the important issues for African cardinals, who believed their young churches needed a doctrinally coherent and morally challenging Catholicism in order to evangelize.22
One of the Church’s newest cardinals had made a lucid analysis of the post-conciliar situation three years before. Joseph Ratzinger, fifty-one, had been ordained archbishop of Munich-Freising in May 1977 and created a cardinal one month later. As a theological adviser to Cardinal Frings of Cologne, Ratzinger had played an important role in the debates that produced several key texts of Vatican II, including the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. Ratzinger was convinced that the Council had many significant achievements to its credit. But the climate in the Church after the Council had become “acrimonious and aggressive.” The hallmark of Christianity—joy—seemed singularly absent from many post-conciliar debates. What had happened?23
Not everything that had occurred after the Council had happened because of the Council. In Ratzinger’s view, the Church had been caught in a “global spiritual crisis of humanity itself or, at least, of the Western world.” But the Church had not responded to this crisis as the Council Fathers might have hoped. Had the Council Fathers themselves been trapped by an excessively optimistic reading of what could be done in dialogue with the modern world? Ratzinger thought so. When the cultural climate of the sixties turned from euphoria about the limitless possibilities of evolutionary progress to disenchantment in some quarters and revolutionary enthusiasms in others, the Church, unanchored, had been swept along by the riptides of the times.
The crucial question for the effective implementation of the Council and for the Church’s service to the world, Ratzinger believed, was not a matter of redesigning the Church’s international, national, and local bureaucracies. The “crucial question” was “whether there are…saints who…are ready to effect something new and living.”24 Unless the Church’s dialogue with modernity was an expression of the universal call to holiness, the Church would inevitably mirror the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age—which at this moment in the self-destructive crisis of humanism was hardly worth emulating.
Cardinal Ratzinger, one of the youngest members of the conclave, had never had the opportunity to meet Karol Wojtyła of Kraków. In the interregnum between the death of Paul VI and the formal opening of the conclave, the fifty-one-year-old Bavarian and the fifty-eight-year-old Pole finally met, and discovered that they had very similar analyses of the Church’s situation. Ratzinger, one of the intellectual fathers of Lumen Gentium (the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church), and Wojtyła, one of the architects of Gaudium et Spes (the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World), found themselves in what Ratzinger later recalled as a “spontaneous sympathy” for each other’s sense of what was needed to secure the legacy of Vatican II.25 Most concisely, Gaudium et Spes had to be reread through the prism of Lumen Gentium so that the Church could engage the modern world with its own unique message. In Ratzinger’s words, the Church must once again “dare to accept, with joyful heart and without diminution, the foolishness of truth.” Karol Wojtyła, who would later tell the French writer André Frossard that the most important word in the Gospels was “truth,” must have agreed.26
A majority of the College, notwithstanding their love for Paul V
I, evidently felt that the drift of recent years had to be replaced by a firmer course. A few, including König of Vienna, believed this would best be accomplished by looking outside Italy for a candidate. His view was not widely shared. One of the Italian cardinals told the Austrian, “Look, we know this situation better. We have done it for centuries…We know how to do it.”27 The result indicated that, on this point, too, an overwhelming majority of the electors were agreed. At the least, they were unwilling to experiment, given their own innate institutional conservatism and their knowledge of the burdens the new pope would face.
There may have been an emerging consensus on what the Church and the papacy needed, but few cardinals came to Rome in August 1978 expecting to find easy agreement on a candidate. The divisions of the post-conciliar years seemed too deep to permit a quick election, particularly given the requirement that the new Pope be chosen by two-thirds plus one of the cardinal-electors. Then there was the size and plurality of the electoral college; 111 cardinals, more diversified than ever in their nationalities and pastoral experiences, did not seem to promise a quick election.28 Cardinal Wojtyła, expecting a long conclave, told his secretary, Father Dziwisz, and Father Stanisław Ryłko (a Kraków priest who had just finished his doctorate in Rome and was helping Dziwisz with pre-conclave business), to take some time off. After Wojtyła had entered the sweltering and un-air-conditioned Apostolic Palace, where he and the other electors would be sealed off during the voting, the two priests headed for the beach.29
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