Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  The same day that the Congregation issued its declaration, John Paul II drove to the Piazza della Pilotta near the Pantheon to meet with the faculty and students of the Pontifical Gregorian University, founded by St. Ignatius Loyola in 1551.93 John Paul’s theme was the special contribution that theology made to the prophetic mission of the Church, its witness to the truth about the human person.

  He began by praising the Gregorian’s founding generations of Jesuit scholars for having sought “allies” for theology among the arts and sciences. Natural science had, since those days, become increasingly specialized, but “the fundamental urge to take into account all the progress made by science in things pertaining to man and the context of his life” remained valid for those practicing theology today.

  Contemporary theology continued to find allies in other intellectual disciplines, including philosophy. Theology today needed a dialogue with modern philosophy, not simply with the great philosophical masters and systems of the past. “Be not afraid!” John Paul said, applied “to the great movements of contemporary thought.” Whatever deepened our understanding of the “whole truth” about the human world deepened our understanding of Christ, the redeemer of that world. To be sure, not every contemporary philosophy could be a collaborator with theology. Some were “so poor or so closed” as to make any real dialogue impossible. Theologians today had to apply the test St. Paul had proposed two millennia ago to the Thessalonians: “Test everything, hold fast to what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5.21).

  Theology was not religious studies, John Paul continued, standing outside the Church like a neutral observer examining a specimen. Theology was an “ecclesial science” that “grows in the Church and works on the Church.” Because of that, its growth, which certainly involved critical and discerning development, had to be based on a “responsible assimilation of the patrimony” of Christian wisdom. A good theological education, he implied, did not begin with critically dismantling the tradition. It began with learning the tradition.

  Theology also had to do with holiness. True theology was an encounter with Christ, and true theological teaching was a way to “convey to the young a living experience of him.” Theology did not exist for itself, but for the Church and for “the formation of Christians.” Theologians should “do your work for truth courageously and openly, free of every prejudice and pinching narrowness of mind.” It was the “excellence of truth,” St. Thomas Aquinas had written, not the excellence of their own skills, that theologians ought to love.94

  Less than two weeks later, on December 28, John Paul appointed Father Carlo Maria Martini, SJ, the Gregorian University’s rector, as Archbishop of Milan, perhaps the most prestigious position in the Italian hierarchy. In the wake of the Küng affair, rumblings had been heard about a papal war against theologians. John Paul’s address at the Gregorian and the appointment of Martini, an internationally recognized biblical scholar who had led one of the Church’s most adventurous theological faculties, should have indicated that such suggestions were overwrought.

  PETER AND ANDREW

  Shortly after his election, John Paul II called the President of the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, Cardinal Johannes Willebrands, and told him to get busy organizing a papal visit to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Orthodoxy, Dimitrios I, in his ancient See of Constantinople.95 Since Vatican II, Roman Catholic and Orthodox delegations had become accustomed to exchanging visits on the patronal feasts of the Sees of Rome and Constantinople (today’s Istanbul): June 29, the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, for the Romans, and November 30, the feast of St. Andrew the Apostle, Peter’s blood brother, for the Orthodox. On John Paul’s initiative, it was arranged that he make an ecumenical pilgrimage to see Patriarch Dimitrios at the end of November 1979.

  John Paul’s ecumenical credentials were suspect in some quarters when he was elected Pope. His first year in office quickly put such suspicions to rest. At the Pope’s insistence, ecumenical meetings and prayer services became staple features of his world journeys. Redemptor Hominis had reaffirmed the Second Vatican Council’s ecumenical commitment. Archbishop Meliton of Chalcedon, representing Patriarch Dimitrios, was warmly welcomed to Rome for the celebrations of Peter and Paul on June 29. With his brief visit to Dimitrios, John Paul II gave Roman Catholic ecumenism a decisive orientation eastward.

  The Polish Pope had grown up in the borderlands between Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy. He had studied Old Church Slavonic, the traditional liturgical language of the Slavic Orthodox world and the basis of many modern Slavic languages. Unlike other Polish clergy, he had developed a great respect and affection for Eastern Christianity, its distinctive liturgical forms, and its unique spirituality. He thought of Europe as a cultural unity and frequently invoked the image of Europe as a body that breathed with two lungs, East and West. And by “East” and “West” he meant two distinct expressions of the same culture, not two divided political camps.

  More than some of his Catholic collaborators and many of his Orthodox interlocutors, he felt acutely the imperative to do something about the division between Roman Catholicism and its Orthodox sister Churches. His papacy was taking place on the threshold of the third millennium of Christian history. The first millennium, in which great questions of Christian doctrine had been resolved by East and West together, had been a millennium of Christian unity. The second millennium had been the millennium of Christian division: East and West had split in 1054, and Western Christianity had splintered in the sixteenth century. Might at least one of those breaches, the originating breach between Constantinople and Rome, be closed on the threshold of the third millennium?

  Throughout his pontificate, this would remain John Paul’s great millennial hope. It would cause him personal anguish, require him to absorb insults, and open him to charges of naïveté and betrayal from members of his own communion who had no interest in a “dialogue of love” with Orthodox churches whose leaders, during the communist period in Russia and elsewhere, had been among their persecutors. No amount of resistance would dissuade him from the view that he had an obligation to close the breach between Rome and the East.

  He began his active pursuit of this great hope on November 28, 1979, flying to Ankara, capital of Turkey, for a round of diplomatic formalities that, according to Turkish government sensibilities, had to take place before his meeting with Dimitrios. He then flew to Istanbul on the morning of November 29 and was met at the airport by the Ecumenical Patriarch. The two churchmen immediately embraced, the Pope unable to suppress a great smile of satisfaction. At St. George’s Cathedral in the Phanar, the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, John Paul reminded his listeners that, amid enormous doctrinal controversy, “these two sister-Churches had maintained full communion in the first millennium of Christian history” and had “developed their great vital traditions” in the bond of unity. It was in “this common apostolic faith” that they were meeting now,” in order “to walk toward this full unity which historical circumstances have wounded.”96 Patriarch Dimitrios responded that their meeting was “intended for God’s future—a future which will again live unity, again common confession, again full communion, in the divine Eucharist.”97

  That evening, after meeting with Armenian Catholics and Armenian Orthodox, John Paul presided at a concelebrated Mass at the Catholic Church of the Holy Spirit in Istanbul. Patriarch Dimitrios and his synod were present, along with other Christian leaders. The contacts of recent years, the Pope said in his homily, “have caused us to discover again the brotherhood between our two Churches and the reality of a communion between them, even if it is not perfect.” Tomorrow, while he would take part in the celebrations of the feast of St. Andrew in the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s church, “we will not be able to concelebrate.” But communion in prayer “will lead us to full communion in the Eucharist. I venture to hope that this day is near. Personally, I would like it to be very near.”98

  After the Patriarch’s celebration of the Divine Liturgy for the
feast of St. Andrew the next day, John Paul reiterated his conviction that “full communion with the Orthodox Church is a fundamental stage of the decisive progress of the whole ecumenical movement.” At the end of the second millennium, he asked, “is it not time to hasten towards perfect brotherly reconciliation” for the sake of evangelization?99 Patriarch Dimitrios responded by praising John Paul’s “talent for freedom” and announcing the concrete accomplishment of his discussions with the Pope: the opening of a formal theological dialogue between Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy on the international level.100

  John Paul flew back to Rome that night, full of “intense emotions,” as he put it at the Rome airport.101 The successor of Peter had joined the successor of Andrew in giving the final blessing at the Latin-rite liturgy for the feast of St. Andrew. The Bishop of Rome had exchanged the kiss of peace with the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople at the Orthodox liturgy for the same feast the following day. It was not full communion, and the Patriarch’s comment about full communion being in “God’s future” could be variously interpreted. John Paul, however, had made it abundantly clear that full communion was what he was striving for—and sooner rather than later.

  SHADOWLANDS

  The hard-eyed men in the Kremlin were, presumably, not all that interested in John Paul’s views on the theological controversies between Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians, or in the Pope’s imaginative efforts to rebuild the foundations of Catholic sexual ethics. They were, however, deeply interested in, and deeply worried about, John Paul II’s impact on world affairs—particularly in Stalin’s internal and external empires, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. An official Soviet report complained that the Vatican had begun to “use religion in the ideological struggle against Soviet lands”—which was, evidently, considered a “more aggressive” approach to relations between the Church and the masters of communist governments.102

  Something had to be done. On November 13, 1979, the Central Committee Secretariat gave its approval to a proposed “Decision to Work Against the Policies of the Vatican in Relation with Socialist States.” The document had been written by a group that included the deputy chairman of the KGB, Victor Chebrikov. Among those approving its plan of action were Mikhail Suslov, keeper of the communist ideological flame, and two men who would eventually become General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party (and thus leader of the Soviet Union), Konstantin Chernenko and Mikhail Gorbachev.

  The planned counteroffensive had six components. The Communist parties of the Soviet “republics” with large Catholic populations—Lithuania, Latvia, Belorussia, and Ukraine—along with state television, the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the Tass news agency, and “other organizations…of the Soviet State” were to be mobilized to conduct expanded “propaganda against the policies of the Vatican.” Meanwhile, Communist parties in Western Europe and Latin America were to dig out what information they could on local Catholic activism inspired by John Paul II, while concurrently launching their own anti-Vatican propaganda campaigns. The Catholic peace movement, which had come to such prominence in North America and Western Europe, was the third target. The foreign ministry was to “enter into contact with those groups of the Catholic Church engaged in work for peace” in order to “explain to them the policies of the Soviet Union in favor of world peace.”

  The fourth point in the action plan was ominous, both in the ambiguity of the goal and in the choice of agency for implementing it. In addition to the foreign ministry, the KGB was ordered to “improve the quality of the struggle against the new Eastern European policies of the Vatican.” The KGB got further orders in point five: “through special channels” in the West and through the publications it controlled within the communist bloc, the KGB was to “show that the leadership of the new pope, John Paul II, is dangerous to the Catholic Church.” The Soviet Academy of Sciences, meanwhile, was to intensify its study of Church activities throughout the world, while improving “the study of scientific atheism.”103

  Two weeks after this virtual declaration of war against John Paul II was approved at the highest levels of Soviet state authority, a young Turkish terrorist recently escaped from prison, Mehmet Ali Agca, sent a letter to the Istanbul newspaper Milliyet. He was, he claimed, deeply offended by the Pope’s impending pilgrimage to Turkey, a ruse by “Western imperialists” to deploy the “Commander of the Crusades” against “Turkey and her sister Islamic nations.” “If this visit…is not canceled,” Agca concluded, “I will without doubt kill the Pope-Chief. This is the sole motive for my escape from prison….”104

  The shadowlands surrounding the pontificate of John Paul II were becoming well-populated.

  11

  Peter Among Us

  The Universal Pastor as Apostolic Witness

  OCTOBER 16, 1979

  The apostolic letter Catechesi Tradendae completes the work of the 1977 Synod of Bishops.

  JANUARY 14–31, 1980

  Special Assembly for Holland of the Synod of Bishops.

  FEBRUARY 24, 1980

  John Paul II’s apostolic letter on the Eucharist, Dominicae Cenae.

  MARCH 24–27, 1980

  Synod of Ukrainian Greek Catholic bishops meets in Rome.

  APRIL 5, 1980

  Polish monthly edition of L’Osservatore Romano launched.

  MAY 1, 1980

  John Paul II writes the Church in Hungary, urging a more assertive Catholicism.

  MAY 2–12, 1980

  John Paul II’s first African pilgrimage.

  MAY 30–JUNE 2, 1980

  The Pope’s first pastoral visit to France.

  JUNE 2, 1980

  John Paul II addresses the 109th meeting of UNESCO’s Executive Council.

  JUNE 30–JULY 12, 1980

  John Paul’s first pastoral pilgrimage to Brazil.

  AUGUST 16–19, 1980

  The first Castel Gandolfo seminar for physicists.

  SEPTEMBER 1, 1980

  John Paul stresses the priority of religious freedom in letter to Madrid review conference on security and cooperation in Europe.

  SEPTEMBER 26–OCTOBER 25, 1980

  The international Synod of Bishops considers the Christian family in the modern world; John Paul II completes the Synod’s work with the apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio, November 21, 1981.

  NOVEMBER 15–19, 1980

  John Paul’s first pastoral visit to West Germany.

  NOVEMBER 30, 1980

  Dives in Misericordia, John Paul II’s second encyclical.

  JANUARY 31, 1981

  John Paul names Jean-Marie Lustiger the Archbishop of Paris.

  FEBRUARY 16–27, 1981

  John Paul’s first Asian pilgrimage.

  The Alitalia jet flew north over the Alps, en route to Cologne in November 1980. Entering German airspace, John Paul II’s plane was met by an escort of Luftwaffe fighters—perhaps the first time that Karol Wojtyła had seen aircraft marked with the black knight’s cross since the days when he had dodged Luftwaffe bombs in Kraków and Luftwaffe strafing on the refugees’ road to Tarnów. Prior to his first pastoral pilgrimage to West Germany, many Poles had said that it would be impossible for any Pole, even this Pole, to kiss German soil. The historical memories were powerful enough, but there were also tensions as fresh as the morning’s newspapers. More than a few German Catholics professed indifference to the arrival of a Pope they regarded as a reactionary. Others, including leading German theologians, were more openly hostile. Some German Protestants were not enthusiastic, and student radicals had scribbled graffiti throughout Cologne: “Papal visit? No, thanks.”

  Arriving at the airport, John Paul II walked down the open gangway in the pouring rain, knelt, and kissed the soil of Germany.

  Interest, it seemed, was higher than what people had told the pollsters. West German television, which broadcast up to eight hours of papal activities each day for five days, said that the number of viewers broke all previous records. The cameras often too
k tight shots of the Pope’s face, and what Germans saw was not what many had expected. This was not a man asserting himself in an authoritarian fashion. Even during the lengthy Masses, his was not the face of someone presiding over a great public ceremony. It was the face of a man lost in prayer, living in a dimension of experience beyond words. Whatever the Germans expected to see, what they saw and were fascinated by was the face of a mystic.

  Nor were they expecting his humor. When schoolchildren at the Cologne airport chanted from a balcony, “Amo te! Amo te! ” he asked in high good humor, “Is that all the Latin you know?” During a sermon in Cologne, the congregation burst into applause after a particularly effective papal exposition which he completed with a citation from St. Paul; the Pope replied, “I thank you on St. Paul’s behalf.” Whatever this man was, people began to think, he was no ecclesiastical martinet. Martinets didn’t behave this way.

  A closed-minded authoritarian would not have told the leaders of the Evangelical Church, custodians of German Lutheranism, that he had come as a pilgrim “to the spiritual heritage of Martin Luther” and that “we have all sinned” in breaking the bonds of Christian unity. A reactionary, and a Polish reactionary at that, would not have acknowledged the Christian debt to the children of Abraham, telling the leaders of West German Jewry that no one could approach Christ without encountering Judaism. And what did the “anti-bourgeois” radicals make of his statement at a meeting with the elderly, whom he described as a treasure demonstrating that “the meaning of life is not confined to making and spending money”?