The Synod of Bishops, created by Paul VI during the Second Vatican Council, had experienced both bureaucratic and theological troubles in its first decade. The Synod was neither a continuation of the Council nor a mini-Council, although some imagined it might function that way. The entire world episcopate, with and under the Bishop of Rome, exercises authority over the universal Church, and this authority could not be delegated to a subset of the world’s bishops. A smaller gathering of bishops, however representative, could not make binding decisions for other bishops or for the people of the Church. They could only speak in their own name, and while what they said would carry weight, it would not be definitive in terms of doctrine or practice. The Synod’s decisions had to be submitted to the authority of the Pope, and then issued with his approval, before they became definitive.50
The Synod was not a legislature, but as an expression of the collegiality of the College of Bishops it should be something more than a sounding board. How to make the Synod of Bishops concretely reflect the communio, the “communion,” of the bishops was an organizational problem from the outset. The first approach adopted, to leave the Synod essentially to its own devices, produced one set of problems. The 1971 Synod document on “Justice in the World” had gotten into murky theological waters by seeming to equate political activism with evangelism and the celebration of the sacraments as a “constitutive dimension” of the Church. The 1974 Synod on evangelism had deadlocked and failed to agree on a consensus statement.51
John Paul II had tried to bring some clarity into the Synod’s procedures and to protect it within the Roman bureaucracy by appointing Slovak Bishop Jozef Tomko as General Secretary of the Synod of Bishops on July 14, 1979. Tomko was a veteran curial official who understood how to give the Synod a presence in the internal Vatican bureaucratic process. Tomko had two additional advantages: he was known to be the Pope’s man, and the Pope had made it quite clear that he wanted to reinvigorate the Synod, not simply in its meetings but through an entire process of preparation, celebration, and implementation.52
The 1980 Synod, on “The Role of the Christian Family in the Modern World,” was the first that the new team, John Paul and Tomko, had summoned and prepared, and set the pattern for the Pope’s participation in Synods throughout his pontificate. He attended virtually every general session, listening but never speaking, and constantly taking notes.53 He invited each member of the Synod to lunch or dinner at the papal apartment, and he presided and preached at the opening and closing Masses.
The 1980 Synod discussions demonstrated that the fifteen years after Gaudium et Spes and the twelve years after Humanae Vitae had not produced agreement among the world’s bishops on the crisis of family life in the modern world, or on the Church’s marital ethic.54 Some bishops thought they were being manipulated by the Roman bureaucracy as they formulated the “propositions” the Synod would forward to the Pope, in order for him to prepare a message on the family to the entire Church. Others thought that those bishops pressing for a revision of the sexual ethic defended by Humanae Vitae had failed to grasp Paul VI’s prophetic stance against the sexual revolution’s assault on marriage. Still others thought that the discussions had paid insufficient attention to the real circumstances of family life today. If Synods, as an expression of collegiality, were supposed to build unity within the world episcopate, the 1980 Synod on the Family fell short of the mark.55
The deadlocked 1974 Synod on evangelization had resulted in the first “post-synodal” apostolic exhortation, Paul VI’s 1975 document, Evangelii Nuntiandi. John Paul II decided to adopt this method of completing a Synod with an apostolic exhortation—a new form of papal teaching instrument. On October 16, 1979, he issued Catechesi Tradendae to mark the completion of the October 1977 Synod on religious education or catechetics. There is, it should be admitted, an unsettled quality about the device of an apostolic exhortation, a major papal teaching document, as the appropriate conclusion of a Synod. The results of the bishops’ discussion, everyone agrees, should be a factor in the life of the Church. But the weight of those discussions, no matter how well-reflected in an apostolic exhortation, tends to be diminished by the very fact of a papal teaching document, which is what the Church remembers about a Synod.
In any case, the same method used in Evangelii Nuntiandi and Catechesi Tradendae was applied to the Synod on the Family. The new apostolic exhortation, Familiaris Consortio [The Community of the Family], was signed on November 21, 1981. Addressing issues which he believes are “still of primary importance,” Familiaris Consortio is one of John Paul’s personal favorites in a pontificate replete with teaching documents.56
Familiaris Consortio links the contemporary problems and promise of family life to what had already emerged as a key theme in the pontificate—the true meaning of freedom. The positive “signs of the times”—a greater sensitivity to personal freedom in entering marriage; the high value contemporary culture places on interpersonal relationships; efforts to promote the dignity of women; a worldwide stress on the importance of education—are expressions of the modern quest for a freedom worthy of human beings. The “shadows” over the family—challenges to the natural authority of parents; governmental, social, and cultural interference in parents’ rights as educators; the denial or rejection of the blessing of fertility; the exploitation of women because of “machismo” attitudes on the part of men—reflect distorted ideas of freedom.57 The “shadows” had created a distorted idea of the family as an accidental gathering of individuals who live together because it serves their self-interest to do so.58 But accidental gatherings have little binding force and can be broken up at will.
In sharp, but thoroughly humanistic, contrast to this thin concept of marriage and the family, John Paul teaches that marriage can never be a mere contract, nor can the family be simply a utilitarian convenience for its members. Since human beings are made “through love” and “for love,” and because love is “the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being,” this vocation is the heart of marriage and the heart of the family. Confirmed for Christians in the redemption won by Christ’s self-sacrificing love, the demands and obligations of family life are liberating, not confining.59
In its mission to “guard, reveal, and communicate love,” a mission that is a “real sharing in God’s love for humanity and the love of Christ the Lord for the Church,” the Christian family is a “domestic Church”—one specific, graced way to live the communio characteristic of the followers of Christ.60 In light of this communio, John Paul vigorously defends “the equal dignity and responsibility of women with men,” while arguing that “the true advancement of women requires that clear recognition be given to the value of their maternal and family role, by comparison with all other public roles and all other professions.”61 Men, for their part, are called to live their fatherhood as an icon of “the very fatherhood of God.”62
Familiaris Consortio tries to reframe the debate over contraception in this sacramental context, arguing that contraceptive sex violates the iconography of marriage by introducing into a relationship that ought to embody the fruit-fulness of love an “objectively contradictory language…of not giving oneself totally to the other.”63 John Paul also defends the “inalienable” rights of parents to be the primary educators of their children and argues that other educational agencies must be the servants of parents and families—a point that told against democracies as well as communist countries.64 Taking a cue from the Synod discussion, John Paul outlined a series of “rights of the family” that the Synod Fathers had proposed and that he promised to study with the idea of eventually issuing a “Charter of Rights of the Family.”65
Familiaris Consortio disappointed those who hoped or expected that John Paul II would announce doctrinal changes in the Church’s sexual ethic, or modifications in dealing with such perennial hard cases as separated or divorced Catholics or Catholics living in common law marriages.66 That expectation misconstrued the nature of the developme
nt of doctrine in the life of the Church. Popes do not simply announce doctrinal changes, as if they were arbitrarily changing what had once been decided just as arbitrarily.
In the microcosm of marriage and the family, the values at stake were the same as in the struggle for freedom from political tyranny, and so was the crucial issue: the “pulverization” of the human person. Viewed from this angle, the 1980 Synod and Familiaris Consortio had given an authoritative interpretation to Vatican II’s teaching on marriage and the family and had put those two basic human institutions—two schools of self-giving love, and thus of freedom properly understood—at the center of the Church’s pastoral agenda.
FATHERHOOD AND MERCY
When he began writing Redemptor Hominis shortly after his election, John Paul II did not think of his inaugural encyclical as the first panel of a Trinitarian triptych, a three-part reflection on the mystery of God as Holy Trinity.67 Christ-centered humanism was to be the driving theme of his pontificate, and Redemptor Hominis was intended to announce that to the Church and to the world. Reflection on the dignity of the human person redeemed by Christ led naturally, though, to reflection on the God who had sent his Son to be the redeemer of the human world. And that, in turn, led to a reflection on the Holy Spirit, sent by the Father and the Son to continue the risen Christ’s redeeming and sanctifying work. Thus Redemptor Hominis “grew” into two more encyclicals, Dives in Misericordia [Rich in Mercy] on God the Father, published on November 30, 1980, and Dominum et Vivificantem [Lord and Giver of Life] on God the Holy Spirit, published on May 18, 1986.
Dives in Misericordia, the most intensely theological of John Paul’s encyclicals, also reflects two personal dimensions of his spiritual life.
Kraków was the center of the “Divine Mercy” devotion promoted by Sister Faustina Kowalska, a Polish mystic who died in 1938 at the age of thirty-three. Through a series of mystical experiences, Sister Faustina believed that she had been called to renew Catholic devotion to God’s mercy, which in turn would lead to a general renewal of Catholic spiritual life. The elements of the Divine Mercy devotion she created include celebrating the first Sunday after Easter as Divine Mercy Sunday; the “chaplet of Divine Mercy,” a set of prayers asking God’s mercy on the Church and the world; and a special time of prayer at 3 P.M. in memory of Christ’s death, including the stations of the cross or Eucharistic adoration when possible. The devotion’s icon is the “Image of the Merciful Jesus,” a painting of Christ clothed in a white garment with two rays emanating from his breast, representing the vision that Sister Faustina had on February 22, 1931. Sister Faustina recorded her mystical experiences in a spiritual diary she kept for four years before her death. As her Divine Mercy devotion spread and the question of her possible canonization as a saint was raised, Sister Faustina’s diary was given its first scholarly analysis by Father Ignacy Rózycki, Karol Wojtyła’s former teacher, his housemate on Kanonicza Street, and the director of his habilitation thesis on Max Scheler.68
As archbishop of Kraków, Wojtyła had defended Sister Faustina when her orthodoxy was being posthumously questioned in Rome, due in large part to a faulty Italian translation of her diary, and had promoted the cause of her beatification. John Paul II, who said that he felt spiritually “very near” to Sister Faustina, had been “thinking about her for a long time” when he began Dives in Misericordia.69 That sense of spiritual affinity was deepened by the second personal element that bore on the composition of Dives in Misericordia.
John Paul II had also been thinking about fatherhood for a long time. Life with his own father and with the unbroken prince, Cardinal Sapieha, had given him a profound experience of both familial and spiritual paternity. He thought of his own priesthood as a form of paternity. As his intuitions about fatherhood deepened, Karol Wojtyła had made a dramatic claim in his poetic essay, “Reflections on Fatherhood”: “everything else will turn out to be unimportant and inessential except for this: father, child, love. And then, looking at the simplest things, all of us will say: could we have not learned this long ago? Has this not always been embedded at the bottom of everything that is?”70
Fatherhood—not electrons, protons, neutrons, and all the other apparatus of the atom—was “at the bottom of everything that is.” As John Paul II developed this poet’s intuition about reality in Dives in Misericordia, he opened up new dimensions of classic biblical texts.
Themes from the Hebrew Bible enriched John Paul’s reflections on Jesus’ preaching of a Gospel of mercy and illustrated the Pope’s conviction that Christianity could only be understood through Judaism and its unique role in salvation history. While God’s merciful love begins “in the very mystery of creation,” the Pope writes, the experience of the People of Israel revealed that “mercy signified a special power of love,” strong enough to prevail over “sin and infidelity.”71 Although the Hebrew Bible constantly teaches that God is a God of justice, it also reveals that “love is ‘greater’ than justice: greater in the sense that it is primary and fundamental.”72 For Christians, that teaching is completed in the mystery of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection, which is the most revelatory icon of the Father’s mercy. Here, mercy is shown to be stronger not only than sin, but stronger than death itself.73
Christ’s parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15.14–32) is, for John Paul, a synthesis of the biblical theology of mercy, and demonstrates how the question of a true humanism inevitably opens up the question of God.74 In John Paul’s analysis of this most poignant of New Testament parables, the prodigal son is a kind of Everyman, burdened by the tragedy of the human condition, which is “the awareness of squandered sonship,” of one’s lost human dignity.75 The forgiving father, by being faithful to his paternity and going beyond the strict norm of justice, restores to the wayward son the truth about himself, which is the lost dignity of his sonship. True mercy does not weaken or humiliate its recipient. It confirms the recipient in his or her human dignity.76
Mercy also has a corporate or social dimension. The powerlessness or alienation humanity often feels in the face of technological progress testifies, John Paul suggests, to the truth to which the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament bore witness: “Justice alone is not enough, if that deeper power which is love is not allowed to shape human life in its various dimensions.”77 One path beyond modern “unease” lies in building societies in which justice is opened to love and mercy, the true fulfillment of human aspirations.78
Dives in Misericordia drew far less press attention that Redemptor Hominis, which was newsworthy because of its programmatic character and its novelty. But there are many forms of news. Among his encyclicals, Dives in Misericordia is the clearest expression of the pastoral soul of John Paul II, and the clearest indication of how that soul was formed by Karol Wojtyła’s experience and understanding of fatherhood.
CONVERSION FROM THE HEAD DOWN
Prior to leaving on a 21,000-mile pilgrimage to Asia, John Paul II made what was arguably the boldest episcopal appointment of his pontificate.
Aron Lustiger79 was born in Paris in 1926, the son of Polish Jews who had immigrated to France the previous decade. During the first year of World War II, young Aron, who was being cared for by a French Catholic family in Orléans and who had received no serious Jewish education, converted to Catholicism and was baptized on August 25, 1940, taking the Christian name Jean-Marie. His mother was deported from France and died in Auschwitz in 1943. After studying literature, philosophy, and theology at the Sorbonne, Jean-Marie Lustiger was ordained a priest in 1954 and served as a chaplain to Catholic students and inquiring nonbelievers at his alma mater for fifteen years. In 1969, he was appointed pastor of the Parisian parish of Ste. Jeanne de Chantal, where his work with students and the elderly continued to attract notice and his homilies drew large congregations of intellectuals.80
In 1979, Cardinal François Marty of Paris began to prepare for his succession, asking the priests of the archdiocese to send him memoranda on the qualities re
quired in a new archbishop. A group of his colleagues went to Father Lustiger, put him under virtual house arrest, and said: “Write what we think.” Lustiger prepared a lengthy, unsparing report on the state of French Catholicism, and laid out the strategy he and his friends thought necessary to deal with it.
According to this analysis, the Church in France, prior to the French Revolution, had been a “Church of power” allied to the political order and in some respects dependent on it. Then came 1789 and the subsequent Terror, when French Catholicism took the earliest (and, until the twentieth century, the hottest) blast from secular modernity. Reeling from that bloody assault, the Church divided. A restorationist wing sought the return of the ancien régime—at first comprehensively, then, when that proved politically impossible, culturally. Over time, this faction had produced the extremism of Action Française, Petainism during World War II, and, ultimately, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre’s rejection of Vatican II. The counterfaction, seeking an accommodation with secularism and the political left, had eventually given birth to the non sequitur of “Christian Marxism.” The bitter battle between these two camps had divided French Catholics for more than 150 years and had drained the Church of its evangelical vigor.
The creativity of Lustiger’s analysis lay in seeing that these two factions, far from being polar opposites, were two variations on the same false option, the determination to be a “Church of power.” They differed on what form of political power was preferable as a partner for the Church. Both agreed, although they could never admit it to each other, that to be the Church in France must mean to be a “Church of power.”
Lustiger disagreed. It was the marriage with power that had made the Church vulnerable to the assault of secular modernity. As for a pastoral strategy, it was impossible to find a satisfactory middle ground between the restorationist and accommodationist factions. The restorationists regarded Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Freedom as heresy, while the accommodationists had mistaken the opening to modernity in the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World as an invitation to cohabitation with Marxism and, later, deconstructionism, both of which led to the collapse of Christian orthodoxy. In these circumstances, Lustiger proposed, the only true option was the evangelical option. The Church must abandon the pretense of power, refuse alliances with any political force, and reevangelize France, not through the mediation of politics, but through the conversion of culture. This meant taking the Gospel straight to the molders and shapers of French high culture, the thoroughly secularized French intelligentsia. The hardest cases should be put first, and France should be reconverted from the head down.81
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