Lustiger later described his memorandum as “very, very radical.”82 In fact, it displayed striking parallels to John Paul II’s “culture-first” understanding of history. The two men had never met, but they had a mutual intellectual interlocutor in Jerzy (Georges) Kalinowski. Wojtyła’s former Lublin colleague was teaching in France and had introduced Lustiger and the leaders of the French edition of Communio, an international theological quarterly, to Wojtyła’s Sources of Renewal and others of the Polish cardinal’s writings in the mid-1970s.83 Lustiger and the young French intellectuals of the Communio circle had a good sense, through Kalinowski, of how Cardinal Wojtyła viewed French Catholicism at the time of his election as Pope: Wojtyła was very admiring, and very critical. That combination of admiration and critical challenge had been clearly displayed in Paris from May 30 to June 2, 1980.
Lustiger is not certain, but it seems likely that his memorandum to Cardinal Marty found its way to Rome. In any event, Jean-Marie Lustiger was named Bishop of Orléans on November 10, 1979. Throughout 1980, the question of a successor to Cardinal Marty dragged on. John Paul was, evidently, wrestling with a decision he must have considered one of his most consequential to date. New leadership, setting a new course for French Catholicism, was clearly needed, but those most frequently mentioned for the Paris post were identified with one or the other of the two main factions in the Church.84 A possible candidate from outside the episcopate, Dom Paul Grammont, the abbot of Le Bec-Hellouin, had indicated that, at age sixty-nine, he thought he could not accept the assignment.85 The exception within the current French hierarchy was Lustiger, but he had been a bishop for only a few months and his appointment to Orléans had not been happily received by some French bishops, who correctly perceived in him a profound challenge to business as usual. Then there was the question of biography. Could the son of Polish Jewish parents be the archbishop of Paris?
John Paul dealt with this crucial appointment on his knees, in the chapel in the papal apartment. Finally, the decision was clear. Bishop Lustiger, informed of his appointment to Paris, was aghast. He thought the Pope was taking an enormous risk and asking him to do the same. When he had been told of his appointment to Orléans, he had written John Paul a memo “reminding him who I was and who my parents were.” John Paul had gone ahead with the Orléans appointment, and now he went ahead with Paris. Three times, Lustiger was told by Monsignor Dziwisz, the Pope’s secretary, “You are the fruit of the prayer of the Pope.” That settled the matter for Lustiger, who later said that if he hadn’t been certain that the appointment had been the result of intense prayer, in which the Pope had confronted the risks both of them would be taking, he wouldn’t have accepted.
France was stunned. John Paul had done the unthinkable. The criticism wasn’t limited to Catholics—Jews were not happy with the elevation of a convert who had always said that he still considered himself a son of the Jewish people. Lustiger faced it all squarely, began a systematic canvass of the Paris clergy in some sixty two-hour meetings, and then got on with the job of reevangelizing—or in many cases, evangelizing—France from the head down, preaching every Sunday night to intellectuals and students in Notre-Dame Cathedral and writing a series of popular books.86
ASIAN PILGRIMAGE
John Paul further refined the title of “universal pastor” on his next overseas journey, which took him to Pakistan, the Philippines, Guam, Japan, and Alaska during twelve days in February 1981.
With the exception of the Philippines, one of the most intensely Catholic countries in the world, East Asia had been the Church’s great evangelical failure in the first two millennia of its history. Christians of all affiliations amounted to approximately one percent of the region’s population. Japan had almost exactly the same number of Catholics in 1981 as it had in 1945, despite a major postwar population boom.87 The papal pilgrimage, built around the beatification of Lorenzo Ruiz, a Filipino missionary who had been martyred in Japan, had two goals. John Paul wanted to demonstrate his respect for the ancient cultures of the Far East. And in the spirit of Luke 22.32, Peter wanted to strengthen the brethren farthest from him geographically. To prepare for the trip, he took crash courses in Japanese and Tagalog, the native language of the Philippines, for two hours a day in the weeks before his departure.88
John Paul flew from Rome on February 16 in the Alitalia jetliner Luigi Pirandello. En route to Manila, a “technical stopover” for refueling had been arranged in Karachi. The euphemism was intended to assuage activist Muslims hostile to the idea of the papal infidel on their soil. The “stopover” lasted four hours. The Pope was greeted at the airport by President Zia Ul-Haq and then driven through streets filled with donkey-drawn wooden-wheeled carts and white-garbed old men pedaling bicycles to a stadium, where he celebrated Mass for 100,000 enthusiastic, impoverished Pakistani Catholics. Leaving from the airport shortly after Mass, John Paul thanked President Zia by noting that “one of the dominant features of the character of Abraham, a prophet recognized by Christians, Muslims, and Jews alike, was his spirit of hospitality.”89
The wonderfully surnamed Cardinal Jaime Sin, a shrewd, exuberant Chinese ethnic who had been archbishop of Manila since 1974, had submitted three possible Philippine itineraries to the papal trip planners. John Paul had chosen the most demanding. “Let us hope,” Sin said with a sigh, “that the reporters can keep up with the front runner in white.”90
The cardinal had other, and graver, causes for concern. Filipino strong-man Ferdinand Marcos and his wife were determined to use the papal visit to bolster their own political position. Imelda Marcos had already tried to seize public credit for inviting the Pope, and had backed down only when Cardinal Sin threatened to have a pastoral letter read in churches throughout the country, explaining that the Pope was coming at the invitation of the bishops and that the Marcoses were lying.91 Just prior to the Pope’s arrival, President Marcos had formally lifted the martial law he had imposed in 1972. Cardinal Sin, for one, was not impressed: “Despite all of Marcos’s legalistic attempts to clothe his regime with the veneer of legitimacy of legal democracy, his was a dictatorial rule.”92
There was something almost comic about the Filipino first couple’s behavior during the papal visit. Virtually everything they did to try to impress John Paul was certain to have the opposite effect. The welcoming ceremony at the airport outside Manila was grandiose, with five honor guards, endless salvos from artillery, jet fighters buzzing the field, and schoolchildren dressed in paramilitary uniforms. The Marcoses’ reception for the Pope at Malacañang, the presidential palace, was an exercise in garishness. At considerable expense, the residence had been transformed into an elaborate Philippine village for the occasion, and the well-heeled guests were required to dress in national costume. The First Lady used a private jet to fly ahead to each of John Paul’s stops in the country, so that she could be seen welcoming the Pope. By the third stop, in Davao, John Paul II, whose patience and courtesy are both legendary, had had enough of the charade and began greeting the local dignitaries as if Imelda simply weren’t there. State-controlled Philippine television, meanwhile, kept the Pope in the background and Mrs. Marcos in the foreground, surrounded by her “loving people,” as she put it.93
John Paul’s remarks to the Philippine political elite showed the influence of Cardinal Sin and the pro-democracy Filipino bishops. At the Malacañang reception, the Pope squarely confronted martial law, whose recent formal recision was belied by the government’s ongoing behavior. Any alleged conflict between national security and human rights, he said, had to be resolved according to the principle that the state exists to serve human beings and their rights. If the state systematically violated those rights, it was not serving the common good.94
Although international media attention focused on the drama between the Pope’s human rights concerns and the Marcoses, John Paul’s primary concern in the Philippines was the Philippine Church, the strongest Catholic presence in East Asia. His message to the bishops was s
imilar to the message he had delivered in Brazil: defend religious freedom and other human rights, promote social justice, but do not sell the Church’s evangelical birthright for the pottage of politics. Bishops and priests best served the well-being of society by forming lay Catholics capable of exercising leadership according to the moral standards set by the Church’s social doctrine—a familiar message, delivered not by issuing orders, but by explaining the vision of Vatican II, in which Catholic social action was one dimension of the universal call to holiness. Nowhere else on his world travels to date had John Paul so emphasized the evangelical role of the laity and their responsibility for preaching the faith to their neighbors.95
The centerpiece of the Philippine pilgrimage was the February 18 beatification—the last step toward sainthood—of Lorenzo Ruiz and his companions. It was the first such ceremony ever held outside Rome or Avignon. Cardinal Sin had asked that the beatification of the Filipino lay missionary martyred in Nagasaki in the seventeenth century take place in Manila, and John Paul had readily agreed. A million Filipinos came to Luneta Park for the ceremony, at which the Pope was joined by bishops from Australia, Bangladesh, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Macao, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan. Breaking into Tagalog from English, John Paul reminded the enormous congregation, the largest Catholic celebration in the history of Asia, of the martyr’s words to the Japanese court that would condemn him: “Even if this body would have a thousand lives, I would let all of them be killed [before you would] force me to turn my back on Christ.” This son of a Chinese father and a Tagala mother, a husband and father himself, “reminds us that everyone’s life and the whole of one’s life must be at Christ’s disposal.” That was “the full meaning” of this first beatification conducted in East Asia, which was intended “to animate all the Christians of the Far East…to spread the word of the Lord.” It was an invitation with special meaning for the Philippines, who should draw “deep assurance and fresh hope” from the lives of their martyrs. What they were celebrating in Luneta Park, and what the Filipinos were to bring to Asia, was “the love of Jesus Christ, who is the Light of the world.”96
The trip schedule was typically brutal, sixteen-hour days without breaks. The Pope met families, priests, seminarians, nuns, lepers, university students. He went to some of the poorest shantytowns in the country and to a refugee camp where Vietnamese boat people were living in appalling conditions. At the latter, the government had discreetly removed the barbed wire just before the Pope’s arrival. At one stop, a little girl was supposed to hand flowers to the Pope. When he put out his hand to accept them, she changed her mind and hid the bouquet behind her back. The nuns in charge almost fainted in embarrassment; John Paul burst out laughing.97 Visiting the Catholic radio station Veritas on February 21, he broadcast a message throughout Asia: “Christ and His Church cannot be alien to any people, nation or culture. Christ’s message belongs to everyone and is addressed to everyone…. [The Church] wants to be, in Asia as in every other part of the world, the sign of the merciful love of God, our common Father.”98 In addition to its other targets, the broadcast was John Paul’s first attempt to penetrate China. It would not be his last.
After an overnight stop in Guam, the Pope arrived in Japan on February 23. The contemporary tension between being authentically Japanese and authentically Catholic had almost 400 years of history behind it, dating to the bloody persecutions that destroyed most of Japanese Catholicism in the seventeenth century. National self-consciousness and anti-Catholicism had formed at the same moment in Japanese history. John Paul’s pilgrimage to Japan was a modest effort to reopen a long-stalled conversation.
In a rare gesture of regard, Emperor Hirohito met the Pope at the door of the Imperial Palace. It was the first time the emperor, whose religious status in Japanese culture was not ended by his postwar renunciation of divine origin, had ever received the head of another faith.99 That afternoon, John Paul met with thousands of Japanese teenagers and young adults, not all of them Christian. After the songs and dances that had become customary at these papal youth events, the Pope had a lengthy give-and-take with the youngsters, who asked questions about everything from his faith to his hopes for the modern world. The most moving meeting of the entire pilgrimage had taken place earlier in the day, when John Paul went to visit Brother Zeno, a Polish Franciscan missionary who had come to Japan with Maximilian Kolbe in the 1930s. After the war, Brother Zeno had become a guardian of castaways and orphans, wandering the mean streets of Tokyo, picking up the human refuse from the sidewalks and caring for them. Now over ninety and sick, Brother Zeno could barely hear. When John Paul bent over his bed, the old man asked him whether he was the Polish Pope. John Paul replied that he was, and tears began to roll down Brother Zeno’s wasted cheeks. There were no dry eyes in the room as the Pope embraced the aged Franciscan and stroked his head gently.100 The Japanese newspapers had said for years that Brother Zeno, whose holiness had won him enormous respect rare for a Westerner, “does not have time to die.” Now another of “God’s brothers,” as playwright Wojtyła had styled the self-sacrificing Brother Albert Chmielowski, would die a very happy man.
On February 25, John Paul spoke at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial in Japanese, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Chinese, German, and Russian. The address was built around an antiphon, repeated three times: “To remember the past is to commit oneself to the future.” Humanity, John Paul insisted, “is not destined to self-destruction,” and the antidote to the threat of war was “a system of law that will regulate international relations and maintain peace.” He closed with a prayer in Japanese, asking “the Creator of nature and man, of truth and beauty,” to “instill into the hearts of all human beings the wisdom of peace, the strength of justice, and the joy of fellowship.”101
After addressing scientists and United Nations University students, John Paul left for Nagasaki, the center of Japanese Catholicism, which welcomed the Pope with icy wind and snow. There, he visited the “Hill of Martyrs” where Lorenzo Ruiz and his companions had been crucified, and the house where Maximilian Kolbe—known to the skittish local bishops as “Mad Max” for his impatience in getting on with the conversion of Japan—had lived in the 1930s.102 At Mass in the cathedral of Nagasaki, he ordained fifteen priests on the first day of his visit. The next day, during Mass at Matsuyama Stadium, he baptized seventy-seven men and women as snow fell on the ceremony.
On the polar route home, the papal plane stopped for refueling in Anchorage, Alaska, where the weather was kinder and 50,000 Alaskans attended an outdoor Mass with the Pope at Delaney Park Strip—the largest crowd in the history of that underpopulated state. A Polish-American had driven a dogsled 600 miles to see John Paul, but didn’t have a ticket to the Mass. The dogs made so much noise that the security guards let him in anyway.103 In his welcoming remarks, Archbishop Francis T. Hurley said that “No future Pope will travel farther from the Eternal City unless he chooses a space ship to the moon—a challenge which many feel would be very tempting to Your Holiness.”104 At the airport, departing for Rome, John Paul rode the last 100 feet to his plane on the runners of Iditarod musher Norman Vaughan’s dogsled. “This was great,” the Pope said, thanking the driver and his nine huskies.105
En route to Alaska, the flight had crossed the international date line and gained a calendar day. With mischief in his eye, the “universal pastor” told an exhausted papal party and press corps, “Now we must decide what to do with the extra day we have been given.”106
12
In the Eye of the Storm
Months of Violence and Dissent
AUGUST 14–31, 1980
Gdańsk shipyard strike launches the Solidarity trade union and movement.
AUGUST 20, 1980
John Paul II’s messages to Polish Church leaders support strikers’ demands.
AUGUST 27, 1980
Polish bishops’ conference supports strikers’ call for independent unions.
OCTOBER 24
–NOVEMBER 10, 1980
Crisis over Solidarity’s legal registration unfolds.
DECEMBER 2, 1980
Four American churchwomen murdered in El Salvador.
DECEMBER 5, 1980
Planned Warsaw Pact invasion of Poland is halted by Soviet government.
DECEMBER 16, 1980
Pope John Paul II writes Leonid Brezhnev in defense of Polish sovereignty.
DECEMBER 31, 1980
Apostolic Letter, Egregiae Virtutis, names Sts. Cyril and Methodius co-patrons of Europe.
JANUARY 15–18, 1981
John Paul meets Solidarity delegation at the Vatican.
MARCH 1981
Bydgoszcz crisis roils Poland; Soviet press intensifies attacks on John Paul II.
MAY 9, 1981
John Paul establishes Pontifical Council for the Family as a permanent curial office.
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