Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  The Church that evangelizes is always a public Church, for evangelization is always a public proposal and both the making of the proposal and its content have public consequences. Yet the Church engages the world not as another contestant for power, but as a witness to the truth about the human person, human community, human history, and human destiny. The Church had not always acted that way, historically. This was the kind of “public Church” envisioned by the Second Vatican Council, however, and the kind of public Church John Paul II, calling himself the “particular heir” of the Council, intended to foster.

  John Paul II’s evangelically focused view of history and politics helps get into focus his relationship to another salient actor on the world stage in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States.

  The Pope and the president held certain common convictions. They both believed that communism was a moral evil, not simply wrongheaded economics. They were both confident of the capacity of free people to meet the communist challenge. Both were convinced that, in the contest with communism, victory, not mere accommodation, was possible. Both had a sense of the drama of late twentieth-century history, and both were confident that the spoken word of truth could cut through the static of communism’s lies and rouse people from their acquiescence to servitude.

  As a candidate for the presidency, Reagan had watched a news clip of John Paul II’s Mass in Warsaw’s Victory Square on June 2, 1979, and was deeply moved, according to his aide Richard Allen.7 John Paul II, for his part, needed no convincing about the truth of President Reagan’s most controversial anti-communist statement—the Polish Pope had known for more than thirty years that the Soviet Union was an empire and that its system was evil. President Reagan admired the Pope enormously and wanted him kept fully informed about U.S. intelligence findings in east central Europe. He also recognized that the Catholic Church had its own interests and its own methods in the contest with communism.8 John Paul, who once described Reagan as “a good President,” was nonetheless determined to maintain his freedom of analysis and action. The Church would not become mortgaged to any state’s political agenda.9

  When they first met, on June 7, 1982, John Paul II and Ronald Reagan recognized in each other a parallelism of interests in challenging the Yalta system. But the claim that the two men entered into a conspiracy to effect the downfall of European communism is journalistic fantasy.10 From the point of view of the Soviet Union, John Paul II had done his maximum damage during his epic pilgrimage to Poland in June 1979, seventeen months before Ronald Reagan was elected president and nineteen months before he took office. Reagan’s decision to share U.S. intelligence with John Paul was appreciated, but John Paul had his own extensive sources of information in east central Europe, and there is no evidence that anything he learned from U.S. satellite photography or other intelligence sources made any fundamental change in his view of a situation or in his action. Stories of the Pope bent over highly classified photographs of Soviet military installations may titillate some imaginations, but they tell us nothing of consequence about the history of the 1980s, hidden or otherwise.11 There was no “deal” between the United States and John Paul II in which support for Poland was traded for Vatican silence on the emplacement of NATO intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe or on U.S. policy in Central America.12 To suggest that John Paul would consider such tradeoffs betrays a fundamental ignorance about the man’s character.

  John Paul II and Ronald Reagan were both committed to the liberation of what their generation called “the captive nations.” They pursued different paths to the same goal. There was no conspiracy.13

  THE UNIVERSAL CALL TO HOLINESS

  While Poland suffered through General Jaruzelski’s “state of war” and John Paul did what he could to support his countrymen, he took several internal initiatives that left large imprints on a Church standing at the threshold of the twenty-first century.

  A Unique Partnership

  Three weeks before Jaruzelski’s coup against Polish society, John Paul made the single most important curial appointment of his papacy, naming Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, archbishop of Munich-Freising since 1977, as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith [CDF].

  Ratzinger was born on April 16, 1927, in a village in Upper Bavaria, the youngest of three children. His theological studies took place after the war at a time of great intellectual ferment in German Catholic circles. After ordination to the priesthood, a postdoctoral dissertation on St. Bonaventure, and a year of parish work, Father Ratzinger became one of the youngest and most popular theology professors in Germany and an adviser to Cardinal Joseph Frings of Cologne. Frings was one of the leaders of the party of reform at Vatican II, and Ratzinger helped draft the cardinal’s interventions, three of which played significant roles in setting the Council’s course at its first session in 1962. In the last phase of the Council, Ratzinger began to be concerned that some thinking about the Church’s action in the modern world was getting uncoupled from the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. Returning to Germany and a teaching position at the University of Tübingen, Ratzinger became even more concerned by the radical direction several post-conciliar German theologies were taking, not least in their dalliance with Marxism.14

  When his intellectual colleagues at the Council, with whom he had helped establish the international theological journal Concilium, declined to challenge these trends, Ratzinger and a number of other influential Vatican II theologians (including Karol Wojtyła’s friend, Henri de Lubac, SJ) launched another journal, Communio, to promote what they regarded as a more authentic interpretation of the Council. The Concilium/Communio split was not just an intellectual parting of the ways. Friendships were broken, and in the course of the ensuing polemics, Ratzinger found himself an object of contempt (odium theologicum, as it is sometimes called) in the eyes of some former colleagues. Amid these controversies, he produced an Introduction to Christianity, based on his 1967 Tübingen lectures, which was thoroughly contemporary in its use of biblical, philosophical, and theological materials. Despite the important differences between the Concilium and Communio interpretations of Vatican II, both groups understood themselves to be heirs of the Council, and both were clearly opposed to Council rejectionists like the dissident French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.

  In the space of three months in the spring of 1977, Paul VI lifted Ratzinger out of his academic chair, named him archbishop of Munich-Freising, and created him cardinal. Ratzinger got to know Karol Wojtyła personally for the first time at the conclaves of 1978; the two had been exchanging books since 1974.15 Shortly after his election, John Paul II, who wanted to make the Bavarian cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education, said to Ratzinger, “We’ll have to have you in Rome.” Ratzinger replied that it was impossible so soon after his arrival in Munich; “you’ll have to give me some time,” he told the Pope. When the Prefecture of the Congregation charged with promoting the Church’s theological life and defending orthodoxy came open, John Paul asked again and, Ratzinger says, he “could not resist a second time.”16

  For more than a decade and a half, Ratzinger was subjected to caricature as the fierce Panzerkardinal, heir of the Inquisitors, or as a gloomy German out of sorts with modernity. In 1996 and 1997, when his attractive personality shone through a book-length interview, it was said that the cardinal had changed.17 He hadn’t. Those willing to look beyond the caricature when Ratzinger was appointed Prefect of CDF could find several important clues to John Paul II’s thinking about the Church’s post-conciliar theological situation.

  First, Ratzinger’s appointment indicated that the Pope took theology and theologians very seriously. By reason of his own contributions to theology and his encyclopedic knowledge of the Western theological tradition, Ratzinger was regarded by friend and foe alike as a theologian of the first caliber. Naming a man of this intellectual quality rather than a curial veteran as Prefect of CDF was an expression of the Pope’s eagerness to fos
ter a genuine renewal of theology.

  Ratzinger’s appointment also suggested that the Pope wanted CDF to interact with the international theological community in a thoroughly contemporary way. John Paul did not appoint a medievalist or a patristics scholar as Prefect of CDF. He appointed a theologian who had been deeply and critically engaged with contemporary philosophy and ecumenical theology.

  Cardinal Ratzinger was the first man in his position in centuries who did not take Thomas Aquinas as his philosophical and theological master. The Pope respected Thomism and Thomists, but he broke precedent by appointing a non-Thomistic Prefect of CDF. It was a clear signal that he believed there was a legitimate pluralism of theological methods, and that this pluralism ought to be taken into account in the formulation of authoritative teaching.

  It made for an interesting partnership. The Pope was a philosopher; the Prefect was a theologian. John Paul was a Pole; Ratzinger was a German. Karol Wojtyła had been one of the intellectual architects of the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World; a decade after the Council, Ratzinger was one of the sharpest critics of the way that document was being interpreted. Over the course of his pontificate, John Paul II would speak frequently about the twenty-first century as a possible “springtime” for the Gospel after the winter of the twentieth century. During the same period, Cardinal Ratzinger would deepen an alternative view, that the Church of the immediate future would be smaller and purer, not quite a catacomb Church, but certainly not the dominant force in Western culture it once had been. Cardinal Ratzinger seemed to think that the West and its humanistic project had fallen into irreversible cultural decline. The Pope believed that a revitalization of humanism was possible.

  If, as one caricature had it, both John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger only spoke with people with whom they agreed, they could not have carried on an intense intellectual conversation for almost twenty years. Ratzinger recognized in the charismatic, pastoral Wojtyła a “passion for man” and a capacity to uncover “the spiritual dimension of history,” two traits that made the Church’s proclamation of the Gospel a powerful alternative to the false humanisms of their time.18 Wojtyła recognized in the shy, scholarly Ratzinger a contemporary intellectual who was a more accomplished theologian than himself. Together they made a formidable intellectual team.

  They had a regularly scheduled meeting every Friday evening, at which Ratzinger reviewed his Congregation’s work with the Pope, alone. Before and during lunch on Tuesdays, the two met frequently for more extended intellectual explorations, usually with others. These luncheon discussions could involve a new encyclical or apostolic letter, a broader topic of concern (bioethics, the ecumenical situation, or the various theologies of liberation), or the themes of the coming weeks’ general audience addresses. John Paul, whom Ratzinger describes as “happy to have a continuous work to do” amid his inevitably fragmented schedule, refined the later catecheses of the theology of the body and his six-year catechesis of the Creed (1985–1991) over these luncheon conversations, a distinctive feature of his pontificate.19

  The Revised Code of Canon Law

  The revision of the Church’s legal system, the Code of Canon Law, was one of three major initiatives that John XXIII announced shortly after his election in 1958. The work of the revision commission was virtually suspended during Vatican II, and serious drafting of the new Code only began in 1966. The drafting process had dragged on for more than fifteen years when John Paul II took a personal hand in the matter and drove the process through to a conclusion.

  In February 1982, the Pope called together a group of seven canonical experts from different countries, each of whom had a different view of what had been drafted thus far. At a working lunch, John Paul told the group that he had read the entire draft Code twice, and wanted them to meet with him to go over the entire project, canon by canon, so that he understood exactly what was being said in each of the 1,752 laws and their various subsections. The experts’ group met with the Pope fourteen times, in four-hour sessions, between February and November 1982. Once, when a member of the group complained that the others were unfairly criticizing everything in the draft Code, John Paul said that the critics were bringing their own expertise to bear and “that is what they should do.”20

  The 1917 Code of Canon Law was a collection of preexisting Church legislation, much of which imitated civil law. The old Code was divided into sections having to do with “persons,” “things,” “processes,” and “crimes and penalties.” In this secular legal context, the sacraments, the center of the Church’s spiritual life and worship, were dealt with under “things.” John Paul was determined that the new Code would be an authentic expression of Vatican II’s vision of the Church. The new Code, after specifying general legal norms, begins with “The People of God,” establishes the equality of all believers in baptism, and organizes the Church’s law under the threefold “office” or mission of Christ as prophet, priest, and king. This is the framework for the canons governing the Church’s teaching office, its mission of sanctification (where the sacraments are properly located), and its structure. Only after these distinctively ecclesial matters have been dealt with does the new Code go into questions of property, offenses and sanctions, and legal processes. In the latter category, seven canons urge that conciliation efforts be made before a formal legal process is undertaken. The new Code does not imagine law as an adversarial process including winners and losers, but aims to achieve reconciliation outside the Church’s courts when possible.21

  The new Code of Canon Law was promulgated by the Apostolic Constitution Sacrae Disciplinae Leges [The Laws of Its Sacred Discipline], which John Paul II signed on January 25, 1983. The apostolic constitution, personally written by John Paul, provides a clear insight into his view of law in the Church.22 The new Code, he insisted, was a service to the Church’s mission of evangelization and sanctification. That mission took place through a human community that, like all human communities, needed a structure of law to function properly. Still, the Code was “in no way intended as a substitute for faith, grace, charisms, and especially charity in the life of the Church and of the faithful.” These gifts of the Holy Spirit always had primacy in the Church, and the Code’s purpose was to facilitate their development in the Catholic community. The Code was based on the Council’s concept of the Church as a communio, a communion of believers, rather than on the analogy of a state and its citizens.23

  The revised Code of Canon Law was the first of three major legislative initiatives in the pontificate of John Paul II. The 1988 Apostolic Constitution Pastor Bonus [The Good Shepherd], reforming the structures of the Roman Curia, and the revised Code of Oriental Canon Law, promulgated on October 1, 1990, for the Eastern-rite Catholic Churches, completed the triad and gave John Paul’s pontificate a unique legislative breadth. The Pope understood all this lawmaking as an expression of his commitment to the full implementation of Vatican II, a point he underlined at the public celebration of the new Code of Canon Law on February 2, 1983.

  The celebration took place during John Paul’s second consistory for the creation of cardinals. Among the eighteen new members of the College were Jean-Marie Lustiger of Paris, Colombia’s Alfonso López Trujillo, Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, Godfried Daneels of Belgium, Józef Glemp, and Julijanus Vaivods of Riga, Latvia. At this consistory, John Paul began his custom of honoring one of the theological elders of Vatican II with the cardinal’s red hat. The first named was Henri de Lubac, then eighty-seven years old, to whom he assigned the Roman titular church once held by Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, a man on the other side of the theological controversies in which de Lubac was embroiled in the late 1940s.*

  Saints for the World

  The most visible expression of John Paul II’s determination to remind the Church of the universal call to holiness has been his numerous beatifications and canonizations; 805 men and women were declared “blessed” and 205 were declared saints in the first twenty years of the pontif
icate—far, far more than any pope in history, even considering that groups of martyrs were beatified or canonized together.

  The Church does not “make” saints, nor does the Pope. Through the teaching office of the papacy, the Church recognizes the saints God has made. Karol Wojtyła had long been convinced that God is wonderfully profligate in making saints and that God’s saint-making touches every vocation in the Church. Holiness is not a preserve of the clergy, nor is it reserved for monks and nuns, deliberately removed from the world. Holiness is every Christian’s baptismal vocation.

  The Christian ideal, for John Paul II, is the martyr: the witness whose life completely coincides with the truth by being completely given to that truth in self-sacrificing love. The Pope has regularly reminded the world that the twentieth century is the greatest century of martyrdom—faithful witness unto death—in Christian history. And no martyr of the twentieth century has been, for John Paul, a more luminous icon of the call to holiness through radical, self-giving love than Maximilian Kolbe. Kolbe was the “saint of the abyss”—the man who looked straight into the modern heart of darkness and remained faithful to Christ by sacrificing his life for another in the Auschwitz starvation bunker while helping his cellmates die with dignity and hope.25

  Kolbe’s canonization was set for St. Peter’s Square on Sunday, October 10, 1982. But a question had arisen. Father Kolbe was widely regarded as a martyr, but was he a “martyr” in the technical sense of the term—someone who had died because of odium fidei, “hatred of the faith”? He had not been arrested because of odium fidei, and witnesses to his self-sacrifice had testified that the Auschwitz commandant, Fritsch, had simply accepted Kolbe’s self-substitution for the condemned Franciszek Gajowniczek without evincing any particular satisfaction that he was killing a priest. The theologians and experts of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints (the Vatican office that considers beatifications and canonizations) had argued that Kolbe, while undoubtedly a saint, was not a martyr in the traditional sense of the term. At Kolbe’s beatification in 1971, Pope Paul VI had said that Kolbe could be considered a “martyr of charity,” but this was a personal gesture and the category lacked standing in theology or canon law. Since then, though, the Polish and German bishops had petitioned the Holy See that Kolbe be canonized as a martyr, rather than as a saintly confessor who happened to have died under extraordinary circumstances.