Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  Two weeks after the Holy Year formally concluded, John Paul II flew to South Korea on his twenty-first pastoral pilgrimage and second to Asia. After a refueling stop and Mass in Fairbanks, Alaska, he arrived in Seoul on May 3,1984. After visiting Kwangju, Taegu, Pusan, and the leper colony at Sorokodo, he presided in Seoul on May 6 at the first canonization ever to take place outside Rome. One hundred three Korean martyrs of the mid-nineteenth century were canonized, including Andrew Kim Taeg?n, the first native Korean priest, and Paul Ch?ng Hasang, a lay missionary. The next day, John Paul flew to Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea, where he made papal linguistic history by preaching in Pidgin. A day in the Solomon Islands and two days in Bangkok completed a 23,000-mile journey, the third-longest of the pontificate.

  John Paul flew to Switzerland the next month on a six-day pilgrimage. Its key moment was his June 12 address to the World Council of Churches [WCC] at its Geneva headquarters. The WCC had experienced considerable difficulties since Pope Paul VI had spoken in Geneva in 1969. Its Faith and Order Commission had continued to do serious ecumenical theological work and was preparing a major international study on “Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry.” It was politics—East-West politics and their linkage to Third World politics—that had brought the WCC under serious criticism. Russian Orthodoxy’s membership in the WCC, and the generally accommodationist attitudes of the central staff in Geneva, had rendered the World Council virtually mute in the defense of persecuted Christians in communist countries.139 The 1983 WCC Assembly in Vancouver, British Columbia, failed to condemn the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and adopted a resolution that was a textbook example of positing moral equivalence between the Soviet occupation of that country and Western support for the Afghan resistance.140 In the Third World, beneficiaries of the WCC’s “Program to Combat Racism” had endorsed and in some instances paid for revolutionary violence against the Rhodesian and South African regimes.141 In 1982, the WCC’s Central Committee had cited Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, New Zealand, Paraguay, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the United States for abusing ethnic minorities. But the WCC refused to deplore the Sandinistas’ destruction of Miskito Indian villages on Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast and the forced relocation of these indigenous people.142

  John Paul’s address emphasized the theological dialogue necessary to build on “the incomplete but real communion existing between us.” The quest for Christian unity, he proposed, was not a negotiation but a matter of giving concrete, historical expression to the unity that already existed between Christians through their common baptism. That meant confronting, “in all frankness and friendship,” the Catholic Church’s conviction that “in the ministry of the Bishop of Rome it has preserved the visible pole and guarantee of all unity in full fidelity to the apostolic tradition and to the faith of the Fathers.” “To be in communion with the Bishop of Rome” was to be in communion with the visible ministry of unity and doctrinal fidelity that Christ willed for his Church. This was “a difficulty” for most of the members of the WCC, John Paul conceded, but “if the ecumenical movement is really led by the Holy Spirit,” ways would be found to engage the unavoidable question of the Office of Peter in the Church.

  Discussing “communion in ecumenical service” to the world, John Paul characteristically stressed religious freedom, which had not occupied a prominent place on the WCC’s recent agenda. The Pope also argued that Christian communities must not “preach violence” as a means of social change. Without mentioning the controversies over WCC “justice and peace” activities, John Paul sketched an alternative vision of the Church’s action in the world, built on “the defense of man, of his dignity, of his liberty, of his rights, of the full meaning of his life.”143

  The five remaining days of the pilgrimage were difficult. The President of the Swiss Federation of Protestant Churches did not raise ecumenical spirits by asserting that mutual prayer was pointless without Eucharistic fellowship. John Paul tried to rally the Swiss Catholic bishops to more assertive leadership, without notable success. His defense of conscientious objection to military service and his call for a greater openness to immigration were not well-received by the Swiss. Like Germany and Austria, Switzerland would remain among the local Churches most resistant to John Paul II throughout his pontificate.

  The third biennial conversation between the Pope and physicists, organized by his old Kraków friend, Jerzy Janik, was held in August. Cardinal Slipyi, leader of the Greek Catholics of Ukraine, died on September 7, 1984. Two days later, John Paul left Rome for a twelve-day visit to Canada, ranging from the Maritime Provinces to Vancouver on the Pacific Coast, with stops in Montréal, Québec, Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Ottawa. Bad weather made it impossible for the Pope to meet with native peoples at Fort Simpson in the Northwest Territories; he promised he would return (and did so three years later). Normally placid Canada saw what papal pilgrimage planner Father Roberto Tucci remembered as some of the “most severe” security measures during any papal journey. Terrorist threats in Québec shortly before the Pope’s arrival had local police and the RCMP on edge, and 5,000 security forces were assigned to the pilgrimage. At one point, John Paul, frustrated by his inability to touch the crowds because of the police cordon around him, almost shouted, “Leave me a little more room!”144

  Less than a month later, John Paul II was compelled to meditate again on the mystery of Christian suffering. Father Jerzy Popiełuszko was driving back to Warsaw from Bydgoszcz on the night of October 19, 1984, when three State Security officers stopped his car. They beat him to death, then threw his broken, trussed body into the Vistula near Włocławek. Polish state radio announced the next day that he had disappeared and was presumed kidnaped. Thousands of Poles began to flock to Popiełuszko’s church in Żoliborz, where Masses were said every hour. Lech Wałęsa came and pleaded for nonviolence. For ten days, the church and the adjacent streets were packed with tens of thousands of Poles fearing the worst.

  Their expectations were confirmed during a Mass on October 30, when it was announced that Father Jerzy’s body had been dredged from the Vistula. One of the local priests, Father Antonin Lewek, a friend of Popiełuszko, urged the crowd at the Kostka church to remember Christ weeping over the death of his friend, Lazarus, and not to lash back in anger. Then, Father Lewek recalled, “Something very moving happened…Three times they repeated after the priests, ‘And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive’…It was a Christian answer to the un-Christian deed of the murderers.”145

  Ten thousand steelworkers whom Popiełuszko had served as a chaplain signed a petition asking permission from Cardinal Glemp (who had clashed with the young priest on several occasions), to have Father Jerzy buried at St. Stanisław Kostka rather than in the priests’ plot of a local cemetery. After a workers’ delegation, accompanied by Popiełuszko’s mother, met with the Primate on November 1, Glemp agreed to the exception. Solidarity’s martyrriest was buried in his churchyard on November 3, 1984, at a funeral Mass celebrated by the Primate and attended by hundreds of thousands who flooded the streets of Żoliborz. Cardinal Glemp’s sermon was, according to one commentator, “dry” and “placatory.” The emotion that everyone felt, and the tie to Rome, was voiced by the white-haired senior assistant pastor at the church, who, in his eulogy, praised his younger colleague’s heroism, thanked John Paul II “who was so pleased with Father Jerzy’s work,” paid tribute to Wałęsa and “all those devoted to the idea of solidarity,” and then closed with a promise: “One priest has died, but many priests have come forward to take up and carry on this work for the glory of God and the good of the fatherland.”146

  The struggle for Christian liberation continued in the face of, indeed through, death. To this day, the grave of Father Jerzy Popiełuszko remains a place of pilgrimage where that fact of Christian life is remembered.

  14

  Reliving the Council

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  DECEMBER 4, 1984

  Joaquín Navarro-Valls appointed director of Holy See Press Office.

  FEBRUARY 27, 1985

  Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko unsuccessfully attempts to enlist John Paul II in campaign against the American strategic defense initiative.

  MARCH 11, 1985

  Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issues “notification” on Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff’s book, Church: Charism and Power.

  MARCH 31, 1985

  John Paul II’s apostolic letter To the Youth of the World.

  APRIL 29, 1985

  Major reorganization of Curial leadership, begun in 1984, is completed.

  MAY 11–15, 1985

  Papal pilgrimage to the Netherlands.

  MAY 27, 1985

  John Paul creates twenty-eight new cardinals at his third consistory.

  JUNE 2, 1985

  Slavorum Apostoli, John Paul II’s fourth encyclical.

  JUNE 24, 1985

  Holy See’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews issues Notes on the Correct Way to Present the Jews and Judaism in Preaching and Catechesis in the Roman Catholic Church.

  JUNE 28, 1985

  On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Vatican’s Secretariat for Christian Unity, John Paul declares the Catholic commitment to ecumenism “irrevocable.”

  JULY 5, 1985

  Resistance Catholicism in Czechoslovakia is publicly reborn in massive celebration at Velehrad in Moravia.

  AUGUST 19, 1985

  John Paul II addresses 80,000 young Muslims in Casablanca.

  OCTOBER 28, 1985

  John Paul marks the twentieth anniversary of Nostra Aetate with an address to the International Catholic-Jewish Liaison Committee.

  NOVEMBER 24–

  DECEMBER 8, 1985

  The Synod of Bishops marks Vatican II’s twentieth anniversary.

  NOVEMBER 1985–

  FEBRUARY 1986

  Philippine “People Power” revolution ousts Marcos regime and demonstrates new form of liberation theology.

  JANUARY 31–

  FEBRUARY 11, 1986

  John Paul visits India.

  APRIL 13, 1986

  John Paul II addresses the Roman Jewish community at the Synagogue of Rome.

  MAY 18, 1986

  Dominum et Vivificantem, John Paul’s fifth encyclical.

  JUNE 30, 1986

  Release of letters by John Paul II, Archbishop Robert Runcie, and Cardinal Johannes Willebrands signals grave difficulties in Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogue.

  JULY 25, 1986

  Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger informs Father Charles Curran that he can no longer be considered a professor of Catholic theology.

  OCTOBER 4–7, 1986

  Third papal pilgrimage to France.

  OCTOBER 27, 1986

  World Day of Prayer for Peace brings world religious leaders together in Assisi.

  NOVEMBER 18–

  DECEMBER 1, 1986

  Longest papal pilgrimage takes John Paul to Bangladesh, Singapore, Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, and the Seychelles.

  DECEMBER 27, 1986

  Pontifical Justice and Peace Commission issues “At the Service of the Human Community: An Ethical Approach to the International Debt Question.”

  The Jewish community of Rome may be the oldest in the world with a continuous history, dating back to the days when emissaries from the Hasmonean prince, Judas Maccabeus, arrived in the imperial capital. St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans was written to a Jewish Christian community that lived in Rome’s Trastevere district, before the division between Judaism and the Christian movement hardened toward the end of the first century A.D. The Jews of Rome made numerous converts among the local pagans. By the end of the first century A.D. as many as twelve synagogues served a substantial Jewish population. There were Roman Jewish physicians, actors, shopkeepers, craftsmen, tailors, butchers, and tentmakers (like the former Saul of Tarsus), in addition to the peddlers and beggars satirized by Juvenal and Martial.

  Although Christianity’s adoption as the official religion of the Roman Empire made life more difficult for the Roman Jews, Jewish life in Rome from the mid-fifth century until the Counter-Reformation was freer than in any other city in Italy, and perhaps in all of Europe. During those years, whether the Roman Jews were harassed or left in relative peace depended on the attitude taken by the reigning pope. Here, too, things were different than in other parts of Europe. The popes tended to apply their anti-Jewish policies less stringently in Rome than zealots did elsewhere, and enforced the laws protecting Jews (who had no civil status anywhere in Europe) more rigorously. During this period, the Roman Jews asked for, and received, papal interventions on behalf of their persecuted brethren in France and other parts of Europe. Conditions in Rome were hardly ideal. Beginning in 1257, Jews were required to wear a special badge and distinctive clothing and were subject to harassment and ridicule during the Carnevale that preceded Lent. The Jewish cemetery on the Aventine Hill was desecrated in 1270. Still, the Jews of Rome were not expelled wholesale, as they were from England in 1240, and Jewish scholarship flourished in the city.

  The Renaissance was the apogee of Roman Jewish life. Jews could freely engage in banking. Every Pope had a Jewish doctor. Paul III’s Jewish physician, Jacob Mantino, was named to a teaching position at Rome’s Sapienza University, a rarity in Europe prior to the nineteenth century. This high period was soon followed by rapidly deteriorating conditions during the Counter-Reformation. Talmudic literature was banned in the city, and Jewish intellectual life collapsed. In 1555, Paul IV decreed that a Jewish ghetto be marked out and the Roman Jews were required to live behind its gated walls. During Christian holidays, the gates were closed and the Jews were not allowed out into the city. Jewish men were required to wear a yellow hat, Jewish women a yellow kerchief. Jews were not to be addressed by titles of respect (for example, “Signor”), no Christian could have a Jewish physician, and Jewish commerce and property ownership were restricted. Most Roman Jews were forced to become peddlers, a trade in which they were regularly abused by the city’s Christians. Only one synagogue was permitted, although this restriction was evaded by having five synagogues, operating according to different ethnic rites, under one roof. On their own Sabbath, Jews were required to go to churches to listen to sermons urging them to convert. The Roman Jews were not permitted to sing songs of mourning en route to the Aventine cemetery, nor could they erect tombstones there. Roman Jews were now generally worse off than Jews in other parts of Europe.

  The Jews of Rome enjoyed a brief period of relative freedom during the Napoleonic occupation of the city, but with the return of the Papal States in 1814, they were once again confined to the ghetto. Though Pius IX had the ghetto walls and gates torn down in 1846, he strictly enforced the proscriptions on Jewish activity. The Roman Jews were emancipated, freed from civil disabilities, and enabled to participate in public life as citizens on an equal footing with their neighbors when the House of Savoy completed Italy’s unification by conquering Rome in 1870.

  Jewish life in Rome slowly recovered. A splendid new synagogue was built in 1900 to replace the old Cinque Scuole [Five Schools] building, which had burned down. Unlike its Axis ally, Mussolini’s Italy was not determined to liquidate Italian Jewry. The Holocaust sufferings of the Roman Jews began in September 1943, when the retreating German army occupied Rome and internal security matters were handed over to the SS. A massive sweep of the city was carried out on October 16. More than a thousand Jews were captured and dispatched to Auschwitz, where they were murdered a week later. From October 1943 until the Allied capture of the city on June 4, 1944, the man-hunts continued. A total of 2,091 Roman Jews were killed in the extermination camps, including 281 children. There were also seventy-three Roman Jews killed among the 335 hostages executed in the Ardeatine Caves in retaliation for Italian partisan raids against the
German army. Catholic institutions and individual Catholic families saved Jews from the SS roundups. Roman Jews were hidden at Castel Gandolfo, where children were born in the private apartments of Pope Pius XII, which had become a temporary obstetrical ward.1

  Throughout 1,900 years of a tortured relationship, no Pope had ever set foot in the Synagogue of Rome, although John XXIII had once had his car stopped so he could bless the Roman Jews leaving their Sabbath worship. On April 13, 1986, John Paul II drove from the Vatican, across the Tiber, and down the Lungotevere, to change history. The Bishop of Rome was going to the Synagogue of Rome to meet the Roman Jewish community at their place of worship.

  It was, in a sense, the culmination of a journey that had begun in Wadowice sixty years before. As he drove to the Synagogue of Rome, John Paul carried with him his boyhood friendships with Jews, his father’s lessons of tolerance, his old pastor’s teaching that anti-Semitism was forbidden by the Gospel, his experience of the Nazi Occupation, and his knowledge of the Holocaust. He had developed, among churchmen, a distinctive sensitivity to Jewish pain and the drama of twentieth-century Jewish life. Now, as the protagonist in another episode in that drama, he had a bold proposal to make to the Jews of Rome, and to Jews throughout the world.

  Professor Giacomo Taban, President of the Jewish Community of Rome, welcomed the Pope. The Chief Rabbi of Rome, Elio Toaff, spoke of his “intense satisfaction” at John Paul’s coming. John Paul responded by underscoring their common faith in the one, true God. For it was “the Lord who stretched out the heavens and laid the foundation of the earth (Isaiah 51.16) and who chose Abraham in order to make him father of a multitude of children” who had, “in the mystery of his Providence,” made it possible for the ancient Roman Jewish community to meet with the Bishop of Rome and the Church’s universal pastor. This was neither a civic meeting nor the ceremonial beginning of a negotiation, the Pope was suggesting. This was a religious encounter between people who should “give thanks and praise to the Lord”—together. Their meeting was taking place not because emissaries between the Holy See and the Jewish Community of Rome had worked out the details, necessary as that had been. This was happening because God wanted it to happen.