Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  Changes in the Team

  On April 29, 1985, John Paul announced two more changes at the highest levels of the Roman Curia, completing the major redeployment of personnel that had taken place in April 1984. The way in which one affected party learned of his new position illustrated the singular way in which even senior appointments in the Vatican are handled.

  In February 1985, shortly after John Paul had announced the Extraordinary Synod for the twentieth anniversary of Vatican II, Bishop Jozef Tomko, the General Secretary of the Synod of Bishops, got a phone call from Cardinal Casaroli, telling him that the Pope would name him a cardinal at a forthcoming May consistory. Archbishop Martínez Somalo, the Sostituto of the Secretariat of State, called two days later, at 9 o’clock at night, and said, in curial code language, “You know what is new? You are Pro of Pro.” Tomko, stunned, didn’t respond. Martínez Somalo asked, “What is your answer?” Tomko replied that he was happy to be sitting down so that he didn’t fall down. He was now Pro-Prefect (until his cardinalate) of Propaganda Fide, which is what everyone in Rome still called the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples. As “Pro of Pro,” the Slovak was now responsible for missions and evangelization throughout the world, for the nomination of bishops in mission territories, for the oversight of the most explosive growth in the Catholic world, and for monitoring and guiding the sometimes fractious arguments over evangelization in ancient religious cultures. He hadn’t been consulted about the appointment. As he later told a mother superior who was complaining about her difficulties moving sisters around, “Yes, you have the rule of obedience, while we have only the obedience.”38

  Tomko’s replacement as General Secretary of the Synod of Bishops was the Secretary of the Pontifical Justice and Peace Commission, Bishop Jan Schotte, who was promoted to archbishop.

  John Paul II’s third consistory, on May 27, 1985, was one of the largest and most internationally diverse of his pontificate, with twenty-eight new cardinals being created. In addition to Tomko and the embattled Nicaraguan, Miguel Obando Bravo, the red biretta went to Myroslav Lubachivsky, leader of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church; Paul Poupard, former rector of the Institut Catholique in Paris and founding President of the Pontifical Council for Culture; the Nigerian, Francis Arinze; Juan Francisco Fresno Larraín of Santiago, Chile, a defender of human rights against the Pinochet government; John O’Connor, “the archbishop of the capital of the world” Bernard Francis Law, the recently appointed fifty-three-year-old archbishop of Boston; Ricardo Vidal, archbishop of Cebu and the Philippines’ second cardinal; Simon Lourdusamy, archbishop of Bangalore, India; Louis-Albert Vachon of Québec; Henryk Gulbinowicz of Wrocław; Adrianus Simonis, the Primate of the Netherlands; Paulos Tzadua, the archbishop of Addis Ababa; and a number of other curial figures and residential bishops. The “elder” of Vatican II named cardinal in this consistory was Pietro Pavan, an Italian specialist in Catholic social ethics who was one of the architects of the Declaration on Religious Freedom. John Paul also honored his old friend Andrzej Deskur, who had said that his job in this pontificate would be “to suffer for the Pope,” and who received the red hat in the wheelchair to which he had been confined since his stroke, just before Conclave II in 1978. John Paul assigned Cardinal Deskur his own old titular church, S. Cesareo in Palatio.

  Encounter in Casablanca

  The evolution of World Youth Day added a new rhythm to the Catholic Church’s life. But perhaps the most striking papal encounter with young people during the International Youth Year and in the months before the Extraordinary Synod took place on August 19, 1985, with 80,000 Muslim young people at a stadium in Casablanca, Morocco.

  This unprecedented event—the first time a Pope had ever formally addressed a Muslim audience at the invitation of a Muslim leader—came on the last day of John Paul’s third African pilgrimage and his twenty-seventh pastoral mission outside Italy. It had taken him to Togo, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Zaire, and Kenya, where he participated in the forty-third International Eucharistic Congress in Nairobi.39 The stop in Casablanca on August 19, a day that began in Nairobi and ended in Rome, was at the personal invitation of Morocco’s ruler, King Hassan II, who had invited John Paul to his country during a royal visit to the Vatican. The Pope had thanked the king for the invitation, but asked what he might be able to do in the officially Islamic kingdom. Hassan had replied, “Your Holiness, yours is not only a religious responsibility but an educational and moral one as well. I am certain that tens of thousands of Moroccans, especially the youth, would be most happy if you spoke to them about moral standards and relationships affecting individuals, communities, nations, and religions.”40 John Paul had happily accepted, and the impending visit became the occasion for the first and, as of 1999, the only formal modus vivendi established between the Holy See and an Islamic state. In a letter dated December 30, 1983, King Hassan legislatively decreed that the Church in Morocco could conduct public worship and religious education and that churches and Catholic schools would be tax-exempt. The Catholic Church would enjoy complete control over its internal affairs; priests and sisters would also be tax-exempt; the Church could receive financial contributions domestically and from abroad and could manage its own finances; and Catholic charitable associations were permitted.

  John Paul’s address to the youth of Morocco, delivered in French, was strikingly simple in style—a précis of his Christian humanism adapted to this unique audience. He had come to meet with them, he began, “as a believer…simply to give witness to what I believe, what I wish for the well-being of my brothers, mankind, and what, through experience, I consider to be useful for all.” His first thoughts were of God, “because it is in him that we, Muslims and Catholics, believe.” God is the “source of all joy,” and to give witness to that, Muslims and Catholics prayed, for “man cannot live without praying, any more than he can live without breathing.”

  Addressing one of the most difficult issues in Catholic-Muslim relations—religious freedom—the Pope proposed that religious faith, not a secular indifference or neutrality toward religion, was the most secure ground for religious liberty: “obedience to God and this love for man ought to lead us to respect human rights,” John Paul suggested. That respect required human “reciprocity in all fields, above all in what concerns fundamental liberties, more particularly religious liberty….”

  It was their task, he said, to build a more “fraternal world,” to “tear down barriers which are sometimes caused by pride, more often by weakness and fear of people.” Their generation was challenged to live “in solidarity” with others so that “each people might have the means to feed itself, take care of itself, and live in peace.” But “however important economic problems are, man does not live by bread alone.” This was the most important witness they could give to the world they were inheriting: the belief that “we are not living in a closed world.”

  Both the things they had in common and things that made them different should be acknowledged. Together, Christians and Muslims believed in the one, unique, all-just, and all-merciful God, who wanted his human creatures to be saved and to live with him forever. Christians and Muslims also believed “in the importance of prayer, of fasting and of almsgiving, of penitence and of pardon.” As for the “important differences” between the two faiths, which centered on the Christian belief in Jesus as the Son of God and redeemer of the world, “we can accept them with humility and respect, in mutual tolerance. There is a mystery here, and God will enlighten us about it one day, I am sure.” For now, if Christians and Muslims alike placed themselves “at [God’s] disposal and [were] submissive to his will,” there would be born “a world in which men and women of living and effective faith [would] sing the glory of God and seek to build a human society according to God’s will.”41

  Cardinal Jozef Tomko was in the stadium at Morocco and had no idea what to expect. He watched the crowd, not the Pope, and what he saw was interest and a kind of reverence.42 T
he Muslim teenagers of Casablanca had, in fact, listened to the Bishop of Rome with far more interest and respect than had many middle-aged Dutch Catholics.

  STRENGTH THROUGH RESISTANCE

  The struggle for freedom in east central Europe continued apace in the months leading up to the Extraordinary Synod of 1985.

  On February 27, Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko interrupted the Pope’s annual Lenten retreat by requesting an audience. John Paul spoke to him, as he always did, “about religious freedom and the liberty of the Church.” Gromyko had other matters on his mind: “He was very worried about the American Strategic Defense Initiative,” the Pope remembered; “he was looking for the Church’s help against the United States.”43 John Paul understood that Gromyko was far more interested in the deteriorating Soviet position visà-vis NATO than in anything else and declined to be recruited into an anti-American campaign.44

  John Paul’s campaign for freedom through cultural resistance moved forward during the middle months of 1985. Although the Czechoslovak regime had refused him a visa to attend the celebrations in Velehrad in July for the 1,100th anniversary of the death of St. Methodius, the Pope had ways of making his presence felt. On March 19, he signed a letter to all the priests of Czechoslovakia, reminding them that Methodius, with his brother Cyril, had established the foundations of Slavic culture in their part of east central Europe. Their evangelical activity, by its culture-forming character, touched every sector of life.45 Methodius’s example, he continued, had three lessons for today. The first was “the courage to accept history and humility before the mysteries of Divine Providence,” even if the present historical situation makes it arduous, difficult, sometimes painful….”46 The second lesson was to maintain the religious character of their priestly personality. Both the clergy permitted to function publicly and those forced to work underground were tempted by the pervasive secularization the Husàk regime enforced in their country. Like Methodius, they should all keep in mind that they had been chosen by God for a special mission. The third lesson was responsibility. Like Methodius, they, as priests, must proclaim the eternal consequences of choices made in history. John Paul’s hope for the Methodius anniversary was that it would be for the priests of Czechoslovakia “a powerful stimulus to acquire sanctity in order to encounter modern man, who seeks, questions, suffers, and awaits…your work of love and salvation in Christ’s name.”47

  Cardinal František Tomášek read the Pope’s letter to 1,100 Czechslovak priests—one-third of the country’s presbyterate—at a massive concelebration in Velehrad on April 11. It was the largest public display of Catholic and priestly solidarity in Czechoslovakia since 1948.

  John Paul continued to celebrate Cyril and Methodius’s contributions to the religious and cultural history of Europe by dedicating his fourth encyclical, Slavorum Apostoli [The Apostles of the Slavs], to their memory.48 Issued in June, 1985, the encyclical depicts the brothers of Thessalonica as dedicated evangelists concerned for both the unity and universality of the Church. Their missionary work had brought the western Slavs into the history of Europe and into salvation history, such that “the Slavs were able to feel that they, too, together with the other nations of the earth, were descendants and heirs of the promise made by God to Abraham.”49 Coming to Moravia prior to the break between the Christian East and the Christian West, their mission approved by both the Bishop of Rome and the Patriarch of Constantinople, the brothers embodied a love for the unity of the Church, East and West, and a dedication to its universality.50 Because they created the foundations of western Slavic literary culture, their evangelism was “constantly present in the history and in the life of these peoples and nations,” however much it might be ignored by the people and regime of a given moment.51

  Slavorum Apostoli addressed controverted questions that had arisen since Vatican II and touched areas far from Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia. One of these was “inculturation”—the question of how the Gospel is incarnated in indigenous cultures. In the ninth century, some considered Cyril and Methodius’s determination to bring the Gospel to the Slavs in their own language a threat to Church unity. The brothers disagreed then, as did John Paul II now. Successful evangelization, John Paul proposed, involved gaining “a good grasp of the interior world” of those to whom one was preaching. Cyril and Methodius had “set themselves to understanding and penetrating the language, customs, and traditions of the Slav peoples, faithfully interpreting the aspirations and human values which were present and expressed therein” in the light of the Gospel. Respect for others’ genuinely human values, and commitment to bringing those values to full light through the Gospel, were the twin dimensions of “inculturation” as exemplified by Cyril and Methodius.52

  Slavorum Apostoli was dated June 2, 1985, the solemnity of the Holy Trinity. A month later, on July 5, the phoenix of the Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia rose from the ashes of Gustav Husak’s “normalization” when almost 200,000 pilgrims came to Velehrad for the main public celebration of the Methodius anniversary. The regime had tried to co-opt the event and turn it into a conventional communist “peace festival.” When the local authorities welcomed the pilgrims in these ideological terms, the Catholics shouted en masse, “This is a pilgrimage! We want the Pope! We want Mass!”53

  The Church in Czechoslovakia had taken new heart in the seven years of John Paul II’s pontificate. Cardinal Tomášek had become a forceful defender of religious freedom and a supporter of Charter 77, the human rights movement led by Václav Havel. A 1982 instruction from the Congregation for the Clergy banning priests from participating in partisan politics had helped whittle down the numbers of priests involved in “Pacem in Terris,” and had essentially destroyed the organization’s influence.54 Velehrad now brought resistant Czech and Slovak Catholics together, bridging the country’s internal ethnic division. The anniversary celebration linked popular piety to resistance to the regime, encouraged the participants to think that they could act together in defense of religious freedom, and showed them that they could rebuff the regime’s efforts to manipulate them (as in the bogus “peace festival”).55 Resistance Catholicism in Czechoslovakia had begun in earnest.

  A CALL FOR AFFIRMATION: THE EXTRAORDINARY SYNOD OF 1985

  Holding an Extraordinary Synod on the twentieth anniversary of Vatican II to relive the Council experience and review its implementation had been John Paul’s “personal idea,” according to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, himself a major figure in the Synod drama. The Council was, in Karol Wojtyła’s settled view, a great gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church that demanded both celebration and deepened reflection.56 Among other things, that deepened reflection required the entire Church to divest itself of the “liberal/conservative” political interpretation of Vatican II and to think about the Council as a religious event in which the chief protagonist was the Holy Spirit.

  Shortly after the Extraordinary Synod convened on November 24, 1985, Cardinal Godfried Danneels of Belgium complained at a press conference that “this is not a Synod about a book, it is a Synod about a Council!”57 The book in question was Cardinal Ratzinger’s review of the post-conciliar state of the Church, a lengthy interview with the Italian journalist Vittorio Messori which had been published in early 1985 under the provocative title The Ratzinger Report. Danneels was right, of course, and Ratzinger would have been the first to admit it. Years later, Ratzinger said that “it was true and important for Cardinal Danneels to say that we are having this Synod about the Council as fathers of the Church and not to discuss a book,” because Il Rapporto, as it was known all over Rome, was “not the point of departure for the Synod.”58

  There was a sense in which Ratzinger was being too modest, however. Il Rapporto was neither the cause nor the substance of the Synod. But Ratzinger’s book had given permission, so to speak, for the Synod to debate two questions that had only been discussed quietly in the two decades since Vatican II. Had there been serious misinterpretations of the Council? Were thos
e misinterpretations impeding the Church’s reception of Vatican II’s teaching, especially on the Church’s distinctive nature as a “communion”? By putting these questions openly on the table, Il Rapporto was a major factor in setting the intellectual framework in which the Synod’s deliberations were conducted and its recommendations framed.

  The issues at the Synod were, in large part, those discussed by Cardinals Wojtyła and Ratzinger prior to the conclaves of 1978. The Church’s engagement with the modern world had to be distinctively ecclesial, or it would betray Christ’s great commission to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28.19). That, and nothing less than that, was what the Church was for. Christ’s commission made the Church a servant of human dignity. It was through Christ that the Church was an agent of liberation. The “Church in the modern world” had to be the Church engaging modernity.

  A careful reading of the Extraordinary Synod’s Final Report suggested that, with varying degrees of conviction and enthusiasm, the Synod members agreed that there had been misinterpretations of the Council and that it was necessary to reread Vatican II.