Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

The Final Report emphatically affirmed Vatican II as a “grace of God and a gift of the Holy Spirit” that had done great good for the Church and the world. Against such Council rejectionists as Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the Synod unambiguously stated that Vatican II was “a legitimate and valid expression and interpretation of the deposit of faith as it is found in Sacred Scripture and in the living tradition of the Church.” That the “large majority of the faithful received the Second Vatican Council with zeal” bore witness to the truths it taught.

  The Council’s reception had, however, been marked by shadows. Some of them were internal, including “partial and selective readings” of the Council and a “superficial interpretation” of its doctrine. Too much time had been spent over the past twenty years in arguing about the Church’s internal management, and too little time invested in preaching God and Christ. There were also external “shadows” in play. Among them was an ideologically hardened secularism that was not open to dialogue. This close-mindedness, the Final Report stated bluntly, was a manifestation of the “mystery of iniquity” in our day.

  What was required was a “deeper reception of the Council,” based on a closer reading of its actual texts “in continuity with the great tradition of the Church.” The Roman Catholic Church did not begin at Vatican II, and a deeper reception of the Council meant understanding Vatican II’s teaching in light of 2,000 years of tradition.

  The Final Report affirmed that the first task of the Church was to be the Church: “to preach and to witness to the good and joyful news of the election, the mercy, and the charity of God that manifest themselves in salvation history….” There was no triumphalism here; there was even a certain modesty. “The Church makes herself more credible,” the Synod fathers wrote, “if she speaks less of herself and ever more preaches Christ crucified.” The way of the Church in the world was always the way of the cross. The easy, friction-free convergence between the Church’s evangelical proclamation and secular progress that some had read into Gaudium et Spes was not the way the Synod fathers thought about “the Church in the modern world.”

  As for the Church’s own renewal, that required what it had always required—saints. The Synod reaffirmed that everyone in the Church was called to holiness, celebrated the new renewal movements as “bearers of great hope,” and proposed, like Vatican II, that the laity sanctify all of life through their witness in the family, at work, and in society and culture. One of the more sharply contested “internal” issues at the Synod had been the theological status of national conferences of bishops, a post-conciliar innovation in many parts of the world. The Synod affirmed the practical utility of these institutions as instruments for coordinating pastoral activity, but equally reaffirmed the authority of the local bishop, which could not be delegated to a national conference.

  The Final Report stressed that ecumenism had “inscribed itself deeply and indelibly in the consciousness of the Church.” At an ecumenical prayer service held in the Synod Hall, built into the roof of the Paul VI Audience Hall, the Pope had said flatly that “divisions among Christians are contrary to the plan of God.” The Final Report, like the Pope, looked beyond the stage of “good relations” with Protestant and Orthodox Christians to a real ecclesial unity, in which “the incomplete communion already existing with the non-Catholic Churches and communities might, with the grace of God, come to full communion.”59

  The Extraordinary Synod had a few surprises, among which was an inversion of roles. The progressives at the Extraordinary Synod were the party of the status quo. “Why does there have to be a change?” one prominent progressive, himself a creator of the liberal/conservative taxonomy of Vatican II, complained. “What’s wrong with the way things have been going?” The progressives most inclined to complain about “Rome” and the Roman Curia were also the most vocal defenders of the new curias that had developed in the national conferences of bishops.60 Of more long-term significance was the fact that ecumenism, long identified with the progressive interpretation of the Council, was “firmly claimed by what is self-consciously the party of orthodoxy” during the Extraordinary Synod, according to one on-site observer.61 The progressive party seemed content with the ecumenism of rapprochement amid continuing division. John Paul II was pressing a far more radical agenda of ecclesial unity.

  The inversion of roles was most pronounced in reaction to a proposal from Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, adopted in the Final Report, that a world catechism or “compendium of all Catholic doctrine regarding both faith and morals” be prepared. The progressive party, failing to see its relevance to modernity, dismissed the idea as impossibly old-fashioned. Bishop James Malone, the President of the U.S. Bishops’ Conference, when asked about it, told a reporter, “Don’t worry about that; you won’t live long enough to see it completed.”62 Bishop Malone turned out to be dramatically wrong. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, published in 1992, became an international best-seller. In part, the Catechism was a response to concerns that postconciliar Catholic religious education had become too process-oriented and too little concerned with content. But the Synod’s recommendation of a new universal catechism, endorsed by the Pope in his closing address on December 7, touched on a deeper issue with even wider implications. It involved, in fact, one crucial dimension of “the Church in the modern world.”

  John Paul II saw the Synod, as he had seen Vatican II, as a preparation for the Church’s entrance into the third millennium of Christian history. Would the Church cross that threshold confidently and hopefully, convinced that it had a credible proposal to make, or fearfully and diffidently, unsure of itself and the grounds for Christian hope? There was a real question in many Christian communities as to whether Christians could, after 2,000 years, “give an account” of their hope—as they were enjoined to do in the New Testament (1 Peter 3.15). Perhaps, many thought, “giving an account” of the Christian proposal was impossible, given the widespread conviction that human beings couldn’t know the truth of anything, much less their eternal destiny. Others thought the task was irrelevant, Christianity being “true for Christians” but not something to be proposed to others.

  The Catechism of the Catholic Church was a clear statement that Catholicism thought it possible to account for its beliefs and practices in a coherent, comprehensive, and accessible way. It could “give an account” of the hope that possessed it and animated it. It could make a proposal to the men and women of this age—that the world understand its story in light of this story.

  Although the ringing affirmation of the Church’s evangelical mission at the Extraordinary Synod of 1985 did not end the divisions in Catholicism by any means, it did mark the end of a period in Catholic history. The Council that had taken the gamble of not providing authoritative keys to its interpretation had been given an authoritative interpretation by the Synod. That process could now continue through further Synod assemblies and the papal “exhortations” that completed an ordinary Synod’s work. Certain interpretations of the letter and “spirit” of Vatican II had been tacitly but decisively declared out-of-bounds. The temptation to self-secularization had been identified, which was the first step toward combating it. At least some of the mythology about “liberals” and “conservatives” had been dispelled. That was accomplishment enough for two weeks’ work.

  ABOVE, NOT OUTSIDE, POLITICS

  Two weeks after the Extraordinary Synod concluded, John Paul II sent Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, the President of the Pontifical Justice and Peace Commission, on a special mission to Tehran and Baghdad, visiting the prisoners of war on both sides of the bloody Iran-Iraq war and quietly exploring the possibilities of a settlement.

  Etchegaray’s visit to the Persian Gulf was the first of several dozen such missions he would make to world trouble spots during the next fifteen years, as one instrument of the Pope’s interest in developing a parallel personal diplomacy to complement the normal diplomacy of the Holy See. John Paul and the French cardinal had different views of the meani
ng of Gaudium et Spes and of the post-conciliar Catholic situation in France.63 But the former archbishop of Marseilles was an adept conversationalist with a capacity for getting along with people whose experiences and views were very different from his own. Recognizing this, John Paul deployed him on missions to a host of conflict-wracked situations, including Lebanon, Mozambique, Angola, Ethiopia, South Africa, Sudan, Namibia, Cuba, Haiti, Central America, Vietnam, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, China, Myanmar, Liberia, Rwanda, Burundi, Indonesia and East Timor, and the Balkans, during the next fourteen years.64

  Cardinal Etchegaray pursued his “parallel diplomacy” as a personal representative of the Pope, rather than as an official Vatican representative—a fine distinction, but one that allowed him to gain access to all parties in a conflict and to serve as a conduit for peacemaking feelers without committing the Holy See to any particular position or mediation strategy. Etchegaray did not think of these missions as diplomatic in the formal sense. He went to the scene of an international or civil conflict, at John Paul’s request, to represent the Pope’s concern for the people involved. If, as a result of contacts with all parties, he was able to open up lines of communication between them, so much the better.

  This was not politics, strictly defined. It was, the cardinal once said, a “reinforcement and extension of the spiritual mission” of John Paul II, who wanted to be present to conflicts as an instrument of reconciliation. John Paul was, Etchegaray suggested, a man “above, not outside, politics.” It was, in another Etchegaray phrase, a “politics of presence,” which could sometimes do more to get a needed conversation started than formal diplomacy could.65

  This back-channel work was difficult and risky, and the risks were not limited to Etchegaray’s bouncing back and forth across primitive roads sown with land mines in one grim situation after another. In sending the French cardinal on these extracurricular missions, John Paul II was stretching the public mission of the Church far beyond the boundaries to which the cautious diplomats in his Secretariat of State were accustomed. These were risks the Pope and his improbable diplomatic troubleshooter were prepared to take, in order to give the “Church in the modern world” a new kind of presence in some of the most intractable situations of the late twentieth century.

  Catholic People Power

  While the Extraordinary Synod met in Rome, a different kind of revolution, embodying John Paul II’s vision of the Church in the modern world, was unfolding in the Philippines, the only Catholic country in Asia.

  Two years after the 1981 papal pilgrimage for the beatification of Lorenzo Ruiz, the Philippine Bishops’ Conference stepped up its public criticism of the increasingly repressive Marcos government. A February 1983 pastoral letter, “A Dialogue for Peace,” had charged the government with widespread violations of civil liberties and economic mismanagement compounded by massive corruption. The pastoral letter had also complained about priests and nuns being arrested or intimidated because of their work for justice, and had warned Marcos that tensions would increase without basic reforms.

  Six months later, on August 21, 1983, Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, a prominent Marcos opponent returning to the Philippines from exile, was shot in the head and killed at the Manila airport as he stepped off his plane. A month later, a half-million Filipinos took to the streets in protest against the regime. On November 27, which would have been Aquino’s fifty-first birthday, the bishops’ conference issued another pastoral letter, “Reconciliation Today,” which stressed the power of Christian love to transform corrupt politics and emphasized that reconciliation was the essential prerequisite to genuine social change.

  The situation continued to smolder through early 1984. In July, yet another episcopal conference pastoral letter, “Let There Be Life,” reflected on the Aquino assassination as one example of a culture of violence that the Marcos government had created: “The murder shocked us all as no other killing in recent history,” they wrote, “and for many of us it was the one, single event that shook us out of our lethargy and forced us to face squarely the violence that has… [become] practically an ordinary facet of our life as a nation….”At the same time, the bishops continued to stress conversion and reconciliation as the road to social change.

  In August and September, large public demonstrations marked the first anniversary of Aquino’s assassination. In October, an independent commission concluded that Ninoy Aquino had been killed as the result of a military conspiracy. In January 1985, twenty-five men were indicted, including General Fabian Ver, the chief-of-staff of the Philippine armed forces. In July, the bishops’ conference issued a “Message to the People of God,” condemning the “increasing use of force to dominate people” as a “frightening reality which we as pastors cannot ignore.” More anti-Marcos demonstrations followed in September. Six weeks later, on November 3, Ferdinand Marcos agreed to a “snap” presidential election in early 1986, presumably in at attempt to confuse the opposition, in which there were numerous possible candidates. On December 3, a day after all those charged with Benigno Aquino’s murder were acquitted, his widow, Corazon, announced her candidacy for president, instantly unifying the opposition.

  With the election now set by the government for February 7, the Philippine drama quickly intensified. The regime was doing its best to intimidate voters and to fix the election. An opposition organization of election monitors, the National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections [NAMFREL] had been formed. On December 28, Cardinal Sin and his auxiliary bishops issued a pastoral letter to the Archdiocese of Manila, stressing the Christian duty to vote, pledging their cooperation with NAMFREL, teaching that vote fraud or cheating was a “seriously immoral and un-Christian act,” and denouncing violence. Three weeks later, on January 19, 1986, the cardinal, his auxiliaries, and the priests’ council of the archdiocese issued a second pastoral letter, “A Call to Conscience,” which sharply challenged a “very sinister plot by some people and groups to frustrate the honest and orderly expression of the people’s genuine will.” No one thought that the cardinal and his associates were referring to NAMFREL.

  The entire national bishops’ conference issued a pastoral letter on January 25. Its content was telegraphed in its title—“We Must Obey God Rather Than Men.” The bishops now said that a “conspiracy of evil” threatened to subvert the election and bring the country to further ruin. Filipinos had a special responsibility, as citizens of the only Catholic country in Asia, to create a morally serious politics and to resist evil nonviolently.

  Two days before the election, Corazon Aquino, now universally known as “Cory,” put the issue of Philippine renewal in explicitly religious terms: “While I have done everything humanly possible to bring back power to our oppressed people, there comes a point where God’s power has to intervene. We cannot win this election without God’s help…. After we have made a vow to be vigilant and to sacrifice even our lives to dismantle the Marcos regime, we can only pray. We already have our people’s overwhelming support, and prayer is all we need right now.”

  The February 7 voting was a farrago of government-organized fraud and cheating. Days later, the bishops’ conference issued a blunt, uncompromising “Post-Election Statement” that denounced the “unparalleled fraudulence” of the election, taught that a government elected on such a basis has “no moral basis” for its claim to power, and said that Philippine people were obliged to correct the injustice done to them by “peaceful and nonviolent means in the manner of Christ.” There was considerable nervousness about the Philippine situation in the Vatican Secretariat of State, and the papal nuncio, Archbishop Bruno Torpigliani, was not a man given to endorsing bold action by a local hierarchy against the government to which he was accredited. Cardinal Sin and his fellow bishops courageously went ahead, declared the Marcos government morally illegitimate, and invited the Philippine people to do something about it—nonviolently.

  Their extraordinary statement, coupled with the certification of Marcos’s victory by a rubber-stamp N
ational Assembly on February 15, galvanized the People Power revolution in the Philippines. At a “victory for the people” Mass celebrated before a congregation of a million in Manila’s Luneta Park on February 16, Corazon Aquino publicly called for a campaign of nonviolent resistance against the regime, a call broadcast throughout the country on the Church’s Radio Veritas. Six days later, defense minister Juan Ponce Enrile and the vice chief-of-staff of the Philippine armed forces, General Fidel Ramos, broke with Marcos and prepared to take a stand at Manila’s Camp Aguinaldo, the military base where the Defense Ministry was located, and Camp Crame, the site of Ramos’s headquarters. Enrile and Ramos called Cardinal Sin and asked his help against what they were certain would be an armed attack on their positions by Marcos-loyal troops. Sin asked them whether they were supporting Cory Aquino as the legitimately elected president of the country. They assured him they were. The cardinal then went on Radio Veritas to broadcast an appeal to “all the children of God” to go to the two camps to protect the rebellious defense minister, General Ramos, and the troops they had persuaded to join them.

  The revolution now centered on the broad boulevard running between Camps Aguinaldo and Crame: Epifanio de los Santos [Epiphany of the Saints] Avenue, or EDSA. During the next three days, hundreds of thousands of unarmed Filipinos, bringing rosaries, flowers, and sandwiches to the crews of the tanks with which Marcos was threatening the rebels, formed a vast human shield between the government troops and the camps. Young and old, laity and religious, wealthy, middle-class, and poor people all flocked to the EDSA revolution, as a biblical sense of kairos—a graced moment of opportunity—transformed people who had been quietly acquiescent for years into nonviolent resisters. “Most of them were scared to death,” a journalist wrote later. “But they came anyway. Their spiritual leader had told them to go.” Henrietta de Villa, a prominent Catholic laywoman, brought her entire family, including her ten-month-old grandson; this was something, she believed, that “we should all face together.”