Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  The hope for visible unity between Anglicans and Roman Catholics would continue to fade—despite the ongoing theological dialogue, warm welcomes to Rome for the archbishops of Canterbury and other visiting Anglican leaders, and impressive joint efforts to heal the historical memories caused by the martyrdoms of the Reformation era.103 The assumptions on which ARCIC-I had been launched had proven to be false, in terms of the contemporary self-understanding of Anglicanism. Because of that, institutional ecclesial reunion seemed very far away indeed.

  MOVING ON

  Meanwhile, criticism of the World Day of Prayer at Assisi continued. John Paul’s annual Christmas address to the Roman Curia on December 22, 1986, defended the “spirit of Assisi,” which the Pope said was rooted in the divinely mandated interplay between unity and diversity in history, against those still carping about Assisi’s alleged “syncretism.”104 A year after the Assisi meeting, the Sant’Egidio Community wanted to continue the process with similar meetings in the future. Even “the more open cardinals” were opposed, but John Paul II called in the community’s chaplain, Monsignor Vincenzo Paglia, and told him “Don Vincenzo, today I fought for you…and we won.” The process would go forward with an eye toward the Jubilee of 2000, with Sant’Egidio responsible for organizing similar meetings in different world venues.105

  Another Jubilee note was struck on December 27, 1986, when the Pontifical Justice and Peace Commission issued a document entitled “At the Service of the Human Community: An Ethical Approach to the International Debt Question.” The document asked that the entire question of Third World indebtedness and its impact on poverty in the developing world be rethought according to a humanistic ethics, with a variety of policy options ranging from rescheduling of debt payments to debt forgiveness being considered. It was a theme to which both the Holy See and John Paul II personally would return time and again as the Jubilee year drew nearer.

  Bleeding Nicaragua

  Nicaragua continued in turmoil. On January 21, 1986, Cardinal Miguel Obando Bravo of Managua met UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuellar to request United Nations assistance against Sandinista persecution of the Church. The cardinal gave the Secretary-General copies of the letters of the Nicaraguan Bishops’ Conference to Commandante Daniel Ortega, which outlined a program of ongoing Sandinista intimidation, including the expulsion of foreign clergy, threats against Catholic lay activists, the closure of Radio Catolica, and the censorship of official Church documents. After his meeting with Pérez de Cuellar, Cardinal Obando took his case to the Interamerican Commission for Human Rights in Washington. The Nicaraguan bishops received messages of solidarity from the bishops’ conferences of Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic; Obando also got a letter of support from Cardinals O’Connor and Law in the United States.106

  On July 14, the Nicaraguan Bishops’ Conference appealed again to fraternal conferences of bishops around the world for assistance against persecution. The situation, they wrote, was “steadily becoming more difficult.” There were ongoing, vicious personal attacks on the Pope and the bishops. The clergy was regularly intimidated by the internal security forces. The director of Radio Catolica and a local bishop had been expelled from the country. Mother Teresa had been refused permission to open two hospices. The Church was still barred from television. The journal of the archdiocese of Managua had been confiscated and the Church’s printing press requisitioned. Radio Catolica remained off the air. Requests for dialogue with the government went unanswered.107

  For his part, John Paul II’s November 12 message to a Nicaraguan national Eucharistic Congress stressed reconciliation as one of the foundation stones of a free society. “In Nicaragua,” he wrote, “the civilization of love must rise strongly and vigorously in a people reconciled, where hatred, violence, and injustice will be no more; a society in which there will always be complete respect for the inalienable rights of the human person and the legitimate freedom of the individual and the family. It is only through a true and deep reconciliation of each one with God and with all mankind that the much desired harmony will be achieved…. The mystery of the Eucharist is in no way aliento the building of a new world. Rather it is its principle and source of inspiration, because the Lord Jesus is the foundation of a new humanity that is reconciled and fraternal.”108

  Closing the Curran Affair

  In the United States, the case of Father Charles Curran, longtime faculty member of the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., drew to its inevitable close in 1986. Father Curran had been the symbolic centerpiece of American Catholic dissent from the teaching of Humanae Vitae as a thirty-four-year-old junior professor in 1968, when he helped precipitate an ongoing controversy over the Church’s teaching authority. Since then, he had published numerous books and articles taking issue with virtually every aspect of the Church’s sexual ethic, while at the same time becoming a tenured faculty member of a Church-chartered institution.109 The anomaly could not be sustained indefinitely.

  The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had sent Father Curran a detailed set of “Observations” on his written work, outlining the points at which he was in opposition to the authoritative teaching of the Church. An exchange of letters followed, in the course of which Curran declined to bring his teaching into conformity with Catholic doctrine. On September 17, 1985, CDF wrote Father Curran again, noting that “the authorities of the Church cannot allow the present situation to continue in which the inherent contradiction is prolonged that one who is to teach in the name of the Church in fact denies her teaching.” Father Curran came to Rome for an “informal” meeting with CDF officials on March 8, 1986. In the wake of that meeting, Curran sent a definitive and final letter of response to the original CDF “Observations,” dated April 1, in which he again declined to bring his teaching into line with that of the Church, and proposed a compromise in which he would retain his position at the Catholic University of America to teach moral theology, but not sexual ethics.

  This was unacceptable. In a letter of July 25, personally approved by John Paul II, Cardinal Ratzinger informed Father Curran that CDF would advise the chancellor of Catholic University that Curran “was no longer…considered suitable [or] eligible to exercise the function of a Professor of Catholic Theology.” The situation was parallel to that of Father Hans Küng. Father Curran was neither stripped of his priesthood nor forbidden to function as a priest. Nor was he forbidden to publish, make public appearances, or teach in a non-Catholic institution. As Father Curran had made clear in his writings and in his responses to the CDF “Observations,” he did not believe to be true what the Catholic Church did, and he was not teaching what the Catholic Church taught about sexual morality. Therefore, CDF concluded, he should not hold the position of a professor of Catholic theology.

  Father Curran was suspended from his faculty position in January 1987 and sued the university for breach of contract on February 28, 1987. After complicated negotiations failed to produce an out-of-court resolution satisfactory to Curran, the suit went to trial. Curran lost the suit on February 28, 1989, and accepted an endowed chair at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.110

  Father Curran claimed, and no doubt truly believed, that he was exercising “responsible” dissent because he publicly disavowed Catholic teaching that had not been infallibly defined. This claim contradicted the teaching of Vatican II, however. The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church had made clear that the Church did not live, so to speak, by infallible definitions alone. The authoritative tradition of the Church, articulated by the Church’s pastors, was binding on theologians and the people of the Church alike.111 To suggest otherwise, as Father Curran did, was to create an absurd situation in which Church teaching was either “infallibly defined” or virtually nonexistent. Vatican II had a much more richly textured view of the nature of authoritative teaching than Father Curran.

  The Curran affair also illustrated a serious problem in post-conciliar moral theology that John
Paul II would, at some point, have to address in detail. Father Curran believed that lowering the bar of Catholic sexual morality was the pastorally appropriate response to the tangled lives of human beings, who had been struggling with chastity since Moses had been given the Ten Commandments. For John Paul, whose pastoral experience was at least as extensive as that of most moral theologians, defining sin down was not, in the final analysis, pastorally sensitive, because it took the dramatic tension out of life and denied human beings the opportunity for moral heroism. Repentance and forgiveness, not preemptive absolution, was the truer humanism.

  Evangelism “Down Under”

  Just prior to the Assisi World Day of Prayer for Peace, John Paul made his third pastoral pilgrimage to France, visiting Lyons, Paray le Monial, Dardilly, Ars, Annecy, and the ecumenical monastery at Taizé in October 1986. Founded by Brother Roger Schutz in 1940 to revive Protestant monasticism, Taizé had evolved into an ecumenical monastic community living under a common rule devised by Brother Roger in 1952. Christian unity was one of Taizé’s missions. Brother Roger believed that ecclesial reconciliation could only be founded on prayer. The monks of Taizé celebrated an ecumenical Liturgy of the Hours three times every day in the monastery’s “Church of the Reconciliation,” in addition to sponsoring ecumenical theological research, hosting ecumenical conferences, and bringing together young people from various denominations.

  John Paul had a longstanding interest in Taizé’s ecumenical and youth work and had participated in several Taizé-sponsored prayer vigils in St. Peter’s. He celebrated the place of monastic rest in the lives of all those who were not monks in a brief address to the guests of the monastery on October 5: “Like you, the pilgrims and the friends of this community, the Pope is only passing through. But to pass by Taizé is like stopping briefly at a spring of water: the traveler halts, quenches his thirst, and continues his journey.”112 Speaking to the Brothers of Taizé themselves, John Paul recalled John XXIII’s greeting to Brother Roger—“Ah, Taizé that little springtime!”—and expressed the “wish…that the Lord may preserve you like a springtime that breaks out and that he may keep you as little ones, in the joy of the Gospel and the transparency of brotherly love.”113

  Three weeks after the Assisi meeting with world religious leaders, John Paul flew to Dacca on the first leg of his longest pilgrimage, a 30,000-mile journey to Bangladesh, Singapore, the Fiji Islands, New Zealand, Australia, and the Seychelles. He was smothered in leis by young women in Dacca and guarded by loincloth-clad natives in the Fijis. At a cricket ground in Sydney, he held hands in a conga line with youngsters in blue jeans. Several days later, he conducted an impromptu question-and-answer session with Australian children by radio while flying from Darwin to Alice Springs, where he also met with Aborigines and urged them to protect their culture. He wore a hard hat in a Sydney factory and cradled a baby koala bear in Brisbane, both bear and Pontiff looking a little nervous about the damage the former might inadvertently do to the latter’s white cassock.114

  At a candlelight service at the town hall in Adelaide, standing at the opposite end of the globe from Peter’s city, the Bishop of Rome lit the first candle of the Advent wreath, which symbolized the Church’s four weeks of preparation for Christmas. Throughout his pontificate, John Paul had insisted that he was, above all, an evangelist. He had now brought the message of the Gospel— “the light of Christ which has come into the world and cannot be extinguished”—quite literally to the ends of the earth.115

  15

  Forward to Basics

  Freedom Ordered to the Dignity of Duty

  JANUARY 13, 1987

  Pope John Paul II meets General Wojciech Jaruzelski at the Vatican.

  FEBRUARY 20, 1987

  The Pope receives Mrs. Muzeyyen Agca, mother of Mehmet Ali Agca.

  MARCH 25, 1987

  Redemptoris Mater, John Paul’s sixth encyclical.

  APRIL 1–12, 1987

  Papal pilgrimage to Chile and Argentina.

  MAY 1, 1987

  John Paul II beatifies Edith Stein in Cologne.

  JUNE 5, 1987

  John Paul issues apostolic letter to the bishops of Lithuania on the 600th anniversary of their nation’s conversion.

  JUNE 7, 1987

  The Pope inaugurates a special “Marian Year,” to be completed on August 15, 1988.

  JUNE 8–14, 1987

  Third papal pilgrimage to Poland.

  JUNE 25, 1987

  Papal audience for Austrian President Kurt Waldheim triggers controversy and special consultation with world Jewish leaders on August 31–September 1 in Rome and Castel Gandolfo.

  JULY 8–14, 1987

  John Paul hikes in the Dolomites.

  SEPTEMBER 10–21, 1987

  Second extended papal pilgrimage to the United States.

  OCTOBER 1–30, 1987

  Synod of Bishops considers lay vocation and mission in the world; Synod’s work completed by the apostolic exhortation, Christifideles Laici, on December 30, 1988.

  DECEMBER 3–7, 1987

  Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I comes to Rome on pilgrimage.

  DECEMBER 22, 1987

  John Paul’s Christmas address to the Roman Curia stresses the priority of discipleship over office.

  JANUARY 25, 1988

  Apostolic Letter, Euntes in Mundum, marks millennium of Christianity among the Eastern Slavs.

  FEBRUARY 14, 1988

  John Paul’s millennium message to Ukrainian Catholics, Magnum Baptismi Donum, praises Greek Catholic fidelity under persecution.

  FEBRUARY 19, 1988

  Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, John Paul II’s second social encyclical.

  MAY 7–19, 1988

  Pastoral pilgrimage to Uruguay, Bolivia, Peru, and Paraguay.

  MAY 20, 1988

  Shelter for the homeless opens in the Vatican.

  JUNE 7, 1988

  John Paul II writes personal letter to Mikhail Gorbachev, indicating openness to a wide-ranging conversation; letter is delivered in the Kremlin on June 13 by Cardinal Agostino Casaroli.

  JUNE 28, 1988

  John Paul creates twenty-four new cardinals at his fourth consistory and issues the apostolic constitution, Pastor Bonus, reorganizing the Roman Curia.

  JUNE 30, 1988

  Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre illegally ordains four bishops and incurs automatic excommunication.

  AUGUST 15, 1988

  Apostolic Letter, Mulieris Dignitatem, on the dignity and vocation of women.

  FEBRUARY 1989

  John Paul II counsels Andrei Sakharov in the Vatican.

  The limousine drove into the Cortile San Damaso, where General Wojciech Jaruzelski was met by the Prefect of the Papal Household and the liveried Gentiluomini del Santo Padre and escorted inside, past the salutes of the Swiss Guards. It was January 13, 1987, sixty-one months to the day since the Polish communist leader had declared war on his own country through the imposition of martial law. General Jaruzelski rode up the elevator to the third floor of the Apostolic Palace, where he and his escort turned left and walked past a striking set of frescoed maps of the world to the papal apartment. The door opened and the Pole whose claim to lead his country rested on armed force was taken to the library, where he would meet the Pole whose leadership in their fatherland was based on the power of the spirit.

  Both men knew who had won.

  General Jaruzelski’s security police had murdered Father Jerzy Popiełuszko, and other priests had disappeared under strange circumstances. But Father Jerzy had been right: hopes could not be murdered. His grave in the churchyard of St. Stanisław Kostka had become Solidarity’s sanctuary, a piece of free Poland. There were many other such sanctuaries throughout the length and breadth of the country, embassies from the Polish nation to itself. One of them was run at the Kolbe Church in Nowa Huta by another resistance priest, Father Kazimierz Jancarz, the chaplain of the Lenin Steelworks and a burly man in his mid-thirties, given to describing himself as �
�just a proletarian.”

  Every Thursday evening at 6 P.M., there was a special Mass celebrated at the Kolbe Church, followed by an educational program in which, as Father Jancarz put it, “We tried to give people back their memory.” There might be a debate on the current political situation or a lecture on Polish history. Lech Wałęsa and the intellectual leaders of the legally nonexistent Solidarity came and participated. An unofficial Christian university sprang up at the church in the mid-1980s. For up to six hours every Saturday, the steelworkers of Nowa Huta studied economics, sociology, psychology, “real history,” and the fine points of political organizing and public relations with professors from the Jagiellonian University, the Polish Academy of Sciences, and the Kraków Polytechnic. Fifty workers were enrolled each semester, and four semesters got you a “degree.” Some 400 workers eventually graduated, including Father Jancarz himself, who “took the program and learned a lot from it.”

  Then there were the “evenings of independent Polish culture,” during which the church basement was used for theater, political cabaret, jazz, symphonic music, or graphic arts exhibits (poster art, in particular, had flourished in post–martial law Poland). The basement had been cleverly constructed, with tunnels leading out into the warren of apartment blocks in Miestrzejowice so that a large crowd could disperse quickly if the authorities wanted to make trouble. There were no announcements of an “evening of independent Polish culture” beforehand. Publicity was by word of mouth. As many as a thousand people attended each evening.