During his two days in Santiago, John Paul pressed the message of a Europe beyond the Cold War, recovering its Christian heritage as it rediscovered the roots of European culture, and challenged the generation that would inherit the new Europe to rethink the meaning of heroism.
The young people spent the entire night of August 19–20 just outside the city, singing and praying in vigil on Monte de Gozo, the “Mountain of Joy” from which medieval pilgrims got their first sight of the shrine of Santiago de Compostela. John Paul had spent part of the evening with them. Then, on the morning of August 20, he spoke to them of true human greatness, by reminding the enormous congregation of the dialogue involving Christ, the apostles James and John, and their determined mother, who had asked Jesus that her two sons be given privileged places in the Lord’s kingdom. Jesus, in turn, asked the brothers whether they could “drink the cup that I am to drink?” They had replied, “We can” (Matthew 20.20–23). They did not know then the full sense of what they had said, John Paul suggested, because they had not yet realized that drinking “this cup” would mean, as it would for Christ, the complete pouring out of their own lives. They had not yet fully realized what Christ had meant when he had said that he “came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many (Matthew 20.28).”
That, he suggested, was what a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela was for. One came to learn what Jesus had meant when he told James, John, and the other ten that “whoever would be great among you must be your servant” (Matthew 20.26). Those words were “the essential criterion of human greatness,” and they implied “a transformation, a renewal of the criteria by which the world is governed.” The young Catholics who were to reevangelize the new Europe would have to do so according to an exacting standard of service.
As he had with James and John, Christ demanded a radical commitment from his followers today. He did not want mediocrity. For a Christian, mediocrity meant measuring one’s commitment by a self-devised standard and thinking of anything beyond that as the preserve of the professional saint.24 Mediocrity was not what the Church and world of the twenty-first century needed. Young people, the Pope knew, wanted to improve the world they had inherited and to do so in freedom. That required not mediocrities, but saints: “Do not be afraid to be saints! This is the liberty for which Christ has set us free… Dear young people, let yourselves be won by him!”25
After World Youth Day, the Pope stopped briefly at the Marian shrine of Covadonga in northern Spain, some 200 miles east of Compostela. There, “with confidence,” he laid before Our Lady of Covadonga “the project of a Europe without frontiers…that has not renounced the authentic humanism of the Gospel of Christ.”26 Two days later, at his regular Wednesday general audience in Rome, he spoke of Santiago de Compostela as “a privileged beacon of Christian radiation for Europe, this old Europe which is facing an important stage in its unification and the imminence of the third Christian millennium.”27 The new Europe being born from the old Europe needed more than the amelioration of ancient animosities. It needed a soul. World Youth Day 1989, an important moment in the “new evangelization,” was meant to help form that soul.
Asia, Again
On September 8, 1989, two days before thousands of East Germans began fleeing west via Hungary and Prague, John Paul received the members of the Joint International Pentecostal/Roman Catholic Dialogue. On September 12, the day that Tadeusz Mazowiecki’s cabinet was approved by the Sejm, he met with Indian bishops on an ad limina visit (other ad limina groups in September 1989 came from Lesotho, Venezuela, and Peru). The Archbishop of Canterbury came to Rome on September 29 for a four-day visit. The joint declaration signed by Archbishop Runcie and the Pope on October 2 acknowledged that “we do not see a solution” to the new obstacles that had emerged in the quest for “visible unity,” which both leaders maintained was still their goal.28
The day before, on October 1, John Paul had beatified an entire seminary—twenty-six priests and seminarians of the Passionist order martyred in Spain in 1936. In 1963, Paul VI had put a “hold” on beatification and canonization causes from the Spanish Civil War. Virtually all the martyrs had been victims of the Republican forces, but Paul VI did not look favorably on the Franco regime (which had defeated the Republicans) and didn’t want to bolster the Spanish dictator’s position by beatifications and canonizations of civil war victims. Pope Paul was also concerned that revisiting the recent past would prove divisive in the current Spanish Church.29 Generalissimo Franco had died in 1975, but John Paul II was, in any event, a pope of a different mind about the martyrology of the modern world. The Church needed to be reminded that it lived in the greatest century of persecution in Christian history. In addition to beatifying numerous victims of the Spanish Civil War, John Paul also beatified martyrs from two other fratricidal conflicts once thought too controversial to touch—the French Revolution and the Mexican “Cristero” uprising of the 1920s. Father Miguel Pro, a thirty-six-year-old Jesuit shot by firing squad in Mexico on November 23, 1927, may have been the first martyr in Church history whose execution was photographed. John Paul had beatified him on September 25, 1988.
The Forty-fourth International Eucharistic Congress was held in Seoul, South Korea, in October 1989. John Paul flew there on October 6–7, his fifth pilgrimage to the Far East. In meetings with South Korean President Roe Tae Woo at the Blue House, the Korean presidential residence, John Paul urged greater legal protection and respect for human rights in what would become Asia’s second majority-Christian country early in the twenty-first century. As always, the primary thrust of his message was evangelical. At the Congress’s closing Mass on October 8, which he concelebrated with 280 bishops and 1,500 priests before a congregation of more than a million, the Pope, who spoke a few sentences in Korean at the beginning of his homily, pointed out that sharing in the Eucharist compelled work for reconciliation. When Christianity had been introduced to Korea two centuries before, it had created a new form of community that abolished the “inviolable class barriers” of traditional Korean society. In an analogous way, Catholics in Korea today were called to try and achieve reconciliation in the face of the “tragic division” of their country.30
At the noontime Angelus prayer following the closing Mass, John Paul, speaking in English, broadcast a greeting to the people of North Korea, where there were neither bishops nor priests to serve the Catholic population. In the broadcast, which was heard in China, the Pope made public for the first time his desire to visit the People’s Republic of China and his hope for a reconciliation in truth between the underground Chinese Church loyal to Rome and the regime-sponsored Patriotic Catholic Association. Given the tangled complexities of the situation, it was a nuanced statement that bears careful reading:
In this filial conversation with Mary, our mother [i.e., the Angelus], I also make mention of our brothers and sisters in Christ living in mainland China…. Deep within my own heart, there is always present an ardentdesire to meet these brothers and sisters in order to express my cordial affection and concern for them and to assure them of how highly they are esteemed by the other local Churches. I am deeply moved when I think of the heroic signs of fidelity to Christ and his Church which many of them have shown in these past years. Through the intercession of Mary, help of Christians, may Christ be their consolation in every trial and in all of life’s daily challenges. May the Lord also inspire within them a firm commitment to the delicate task of fostering reconciliation within the ecclesial community, in communion of faith with the successor of Peter, who is the visible principle and foundation of that unity.31
John Paul’s broadcast from Seoul was a public effort to accomplish what private diplomacy had failed to achieve—an opening to the People’s Republic of China. Six years earlier, in 1983, the Pope had sent a letter to Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. Written in English on his personal stationery, and replete with expressions of John Paul’s respect for Chinese culture and its ancient history, the plea for
a renewed conversation read as follows:
To His Excellency, Deng Xiaoping
I am of the opinion that the pursuit of the common good of humanity encourages something that is also the object of my own lively desire: a direct contact between the Holy See and the authorities of the Chinese people….
I am moved to this also by the profound responsibility that is proper to my religious ministry as universal pastor of the Catholics of the whole world, which inspires within me a special solicitude toward Catholics who are in China. Men and women, scattered throughout the country, who feel a deep loyalty and love for their own land…and who at the same time feel united with the Pope and with the Catholic communities of all the other countries.
It is a bond which, for the religious faith of Catholics, is an essential one, and which, on the other hand, cannot harm the ideal and concrete unity of their own nation or be to the detriment of its independence and sovereignty…
[Taiwan] is undoubtedly a long and complicated situation in which the Holy See has found itself, through a series of events, not always dependent on its own will. Nevertheless, I am confident that in the context of a concrete examination of the question it will be possible to reach a positive solution.
JOANNES PAULUS PP. II32
From the Vatican
16 November 1983
At Deng’s death on February 19, 1997, the letter remained unanswered.
Human rights were an issue in Indonesia, the next stop on the Pope’s second-longest voyage (some 23,400 miles in eleven days). The world’s fifth-largest country was predominantly Muslim and had been ruled by the Suharto dictatorship since 1966. Catholics were a majority in East Timor, forcibly annexed by Indonesia in 1975 as Portuguese colonialism was collapsing around the world. The Church in East Timor, including the apostolic administrator of Díli, the capital, Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo, SDB, had been involved in nonviolent resistance to what the East Timorese regarded as a foreign occupation. Violent opposition had met with brutal Indonesian repression; the site of the papal Mass in Díli on October 12 had seen considerable bloodshed.
It was a very difficult situation. After blessing the new Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception at Díli, John Paul preached on the challenge of being “salt” and “light” for people who had “experienced death and destruction as a result of conflict” and had known what it means to be “the victims of hatred and struggle,” in which “many innocent people have died while others have been prey to retaliation and revenge.” The Pope did not mention publicly the issue of East Timor’s lost sovereignty, as banners supporting East Timorese independence appeared in the crowd of some 80,000 at the Mass. In Jakarta, though, John Paul had told President Suharto and his cabinet that they could not “disregard human rights in a misguided search for political unity.”33 He also urged the Indonesian bishops to be more vigorous defenders of the right of religious freedom.34
The Pope returned home by way of the Indian Ocean island state of Mauritius, where he spent the better part of two days. In Curepipe, a magnificent rainbow crowned his last meeting with thousands of rain-soaked pilgrims.35 He flew back to Rome on October 16 as unprecedented demonstrations broke out against the East German regime in Leipzig.
WORLD WAR II REMEMBERED
John Paul II was acutely aware that the Yalta imperial system had begun to crumble on the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of World War II. Reading the Revolution of 1989 through the prism of moral analysis, the Pope began to offer a distinctive interpretation of the past half-century of European and world history as the revolution unfolded.
On August 26, 1989, the feast of Our Lady of Częstochowa, he wrote the bishops of Poland to mark the anniversary of the war that had devastated their homeland. The following day he issued an apostolic letter to the Church throughout the world. Its theme was taken from Psalm 88—“You have laid me in the depths of the tomb, in places that are dark, in the depths.” Taken together, these two important texts define the Pope’s view of the meaning of World War II and the challenge such a “depth” reading of history poses to the twenty-first century.
It had been, he believed, a war for the future of civilization, and the aggressor against civilization was totalitarianism. “The Second World War,” John Paul wrote, “made all people aware of the magnitude…which contempt for man and the violation of human rights could reach. It led to an unprecedented marshaling of hatred, which in turn trampled on man and on everything that is human…. Many people were led to ask whether, after that terrible experience, it would ever be possible to have any certainty again.”36
That question of confidence in the human future remained unanswered, fifty years later: “It could be said that Europe, contrary to appearances, is not yet completely healed of the wounds inflicted throughout the course of the Second World War. For this to happen…a genuine solidarity is needed.”37 So was an accurate analysis of what had happened in 1939–1945, for only when that truth was recognized could true solidarity be reestablished. Long before 1939, he wrote, “certain sectors of European culture” had tried to “erase God and his image from man’s horizon.”38 One result of that erasure was the substitution of false religions in the form of “Nazi paganism and Marxist dogma,” two “totalitarian ideologies” with pretensions to “become substitute religions.” Contempt for God had led inexorably to contempt for humanity and for individual human lives. The result was a moral abyss, in which twentieth-century Europe had been reminded of the reality of Satan.39
The world had a duty to “learn from the past so that never again will there arise a set of factors capable of triggering a similar conflagration.”40 Racism and anti-Semitism had to be rejected completely. Citizens of the new Europe had to learn that “public life cannot bypass ethical criteria.” Statesmen had to learn that “respect for God and respect for man go hand in hand.” The Church had to learn from the failure of evangelization that had contributed to the disasters of twentieth-century Europe, and to “be vigilant as to the way the Gospel is proclaimed and lived out today.” This underscored the importance of the quest for Christian unity.41
A crisis of confidence in the human prospect was the enduring legacy of World War II. That crisis of faith remained to be dealt with, even as the political effects of the war were being reversed in the Revolution of 1989. In dealing with it, the Church had to remember that, as “God does not despair of man,” so “neither may we despair of man.”42
MESSIANIC LIBERATION
When the papal schedulers slated the canonizations of Blessed Agnes of Bohemia and Blessed Albert Chmielowski for Sunday, November 12, 1989, they certainly did not imagine that the ceremony would take place during a political upheaval that would fundamentally alter the landscape of Europe and the politics of the world.
Two and a half months before, on August 22, the Lithuanian Supreme Soviet had unilaterally voided the republic’s annexation by the Soviet Union. Although the gesture had no immediate effect, it was a harbinger of the fact that the revolution gaining irresistible momentum in east central Europe would unravel far more than the external Soviet empire. On September 10, Hungary opened its border with Austria to permit the departure of East German refugees to the West. More than 30,000 eventually escaped the German Democratic Republic through this breach in the iron curtain. Three weeks later, on October 1, East German communist leader Erich Honecker permitted 15,000 East Germans who had taken refuge in the West German embassies in Prague and Warsaw to travel to West Germany on special trains—another breach in the once impregnable technological moat dividing Germany and Europe. On October 18, two days after massive demonstrations began in Leipzig, Honecker, who had ruled since 1971, was ousted as party leader and replaced by Egon Krenz.
There was no letup in the demonstrations or the emigrations. On November 5, more than 500,000 rallied in East Berlin on behalf of democratic reforms. Between November 4 and 8, another 50,000 East Germans fled to the West through Czechoslovakia. The East German cabinet resigned and
old warhorses were removed from the Communist Party Politburo on November 7 and 8. It was too little reform too late, however, and the new party and governmental leaders knew it. They essentially surrendered on November 9, opening the Berlin Wall for a free exchange of people between East and West. Berliners danced atop the Wall. By 1 A.M. on November 10, the legendary Kurfürstendam was filled with Germans from both sides of the border blowing trumpets, embracing, dancing—and scarcely believing what was happening. The greatest symbol of the Cold War had fallen.43
The canonizations of Albert Chmielowski and Agnes of Bohemia on November 12 gave John Paul II the opportunity to offer a public interpretation of these epic events. In another vivid demonstration that there are no mere coincidences in the designs of Providence, the canonization ceremony in Rome also became the occasion for Czechs and Slovaks to gather their energies for the next phase of the Revolution of 1989.
The canonization of Brother Albert, the first time in history that a playwright had proclaimed one of his characters a saint, could not have been better timed. Brother Albert had quite literally resisted Lenin’s temptation and had chosen the “greater freedom” of a life wholly dedicated to God through service to the poor. In doing so, he became an icon of the full meaning of Christian liberation, which transcended politics while infusing it with meaning and value. As John Paul put it in his canonization homily, the reading from Isaiah during the liturgy—“Release those bound unjustly, untie the thongs of the yoke, set free the oppressed, break every yoke” (Isaiah 58.6)—was “the theology of messianic liberation, which contains what we are accustomed to calling today the ‘option for the poor’: ‘Share your bread with the hungry, shelter the oppressed and the homeless; clothe the naked when you see them, and do not turn your back on your own’ (Isaiah 58.7).” “This is exactly what Brother Albert did,” the Pope concluded. “He took upon himself Christ’s yoke and burden; he did not become merely ‘one of those who give alms,’ but he became the brother of those whom he served….”44
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