Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  Had the Secretariat of State undertaken a more rigorous empirical analysis of the situation, and had classic just-war categories been more evident in John Paul’s public addresses, the Pope’s appeals for peace might have elevated the international debate, as he had done so effectively in the past.137 John Paul’s difficult search for a language to express his sense of a pope’s appropriate role in such a crisis, combined with the problems of transition in the Secretariat of State and the U.S. failure to consult adequately with the Holy See, lead to the conclusion that the Vatican’s performance in the Gulf War crisis between August 1990 and March 1991 did not meet the high standards set in the previous twelve years of the pontificate.

  FROM THE HEART OF THE CHURCH

  As in any other crisis, John Paul II had numerous other issues to contend with during the pre–Gulf War debate, the war itself, and its aftermath. He received bishops from India, Brazil, the Philippines, South Korea, Bolivia, Vietnam, Taiwan, and eight regions of Italy on ad limina visits to Rome. A meeting with representatives of the Brazilian Bishops’ Conference was held on March 8–9, 1991, to review with leading members of the Roman Curia the themes discussed during the Brazilians’ 1990–1991 cycle of ad limina consultations. On August 17, John Paul sent a letter of congratulations to Brother Roger Schutz for the fiftieth anniversary of the ecumenical monastery at Taizé. Ten days later, on August 27, Mr. and Mrs. Lech Wałęsa came to visit at Castel Gandolfo; the same day, a three-day meeting to prepare for a special Synod of Bishops for European episcopates on both sides of the former iron curtain began.138 On September 14 the Pope met with the dissident Chinese physicist and prodemocracy activist Feng Lizhi, after addressing a meeting of astrophysicists at Castel Gandolfo. On September 28, John Paul received a group of ex-Lefebvrist monks who had been reconciled to Rome through the Ecclesia Dei Commission. The Eighth Ordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops met in October 1990. Germany was reunified on October 3, and on October 16 John Paul sent a telegram to Mikhail Gorbachev, congratulating him on winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

  On October 8, John Paul received the credentials of Hans-Joachim Hallier, the new ambassador of united Germany, telling him that “the Second World War…came to an end on October 3.”139 On November 8, Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, the former Secretary-General and President of the Latin American bishops’ council, was named President of the Pontifical Council for the Family; several months later, over lunch, John Paul urged the Colombian cardinal to organize a series of seminars for the world’s bishops on married life and bioethics.140 The Pope delivered a blistering critique of the Mafia during a four-day pastoral visit to Naples and Campania from November 9 to 13, coming back to Rome in time to receive Soviet President Gorbachev on his second visit, which took place on November 18. Gorbachev had been memorizing Bible verses to drop into their conversation.141 On December 9, Lech Wałęsa was elected President of Poland. A week after that, and in defiance of orders from his religious superiors, a young priest named Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected President of Haiti. On January 18, Archbishop Camillo Ruini, a former seminary professor serving as Secretary-General of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, was named the Pope’s vicar for the diocese of Rome, succeeding the retiring Cardinal Ugo Poletti. On January 20, the Polish bishops’ letter marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of Nostra Aetate was read in all Polish churches. President Wałęsa made a state visit to the Vatican on February 5. Father Pedro Arrupe, SJ, was buried on February 8.

  During this same exceptionally busy period, John Paul took up the question of Catholic universities in an apostolic constitution that seemed likely to shape Catholic intellectual life well into the twenty-first century, and perhaps beyond.

  Ex Corde Ecclesiae

  Karol Wojtyła’s piety about the university and what it represents in the world of human culture dates back to his student days at the Jagiellonian in Kraków. It intensified during his years on the faculty at Lublin, in part because Lublin represented an oasis of truth in a desert of lies. Six months after his election as pope, in April 1979, John Paul had issued the apostolic constitution Sapientia Christiana [Christian Wisdom], regulating the universities and faculties that receive a special charter from the Holy See and are thus deemed “pontifical universities” or “pontifical faculties.” Now, in 1990, he issued another apostolic constitution, Ex Corde Ecclesiae [From the Heart of the Church], to chart the future of all Catholic institutions of higher education, the great majority of which are not “pontifical.” The apostolic constitution was signed on the solemnity of the Assumption, August 15, and was publicly presented at a press conference on September 25, 1990.142

  Ex Corde Ecclesiae was an initiative of the Curia’s Congregation for Catholic Education, which believed it necessary to complete the work of Sapientia Christiana. John Paul II had “real input” into the writing and rewriting of the document, according to a senior official involved in the process.143 Its opening section bears the distinctive personal mark of Karol Wojtyła’s thinking about the nature of a Catholic university, which ought to be the repository and defender of “a kind of universal humanism [that is]…completely dedicated to the research of all aspects of truth in their essential connection with the supreme Truth, who is God.” This was not a burden, for all knowledge was a reflection of Christ the Logos, the Word through whom the world was created, and who “alone is capable of giving fully that Wisdom without which the future of the world would be in danger.”144

  There had been major changes in Catholic universities and colleges since Vatican II, and Ex Corde Ecclesiae was an attempt to give direction to their future evolution. To Catholic universities and colleges whose sense of Catholic identity had become attenuated, or who were unclear about the distinctive character of a Catholic institution of higher education, the document urged retrieving the idea that the Catholic college or university is part of the mission of the Church. As the document’s title indicated, these were institutions that had grown “from the heart of the Church,” and their life should reflect that. Ex Corde Ecclesiae also tried to rebuild the relationship between Catholic institutions of higher education and bishops, who “should be seen not as external agents but as participants in the life of the Catholic University.”145

  These ideas about the nature and mission of the Catholic university were then concretized in eleven “norms.”146 The most controversial of them in some countries stated that “Catholic theologians, aware that they fulfill a mandate from the Church, are to be faithful to the Magisterium of the Church as the authentic interpreter of Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition.” This was a specification of Canon 812 in the new Code of Canon Law, which stated that “it is necessary that those who teach theological disciplines in any institute of higher studies have a mandate from the competent ecclesiastical authority”—which in most instances meant the local bishop. Sapientia Christiana had made it clear that theologians at pontifically chartered faculties must have this “man-date.” Ex Corde Ecclesiae extended the requirement of the mandate to theologians in all Catholic colleges and universities, who were required to make a profession of faith according to a formula established by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1989.147 Specific local norms for the application of these general norms were to be developed by the national conferences of bishops.

  Ex Corde Ecclesiae was well-received in Spain and Latin America, where the “mandate” was not thought a problem and where ecclesiastical authority and instruments (like diplomas and degrees) were regarded as credentials in civil society. In France and Italy, the apostolic constitution’s description of the mission of the Catholic university was also well-received, but there was resistance to devising local applications of the norms, on the theory that the Catholic character of the institution was assured by the spirit of the individuals in it, not by legal structures. The question Ex Corde Ecclesiae raised, even for institutions where that was true today, was how that character was to be preserved over time as faculties, administrators,
and intellectual fashions changed.148

  The most negative reaction to the “mission” section of Ex Corde Ecclesiae and its norms came from the United States. The dominant tendency among American Catholic higher education leaders and the theological community was to frame discussion of the document in terms of Vatican interference with their institutional autonomy and academic freedom. This reaction grew out of a particular history.

  Catholic colleges and universities in the United States had been built, in the main, at a time when the Church considered itself an enclave against the wider culture. When Vatican II challenged the Church to engage the modern world, it may well have seemed to many Catholic educators that the choice was between being an enclave and emulating American elite educational institutions.149 The intention of the Catholic college and university presidents who met for a crucial 1967 planning session at Land O’Lakes, Wisconsin, was to move Catholic higher education into the ranks of the country’s culture-forming leadership, and institutional autonomy from Church supervision was considered essential in that effort. But the Land O’Lakes meeting overestimated the amount of Catholic capital available to be drawn on in this process, and looked to elite American colleges and universities for models of “independence” at the precise moment when those schools were in intellectual and moral turmoil. The resulting effort to sever the legal control that had been exercised by bishops or religious orders over Catholic colleges and universities effectively, if unintentionally, cut these institutions loose from their intellectual moorings in the midst of a major cultural crisis. Twenty years after the Land O’Lakes meeting, there were important changes in the thinking of some American Catholic higher educators, and an increasing awareness that something had gone seriously awry in Catholic higher education in the United States since Vatican II. Ex Corde Ecclesiae was intended to help advance this reflection even further, but confusions about academic excellence and academic freedom in a distinctively Catholic context impeded the document’s reception.150

  The debate over the Catholic identity of Catholic colleges and universities would continue throughout the pontificate.151 Granting its entanglement with a host of other issues and concerns, that debate was, at bottom, another expression of John Paul II’s conviction that, after the death of the empire of lies, the crucial question for free societies old and new was the relationship between freedom and truth. It was a theme he would pursue tirelessly, even relentlessly, in the years ahead, as he sought to apply the lessons of the Revolution of 1989 to the emerging world of the twenty-first century.

  17

  To the Ends of the Earth

  Reconciling an Unreconciled World

  DECEMBER 7, 1990

  Redemptoris Missio, Pope John Paul II’s eighth encyclical.

  APRIL 13, 1991

  John Paul establishes three apostolic administrations in the Soviet Union.

  JUNE 1–9, 1991

  The Pope’s fourth pastoral visit to Poland.

  JUNE 28, 1991

  At his fifth consistory John Paul creates twenty-three new cardinals.

  AUGUST 14–15, 1991

  John Paul addresses third international World Youth Day, in Częstochowa, Poland.

  OCTOBER 2, 1991

  Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I dies, and is succeeded on October 22 by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I.

  NOVEMBER 28–DECEMBER 14, 1991

  The Special Assembly for Europe of the Synod of Bishops meets in Rome.

  JANUARY 13, 1992

  The Holy See recognizes the independence of Croatia and Slovenia.

  MARCH 25, 1992

  Polish hierarchy re-organized.

  MAY 13, 1992

  The Pope announces that a World Day of the Sick will be observed annually on February 11, feast of Our Lady of Lourdes.

  JULY 15, 1992

  John Paul has surgery for the removal of a benign intestinal tumor.

  SEPTEMBER 21, 1992

  The Holy See establishes full diplomatic relations with Mexico.

  OCTOBER 9–14, 1992

  John Paul participates in fourth general conference of Latin American bishops in Santo Domingo.

  OCTOBER 31, 1992

  John Paul II receives report of the papal commission on the Galileo case and urges new dialogue between science and religion.

  DECEMBER 5, 1992

  The Pope asserts a “duty” of “humanitarian intervention” in cases of impending genocide.

  DECEMBER 7, 1992

  Public presentation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

  JANUARY 12 AND 15, 1993

  John Paul declares the “hour of the laity” in Polish Catholicism and rejects a partisan Church in two ad limina addresses to Polish bishops.

  FEBRUARY 10, 1993

  During his tenth African pilgrimage, John Paul condemns persecution of Sudanese Christians in address at Khartoum.

  APRIL 9, 1993

  John Paul writes the Carmelite nuns living in a convent just outside the Auschwitz concentration camp, asking them to continue their ministry in a new location.

  APRIL 25, 1993

  The Pope ordains four new bishops in Albania.

  MAY 8–10, 1993

  John Paul makes his most vigorous protest against the Mafia during three-day pilgrimage to Sicily.

  JUNE 17–24, 1993

  Roman Catholic/Orthodox consultation in Balamand, Lebanon, attempts to repair ecumenical divisions of post-communist period.

  SEPTEMBER 4–10, 1993

  Papal pilgrimage to Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.

  In the second half of the second Christian millennium, no incident had done more to sustain the image of the Catholic Church as an authoritarian enemy of human progress than the seventeenth-century Galileo case, in which the pioneering Florentine scientist was condemned by the Church for holding and teaching Copernicus’s theory that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the solar system. Galileo, who would spend the last eight years of his life under house arrest, was forced to make a humiliating public retraction—after which he is said to have muttered, “Eppur’ si muove” [Yet it moves… ].

  As a cultural myth, the Galileo affair had affected far more than the Church’s relations with modern science. Scratch the surface of any controversy involving Catholics and modern intellectual, social, or political life, and “Galileo” was sure to be played as a trump card by the Church’s opponents. Careful historical investigation had shown that the entire affair was far more complicated than, say, the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht had made it out. At the time of the controversy, for example, the heliocentric theory was not well-established and Galileo was in fact challenging the scientific consensus of his time. No amount of historical research, however, could explode the myth of Catholicism’s incompatibility with modern science and freedom of inquiry. Only the Church could do that—or try to.

  John Paul II, fellow graduate with Copernicus of Kraków’s Jagiellonian University, was determined to try. The truth demanded it. So did the evangelization of the twenty-first century.

  On July 31, 1981, John Paul had established a study commission to reexamine the entire Galileo case. Under the leadership of Cardinal Paul Poupard, President of the Pontifical Council for Culture, its research on the theological, biblical, scientific, historical, and legal questions involved was brought to a conclusion in 1992, the 350th anniversary of Galileo’s death. On October 31, 1992, John Paul met with the members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in the Sala Regia of the Apostolic Palace to accept the commission’s report. Members of the diplomatic corps, a bevy of cardinals and other high-ranking Church officials, and the members of the Pontifical Council for Culture were present for what all expected to be a historic event.

  Cardinal Poupard reported on the interdisciplinary research done during the past eleven years on the difficult relationship between Galileo, a sincere Christian believer, and the Church. The Commission noted that St. Robert Bellarmine, one of the leading theologians of the
day and a bulwark of Catholic orthodoxy, had urged prudence in thinking through the relationship between what seemed persuasive (if not irrefutable) scientific evidence, on the one hand, and what were thought to be basic (although possibly reformable) theological propositions arising from the Bible, on the other. In circumstances like this, Bellarmine proposed, it was much better “to say that we do not understand, rather than affirm as false what has been demonstrated.” That, Cardinal Poupard continued, Galileo’s judges had not done. “Incapable of dissociating faith from an age-old cosmology,” they believed, sincerely, “that the adoption of the Copernican revolution…was such as to undermine Catholic tradition, and that it was their duty to forbid its being taught.” In this, the cardinal said, they had been seriously mistaken. “This subjective error of judgment, so clear to us today, led them to a disciplinary measure from which Galileo ‘had much to suffer.’” Turning to the Pope, whose words in 1979 he had just quoted, the French prelate then concluded, “These mistakes must be frankly recognized, as you, Holy Father, have requested.”

  John Paul thanked Cardinal Poupard for the commission’s work. Its conclusions, he said, “will be impossible to ignore in the future.” An objective error had been made, which had to be recognized and repented, no matter how complex the subjective motivations involved. The Church had just done that. But now what? What had been learned from this experience?