Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  It could not be blithely assumed, the Pope said, that something like this would never happen again. The Church was not going away, and neither was science. The possibility could not be excluded that “one day we shall find ourselves in a similar situation, one which will require both sides to have an informed awareness of the field and of the limits of their own competencies.”

  History, literary studies, biblical interpretation, philosophy, and theology had all had to reexamine their procedures and their age-old assumptions because of the scientific method. But science, too, had things to reflect upon in light of the developments of the last several centuries, John Paul suggested. Science was not simply a matter of empirical facts. In describing “the data of experience” and drawing conclusions from it, scientists made use of concepts that were beyond the empirical. Scientists needed philosophers, just as philosophers had come to recognize that they needed scientists.

  The same lesson applied to the Church and theology. In confronting scientific advances, theologians and pastors “ought to show a genuine boldness, avoiding the double trap of a hesitant attitude and of hasty judgment” about new scientific discoveries. It was essential for theologians “to keep themselves informed of scientific advances in order to examine…whether or not there are reasons for taking them into account in their reflection or for introducing changes in their teaching.” At the same time, the Pope proposed, everyone should recognize that the Galileo affair had become a “sort of myth” which had helped to “anchor a number of scientists of good faith in the idea that there was an incompatibility between the spirit of science and its rules of research…and the Christian faith.” That, in turn, had led to “a tragic mutual incomprehension,” based on the notion of “a fundamental opposition between science and faith.”

  That could not be true, for as Pope Leo XIII had written, “Truth cannot contradict truth.” If that seemed to be happening, a mistake had been made somewhere. There were different ways of knowing the truth about the human person and the human place in the cosmos. A genuine humanism respected that diversity, and celebrated the plurality of intellectual methods necessary to probe the human condition in its marvelous complexity. Science and theology were “two realms of knowledge” that should not regard themselves as locked inexorably in opposition. The Church recognized that. The question now was whether science did.

  The Galileo case had compelled the Church to examine its conscience and to recommit itself to the ancient Christian conviction that all genuine knowledge was welcome, because it shed light upon the mystery of the human person the Church existed to serve. The challenge for the twenty-first century, John Paul suggested, was for the experimental sciences to commit themselves to a genuinely humanistic perspective, in which the full truth of the human condition, including the spiritual dimension of experience, was part of the conversation about the greatest mystery in the universe—the mystery that is every human life.1

  STEADY COMPASS

  In the years immediately following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, it quickly became a truism that the post–Cold War world was an uncharted wilderness without benchmarks or guideposts. Like every other institution on the planet, the Church faced a confusingly diverse international situation.

  The world’s leading powers shied away from maintaining order in the Balkans and in the Lakes Region of central Africa, where hundreds of thousands died because there was no persuasive answer to the question of why the victors in the Cold War should put their sons and daughters in harm’s way. Nothing had yet taken the place of bipolarity and containment as a matrix for thinking about the new world disorder and devising policy for bringing order out of chaos.

  Among academics and pundits, the collapse of communism was generally agreed to have been the result of its misguided economics, which had made it impossible for the Soviet Union and its satellites to compete in a world dominated by the silicon chip and the fiber-optic cable. This was, ironically, an essentially Marxist answer to the demise of Marxism, and illustrated just how deeply economic determinism had entered into the thinking of Western scholars and commentators.

  Within the victorious democracies, the meaning of the end of the Cold War was never publicly defined—in part, for fear of aggravating an aggrieved Soviet Union during its collapse, and thus jeopardizing the reunification of Germany within the Western alliance; in part, because the cluster of politicians who succeeded the leaders of the 1980s lacked the historical imagination to see the parallels between 1945 and 1989/1991. Without a compelling public proclamation of freedom’s victory over tyranny, tens of millions of Western Europeans and North Americans were left wondering what the struggle of the previous forty-five years had been about. This deficiency in public understanding, in turn, fueled two post–Cold War instincts in the established democracies: to withdraw from world politics into domestic concerns, and to think of freedom as liberation from any traditional moral code, rather than as a method for seeking the truth and conducting public life in ways that advanced the common good.2

  Just as he had had a different view of the nature of the Cold War than most politicians and international relations specialists, Pope John Paul II had a different view of the world’s post–Cold War situation.

  In the Pope’s mind, the fundamental crisis of modernity remained unresolved. The inalienable dignity of the human person was still threatened in the post–Cold War world, by new authoritarians, retooled ex-communists (or “postcommunists,” as they were known in central and eastern Europe), and utilitarians. Then there was the question of the moral structure of the free society. As Centesimus Annus should have made clear, John Paul passionately believed in the free society. His encyclical had, in fact, offered a more detailed blueprint for building and sustaining such a society than was on offer anywhere else. To the Pope’s way of thinking, though, the free society was threatened by the drift toward what Zbigniew Brzeziński called the “permissive cornucopia.”3 Unbridled material appetites, John Paul believed, were another form of tyranny.

  Just as culture had been the key to defeating communism, culture would be the key to building a twenty-first century capable of fulfilling the aspirations of those who had struggled so long against communist tyranny. Free economies and democratic political communities were crucial components of the post–Cold War free society. As Centesimus Annus had argued, though, neither the free economy nor democracy was a machine that runs by itself. Both needed the foundation, boundaries, and discipline provided by a vibrant public moral culture if freedom was to fulfill itself in genuine human flourishing.

  John Paul’s compass was unaffected by the atmospheric turbulence of the post–Cold War 1990s. Jesus Christ remained the answer to the question that was every human life. And that was an “answer” with large public consequences.

  THE EVANGELICAL IMPERATIVE

  John Paul II’s charter for the Church of the third millennium was his eighth encyclical, Redemptoris Missio [The Mission of the Redeemer], which he signed on December 7, 1990, to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Vatican II’s Decree on the Church’s Missionary Activity.4 The post-conciliar Church had been divided over the question of what kind of mission the Church had. John Paul insisted that the Church didn’t simply have a mission. The Church is a mission.5

  In the world as a whole, the Christian movement claimed some 2 billion members, of whom approximately 1 billion were Roman Catholics. Measured numerically, the twentieth century had seen the greatest expansion of Christianity in history. For example, in 1900 there were about 2 million Catholics in Africa; by the end of the century there were almost 100 million.6 Yet Christianity’s development had not kept pace with population growth. During the twentieth century, Christians decreased slightly as a percentage of total world population, from 34.4 percent to 33.2 percent.7 Some areas of the world—notably the Indian subcontinent and East Asia—remained essentially unevangelized.

  In the wake of Vatican II, however, various Catholic theologians had suggested that
the Church’s mission ad gentes, “to the nations” of the unevangelized, was over. Some argued that evangelization today was simply work for justice. Others proposed that, in a post-colonial world, a Christian mission ad gentes was cultural imperialism: to evangelize was to impose, and the Church should go to the non-Christian world to learn from the faiths of others, not to teach the faith of which it was a bearer. An even more radical faction saw Jesus as simply one embodiment of a generic divine will-to-redeem that appeared in different forms in different cultures. Jesus was the redeemer for Christians, but other great world religious figures filled that “role” in other cultures.8 In this intellectual atmosphere, it was not surprising that the post-conciliar period had seen a shrinking of Catholic missionary efforts around the world, at precisely the time when evangelical Protestantism and Islam were assertively seeking converts in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

  Catholic thinking had traditionally held that Christianity was the “ordinary” means of salvation, while God could make provision for “extraordinary” exceptions. Some Catholic thinkers were now proposing that Christianity was the “extraordinary” path. Redemptoris Missio was, among other things, an attempt to correct this inversion. It was also much more.

  Like any encyclical of such ambitious scope, Redemptoris Missio grew from several roots. One was an international congress on the theme of “salvation today,” held in early 1988 at the Church’s Roman missionary university, the Pontifical Urban University. Cardinal Jozef Tomko, who had been Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples (the curial department responsible for Catholic missions throughout the world) since 1985, decided to stage what he later termed a “provocation” at the congress.9 In his opening address, Tomko confronted the entire range of proposals made by many theologians of Christian mission during the past generation. The cardinal tried to raise questions from the vantage point of missionaries, who often found themselves considered irrelevant—if not downright imperialistic—by “missiologists,” theologians of the Church’s mission. What was the point of preaching Jesus Christ if Christ was not the redeemer of the world, through whom all human beings would be saved? Why give one’s life to the proclamation of the Christian Gospel if it was simply one among a variety of possible forms of God’s revelation? How could a real dialogue with world religions take place if Christians were unconvinced of the truth of the Gospel they preached? If evangelization was simply the promotion of justice in society, who needed a Church? Cardinal Tomko’s address caused sufficient controversy that an entire book of essays was organized to refute it.10 The cardinal had brought to the surface a host of interrelated issues that, clearly, needed attention.

  “It’s about time,” John Paul said to Tomko, “that I say something about all this.”11

  The Church as a Mission

  While sorting out theological confusions about Christian mission and dealing with controversies about the relationship of Christ and the Church to God’s saving will for all humanity were two purposes of Redemptoris Missio, it would be a mistake to think of the encyclical as a corrective. It is, rather, a reminder to the entire Church that every Catholic has a missionary vocation because, as the Pope puts it, “the Church is missionary by her very nature.” 12 The universal call to holiness includes a universal call to evangelize. Christianity is good news that demands to be shared, and to share Christ with others is the best possible thing that individual Catholics and the Church can do for the world.13 Moreover, a radical sense of the evangelical imperative is necessary for revitalizing the Church itself, for “faith is strengthened when it is given to others.” 14 The impending third millennium ought to remind Catholics that the Church’s mission, a continuation of the mission of Christ himself, “is still only beginning.”15

  That mission, John Paul writes, grows out of the twin doctrines that define Christianity: the doctrine of God as Trinity, and the doctrine of the Incarnation—Jesus Christ as God-made-man for the salvation of the world. Because God is a Trinity of self-giving Persons, the Church must be a community of self-giving missionaries, teaching all nations God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. The Pope does not deny that there are saving elements in other world religions, but he insists throughout the encyclical that “God’s revelation becomes definitive and complete through his only-begotten Son,” Jesus Christ.16 Nor can one disentangle “Jesus” from “Christ,” such that Jesus appears as one manifestation among others of God’s word to the world: “Jesus is the Incarnate Word—a single and indivisible person. One cannot separate Jesus from the Christ…. Christ is none other than Jesus of Nazareth; he is the Word of Godmade man for the salvation of all.”17

  This uniqueness gives Christ “an absolute and universal significance.”18 Whatever is true in other religions tends toward the truth revealed in Jesus Christ and reaches its fulfillment in him. The salvation offered by Christ is offered to all, even to those who have not explicitly heard Christ’s Gospel or who do not formally belong to his Church. Because God wills that his salvation be offered to all, “it must be made concretely available to all,” John Paul urges. That is the reason for the Church’s mission to the nations. At the same time, he concedes, “many people do not have an opportunity to come to know or accept the Gospel revelation or to enter the Church.” They are not necessarily lost. For them, “salvation in Christ is accessible by virtue of a grace which, while having a mysterious relationship to the Church, does not make them formally part of the Church but enlightens them in a way which is accommodated to their spiritual and material situation. This grace is from Christ; it is the result of his Sacrifice and is communicated by the Holy Spirit.”19 Whoever is saved, is saved through Jesus Christ.

  If all can be saved by the mysterious workings of grace beyond the formal boundaries of the Church, why worry about mission? The encyclical offers six reasons. The Church is a mission by its very nature, and to lose that missionary imperative is to break with the Church of the New Testament. Christian mission is one form of obedience to the great commandment of love for one’s neighbor. Christian mission is a fulfillment of our duties to others, who have a right to know about Christ so that they might have the option to believe. Christian mission strengthens unity among Christians, and impels them to deepen that unity so that the scandal of Christian division is less an obstacle to the proclamation of the Gospel. Christ has saved us, and our willingness to share his Gospel with others is an index of the degree to which we have truly understood and grasped the import of that.20 Finally and most importantly, this is what God requires of us. Like the good shepherd who seeks out the lost sheep (see John 10.1–18), the Church that continues the good shepherd’s mission must be missionary.21

  To those who ask, “Who, then, is to be evangelized?” John Paul has a direct answer: everyone. That evangelization takes different forms. One is the pastoral care of the evangelized people of the Church. Another is the “new evangelization” of those who have fallen away from Christian faith or who were poorly instructed. Then there is the mission ad gentes, to those places “in which Christ and his Gospel are not known,” or where local Christian communities are too immature to take up the challenge of mission. Redemptoris Missio is primarily concerned with this third form of Christian mission. The Pope suggests three criteria for developing it in the third millennium.

  The first is geographic. The great failure of Christian mission in the first two millennia of Christian history is Asia, and thus it is to Asia that the mission ad gentes “ought to be chiefly directed.”22 The second criterion is demographic. There are new human worlds and environments in late modernity that demand the Church’s missionary attention—among them John Paul notes the new “megalopolises” or massive urban areas of the developing world, young people, and migrants and refugees in traditionally Christian societies.23 The third criterion is cultural. The mass communications media, human rights associations and advocates, the feminist movement, movements to protect children, the environmental movement, the world of scien
ce, and international legal and political institutions are the “modern equivalents of the Areopagus,” waiting for a compelling proclamation of Jesus Christ as the answer to humanity’s most urgent questions.24 In dealing with them, as in dealing with ancient cultures formed by venerable religious traditions, the Church’s method, the Pope insists, must be the method of freedom: “The Church proposes; she imposes nothing. She respects individuals and cultures, and she honors the sanctuary of conscience.”25

  Christian mission in the post–Cold War world will be lived out, John Paul suggests, in various ways. The first is example: the truth of Christianity is often more powerfully revealed by the quality of Christian lives than by explicit teaching, though the latter must complete the former.26 People who have seen love in action may be more disposed to consider the teaching that God himself is love. In situations like India, the witness of the Missionaries of Charity is a great good in its own right and a first step toward planting the Church in that particular culture. John Paul also mentions the martyr as the most powerful witness to the truth of Christian faith.27 Ecumenical cooperation and interreligious dialogue are two other “paths of mission.” A growing unity among Christians aids the Church’s witness to non-Christians, as does a serious conversation with other religious traditions in which both parties acknowledge that truths are at stake.28

  The Pope affirms “inculturation,” the effort to “translate” Christian truth claims into the idiom of a local, non-Christian culture, which must be guided by two principles: compatibility with the Gospel and communion with the universal Church. Any “inculturation” that empties the Gospel of its distinctiveness is not inculturation but accommodation. One way to test whether that is happening is to determine whether the proposed “inculturation” sets local expressions of Christian truth against the universal Church and its center of unity in the Office of Peter.29 As for the relationship between evangelization and the pursuit of justice and peace, the Church’s primary task and greatest contribution in the “development of peoples” is the formation of consciences. By “offering people an opportunity…to ‘be more’ by awakening their consciences through the Gospel,” the Church serves human liberation. In that “being more,” men and women will come to recognize their human dignity, the rights that flow from it, and the solidarity that ought to characterize relations among peoples and nations.30