Ethnic and ecumenical tensions also marred the visit. St. Teresa’s Church in Przemyśl, near the Polish-Ukrainian border, had been seized from Greek Catholic Poles of Ukrainian origin in 1946 and eventually given to the Carmelites. It had been returned to the Greek Catholics for five years in January 1991, until Latin-rite protesters forcibly reversed a decision John Paul had endorsed. For perhaps the first time in his life, John Paul was angry with the Carmelites he had once hoped to join.47 The alternative was to build a Greek Catholic cathedral in the formerly vacant Greek Catholic Diocese of Przemyśl, to serve as the seat of a new Greek Catholic bishop, Ivan Martyniak. Things were so unsettled in Przemyśl because of ancient animosities between the local Poles and Ukrainians that the Polish bishops had felt compelled to issue a statement on February 28, reminding the irate Latin-rite locals that Bishop Martyniak was “being sent by the Holy Father” and deserved a “worthy entrance” into his See.48 For their part, the Greek Catholics were upset that their restored diocese had been made subordinate to the Latin-rite Primate in Warsaw, rather than to the Major-Archbishop of L’viv in Ukraine.49 Cardinal Lubachivsky brought several thousand Ukrainian Catholics to Przemyśl for the papal Mass, but the Pope’s hopes for a definitive reconciliation between Latin-rite Polish Catholics and Greek Catholic Poles of Ukrainian origin was not fulfilled during the visit.
Even the Solidarity-led government managed to make difficulties for John Paul. At the end of the visit, the Pope had hoped to spend a few days privately in his beloved Tatra Mountains. The government, caving in to press carping about the cost of the visit and complaining that the Pope didn’t understand the pressures democratically elected leaders were under, did not encourage a papal respite in the Tatras. John Paul, who canceled his plans for a brief mountain holiday, was offended and hurt.50
The 1991 papal pilgrimage to Poland was not adequately prepared by the Polish Church. The Pope seems not to have been adequately briefed on the dynamics of the new political and cultural situation. The “Ten Commandments” theme, unobjectionable in itself, was not well-suited to the psychology of the moment. And the Polish Church lacked the media resources to meet the challenge of a Polish press that, in dealing with public figures, was beginning to imitate the Western media in assuming guilt and hidden agendas until proven otherwise. John Paul himself would later muse on whether he had not underestimated the degree of damage that communism had done to the culture of his homeland. He also knew that the Polish bishops had made his task in June 1991 more difficult by their heavy-handed approach to post-communist politics, and he may have suspected that his own approach to democratic Poland needed refinement.
The 1991 pilgrimage created a new image of John Paul II in the Western press—the angry old man, incapable of understanding the world he had helped bring about.51 It was a crude caricature. What could have been described as papal passion in defense of basic human rights was dismissed as the fierce anger of a disappointed lover embittered by his rejection. John Paul II, as anyone who knew him could well attest, was not a man given to bitterness. The inadequacies of the trip’s preparation, and the public context set by the poor performance of much of the Polish hierarchy in the previous year, helped give the caricature a certain plausibility among commentators for whom freedom is defined almost entirely as independence from moral authority.52
Six years later, John Paul II would find his voice during a pilgrimage to Poland that swept away many of the unhappy memories of the 1991 visit. For the moment, though, the fourth papal pilgrimage to Poland was another trial in a difficult year.
EUROSYNOD 1991
In advancing the new evangelization, John Paul first turned his attention to the “old continent,” Europe.
Archbishop Jan Schotte, General Secretary of the Synod of Bishops, had been in England in early 1990 to talk about the Vatican’s view of the new Europe. In the course of an informal discussion about how the Church might best grasp the opportunity created by the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Schotte floated the idea of a pan-European Synod of Bishops. Cardinal Basil Hume of Westminster liked it. On his return to Rome, Schotte mentioned his discussion with Cardinal Hume to the Pope. John Paul handed the Belgian prelate a sheet of paper, dated December 24, 1989, on which he had begun jotting down his own ideas for just such a meeting.53
The Pope announced the Special Assembly for Europe of the Synod of Bishops at Velehrad, in Moravia, on April 22, 1990, during his dramatic trip to newly free Czechoslovakia. Reporting on the announcement, Le Monde described the impending Eurosynod as John Paul’s proposed “reconquest of the European mind.” A commentator in the Manchester-based Guardian suggested that the Pope had emerged “as one of the few European leaders with an indisputably hegemonic project,” which was the formation of “a political movement based on belief in God, simultaneously rejecting both irreligion and materialism.”54 The evangelical thrust of the Pope’s initiative was lost in these and other commentaries. On June 5, during a special consultation in Rome to begin planning for the Eurosynod, he tried to make his intentions clear again, in an address to the forty-seven churchmen present that was a distinctive reading of the history of European civilization and a portrait of the mind of Karol Wojtyła, European.
History Lesson
Those who had lived through the stirring events of the past months—the fall of the Berlin Wall, the liberation of captive nations, the collapse of the “bloc” system, the end of the Cold War—must have sensed that they were passing through “a divine kairos,” a special moment when God’s power within history was palpable. This, John Paul began, was the way that history ought to be read: “in depth.” Only that kind of reading could illuminate the “new situation [that] is dawning in the life of the Nations” of Europe.
Christianity’s European presence dated back to the first missions of the apostles. A large part of what the Pope termed “the great evangelization” of the continent had spread from Rome, but there was another “important focal point” to Europe’s evangelization: Constantinople. For a millennium, the Gospel had come to Europe through that diversity-in-unity John Paul styled “Rome— Byzantium.” Only after the eleventh century did evangelization, and the formation of Europe’s distinct cultures, involve a divided Christianity.
In addition to shaping national cultures, John Paul continued, the evangelization of Europe contributed to the development of a transnational “humanist culture,” born from the encounter between biblical religion and ancient Greek philosophy. Married to Roman law, this triad—Jerusalem, Athens, Rome—created what we recognize as “European civilization.” The “humanist culture” of Europe began to change several hundred years ago, John Paul argued, when the belief in God that had shaped its understandings of the cosmos and the human person was replaced by a culture built around subjective human consciousness. Man, the “knowing subject,” now fully occupied “the center of things.” And there, the Pope observed, “he has remained, alone,” his loneliness intensified by the breach between science and religion and by the rise of Marxism. There was a deep paradox in all this. The biblical view of creation as intelligible, the biblical view of the human person as having “dominion” over creation, and the biblical view of history as purposeful had shaped the cultural foundations that eventually made what moderns know as “science” possible.
In any case, forgetting God had had tremendous public consequences. Indeed, the very awfulness of twentieth-century European history had created an evangelical opportunity. European man had been forced to acknowledge what the Pope termed “the other side of a civilization he was inclined to think superior to all others.”
Auschwitz, the Pope insisted, was not the end of Europe’s civilizational story. But it revealed the depths of depravity to which men who had forgotten God could descend. Nazism had been “completely vanquished,” but one of the victors in that struggle had been yet another totalitarian power. It, too, had finally fallen, thanks to a “resistance…based on the inviolability of the rights of man,” inc
luding the centrality of the “right of freedom of conscience and of religion.” The human rights resistance that had swept away the communist system posed a fundamental challenge to those who read a secular trajectory in Europe’s civilizational history. The events they had all just lived through had demonstrated the exact opposite of the secularist claim: “religion and the Church have shown themselves to be among the most effective means to liberate man from a system of total subjugation.”
Far from providing the Church with a chance to gloat, however, this ought to compel a serious examination of the Christian conscience, John Paul said. If Christians had been faithful to the Gospel, would the horrors of the twentieth century have taken place? All the more reason, then, to resist the notion that post–Cold War democratic public life in Europe could “be detached from the values of Christian faith and morals.”
The Churches of Europe, East and West, had lived through extraordinary experiences in the past fifty years. Those experiences could only be adequately understood within a concept of history that left room for God and for the workings of God’s providence. That was what had made Europe “Europe.” And that was what the bishops of Europe, John Paul thought, ought to be considering at the Eurosynod—how to “translate” their countries’ recent experiences of God’s hand at work in history into a new European Pentecost, one that would take what was best in modern European culture and reconnect it to its most authentic roots, which were Christian.55
The Difficulties of Different Expectations
That the Eurosynod could not meet in 1990 made it far more difficult for it to be the energizing evangelical experience for which John Paul hoped. But in order to balance the Synod’s membership between the two reunited halves of the continent, bishops had to be appointed to vacant dioceses in central and eastern Europe, and that took time. If the Synod had met in 1990, the ratio of bishops would have been 3:1, West to East. Delaying the Synod until the late fall of 1991 allowed for more equal representation. It also meant that the Synod was meeting a full two years after the kairos that John Paul had hoped would ignite the new evangelization of the old continent. During that period, much had happened.
Yugoslavia’s collapse into bloody chaos and the inability of the European powers to do anything about it had raised more questions about the concept of a common European home. Transitions to democracy in east central Europe had caused considerable economic dislocation and a lot of disgruntlement. Every newly democratic east central European state was struggling with how to render justice to the victims of the state security services and to officials complicit in serious injustices. Democratic “normality” in the new democracies had turned out to mean “normal” divisiveness—a particularly bitter pill after the remarkable unity displayed by the anti-communist resistance in 1989. The Soviet Union had come apart at the seams, and no one knew what was coming there next. Western Europe moved quickly to take advantage of investment opportunities in the new democracies (no small matter, to be sure, in the reconstruction of east central Europe), but Western Europeans and their political leaders seemed largely uninterested in the ongoing drama east of the Elbe River.
Sadly but almost inevitably, by the time the 137 members of the Synod finally convened on November 28, 1991, much of the energy generated by the Revolution of 1989 had dissipated.
The Synod met for two and a half weeks. For the first time in Synod history, representatives of other Christian communities participated as “fraternal delegates.” Despite the ecumenical innovation and the Pope’s high expectations, it quickly became evident that the bishops had come to the Synod with different sets of expectations. The new archbishop of Prague, Miloslav Vlk, believed the Synod ought to have challenged the preconceptions of both groups of bishops. The bishops of the new democracies should have gotten beyond an attitude of “We’ve been martyrs, we don’t need you,” and the bishops from the established democracies should have looked for some lessons in the testimony of churchmen who had sustained the faith in very trying circumstances. Yet the problem, as Vlk saw it, was that virtually none of the Westerners understood communism, which meant that they couldn’t grasp what their newly liberated brothers had gone through.56
Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger of Paris also thought that the bishops were having problems understanding one another’s experiences. The Western bishops were “too conscious of their own superiority,” while the bishops from east central Europe were profoundly conscious of their recent persecution and reluctant to be led by others. “They wanted to tell what had happened to them and the Western bishops found it difficult to listen,” as Lustiger put it. At the same time, the Westerners were confronting problems the bishops in the new democracies could barely imagine—the temptations of material abundance, which meant being tempted by good things, not simply by evils.57
Cardinal Jozef Tomko agreed that there was a communications problem, based on bishops who had lived “two different realities.” But the 1991 Eurosynod, he insisted, was intended to be an “exchange of spiritual gifts,” and at that level he thought it had succeeded. The Western Churches began once more to “realize that these [other European] Churches were now free,” and the Churches in the new democracies began to realize, like the West, “both how needy they were and how rich they were in faith.” Tomko believed there was also a rediscovery of old truths at the Eurosynod. Western Churches, focused for centuries on the intellectual challenge of modernity, “rediscovered the importance of traditional religion and traditions like the family and the Bible” in sustaining the faith. Everyone involved, East and West, was compelled by the Eurosynod to focus on the cross as the center of Christian life. Meeting modern martyr-confessors helped one to rediscover “the old mysteries of the Church in the light of new realities.”58
Then there was the question of Vatican II. The Western bishops admired the tenacity of their colleagues from behind the former iron curtain, but many found it difficult not to think of the central and eastern Europeans as men who had dropped out of history—and who needed instruction in how to be “the Church in the modern world,” according to the Western European understanding of the Council. The bishops from many formerly communist countries were justifiably nervous about the assumption that the Western European model of conciliar implementation applied to everyone—not least because of the continued decline of Catholic adherence and practice in Western Europe. This tension left open the question of precisely what kind of help the Churches in the new democracies should seek from the West in forming new institutions like national bishops’ conferences and in rebuilding their seminaries.59
Western bishops were tempted to think that their colleagues in the new democracies should go through an accelerated course in post-conciliar theology and pastoral practice. Men like Prague’s Vlk felt that the Council had to be implemented there in light of the very distinctive pastoral problems of post-communist societies. The most important issues, Vlk believed, were the recreation of real Christian community, a new pattern of collaboration between clergy and laity, and fostering lay initiative. Then there was the question of reconstituting public moral culture. Life under communism had been, in a sense, living in black-and-white; “normality,” Vlk said, was “shades of gray.”60 Perhaps there was something to be learned from the Western Churches in this regard, but these institutions were hardly exemplars of a robust public Catholicism.
The refusal of the Orthodox Churches, and particularly the Russian Orthodox Church, to participate in the Synod was another frustration for John Paul II’s ecumenical agenda. It also provided the occasion for the Synod’s most dramatic moment. Though most Orthodox leaders had refused the Pope’s invitation to participate, one exception was the newly elected Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I, who sent a “fraternal delegate” to the Synod, Metropolitan Spyridon Papagheorghiu of Venice, the chief Orthodox leader in Italy. On the evening of December 7, 1991, during an ecumenical prayer service at St. Peter’s Basilica in which all the Synod members participate
d, Metropolitan Spyridon attacked the Eastern Catholic Churches in union with Rome (the “Uniates”) for what he termed their “violent” reoccupation of churches in Ukraine and Romania, and charged Rome with setting up “parallel missionary structures” in Russia itself (i.e., the new apostolic administrations). Catholic-Orthodox relations were at a low ebb thanks to Roman aggression, the Metropolitan concluded. The Synod members and Protestant participants in the ecumenical service were stunned by Spyridon’s public attack on Catholicism and the Pope inside the basilica, and the Metropolitan’s remarks were followed by an embarrassed silence.
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