Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  In April 1994, Navarro met with Messori at the Italian journalist’s home and gave him a large white envelope. It was John Paul’s answers to Messori’s questions, prepared as a book manuscript, with the title Crossing the Threshold of Hope handwritten by the Pope on the folder containing the results of this unprecedented act of papal authorship. John Paul indicated that the title was only a suggestion and that the editors could do what they thought right. Messori, Navarro, and the others involved in getting the manuscript published wisely decided to leave the title exactly as the Pope had written it. John Paul reviewed and approved the lightly edited manuscript, which was published simultaneously in the major world languages in October 1994.130

  Popes had written encyclicals, apostolic letters, apostolic exhortations, and homilies, but no pope had ever written a book that was essentially a conversation with the reader about his own experience of Christian faith and his hopes for the world. Predecessor popes might have worried about how the authority of such a book would fit into the taxonomy of papal documents. John Paul evidently thought that that could be left to the theologians to work out. Here was another opportunity to clarify, in a very personal way, the proposal he had been making for sixteen years. The question of what it meant for a pope to be doing such things could be sorted out later. More than a decade and a half into his pontificate, John Paul II was still governing the Church as an outsider, at least insofar as the traditional managers of popes were concerned.

  Substantively, Threshold contained no surprises for those who had been following John Paul’s published papal texts. To others, who were accustomed by now to thinking of Karol Wojtyła as an authoritarian seeking to impose a rigorous Polish form of Catholicism on the universal Church, Threshold was a revelation. Emphatically and unmistakably, this was a Pope in conversation, a man living the teaching he had laid down in Redemptoris Missio: “The Church proposes; she imposes nothing.” His descriptions of his own struggles in prayer; his autobiographical reflections on the fate of his Jewish schoolmates in Wadowice, on his vocational discernment, on learning “to love human love” through his first experiences as a young priest with those preparing for marriage; his deep ecumenical hopes; his profound sense of the twentieth century as a century of martyrs; his passion to reinstill hope into humanism in the face of modern fear—all this bespoke a richly human and humane sensibility, not the cast of mind of a doctrinaire scold.

  For all its popular appeal, Crossing the Threshold of Hope was neither generic “spirituality” nor popularized philosophy. Rather, it was another expression of Karol Wojtyła’s core conviction that Jesus Christ is the answer to the question that is every human life. That answer, he believed, spoke to the depths of the world’s fear at the end of a terrible century:

  …Someone exists who holds in His hands the destiny of this passing world; Someone who holds the keys to death and the netherworld (cf. Revelation 1.18); Someone who is the Alpha and the Omega of human history (cf. Revelation 22.13)—be it the individual or collective history. And this Someone is Love (cf. 1 John 4.8,16)—Love that became man, Love crucified and risen, Love unceasingly present among men…He alone can give the ultimate assurance when he says, “Be not afraid!”131

  In a modern world that had once feared God’s existence and now feared what humanity might be capable of in a world without God, to encounter that Love was to cross the threshold of hope.132 That, his book suggested, was what John Paul II had been proposing all along, in multiple variations on a single great theme.*

  Aging into the Future

  Although there were elements of autobiographical retrospection in Threshold, the Pope continued to look toward the future even while he visibly aged.

  On November 11, as his book was breaking to the top of the best-seller lists, John Paul II signed a “Common Christological Declaration” with the Assyrian Church of the East, whose members live in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, India, North America, and Australia. It was the latest in a series of ecumenical agreements with smaller Eastern Churches long divided from Rome—and, in the case of the Assyrian Church of the East, which had broken with the rest of Christianity at the Council of Ephesus in 431, divided from every other Christian communion as well. The Common Christological Declaration recognized that the same faith in Christ could be expressed in different formulas and affirmed that Catholics and Assyrians are “united today in the confession of the same faith in the Son of God.” This breakthrough in a 1,500-year-old dispute was entirely the accomplishment of John Paul II’s pontificate, and presaged even greater cooperation and perhaps ecclesial reunion in the future, as the Assyrians began to plan common projects with the Iraq-based Chaldean Catholic Church, including a common catechism and joint priestly formation.134

  Even as his ecumenical hopes with Orthodoxy were being frustrated on a number of fronts, John Paul had made steady progress in resolving centuries-old theological disputes with a group of ancient Eastern Churches, once called “monophysite” or “pre-Chalcedonian,” but now usually known as the Oriental Orthodox Churches. These Churches broke with the rest of a unified Christianity over the definition of Christ’s “two natures” at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Yet a patient series of bilateral ecumenical dialogues with these communions resulted during John Paul II’s pontificate in declarations with the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Coptic Orthodox Church, and the Syrian Orthodox Church, in which both parties stated that their faith in Christ, despite verbal differences in formulation, was “the same.” Though there was no formal declaration as such when the Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church came to Rome in June 1993, John Paul had said that Catholics and Ethiopian Orthodox shared “the same” faith in Christ. The dialogue between Roman Catholicism and the Oriental Orthodox Churches could now move on to questions of the nature of the Church and of ecclesiastical jurisdiction.135

  These ecumenical achievements were the result of several factors: the maturing of bilateral theological dialogues; the pressures on small Churches living in an Arab and Muslim sea (a circumstance which could make Rome seem like a protector rather than an ancient foe); large-scale immigration to the West and the desire of these Churches to maintain their own identity amid the pressures of assimilation.136 Whatever the complexities of motivation, the result was that disputes dating to the first half of the first Christian millennium were being resolved on the threshold of the third.

  The Catholic Church of the twenty-first century was further defined by John Paul’s sixth consistory for the creation of cardinals, held on November 26, 1994. Miloslav Vlk, the former Prague window washer who had conducted his ministry underground for years because of communist repression, and Jaime Ortega y Alamino, the archbishop of Havana who was still contesting for Cuba’s future with one of the world’s last communist regimes, received the red hat, as did Vinko Puljić, the forty-nine-year-old archbishop of Sarajevo. John Paul broke precedent by raising the General Secretary of the Synod of Bishops, Jan Schotte, to the cardinalate. Belarus received its first cardinal in Kazimierz Świątek, the eighty-year-old archbishop of Minsk-Mohilev; a veteran of ten years in the Gulag Archipelago, he had celebrated Mass lying on his back in a prison bunk in order to avoid suspicion. Mikel Koliqi, a ninety-two-yearold Albanian who had spent twenty-one years in communist labor camps and twenty-three years in communist prisons, was named cardinal, as were two venerable figures from the Vatican II generation of theologians, the German Jesuit Alois Grillmeier and the French Dominican Yves Congar, who was too infirm to attend the consistory. It was a thoroughly international consistory, with new cardinals from Lebanon, the Czech Republic, Japan, Chile, Scotland, Mexico, Indonesia, Cuba, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Uganda, the United States, Peru, Québec, Spain, Bosnia, Madagascar, Vietnam, Ecuador, Belarus, and Germany being inducted into the College along with four Italians. John Paul’s sixth consistory guaranteed that the conclave to choose his successor would be the most multinational in history.

  The Pope closed a year of controversy with a Decembe
r 13, 1994, Letter to Children. John Paul wrote of his own memories of Christmas, and of the importance of First Communion; he recalled child martyrs and child visionaries as exemplars of the “Gospel of children.” At the close of this International Year of the Family, with all the contention that had caused, he wanted to ask children for something that no other world leader had requested during “their” year—their prayers. Children, he wrote, “instinctively turn away from hatred and are attracted by love.” That was why he asked the children of the world to “take upon yourselves the duty of praying for peace.” The prayers of children had enormous power, and that was a model for grown-ups, who ought to pray with the simple and complete trust of the young.137

  John Paul concluded his letter by asking the world’s children to be missionaries of love. The previous month, placing a ring on the fingers of the men he had just created cardinals, he had reminded them of the necessity of bearing witness even to shedding their blood. The two statements may have seemed dramatically different. To the Pope’s mind, being a witness to love and giving oneself completely to the truth were two dimensions of life on the far side of the threshold of hope.

  19

  Only One World

  Human Solidarity and the Gospel of Life

  APRIL 10–MAY 8, 1994

  Special Assembly for Africa of the Synod of Bishops meets in Rome; Synod’s work completed by apostolic exhortation, Ecclesia in Africa, issued in September 1995.

  JUNE 13, 1994

  The College of Cardinals discusses the jubilee year of 2000.

  SEPTEMBER 29, 1994

  Ambassador Shmuel Hadas, Israel’s first ambassador to the Holy See, presents credentials to John Paul II.

  OCTOBER 25, 1994

  The Holy See establishes “official relations” with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

  NOVEMBER 10, 1994

  Apostolic Letter, Tertio Millennio Adveniente, on the Great Jubilee of 2000.

  JANUARY–DECEMBER 1995

  John Paul II issues fifteen public appeals for peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

  JANUARY 14, 1995

  On Radio Veritas Asia, John Paul urges all Chinese Catholics to “seek paths of communion and reconciliation.”

  JANUARY 15, 1995

  In Manila, John Paul II gathers the largest crowd in history for the closing Mass of the fifth international World Youth Day.

  MARCH 25, 1995

  Evangelium Vitae, John Paul’s eleventh encyclical.

  MAY 25, 1995

  Ut Unum Sint, the first papal encyclical on ecumenism.

  JUNE 27–29, 1995

  Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I visits the Vatican.

  JUNE 29, 1995

  John Paul II issues his Letter to Women throughout the world.

  SEPTEMBER 4–15, 1995

  Fourth World Conference on Women meets in Beijing.

  OCTOBER 4–9, 1995

  John Paul’s third extended pilgrimage to the United States.

  OCTOBER 5, 1995

  John Paul II addresses the Fiftieth General Assembly of the United Nations.

  NOVEMBER 12, 1995

  An apostolic letter marks the fourth centenary of the Union of Brest.

  NOVEMBER 26–DECEMBER 14, 1995

  Special Assembly for Lebanon of the Synod of Bishops meets in Rome.

  MARCH 25, 1996

  Apostolic Exhortation, Vita Consecrata, completes the 1994 Synod of Bishops.

  OCTOBER 8, 1996

  John Paul’s appendix is removed at the Policlinico Gemelli.

  NOVEMBER 7–10, 1996

  John Paul celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination with priestly golden jubilarians from around the world.

  NOVEMBER 15, 1996

  John Paul II publishes his vocational memoir, Gift and Mystery.

  On the morning of June 13, 1994, as they gathered for the fifth extraordinary consistory of the pontificate, more than one member of the College of Cardinals thought that the Pope was on the verge of making a serious mistake. There were several items on their two-day agenda, but it was the first day’s topic, preparations for the Great Jubilee of 2000, that had caused considerable controversy within the College and the Curia.

  Earlier in the year, the Pope had sent the cardinals a twenty-three-page memorandum, “Reflections on the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000,” and asked for their written responses. The memo proposed five initiatives leading up to and celebrating the turn of the millennium—a series of regional Synods for Asia, the Americas, and Oceania, to be held in Rome; a great ecumenical meeting of all Christian communions; an international meeting of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim leaders; an updating of the Church’s “martyrology,” bringing thousands of witnesses to the faith onto the official roster of martyrs; and an examination of the Church’s conscience in order “to acknowledge the errors committed by its members and, in a certain sense, in the name of the Church.”

  On forty previous occasions, John Paul had directly or indirectly acknowledged the errors of Catholics throughout history: errors in interreligious relations, errors in the Church’s relationship to its own reformers, errors in the Church’s treatment of indigenous peoples, errors in its treatment of women, errors that had contributed to the East-West break of 1054 and to the intra-western fracture of the sixteenth-century Reformation. The Pope was now proposing a general examination of conscience of far greater magnitude—and proposing to do it publicly for all the world to see. The cardinals were worried.

  Cardinals from the new democracies of central and eastern Europe were concerned that a public admission of past errors might revive anti-Catholic propaganda in countries that had just been freed from the burden of communist anti-Catholicism. Third World cardinals, representing local Churches often less than 200 years old, were not terribly interested in the tangled history of Catholic Europe. Other cardinals were concerned about the historical methodology of any such self-examination: Did it make sense to judge the deeds of churchmen in the fourteenth century, who may well have been acting according to their best lights, by the standards of the twentieth? Still others, including Bologna’s outspoken Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, had raised a theological caution. The members of the Church were certainly all sinners, but in acknowledging that, it was important to remember that the Church itself, as the Body of Christ, was without sin. Some veteran members of the Roman Curia thought that this initiative, like others in the pontificate of John Paul II, was simply an inappropriate thing for a pope to do.

  In his opening address to the consistory, John Paul quickly deflected any attempt to blame the jubilee memo on unnamed papal staffers by making two personal references to “the memorandum sent to each of you.” This was his document, he stood behind it, and it represented his best thinking on the subject, which he now laid out in further detail.

  The Pope spoke at length about the Second Vatican Council as the “high point” of the Church’s preparation for the third millennium. Between 1994 and 2000, any authentic preparation for the jubilee year “must have the application of the Council’s directive as its basic criterion.” Ecumenism was also high on John Paul’s millennium agenda. The quest for Christian unity was one of the Church’s basic obligations en route to the jubilee year, and in meeting it, “mutual accord between the Catholic West and the Orthodox East” was “perhaps the greatest task. We cannot come before Christ, the Lord of History, as divided as we unfortunately have been during the second millennium.”

  The new martyrology, the Pope continued, reflected Vatican II’s emphasis on the universal call to holiness. John Paul knew there had been criticism of the number of beatifications in his pontificate. If some present had difficulties with this, he gently suggested, they should complain to the Holy Spirit rather than about the Pope, for “the great number of beatifications vividly reflects the action of the Holy Spirit and the vitality flowing from him in the Church’s most essential sphere, that of holiness.” The Church’s devotional and liturgical life was still histori
cally unbalanced, with too little attention paid to examples of sanctity from the young Churches evangelized in the second millennium.

  At the end of the address he squarely faced the most difficult issue raised by his pre-consistory memorandum: the cleansing of the Church’s conscience as it turned into a new millennium. Conversion, John Paul said, was an essential part of the preparation for 2000: “As she faces this Great Jubilee, the Church needs ‘metanoia,’ that is, the discernment of her children’s historical shortcomings and negligence with regard to the demands of the Gospel.” This was not ecclesiastical political correctness. It was obedience to Christ’s desire that his Church be evangelical and united. Cleansing the Church’s historical conscience was essential if the Gospel were to be preached credibly.

  The cardinals listened and then broke into language-based discussion groups to think more about the Great Jubilee. It was a busy time and they were busy men. The year 2000 was half a decade away. Did it really require all this attention now? At the end of the extraordinary consistory, the cardinals issued two statements. The first urged the nations of the world to clarify the international law of humanitarian intervention in light of the butcheries in Rwanda. The second supported John Paul’s campaign to sharpen the moral focus of the Cairo population conference.