Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  The far more positive reaction that John Paul received in the United States in 1995 was due to several factors. Unlike 1987, the 1995 pilgrimage was not organized conceptually around the concerns of the American bishops’ conference staff. The times were also different. Confronted by baffling issues with an unmistakable moral core, the public and the press seemed ready for more assertive moral leadership than was being provided by American politicians. Perhaps most significantly, John Paul’s addresses made arguments from inside the historic experience of the United States. This was not an outsider lecturing Americans on their failings by citing alien norms. This was a religious and moral leader drawing on great themes from American history to challenge Americans to live up to standards they had set for themselves. That approach framed the entire visit, from Newark cathedral on October 4 to the departure ceremony at Baltimore-Washington International Airport on the evening of October 8. The key themes of the message were not dramatically different than in 1987. But the framework was, and it made a considerable difference.

  TWA, which had reconstructed the first-class section of a Boeing 767–300 jet as a papal suite for the Pope’s return flight to Rome, offered an elaborate dinner menu that included rack of lamb, beef Wellington, quail, halibut, and pheasant. Father Robert Tucci’s instructions to those planning papal menus on these trips, that the rules should be “no ice, no spice,” were overridden by the airline’s wish to be as hospitable as possible. John Paul had some soup, a cold seafood platter, asparagus, strawberries, and a glass of champagne, and went to bed without watching Apollo 13, A River Runs Through It, or Field of Dreams, the three films being offered.143 It had been a good week, he was tired, and, as always, there were things to do in Rome the next day.

  THE GIFT OF CONSECRATION

  Shortly after returning from the UN and the United States, John Paul began a series of Sunday Angelus reflections on the documents of Vatican II, thirty years after the beginning of the Council’s fourth session. Following a pattern that had governed his interpretation of the Council since the mid-1960s, the addresses began with a meditation on Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, as the key to the Council. They immediately continued with a reflection on Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.144 On November 8, 1995, there was a solemn commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of Gaudium et Spes in the Synod Hall.145

  On November 12, the Pope issued an apostolic letter marking the fourth centenary of the Union of Brest, which had brought the Greek Catholics of Ukraine into full communion with Rome. Even as he continued to press for a new relationship with Russian Orthodoxy, the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine was never far from John Paul’s mind and heart. This new letter stressed the historic reality of Ukrainian Catholicism as a Church of martyrs and asked Greek Catholics, while giving thanks to God for their historic fidelity to Peter’s successor, to “understand that today this same fidelity commits [the Greek Catholic Church] to fostering the unity of all the Churches.” The fidelity of the past, which had so often led to persecution and martyrdom, must be “a sacrifice offered to God in order to implore the hoped-for union” of Catholicism and the Christian East at the end of the second millennium.146 Honoring contemporary martyrs while opening a new ecumenical dialogue was a delicate balance to strike, a hope perhaps easier to annunciate than to realize.

  Another situation that seemed condemned to irresolution was Lebanon, which John Paul had tried to keep before the world’s attention since his Otranto address in October 1980. If the world declined to take the travail of Lebanon seriously, the Church had to, because of the historic Christian linkage to a land where Christ himself had walked. A Special Assembly for Lebanon of the Synod of Bishops met from November 26 through December 14, 1995. In his closing homily at a solemn Mass in St. Peter’s on December 14, the Pope cited Luke’s Gospel on Christ’s preaching in Lebanon. He urged that the Beatitudes the Lord had spoken near Tyre and Sidon—and especially the last, “Blessed are you when men hate you…on account of the Son of Man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven” (Luke6.17–23)—be a “fundamental program” for the six Catholic communities of different rites in the divided country. In reconstructing the country, he concluded, “Put love above all things!”147 The Synod’s concluding message also urged the restoration of national independence and sovereignty.148 It was another hope that seemed destined to frustration in the foreseeable future, thanks to the bloody politics of the region and the ambitions of Syria.

  That the world thought some situations hopeless had never seemed to John Paul a reason for the Church to remain silent. He had issued fifteen public appeals for peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995, and had continued to call the world’s attention to the tribal slaughter in Rwanda and Burundi. The Pope also tried to focus international public attention on places that tended to fall off the historical stage, like Sierra Leone and the Sudan.149 In January 1996, the Pope sent Archbishop Claudio Celli on a special humanitarian mission to North Korea. A month later, Cardinal Roger Etchegaray was off to Jakarta, Indonesia, to try to find a diplomatic solution, by back channel if necessary, to the continuing troubles in East Timor. Three weeks before Etchegaray departed, the Pope could note one diplomatic success. On February 1, he received President Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico on a historic first official visit by a Mexican head of state to the Holy See.

  “How Is the Pope?”

  Although John Paul ordained fourteen new bishops in St. Peter’s on January 6 and baptized twenty infants in the Sistine Chapel the next day, his UN address and his American pilgrimage in the fall of 1995 had reminded the world of his health problems. Asked by visitors and friends how he was feeling, the Pope sometimes replied with a wry joke: “Neck down, not so good.” Those who worked with him and those who saw him over lunches and dinners found him as intellectually alert as ever. But visitors would also note that he tired earlier in the evening. The inadequacy of his hip replacement surgery in April 1994 continued to cause him pain. His difficulties walking meant that he was getting less exercise, which in turn led to putting on weight. A form of Parkinson’s disease, causing a tremor in his left arm and hand, was diagnosed in 1994.150 Physical limitations were not easy for John Paul. He had been physically vigorous his entire life, and it was difficult to adjust to a situation in which his body no longer did what he asked it to do. The tremor in his arm and hand was not only physically annoying; to a man with both an acute sense of public presence and a deeply ingrained sense of privacy, it was an embarrassment. His profound conviction that his life was in the hands of another authority, coupled with his disinclination to cut down his official schedule or the time he took for reading and writing, could make him seem an impatient patient, sometimes disinclined to look to medication for relief. He made occasional concessions in scheduling. Beginning in 1995, his ad limina address to visiting groups of bishops was given to each bishop as a personal letter after their group Mass with the Pope in his private chapel, rather than being read to them in a group audience. He would go to bed a little earlier some evenings. Yet the pace remained intense, even with these adjustments. Close colleagues also noted that, even in dealing with the worst situations, he never lost his sense of humor. Joaquín Navarro-Valls, his press spokesman, once asked him, “Do you cry?” John Paul replied, “Not outside.”151

  As a physician and psychiatrist, Navarro found the Pope a striking combination of two human archetypes, the abstract, rational philosopher and the daringly emotional poet. Either set of characteristics, the Spaniard thought, was difficult to find in high degree in a balanced and healthy personality. The singular thing about John Paul was that he was both, and without any apparent psychological conflict. For such an intense personality, he was remarkably normal.152

  John Paul’s health was a legitimate issue for the press, but the story was more often treated luridly than sympathetically. The sometimes fanciful coverage was not helped by a reversion (whic
h Navarro could not prevent) to the classic curial style, in which any public discussion of papal health was deemed inappropriate. Nor was the suspiciousness of the Vatican press corps assuaged by the decision of the Secretariat of State and the Pope’s personal physician not to bring in international teams of specialists for consultations during John Paul’s colon and hip surgeries, as Cardinal Casaroli had done in 1981 when the Pope was shot. Casaroli’s decision had created a sense of transparency that suggested that the Vatican was not hiding anything about the Pope’s medical situation. Absent the window provided by international consultation, the old assumption—however unjustified—inevitably recurred.153

  For all the occasionally wild speculations in the world media, the public seemed not to be disconcerted by a physically weaker John Paul II. If anything, the Pope’s health difficulties provoked a sense of concern that Cardinal John O’Connor of New York found amazing. He would be walking down the street, the cardinal once said, “and people stop and ask me, ‘How’s the Pope?’” That they were aware and concerned—that the proverbial man-in-the-street knew he had a Pope, whether he was Catholic or not—struck the archbishop of the media capital of the world as something significant.154

  A More Excellent Way

  On March 25, 1996, John Paul issued a post-synodal apostolic exhortation, Vita Consecrata [The Consecrated Life]. In addition to completing the work of the ninth Ordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, which had met from October 2 to 29, 1994, Vita Consecrata was the final panel in the Pope’s triptych of post-synodal exhortations on the three “states of life” in the Church, which had begun with Christifideles Laici (on the laity and the distinctive lay mission in the world) and continued with Pastores Dabo Vobis (on the priesthood and priestly formation), documents intended to provide “keys” to the authentic interpretation of Vatican II and its implementation in the twenty-first century.

  Consecrated men and women—those who take perpetual vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—are 0.1 percent of the Catholic Church throughout the world—1 million men and women in a billion-member community. Yet for almost two millennia Catholic Christianity has considered the consecrated life, or what many Catholics refer to as “religious life,” to be in some sense the center of the Church’s life and mission. Discussion at the Synod, in which 245 bishops participated along with theologians and auditors from men’s and women’s religious orders, was predictably focused by the difficulties that many religious communities of priests, brothers, and sisters had experienced since Vatican II, and how those difficulties were to be interpreted. In Africa and Asia, communities of consecrated life were growing, sometimes rapidly. In Western Europe and North America, vocations to the consecrated religious life had dropped sharply since the Council and many religious communities were rapidly aging. Some argued that the failure to recruit young men and women to this admittedly challenging way of life had more to do with secular lifestyles and theological dissent in post-conciliar religious orders than with the age-old problems of living poverty, chastity, and obedience in community. Many of the leaders of the major religious communities vehemently disagreed with this analysis. The net result was a paradoxical Synod. The pre-Synod phase was the most successful in history, with the Synod secretariat receiving the largest number of written responses to the proposed agenda ever. Some participants believed that the Synod itself failed to ignite the kind of theological discussion hoped for, in part because of the ongoing argument over whether (and if so, how) the post-conciliar renewal of religious life had gone wrong.155

  If the Synod discussions themselves dealt largely with problems, Vita Consecrata took an entirely different approach, focusing on the opportunities to renew religious life in the twenty-first century and encouraging consecrated men and women in vocations that John Paul described as being “at the very heart of the Church.”156 The exhortation is richly biblical and draws extensively on the Eastern Christian theology of beauty to portray the consecrated life. The technical Greek theological term is philokalia, or “love of the divine beauty,” and the Pope suggests that that distinctive love is the spiritual path to be followed by those living the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience through a vowed and consecrated life.157 The central New Testament icon for the consecrated life is thus the story of the Transfiguration, in which Peter, James, and John are awe-struck by the radiant, transfigured face of Christ on Mount Tabor (see Matthew 17. 1–9). Consecrated men and women, John Paul suggests, are those who have given their lives completely to contemplating that beauty and proclaiming it, through radical withdrawal from the world or active service in it.158

  The Pope uses other biblical images to describe the meaning of the consecrated life. Jesus’ anointing at Bethany by Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus (see John 12.1–7), is “a sign of [the] unbounded generosity” that should characterize a religious life given completely to Christ and his Church.159 The presence of Mary, Christ’s mother, and the apostle John at the foot of the cross expresses the discipleship that is the heart of religious life.160 Then there are the Virgin Mary and the apostle Peter together in the Upper Room, waiting for the descent of the Holy Spirit (see Acts 1.13–14): Jesus’ mother represents the “spousal receptivity” of the Church to God’s grace; Peter embodies one aspect of that receptivity’s fruitfulness, the ordained ministry.161

  John Paul deployed these powerful biblical images to underscore a crucial point. The consecrated life cannot be judged by the usefulness of what consecrated persons do, as measured by society’s criteria of utility. Consecrated life must be understood and measured by a different standard—the Law of the Gift built into the human condition and confirmed by the cross. The dramatic self-abandonment of men and women who give up everything—including, in some cases, an active life in the world—in order to devote themselves entirely to Christ is the most radical form of discipleship possible, and it is its own validation. Lives completely given to Christ without any prospect of earthly reward embody the Church’s conviction that the Kingdom of God is already present in history in an anticipatory way, and express the Church’s faith that death does not have the final word in the script of the human drama.

  The witness of the vows also speaks to “the world.” The vow of obedience is a countercultural challenge, demonstrating that freedom and obedience are complements.162 The vow of poverty is a prophetic challenge to “the idolatry of anything created.”163 Chastity not only challenges contemporary hedonism but is “a witness to the power of God’s love manifested in the weakness of the human condition. The consecrated person attests that what many have believed impossible becomes, with the Lord’s grace, possible and truly liberating.”164 For these reasons, the consecrated life teaches the entire human family important things about the human condition and about true humanism.165

  How, then, should the consecrated life be understood in relationship to the other “states of life” in the Church? In the wake of Vita Consecrata, a controversy broke out over the English translation of the Latin term praecellens, which the English text published by the Holy See translated as referring to the “objective superiority” of the consecrated life. The French and Spanish texts translated praecellens as “objective excellence” while the German text translated it as “objective perfection.” When the Libreria Editrice Vaticana, the Holy See’s publishing house, publishes a multilanguage text, each is considered official, so the debate over the precise meaning of praecellens, and what it might mean to think of the consecrated life as “objectively superior” to other forms of Christian life, was bound to continue.166 One commentator familiar with the internal debate over the translation noted that, whatever else it might mean, to speak of the “objective superiority” of consecrated life “has nothing to do with consecrated persons being ‘holier’ than priests or laity. Rather, [John Paul] confirms the Christian tradition that the consecrated life is ‘the most radical way of living the Gospel on this earth, a way which may be called divine, for it was embraced by
him, God and man, as the expression of his relationship as the only begotten Son with the Father and the Holy Spirit.’” Moreover, the “objective excellence” of consecrated life “confers a specific responsibility on consecrated men and women,” whose mission is to remind the rest of the Church to keep its gaze fixed on the beauty of the Lord, to seek the peace of Christ which is to come, and to strive for the happiness that can only be found in the abandonment of self to God.167

  Responses to Vita Consecrata fell along the fault line in post-conciliar religious life that the Synod had tried to address. Those comfortable with the path taken in recent decades by many religious communities, especially of women, tended to regard the exhortation as badly out of touch. Those who thought the renewal mandated by the Council had been badly distorted and religious life deconstructed as a result were encouraged. That it was the latter groups who were growing in the late 1990s while the former got smaller and older suggested that Vita Consecrata would play a large role in the Catholicism of the twenty-first century.168

  Fifty Years a Priest

  John Paul II celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his priestly ordination by inviting all the world’s other priests marking golden jubilees to join him for several days of celebration and reflection in Rome in November 1996.

  A month before, there had been yet another flurry of rumors that the Pope’s health was rapidly deteriorating. After a period of occasional abdominal discomfort accompanied by a mild fever, John Paul’s appendix was removed at the Policlinico Gemelli on October 8. The following Sunday he concelebrated Mass in his suite’s chapel, waved to visitors from a window of the Gemelli, thanked them for coming to what he now jokingly referred to as “Vatican Number Three,” and broadcast his Sunday Angelus back to St. Peter’s Square from the hospital.169 Handmade get-well cards from the children of friends were returned with a handwritten note on them—“Thanks. JP II.” He left the Gemelli on October 15 and resumed his normal schedule at “Vatican Number One.”170