Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  Sixteen hundred priests and some ninety bishops accepted John Paul’s invitation to share their golden anniversaries together in Rome. What might, in other circumstances, have become a festival of clericalism was instead a moving experience of international priestly solidarity and a reminder that the Church at the end of the second millennium had once again become a Church of martyrs. The celebrations opened in the Paul VI Audience Hall on the evening of November 7, with evening prayer and a program of testimonies. The most moving was from Father Anton Luli, an eighty-six-year-old Albanian Jesuit who had spent forty-two years in communist prisons or labor camps, often under grotesque physical torture. Asked how he withstood the suffering and could forgive his torturers, he once said that, under torture, “Christ was with me, giving me extraordinary strength and joy. It was a tremendous priestly experience, for which I am grateful to God…. They could take everythingelse away from us, but they could never tear from our hearts the love of Christ and of our brothers.” In the years since Albania’s liberation from communism, Father Luli had become known, simply, as “the saint.” Men and women came from all over the country to have him hear their confessions. To the Pope and the jubilarians, he said that “the Lord asked me to live nailed to a cross—and, with my arms spread out in the service of denial, to celebrate my Eucharist, my priestly ministry, through every form of chains and suffering.”171 At the end of his stirring address, Father Luli and John Paul embraced while his fellow priests thundered their gratitude in applause.

  The celebrations concluded with a golden jubilee Mass in St. Peter’s on Sunday, November 10. The 1,600 visiting jubilarians processed into the basilica wearing stoles embroidered with the papal coat-of-arms, a gift from John Paul II. The procession took almost forty-five minutes, and the concelebrating jubilarians filled an enormous semicircle in front of the altar as well as perhaps one-fifth of the basilica’s nave. The high altar was surrounded by a splendid display of red, white, and gold flowers, combining Poland’s colors with those of the Holy See. Wearing brilliant red vestments and a gold miter, John Paul was greeted by tremendous applause from the more than 10,000 present when he arrived at the altar after another lengthy procession. Visitors and pilgrims sometimes find the behavior of congregations at great papal liturgies a bit disconcerting, orderliness not being a natural habit in Rome, even in church. Guests at this magnificent Mass were struck by an atmosphere of remarkable good cheer, decorum, and reverence. Romans who had become somewhat jaded by familiarity with priests, bishops, cardinals, and popes seemed to sense that they were participating in a great act of thanksgiving for lives faithfully spent out in devotion to others.

  The antiphon for the responsorial psalm after the Mass’s first reading had been carefully chosen: Christ’s words to Peter at the Last Supper in Luke 22.32, “I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail; and when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren,” summarized John Paul’s concept of the papacy in a single New Testament verse. The image of the Last Supper also framed the Pope’s homily. Every time a priest celebrated Mass, he said, he relived the experience of the institution of the Eucharist and the priesthood of the new covenant, and of Christ’s washing his apostles’ feet. All of that, the Pope suggested, should remind every priest, every day, that “he is a servant of the mystery of Redemption…called to serve all [his] brothers and sisters.” To be a servant, he repeated as he had done so many times before, was the essence of the ministerial priesthood.172

  Just before the final blessing, a “Magnificat” composed for the occasion by Giuseppe Liberto was sung by a 130-member choir drawn from various parts of Sicily and supported by ten instrumentalists; the congregation joined in the antiphon, Magnificat anima mea Dominum [My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord]. After Mass, the jubilarians, who had been joined as concelebrants by 116 cardinals from all over the world, processed out to special seats on the sagrato, the platform in front of the basilica, for the Sunday Angelus and a musical program. The crowd was so large that it spilled out of the vast square and down the Via della Conciliazione. On the square itself, just in front of the offices of the Congregation for Bishops, an enormous multicolored balloon inscribed in Italian and Polish, “Auguri Santo Padre! Najlepsze Życzenia, Ojcze Święty! ” [Best wishes, Holy Father!] was waiting. John Paul appeared on the loggia outside St. Peter’s in white cassock and red cape. After leading the Angelus, he gave a brief address to the entire Catholic presbyterate:

  I am thinking at this moment of all the priests in the world. Of priests who are elderly and sick: I go to visit them in spirit, and to pause beside them with fraternal sympathy. I am thinking of young priests in the first years of their ministry, and I encourage them in their apostolic zeal. I am thinking of parish priests who are like “fathers of families” in their respective communities. I am thinking of missionaries who are committed on the five continents to proclaiming Christ, the Revealer of God and Savior of mankind. I am thinking of priests in material and spiritual difficulty, and also all those who have unfortunately given up the commitment they made. I pray for support and help for them all from the Lord.

  I embrace you, dear priests scattered throughout the world, as I entrust you to Mary, Mother of Christ the Eternal High Priest, Mother of the Church and of our priesthood.173

  As the gaily striped balloon lifted off into the brisk autumn air, the orchestra and chorus of Italian Radio and Television played Haydn’s “Te Deum” and other pieces. Bands from the Italian Carabinieri and Police played the “Pontifical Anthem,” the Italian national anthem, and the triumphal march from Verdi’s Aida. The program concluded with a hymn, “The Tree of Faith and Peace,” which was sung by a Catholic, a Jew, and a Muslim as John Paul released five doves as a sign of peace.

  John Paul then had lunch with the College of Cardinals in the new Vatican guest house, the Domus Sanctae Marthae [St. Martha’s House], where future papal electors would live during a conclave. His vitality that afternoon, as he visited with every table and talked with his luncheon guests after a two-and-a-half-hour Mass and a forty-five-minute Angelus-cum-anniversary celebration, suggested that rumors about his rapidly declining health were exaggerated. If any of the Church’s princes had come to Rome anticipating something more dramatic than the anniversary celebrations, they were mistaken.

  The fiftieth anniversary of his priestly ordination also prompted the Pope to write a brief memoir, Gift and Mystery, in which he reflected on the influences that had led him to the priesthood, reminisced about the first years of his work as a priest, and offered a series of brief meditations on the theology of the priesthood. A half-century of experience, he wrote, had confirmed him in the conviction that to be an effective priest meant above all to be a holy priest. Programs were important, pastoral planning had its place. But holiness was the way in which the priest could become a “leaven of fraternity” in a world constantly in need of solidarity.174

  20

  A Reasonable Faith

  Beyond a Century of Delusions

  APRIL 7, 1994

  Pope John Paul II hosts Holocaust Memorial Concert in the Paul VI Audience Hall.

  FEBRUARY 22, 1996

  Apostolic Constitution, Universi Dominici Gregis, revises rules for papal elections.

  MARCH 21–23, 1996

  John Paul’s first pilgrimage to unified Germany.

  JUNE 15, 1996

  Major re-organization of Curial leadership begins.

  SEPTEMBER 19–22, 1996

  Fourth papal pilgrimage to France.

  OCTOBER 14–18, 1996

  Negotiations between the Holy See and the Government of Vietnam in Hanoi.

  DECEMBER 4–6, 1996

  The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. George Carey, visits Rome.

  APRIL 4, 1997

  Holy See press release reports 2.9 million “hits” on the Vatican website in its first three days of operation.

  APRIL 12–13, 1997

  John Paul goes on pilgrimage to Sarajevo.
>
  MAY 10–11, 1997

  John Paul visits Lebanon.

  MAY 31–JUNE 10, 1997

  The fifth extended papal pilgrimage to Poland.

  JUNE 1997

  Patriarchate of Moscow cancels planned meeting between Patriarch Aleksy II and Pope John Paul II.

  AUGUST 21–24, 1997

  John Paul participates in sixth international World Youth Day in Paris.

  SEPTEMBER 5, 1997

  Mother Teresa of Calcutta dies.

  OCTOBER 31, 1997

  John Paul addresses Vatican-sponsored symposium on “The Roots of Anti-Judaism in the Christian Milieu.”

  NOVEMBER 16–DECEMBER 12, 1997

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

  JANUARY 21–25, 1998

  History’s first papal pilgrimage to Cuba.

  FEBRUARY 21, 1998

  Pope John Paul II creates twenty new cardinals at his seventh consistory.

  MARCH 16, 1998

  The Holy See’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews issues “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah.”

  APRIL 19–MAY 14, 1998

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

  MAY 18, 1998

  Apostolic Letter, Ad Tuendam Fidem.

  MAY 21, 1998

  Apostolic Letter, Apostolos Suos.

  MAY 25, 1998

  John Paul becomes longest-serving pope of the twentieth century.

  MAY 30, 1998

  A half-million members of renewal movements celebrate the Vigil of Pentecost with the Pope in St. Peter’s Square.

  MAY 31, 1998

  Apostolic Letter, Dies Domini.

  JUNE 25, 1998

  Holy See releases text of joint Lutheran/Roman Catholic statement on doctrine of justification.

  OCTOBER 11, 1998

  John Paul II canonizes St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) in St. Peter’s Square.

  OCTOBER 15, 1998

  Public presentation of John Paul’s thirteenth encyclical, Fides et Ratio.

  OCTOBER 18, 1998

  Pope John Paul II celebrates the twentieth anniversary of his papacy at outdoor Mass in St. Peter’s Square.

  MAY 7–9, 1999

  John Paul II in Romania.

  Their meeting had been billed as a historic encounter of aging warriors, both of whom had, as one observer put it, “power, charisma, intellectual force, and a clear agenda.” Forty-five minutes into history’s first papal pilgrimage to Cuba, such exercises in moral equivalence had been overrun by reality. In their exchange of opening remarks, President Fidel Castro demonstrated that he had power, understood as brute force, but little else. John Paul II—older, frailer, and less rhetorically fervid than the gray-bearded revolutionary who greeted him at Havana’s José Martí International Airport—exemplified the power that comes from speaking truths long denied or repressed. It was no contest.

  On the hot, humid afternoon of January 21, 1998, the Cuban president, dressed in a double-breasted blue suit instead of his usual military fatigues, greeted the Pope at the base of the rampway of his jet. After John Paul kissed the soil of Cuba, held up to him in a container carried by four local children, the two men made their way slowly along a red carpet to a dais with two chairs, where an awning had been erected to protect them from the elements. Fidel Castro, addressing not only the Pope, but the largest international audience he had enjoyed in decades, welcomed John Paul, saying that “the land you have just kissed is honored by your presence.” The rest of his twenty-five-minute address, beginning with its second sentence, was a bitter jeremiad about Cuba and Cubans as the victims of history.

  The native peoples of the island had been “annihilated” by colonizers; those who managed to survive were turned into slaves or prostitutes. More than a million Africans had been torn from their homelands to replace the Indians as chattels. Somehow, a Cuban nation was formed, but its fight for independence had involved a “holocaust” comparable to Auschwitz. Even today, Cubans were the victims of a “genocide,” a program of “total economic suffocation” caused by the imperial wickedness of “the mightiest economic, political, and military power in history.” In resisting that brutal hegemon, Castro said, modern Cubans were like the martyred Christians of ancient Rome, choosing death “a thousand times” rather than the surrender of conviction.

  As for the revolution he led, it, too, was an innocent victim. Nothing that the Pope would see during his pilgrimage—the reduction of one of the world’s most beautiful cities to a Caribbean Sarajevo, the poverty, the crumbling buildings, the empty pharmacies, the hospitals whose remaining windows were held together by tape, the militarization—was the revolution’s fault. Nor could the revolution be blamed for what had happened to some of the churchmen John Paul would meet. If there had been “difficulties” between the regime and the Catholic Church in the previous forty years, “the revolution is not to blame.” Blame was for others, above all for the United States. Cubans were victims.

  When his turn came, John Paul rose with difficulty from his chair, walked to the podium, and speaking quietly, even gently, told the people of Cuba the truth about their history and about themselves.

  It was the “Lord of history and of our personal destinies” who had brought him to “this land which Christopher Columbus had called ‘the most beautiful that human eyes have seen.’” He knew their aspirations; his hope was that his presence might encourage everyone to make those aspirations a reality. Do not think of yourselves as victims, he urged: “you are and must be the principal agents of your own personal and national history.”

  Some things had clearly changed in Cuba in the previous forty years, but not the character of “this noble people who thirst for God and for the spiritual values which in the 500 years of her presence on the island the Church has not ceased to dispense.” And so he wanted to say to believers and nonbelievers alike what he had said at the very beginning of his pontificate: “Do not be afraid to open your hearts to Christ. Allow him to come into your lives, into your families, into society. In this way, all things will be made new.”

  His prayer for Cuba was a simple one: “that this land may offer to everyone a climate of freedom, mutual trust, social justice, and lasting peace. May Cuba, with all its magnificent potential, open itself to the world, and may the world open itself to Cuba, so that this people, which is working to make progress and which longs for concord and peace, may look to the future with hope.”1

  John Paul did not mention the Castro regime or the Cuban communist revolution—nor would he, not even once, during the next four days. He had come to give back to the people of Cuba their authentic history and culture. There was no need to make reference to the men who had reduced their island to penury. That was the past; that was an aberration. He had come to tell the truth about the past and present, to spark hope for the future, and to inspire Cubans to be the protagonists of their destiny.

  THE PRIORITY OF CULTURE

  Even as he became physically frailer in the second half of the 1990s, John Paul II continued to sharpen one of the distinctive themes of his pontificate—that culture is the driving force of history.

  It was a lesson he had first been taught by his father and by his early reading of the classics of Polish Romanticism. Seven decades of intellectual reflection and personal experience had refined and deepened an analysis that cut straight against the grain of the modern delusions that politics and economics are the motors of historical change. The collapse of European communism in 1989–1991 had vindicated the claim that culture drives history. Now, in the late 1990s, John Paul vigorously applied his “culture-first” view of historical change to the reevangelization of Western Europe, to securing the foundations of freedom in the new democracies of east central Europe, and to the liberation of Cuba.

  Germany: The Long History of Faith

  John Paul’s third pastoral visit to Germany, from June 21 to 23, 1996, brou
ght him to one of the lands that had been most resistant to his message for almost eighteen years, and took place in the wake of a public controversy over one of contemporary Catholicism’s most difficult pastoral problems: the situation of divorced-and-remarried Catholics who wished to lead full sacramental lives, including the reception of Communion. The controversy pitted leading German bishops against the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the German bishops’ former episcopal colleague, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.2 But perhaps sensing that the difficult question of the divorced-and-remarried could be engaged properly only by a community secure in its profession of faith, John Paul II chose not to address this controversy during his first pilgrimage to a united Germany. Rather, he stressed the new evangelization of a country with a long Christian history and painful memories of the recent past.

  At a Mass for the Archdiocese of Paderborn on June 22, John Paul reminded the thousands gathered at the Senne Military Airport that they were the heirs of a religious and cultural legacy that dated back to the meeting in Paderborn in 799 between Charlemagne and Pope Leo III. That world was long past, but it had left an indelible cultural imprint on European civilization. As all Germans faced the challenges of a unifying Europe, they ought to remember, the Pope urged, that “unity…cannot depend solely on a commonality of material interests.” Rather, it had to be based on “agreement regarding fundamental goals and moral concepts, on a common cultural heritage, and, last but not least, on solidarity of mind and heart.” Without the Christian faith, John Paul continued, “Europe would have no soul.” That was why Christians were called to “foster the spirit which will unite and shape the Europe of the future.” This was a responsibility that “we…must assume above and beyond borders.”