Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  As for the immediate situation of the German Church, John Paul used an image from the Gospel of the day—Christ reassuring the apostles in a stormtossed ship on the Sea of Galilee (Matthew 8.23–27)—to make an urgent plea: “Do not be downcast and resign yourselves to the storm and the sea! Instead, be united in hope and find strength in your common faith! Remember the long history of the Christian faith of this country! Never allow this faith to become weaker or more feeble!…On board the ship of the Church, fear and complaints must never gain mastery of our hearts.” That was a Gospel imperative and a lesson from Germany’s modern martyrs, who had died resisting Nazi tyranny. A martyrology, the Pope continued, was not simply a historical record, “it is an exhortation.” The Second Vatican Council, the World Day of Prayer for Peace, the World Youth Days, the new recognition of heroic virtue in marriage—all of these, John Paul claimed, were fruits of the witness of the martyrs of World War II, who had given the Church “a better understanding of herself and of her duty in the world.”3

  At an ecumenical Liturgy of the Word celebrated later that day in Paderborn Cathedral with Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, and Orthodox Christians, John Paul spoke about the enduring historical consequences of St. Paul’s mission to Europe. The same Holy Spirit who had inspired St. Paul—and missionaries like Patrick, Boniface, Cyril, and Methodius, who had brought the Gospel out of the Mediterranean world and into central, northern, and eastern Europe—had strengthened those Christians who had resisted the Nazis in witness to the Gospel, including the Protestant martyrs Dietrich Bonhöffer and Helmuth Count Moltke. And it was the same Spirit who would inspire the new evangelization of the first undivided Germany in almost a half-century.

  After the ecumenical service, John Paul went to the Collegium Leoninum in Paderborn to have dinner with the Catholic bishops of Germany, the leaders of what some senior Vatican officials regarded as among the weakest local Churches in the world. Bishop Karl Lehmann of Mainz, the German bishops’ president and one of the principal figures in the controversy over divorced-and-remarried Catholics, welcomed the Pope, who then addressed the bishops at length. Seven months before, he recalled, they had celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of the letters of forgiveness and reconciliation exchanged by the Polish and German hierarchies at the end of Vatican II. That was the kind of example the Church should set for the Europe of the twenty-first century. The Church’s primary role in the process of European unification should be to strengthen Europe’s soul in “brotherliness, mutual understanding, and cooperation” by witnessing to those virtues in its own life, challenging the rampant relativism of modern culture by defending the truth about human dignity, human rights, and human duties.

  The Pope also discussed the evangelization of the vast numbers of unchurched men and women in the former East Germany, suggesting quietly but pointedly that this was also an opportunity for the Church in the former West Germany to reevangelize itself in a “second conversion.” The new evangelization, he continued, required a Church that presented itself “as a stronghold of joy in the faith and of trust in the future”—which would not be the message German Catholicism communicated if the self-examination called for by Vatican II deteriorated into the kind of “destructive criticism of institutions” that sapped evangelical energies.4

  On Sunday, June 23, John Paul flew to Berlin. After a meeting with German President Roman Herzog at Bellevue Castle, the Pope went to the Olympic Stadium to celebrate Mass and beatify two martyrs of the Nazi era, Fathers Bernhard Lichtenberg and Karl Leisner.

  Lichtenberg had served at St. Hedwig’s Cathedral in the German capital and was an outspoken opponent of the Nazis. His regular evening prayer services at the cathedral, a little more than half a mile from Hitler’s chancellery, always included prayers for Jews, persecuted Christians, and the deceased soldiers of all combatants. Arrested by the Gestapo in May 1942, he was sentenced to prison, but the Nazis, thinking his continued presence in Berlin a threat, shipped him to Dachau. Already ill, he died en route, in a cattle car, on November 5, 1943. Karl Leisner had become active in Church youth work as a seminarian, taking youngsters on camping trips to Belgium and the Netherlands so they could discuss the Church’s faith without Nazi harassment. Arrested for criticizing Hitler, he was eventually sent to Dachau in December 1941. There, three years later, now gravely ill, he was clandestinely ordained a priest by a French bishop, a fellow prisoner. After the camp’s liberation in May 1945, Father Karl Leisner was sent to a sanitarium near Munich, where he died of tuberculosis on August 12, 1945.

  In his homily, John Paul noted that the beatifications were taking place in the stadium where, sixty years before, “the Nazi regime wanted to use the celebration of the Olympic Games for the triumph of their inhuman ideology.” Today, in that same venue, the Church was thanking God for the victory of her martyrs. For Bernhard Lichtenberg and Karl Leisner, martyrdom “was no accidental stroke of misfortune.” Rather, it was the “inevitable consequence of a life lived in following Christ.” Like the two new blesseds, German Catholics today were called to “bear witness to life” and to “resist the culture of hatred and death, regardless of the guise which it may assume.” That required a Christianity that refused to become “conformist and complacent,” that declined to sacrifice its independence to any State, and that did not confuse material with spiritual wealth.5

  At the Sunday Angelus after the beatification Mass, John Paul announced that there would be a second Eurosynod of Bishops in 1999, thanked the Polish bishops who had come to Berlin for the beatification, paid tribute to the Polish priests and intellectuals who had died in concentration camps in Germany during the war, and remembered the thousands of Polish women tortured by medical “experiments” at Ravensbrück (whose survivors included his friend and colleague in the Kraków family ministry, Dr. Wanda Połtawska).6

  After meetings later that day with the Central Committee of German Catholics and the Jewish Central Council, John Paul had a private meeting with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. The two men then went to St. Hedwig’s Cathedral, where the Pope prayed at Blessed Bernhard Lichtenberg’s tomb. Finally, under spotlights, Pope and chancellor walked together through the Brandenburg Gate from east to west, crossing what had once been the murderous no-man’s-land surrounding the Berlin Wall. It was a scene that reduced to graffiti the skinhead and gay demonstrations against the Pope that had taken place earlier in the day.

  Late that night, Chancellor Kohl, who had previously shared some of his countrymen’s skepticism about John Paul II, called his friend, the Italian philosopher Rocco Buttiglione, in Rome. Kohl was excited: “This is the greatest man of the second half of the century, perhaps of the entire century,” he told Buttiglione. “And you know, he even draws a bigger crowd than I do!”7

  Surprises in France

  Reevangelization through the restoration of cultural memory was also the strategy John Paul adopted in two visits to France in the late 1990s.

  The first, in September 1996, marked the 1,500th anniversary of the baptism of Clovis, King of the Franks—and through him, the baptism of France. Like other great historical events, Clovis’s baptism and its effects on the nascent French nation were full of ambiguities; read through the filters of modern secularism, those ambiguities set loose a tremendous controversy in French intellectual circles prior to the Pope’s pilgrimage. Expectations were low. To the surprise of many, great crowds in the hundreds of thousands came to Tours, Reims, Saint-Laurent-sur-Sèvre, and Sainte-Anne-d’Auray. At the jubilee Mass in Reims, John Paul, who had asked France sixteen years before whether she was still faithful to her baptismal vows, asked the men and women of 1996 to read their history through the story of French sanctity. French Catholic history had its dark periods, marked by infidelity and confrontation. But every trial, the Pope insisted, “is an urgent call to conversion and holiness…. It is when night envelops us that we must think of the breaking dawn, that we must believe that the Church is reborn each morning through her saints.”8r />
  The unexpectedly positive response to John Paul’s 1996 pilgrimage suggested that something was stirring in the French soul. World Youth Day 1997, held in Paris from August 18 to 24, confirmed that suspicion and may have marked a turning point in contemporary French religious history.

  Like their American counterparts before World Youth Day ’93 in Denver, many French bishops were skeptical about WYD ’97. But Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger of Paris saw the event as a dramatic opportunity to demonstrate, before the entire French nation, that this was now a Church committed to the reevangelization of France through a new evangelization of culture. During the Pope’s four days in Paris, John Paul’s contacts with French public authorities were kept to the minimum required by protocol and good manners: a brief welcoming meeting with President Jacques Chirac, and a brief pre-departure meeting on August 24 with Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. Wherever John Paul appeared in Paris between August 21 and August 24, it was in an explicitly ecclesial context. The message was clear. This was not a “Church of power,” but a Church of the Gospel, whose witness to Christ compelled a defense of the rights of man.

  The rhythm of WYD ’97 followed a pilgrimage model that Cardinal Lustiger had first encountered during his days as a student chaplain at the Sorbonne, where Monsignor Maxim Charles was reviving the tradition of student pilgrimages with a group of young intellectuals who later became friends and collaborators of Father Lustiger. These pilgrimages—first to the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, later to Chartres—were inspired by the French liturgical theologian Louis Bouyer, who had written that every significant Christian event should recapitulate Holy Week and Easter, the core of Christian experience. On every student pilgrimage, no matter at what time of the year, young people would “relive” Holy Week from Palm Sunday through the Easter Vigil. That template was adopted for WYD ’97 to great effect.

  The first official day of the youth festival, which happened to be a Tuesday, re-created Palm Sunday, as the great World Youth Day cross was solemnly carried on a blazing hot afternoon through a crowd of perhaps 500,000 young people—from the Eiffel Tower, down the Champs de Mars, to the front lawn of the Ecole Militaire, where a platform had been built for the opening Mass. Thursday, August 22, when John Paul II first met the participants in WYD ’97, was “Holy Thursday.” During the welcoming ceremony, the Gospel reading was the account of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet (John 13.1–15)—a text explicated in a written papal homily read to the young people in their language-based catechetical groups the next day. On Friday, hundreds of thousands of teenagers and young adults relived Good Friday by making the stations of the cross at dozens of venues all over Paris. On Saturday night, a candlelight vigil was celebrated at the Longchamp racecourse, as the Pope baptized twelve young converts from every continent. After this re-creation of the Easter Vigil came the closing Mass on Sunday morning, which turned out to be the largest in French history, with more than a million gathering at Longchamp.

  The massive turnout far exceeded the expectations of even the most optimistic of Cardinal Lustiger’s associates. Arriving in Paris early in the week, visitors were told that there might be 250,000 young people, with a crowd of perhaps 500,000 for the closing Mass. At least twice that many youngsters turned out, and the outpouring of interest from French teenagers lured many vacationing Parisians back to the city to see what, exactly, was going on. It also stunned the French press, and perhaps more than a few French bishops.

  The two local “icons” of WYD ’97 were drawn from the modern history of French Catholicism: St. Thérèse of Lisieux and Frédéric Ozanam, founder of the worldwide charitable organization, the St. Vincent de Paul Society, whom John Paul beatified in a nationally televised Mass from Notre-Dame on August 22. The choice of patrons was not accidental. Both were young Catholics: Thérèse had died at twenty-four, Ozanam at forty. Thérèse was a contemplative and a woman who had made original contributions to theology.9 Ozanam was an intellectual in an age of radical skepticism, a democrat free of the ancien régime longings of many French Catholics of his day, a servant of the poor, a devoted husband and father, and a thinker whose writings on the just society prefigured modern Catholic social doctrine. The message being sent by this iconography was unmistakable. Sanctity is possible in modernity. Youthful enthusiasm can be drawn to Christ. Catholic faith can nurture a free society (liberty), human dignity (equality), and human solidarity (fraternity).

  Cardinal Lustiger drove this point home on French national television the night WYD ’97 ended. Asked by a middle-aged interviewer how he explained the extraordinary response to World Youth Day, the cardinal suggested that it was a question of generations. The interviewer belonged to a generation that had grown up in the Church, had lost its faith in 1968 or thereabouts, and had been fighting its parents, so to speak, ever since. These young people, Lustiger continued, grew up empty. They had found Jesus Christ and wanted to explore all that that meant. Do not, he concluded, read their lives through your experience. They do not think being Christian and being engaged, intelligent, compassionate, dedicated people are mutually exclusive. Or, as the Pope had put it in his farewell homily at Longchamp: “Continue to contemplate God’s glory and God’s love, and you will receive the enlightenment needed to build the civilization of love, to help our brothers and sisters to see the world trans-figured by God’s eternal wisdom and love.”10 In the capital of a particularly skeptical and anti-clerical Enlightenment, a new enlightenment of culture, capable of rebuilding the foundations of the free society, was being proposed.

  It had been a week full of the unexpected. The Basilica of Sacre Coeur may never have witnessed anything like the scene there on August 21, with the flags of Canada, Barbados, Malta, Malaysia, Kenya, Panama, and the United States being waved over a congregation of thousands of singing, cheering young people. One catechetical session featured evangelical-style “testimonies” and songs led by a young Hispanic-American, born without arms, who played the guitar with his feet. Parisians smiled and were helpful to Anglo-phone visitors. A technological “cathedral of light” was created by spotlights at Longchamp during the baptismal vigil. All week long, the concelebrating bishops wore brilliantly colorful liturgical vestments designed by French couturier Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, who not only donated his own time but paid for the materials and labor. There was also political silliness. On Saturday, John Paul made a private visit to the grave of his old friend Jérôme Lejeune, the French geneticist who had been a prominent pro-life advocate. Officials of the French Socialist Party immediately started complaining publicly about the Pope’s inserting himself into the French debate over abortion. It was, to put it gently, ironic: politicians, in the name of “tolerance,” condemning an old man for visiting the grave of a friend.

  The unexpected, even stunning, success of World Youth Day ’97 had another parallel to WYD ’93 in Denver. Some time after the event, the chief of the Paris police told Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, the Vatican’s “foreign minister,” that there “had not been a single incident” with the young people at WYD ’97. This was “inconceivable” at a mass gathering of the young for a concert or a soccer game, the veteran policeman said.11 Once again, something remarkable had happened at a World Youth Day. The youngsters attending were probably not aware of it, but their participation in WYD ’97 profoundly challenged the secularist and materialist delusions that had shaped much of modern European culture. French history—modern European history—was not, it seemed, defined solely by the secular revolution of 1789 and the student revolt of 1968.

  In Tune in Poland Again

  John Paul’s June 1997 journey to his Polish homeland took place under several dark clouds.

  One was the memory of his 1991 pilgrimage. Widely regarded as the Pope’s least successful visit to his native country, it had helped create the international media caricature of the angry old man, incapable of understanding the world he had helped create. The second was Poland’s recent political history. In September 1993, a coa
lition led by ex-communists (or “post-communists,” as they were known) won the national parliamentary elections and took power in the Polish Sejm. Two years later, on November 19, 1995, Aleksander Kwaśniewski, the youthful, mediagenic founder of the postcommunist Democratic Left Alliance, defeated Lech Wałęsa for the Polish presidency. Wałęsa’s erratic behavior since his election to the presidency in December 1990 made his dismissal by the electorate understandable, just as divisiveness within the old Solidarity coalition had made the post-communists’ 1993 parliamentary victory understandable.12 But the fact that it was understandable made it no less disconcerting. The icon of the Solidarity revolution had been displaced by a former communist apparatchik of notably elastic principles, who would certainly try to manipulate the papal visit for his own partisan advantage.

  There were also worries about the Pope’s health. Poles who had been in Rome in 1996 and early 1997, knowing how little their countrymen had seen of John Paul since his physical condition had weakened, were worried about the shock effects of wall-to-wall television coverage of the forthcoming pilgrimage—would people think the Pope had come home to die, or even to bid Poland farewell? The Polish bishops, many of whom were still trying to find the kind of public voice John Paul had urged on them during their 1993 ad limina visits to Rome, were concerned about turnouts at the various papal events and fretted about the reception the Pope would get from the feisty Polish press.