Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  Previous conclaves had been authorized to choose a pope by one of three methods: inspiration (in which a cardinal or group of cardinals proclaimed their belief that God had already chosen one of their number, to which the rest of the conclave would assent by acclamation); delegation (in which the entire conclave delegated the election to a committee on whose members all would agree); or election (technically styled “scrutiny”), which in practice was the method invariably used. In Universi Dominici Gregis, John Paul II suppressed the methods of inspiration and delegation. Inspiration, he wrote, was “no longer an apt way of interpreting the thought of an electoral college so great in number and so diverse in origin.” The second proscription, of election by delegation, was explained in terms redolent of Karol Wojtyła, philosopher of moral agency: delegation “by its very nature…tends to lessen the responsibility of the individual electors, who…would not be required to express their choice personally.” Thus future popes would be elected by secret ballot, which “offers the greatest guarantee of clarity, straightforwardness, simplicity, openness, and, above all, an effective and fruitful participation on the part of the cardinals who…are called to make up the assembly which elects the Successor of Peter.”61 John Paul retained Paul VI’s restriction of the electoral franchise to those cardinals who had not reached their eightieth birthday before the pope died, although its octogenarian members would participate in pre-conclave meetings of the College of Cardinals.

  Following longstanding custom, Universi Dominici Gregis establishes that the election of a new pope requires two-thirds of the votes of the cardinals present in the conclave, if the number of electors is equally divisible by three; if not, a majority of two-thirds-plus one is necessary.62 But if, after thirty-four ballots over thirteen days, the conclave fails to elect anyone by two-thirds majority, the document provides for a valid election by absolute majority, if an absolute majority of the cardinal-electors agree to the procedure. At this juncture, the cardinals are also permitted to limit candidates to the two who had received the highest number of votes on the last ballot conducted under the two-thirds rule.63

  This was an innovation and there were critics. One American commentator suggested that the new procedure created incentives for a majority unable to command a two-thirds consensus to hold fast to its candidate, refusing compromise, until the majority-election provision became operative.64 That might indeed be the case if a conclave were simply an exercise in wielding political power. But John Paul, who once described himself as “firmly convinced that the Holy Spirit guides the conclave,” did not believe that the process of electing a pope could be understood by analogy to democratic politics.65 As for the new procedure itself, which the Pope said was deliberately designed with the special religious character of the conclave in mind, it is difficult to imagine the circumstances in which a bare majority of electors could hold intransigently to its position after thirteen days of conclave, thirty-four ballots, and the special days of prayer, consultation, and “exhortations” (preached by senior members of the College of Cardinals) mandated by John Paul after the thirteenth, twentieth, and twenty-seventh inconclusive ballots. No conclave had taken more than four days since 1831. Given the expectations of the Church and the world, it is not easy to think that a conclave could be dragged out for the better part of two weeks, even in the more agreeable quarters at the Domus Sanctae Marthae. John Paul’s new rules did make it impossible for an intransigent minority, composed of one-third-plus-one of the electors, to block the election of a candidate who was clearly the overwhelming favorite.

  Universi Dominici Gregis also included several personal touches. John Paul’s rules were written to ensure that popes would be permitted to die with the dignity befitting any human being.66 It was strictly forbidden to photograph or film the pope “either on his sickbed or after death, or to record his words for subsequent reproduction.” If it was necessary to photograph the dead pope for “documentary purposes,” doing so required the permission of the Cardinal Camerlengo, the administrator of the Holy See during the interregnum, who was forbidden to “permit the taking of photographs of the Supreme Pontiff except attired in pontifical vestments.”67

  In addition, John Paul tried to make certain that his longtime secretary, Stanisław Dziwisz, would not suffer the fate of Paul VI’s secretary, Pasquale Macchi, who was rudely ejected from the Vatican less than twenty-four hours after Pope Paul’s death and found himself living in a Roman guest house. According to Universi Dominici Gregis, the “personnel who ordinarily reside in the private [papal] apartment can remain there until after the burial of the Pope.”68 It was a small, but telling, gesture of appreciation, and another break with local custom.

  So was a paragraph largely ignored in the commentary on Universi Dominici Gregis, which laid down that the electoral rules John Paul had defined and the pre-conclave procedures he had prescribed were to be observed in full, “even if the vacancy of the Apostolic See should occur as a result of the resignation of the Supreme Pontiff….”69 No Pope had resigned since 1294, but that did not preclude the possibility in the future—in, for example, an instance of extreme disability. If the Petrine ministry was a service, not a personal privilege, then John Paul evidently believed that the possibility of a papal resignation should be considered in devising the rules of succession.

  Universi Dominici Gregis was also criticized for retaining the College of Cardinals as the electoral body for choosing the Pope. Since Vatican II, proposals that popes be elected by a Synod of Bishops or by the presidents of the national episcopal conferences had been bruited. John Paul disagreed. In his judgment, the College of Cardinals combined “in a remarkable synthesis” the two aspects of the Office of Peter. The Pope was the Bishop of Rome and the cardinals were formally members the Roman clergy because of their titular pastorates in and around the city. The Pope was the universal pastor of the Church, and the composition of the College, in which 120 electors were drawn from every continent, reflected that universality. A millennium of experience, he concluded, had confirmed the wisdom of this unique body as the papal electoral college.70

  Personnel as Policy

  The appointment of bishops to major sees often demonstrates how personnel often is policy, in the Church as in the world. That adage of management theory was amply confirmed in crucial appointments John Paul made to two of world Catholicism’s most important local Churches in the mid-1990s. On April 13, 1995, fifty-year-old Christoph Schönborn, OP, the auxiliary bishop of Vienna and general editor of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, was named coadjutor archbishop of the Austrian capital, and succeeded as archbishop on September 14, 1995.* On April 8, 1997, sixty-year-old Francis George, OMI, who had served as archbishop of Portland, Oregon, for only eleven months, was named the new archbishop of Chicago. Archbishop George succeeded Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, whose witness as he approached death the previous autumn had been a moving experience for millions throughout the United States.

  Surface appearances and background suggested two very different men. Schönborn was the son of one of Europe’s most distinguished families; George was a son of the American middle class. Schönborn, a tall man, carried himself with aristocratic ease; George, a slighter figure, was a polio survivor who wore a leg brace and walked with a limp. Beneath the surface there were great similarities between them, which illustrated John Paul’s concept of a twenty-first-century bishop. Both men had had considerable experience as teachers. Both were serious intellectuals, at home in contemporary philosophy and theology and well-grounded in the Church’s doctrine—which, as Archbishop George insisted at his first Chicago press conference, was neither “liberal” nor “conservative,” but true. Both were committed to the model of the bishop as evangelizer, both were comfortable dealing with the media, and both enjoyed the give-and-take of debate. They were both men in whom friends and visitors sensed the kind of serenity that comes from intense prayer, yet they were good company, sharp listeners as well as able conversationalists, and
devoted priests devoid of clericalism.

  John Paul’s third major reorganization of senior curial personnel further internationalized the Church’s central bureaucracy and brought men with extensive pastoral experience and demonstrated intellectual interests into positions of leadership. On June 15, 1996, Dario Castrillón Hoyos of Colombia was appointed Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy in the summer of 1996. Ordained a bishop at forty-two, he had served as Secretary-General of CELAM, the council of Latin American Bishops’ Conferences, from 1983 to 1987, and had been a diocesan bishop for seventeen years. A week later, on June 21, John Paul appointed the Chilean Jorgé Arturo Medina Estévez, bishop of Valparaiso, as Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship. In August 1996, the host of World Youth Day ’93, Denver Archbishop J. Francis Stafford, was called to Rome to become President of the Pontifical Council for the Laity. (Stafford’s successor in Denver was the first American archbishop of Native American background, Charles J. Chaput, a Capuchin.)

  The reorganization continued in 1997 with the appointment of a Mexican, Bishop Javier Lozano Barragán of Zacatecas, as President of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Health Workers, and was completed in the first half of 1998. Cardinal Roger Etchegaray became the full-time President of the Committee for the Great Jubilee of 2000; promoted to the rank of cardinal bishop, he received the titular see of Cardinal Agostino Casaroli after the former Secretary of State died at age eighty-three on June 8, 1998. Etchegaray’s successor as President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Archbishop Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan, wore a pectoral cross made of wood and electric wire, a relic of his thirteen years in a Vietnamese prison camp. In June 1998, John Paul accepted the resignation of one of his closest collaborators, Cardinal Bernardin Gantin of Benin, who had been Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops for more than fourteen years; the courtly African remained dean of the College of Cardinals. Gantin’s successor was a Brazilian Dominican, Cardinal Lucas Moreira Neves, who had served as Secretary, or deputy head, of the Congregation for Bishops in the 1980s before returning to his native country in 1987 as archbishop of São Salvador da Bahia and Primate of Brazil. The Church’s central leadership was further internationalized by the appointment of Bishop Stephen Fumio Hamao of Yokohama as President of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People and José Saraiva Martins, a Portuguese curial official, as Pro-Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.

  In the midst of this curial rearrangement, John Paul also reorganized the papal household to meet the demands of the impending jubilee year. Centuries of precedent were broken when the Pope appointed an American, Monsignor James Harvey, as Prefect of the Papal Household. Harvey, a native of Milwaukee, had previously served in the Secretariat of State as head of the English section and then as Assessor for General Affairs (the deputy to the Sostituto, the de facto papal chief-of-staff). In order to link the work of the Prefecture, which is responsible for all papal audiences, public and private, more closely with the work of the papal apartment, John Paul appointed Monsignor Stanisław Dziwisz, his secretary, as Adjunct Prefect of the Papal Household. Both Monsignor Harvey and Monsignor Dziwisz were named bishops, as was another longtime papal collaborator, Monsignor Piero Marini, the Master of Pontifical Liturgical Ceremonies. John Paul ordained all three men to the episcopate in St. Peter’s Basilica on March 19, 1998. In one of the most touching ceremonies of the pontificate, he thanked all three for their help over the years. A special word of gratitude went to Monsignor Dziwisz, whom he had ordained a priest thirty-five years before, for “sharing my trials and joys, hopes and fears” during the entire pontificate.72 These unprecedented arrangements, which raised eyebrows among the traditional managers of popes, brought out the puckish sense of humor that John Paul and Stanisław Dziwisz share. On the day the changes were publicly announced, Dziwisz, the man closest to Karol Wojtyła for more than thirty years, called Harvey, who now ranked above him on the formal organization chart, and said, “I want you to know that I’m very good at taking orders.” Some days later, the Pope and Monsignor Harvey were walking toward an audience when John Paul, who was well aware of the internal muttering about an American Prefect of the Papal Household, started musing in Italian in a quiet voice, “Il Prefetto…Americano…impossibile!” [The Prefect…an American…impossible!]… “Un Aggiunto…Polacco…peggio ancora!” [A Deputy Prefect…Polish…even worse!].

  Three weeks after announcing these household changes, John Paul held his seventh consistory for the election of new members of the College of Cardinals. Twenty men received the red hat; the Pope named another two in pectore [in his heart], whose names were not publicly revealed. Among the new cardinals were Archbishops Schönborn of Vienna and George of Chicago; the new curial department heads Dario Castrillon Hoyos, Jorgé Medina Estévez, and J. Francis Stafford; and the archbishops of Palermo, Genoa, Mexico City, Toronto, Lyons, Dar-es-Salaam, Madrid, and Belo Horizonte in Brazil. A retired Polish missionary bishop in Zambia, Adam Kozłowiecki, SJ, received the red hat at age eighty-six, as did five veteran curial officials and the bishop of Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s first cardinal.73

  AN EPISTOLARY SUMMER

  On May 25, 1998, a week after his seventy-eighth birthday, John Paul II became the longest-serving Pope of the twentieth century, passing Pius XII, who had served nineteen years and seven months. Pius’s major teaching documents had all been issued by the eleventh anniversary of his election, and in the last years of his pontificate he had been something of a recluse. John Paul’s twentieth year on the Chair of Peter was marked by a flurry of teaching documents and a pace of activity that, although somewhat slowed by his physical difficulties, continued to exhaust men thirty years younger.

  Boris Yeltsin, President of the Russian Federation, came to the Vatican on February 10 for a fifty-minute talk with the Pope and reiterated Mikhail Gorbachev’s invitation to John Paul to visit Russia. Absent an invitation from the Russian Orthodox Church and given the Pope’s ecumenical commitments, no such pilgrimage was possible. Yeltsin and his family were charmed by John Paul, with whom the Russian president discussed both the internal Russian situation and security issues in Europe. For his part, the Pope emphasized the importance of the Great Jubilee of 2000 being celebrated in fidelity to both the Church’s “lungs,” East and West.74

  John Paul made another effort to reach out to German-speaking Catholicism in a June pilgrimage to Austria, his eighty-third apostolic visit outside Italy. In an address to local political leaders and the diplomatic corps in Vienna, he noted that Austria had gone from being a “border country” to a “bridge country,” with close links to the new democracies of east central Europe. This should not be understood, the Pope suggested, as an “opening to the east” so much as a “Europeanization of the entire continent.” John Paul also stressed that the new Europe had to come to grips with the roots of anti-Semitism, some of which, he said, had not yet been pulled out. The Pope addressed the divided Austrian Church passionately: “The heart of the Bishop of Rome beats for all of you!” he said in his June 19 homily in Salzburg cathedral. “Do not abandon the flock of Christ, the Good Shepherd! Do not abandon the Church!…The Pope is counting on you to give a Christian face once again to the old Europe.” John Paul’s former student and successor at Lublin, Father Tadeusz Styczeń, thought that the Pope had “never been more transparent” than during his 1998 Austrian pilgrimage. He was now, visibly, living the way of the cross, and while that had always been at the center of his spiritual life, what had once been masked by his great vitality was now unmistakably evident.75 Four months after the visit, an October 1998 national meeting of delegates of Austrian Catholics in Salzburg voted resolutions in favor of ordaining married men to the priesthood and women as deacons, allowing the divorced-and-remarried to receive Communion, individual conscience decisions in matters of contraception, and accelerated procedures for men who wanted to leave the ordained ministry to marry.76 The Pope’s co
ncern for the reevangelization of Europe was not prominently featured in the Salzburg resolutions.

  Just prior to the Pope’s Austrian pilgrimage, the Vatican community was rocked and John Paul suffered a personal loss when Colonel Alois Estermann, who had just been installed as commander of the Swiss Guards, was murdered in his Vatican apartment, along with his wife, by a disgruntled guardsman. Estermann had jumped into the Popemobile on May 13, 1981, to shield a stricken John Paul from any further shots, and the Pope felt a special affection for the eighteen-year veteran of the Guards. The murderer, Cedric Tornay, who committed suicide after shooting Estermann and his wife, had acted, according to papal spokesman Joaquín Navarro-Valls, in a “moment of madness.” The journalistic rumor mill ground out any number of lurid speculations about the murder/suicide, but months later Navarro’s analysis remained unshaken by evidence of any other motive.77

  The Church’s campaign for John Paul’s “culture of life” could claim a success on June 25, 1998, when Portuguese voters upset the pollsters’ predictions by rejecting a law that would have permitted abortion on demand through the tenth week of pregnancy.78 Six weeks later, on August 17, Norma McCorvey was received into the Catholic Church. As plaintiff “Jane Roe” in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, McCorvey had been the leading symbol of the abortion license in the United States for more than two decades.

  In 1991 (Redemptoris Missio and Centesimus Annus) and 1995 (Evangelium Vitae and Ut Unum Sint), some Catholics joked that they were members of the “Encyclical-of-the-Month Club.” July 1998, in those circles, was known as the “Apostolic-Letter-of-the-Week Club,” as John Paul issued three major documents addressing the integrity of theological teaching, the special character of Sunday, and the role of national conferences of bishops.