Ad Tuendam Fidem [In Protecting the Faith] was published on June 30 in order, as John Paul put it, to “fill a gap” in canon law. Since 1989, teachers of Catholic theology had been required to affirm a “Profession of Faith” by which they pledged to teach as true what the Catholic Church taught to be true. The 1983 Code of Canon Law, however, had not fully specified the procedures to be taken in dealing with those who violated what they had sworn to uphold and teach. Ad Tuendam Fidem filled the gap by making three additions in the relevant canons. It was a bit of legal housekeeping, primarily of interest to canonists. Of considerably more interest, though, was a commentary on the Profession of Faith which the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued concurrently with Ad Tuendam Fidem. The commentary discussed three levels of authoritative teaching: truths held to be divinely revealed (e.g., the truths of the Creed); truths linked to revelation by “logical necessity” (e.g., the condemnation of euthanasia in Evangelium Vitae) or by “historical necessity” (e.g., the legitimacy of a papal election); and truths taught by the “ordinary magisterium” of the Pope and the bishops, even if they have not been formally defined. The tripartite schema was not an innovation, but the commentary also included examples of each level of authoritative teaching. One example used to illustrate a truth of the second level (i.e., a truth linked to revelation by historical necessity) was Leo XIII’s 1896 declaration that Anglican ordinations were invalid. This immediately touched off an ecumenical controversy with Anglicans and a theological controversy within Catholicism. Months later, it remained unclear whether the examples used in the commentary had been as carefully thought through as the commentary’s description of the three levels of authoritative teaching.79 The documents were released without a press conference; neither bishops nor their doctrinal advisers were given any advance information about the apostolic letter or the commentary. The result was that what ought to have been presented as an effort to ensure the integrity of theological teaching on Catholic campuses was reported as another skirmish in an ecclesiastical power game.
Dies Domini [The Day of the Lord] was signed on May 31, Pentecost Sunday, and released on July 6, 1998. An apostolic letter “on keeping the Lord’s Day holy,” it was far more than an admonitory warning to Catholics who were lax in their Sunday Mass attendance.80 Dies Domini was in fact a complement to Laborem Exercens. The 1981 encyclical had analyzed the “Gospel of work.” The 1998 apostolic letter discussed the sanctification of time through keeping the “Lord’s Day” as a day of worship, leisure, rest, and recreation.
Sunday, John Paul writes, is the “Easter which returns week by week.” As such, it is the day that recalls the creation of the world, anticipates the completion of the world’s story in the Kingdom of God, and draws our attention to “the true fulcrum of history,” the resurrection of Christ.81 The modern institution of the “weekend” meets the human need for rest. But only a day kept as the “Lord’s Day” can fully meet the parallel human need for celebration.82
The breadth of horizon provided by the “Lord’s Day” enables human beings to rest and celebrate in a fully human way, because it reflects the “seventh day of creation,” the day on which God did not “look to new accomplishments” but enjoyed “the beauty of what [had] already been achieved.” Chief among those achievements was the human person, “the crown of creation,” with whom God wants to “enter a pact of love.” The “Lord’s Day,” John Paul suggests, discloses the “nuptial shape of the relationship which God wants to establish with the creature made in his own image.”83 By reminding us of our origins and destiny, and by relating that destiny to the liberation won by the risen Christ, the “Lord’s Day” teaches us, week in and week out, that we are greater that we can imagine.
In this context, the obligation of Sunday worship is not an arbitrary law imposed by the Church but “an indispensable element of our Christian identity,” John Paul writes. For Sunday is not only the first day but the “eighth day,” the day after the Sabbath, the day that looks forward in anticipation to the day without end, eternal life in communion with God.84 As such, it expresses who we are in the most profound sense of our created and redeemed humanity.85 The “law” of Sunday Mass attendance is the juridical expression of a law inscribed on the human heart.
The third apostolic letter released in July 1998, Apostolos Suos [His Apostles], was an effort to guide the development of national conferences of bishops, a post–Vatican II innovation in the Church’s life. Once again, the headlines set the letter in a political context: “Pope Tightens Grip by Rome On Its Bishops,” as the New York Times had it.86 Once again, the deeper issues were minimized if not ignored.
The question of where national bishops’ conferences and their attendant bureaucracies “fit” into the theology of the Church was not a simple one. The college of bishops cannot delegate its teaching authority to any subset of bishops. On the other hand, the Council had urged the formation of national conferences so that the bishops of a country or a region could support one another in their pastoral work. The question was what kind of teaching authority these national conferences had, in addition to their role as pastoral resources for individual bishops.
Apostolos Suos teaches that national conferences of bishops cannot substitute themselves for the individual authority of local bishops and that their authority as corporate entities can only be exercised in a binding way when what they teach is confirmed by the Bishop of Rome. This was not, as widely reported, an attempt to “rein in” bishops’ conferences. It was an expression of a basic theological truth taught by Vatican II, that the college of bishops exercises its authority under the authority of its head, the Pope. If the Church, as the Council taught, is a communio or “communion,” then the question of the relationship of national conferences of bishops to the Bishop of Rome cannot be understood as one in which the conferences’ “gain” is the papacy’s “loss.” Precisely the opposite is true, at least as Vatican II understood the relationship between bishops and the Bishop of Rome in the communio of the Church. On this understanding, it is the relationship of the college to its head that confirms the college in its authority. A careful reading of Apostolos Suos suggested that national conferences, far from resisting a close working relationship with Rome, should actively seek to have their most authoritative statements approved and ratified by the Holy See. That, according to the theology of Vatican II, was how those statements participated in the teaching authority vested in the Pope and the college of bishops.87
THE ASTONISHING HOLY SPIRIT
In its Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, the Second Vatican Council had taught that charismatic gifts, “special graces” given by the Holy Spirit to individuals or groups, were a source of holiness in the Church.88 The tremendous expansion of renewal movements throughout world Catholicism in the years since Vatican II seemed to John Paul to confirm this teaching, and to provide empirical evidence that the Council had been inspired by the Holy Spirit to prepare the Church for an evangelically vigorous third millennium.89
As in past centuries, the explosive growth of movements inspired by charismatic individuals had caused tensions with the institutional Church, as parishes and dioceses tried to find a place for renewal groups that sometimes didn’t fit easily into established patterns of doing the Church’s business. Karol Wojtyła had been willing to live with that tension as archbishop of Kraków, and encouraging renewal movements had been one of the leitmotifs of his pontificate. The Pope invited members of these movements from around the world to come to Rome for the Vigil of Pentecost to celebrate a new moment of “ecclesial maturity,” gathered together around Peter, the symbol of the Church’s unity. On May 30, 1998, half a million accepted, spilling out of St. Peter’s Square, down the Via della Conciliazione toward the Tiber, and into the rabbit warren of streets near the Vatican, in the largest celebration of the Church’s charismatic element in Roman history.90
Testimonies were given by Chiara Lubich, founder of the Focolare movement, whic
h takes fostering the unity of the human race as its mission; Kiko Argüello, leader of the Neocatechumenal Way, which is dedicated to the evangelization of the unchurched and the reevangelization of those poorly educated in their faith; Jean Vanier, founder of the L’Arche Community, which works and lives with the mentally handicapped; and Monsignor Luigi Giussani, founder of Comunione e Liberazione, an Italian-based renewal movement that had spread throughout the world.91 In his address, John Paul spoke of their meeting in frankly biblical terms. It was, he said, “as though what happened in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago were being repeated this evening in this square…. The Holy Spirit is here with us! It is he who is the soul of this marvelous event of ecclesial communion.”
As for the tensions that had been experienced between the movements and the institutional Church during the past thirty years, that was normal. “An unexpected newness…is sometimes disruptive,” leading to “prejudices and reservations” by some institutional leaders and “presumptions and excesses” in some movements. All of that, the Pope declared, should be understood as a “testing period,” in which the truth of what seemed to be Spirit-inspired charisms was being verified by the Church’s teaching authorities, the bishops in communion with the Bishop of Rome. Now, John Paul concluded, “a new stage is unfolding,” in which renewal movements would bring the “mature fruits of communion and commitment” to the Church and the institutional Church would be renewed by the vibrant Christian life being lived in movements that hadn’t emerged out of the Church’s standard structures. “The institutional and the charismatic” were both essential to the Church’s constitution, and if the charismatic element was subject to the pastoral judgment of the bishops, the institutional Church always had to remember that “whenever the Holy Spirit intervenes, he leaves people astonished. He brings about events of amazing newness; he radically changes persons and history.”92
How, precisely, the new renewal movements and communities would eventually be fitted into the Church’s legal and institutional structure was an issue for the twenty-first century. Nothing quite like this had ever happened before: these lay-led movements, some of them including men and women who had taken permanent vows of poverty and celibacy while continuing to work professionally in the world, were neither traditional religious orders nor religious societies of the sort found in every Catholic parish. Throughout the Church’s history, it had been the popes, rather than the local bishops, who had encouraged charismatically inspired renewal movements.93 That pattern was replicated by John Paul II, with consequences for the Church in the third millennium that are sure to be profound, and likely to be surprising.
BE NOT AFRAID, AGAIN
Pope John Paul II’s twentieth anniversary, October 16, 1998, fell in the middle of an extraordinary week. The previous Sunday, October 11, the Pope canonized Blessed Edith Stein, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross in her Carmelite name, before an enormous congregation of Romans and pilgrims from Poland, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Spain, the United States, and elsewhere. One of the concelebrating priests, a member of the Eastern-rite Melkite Church, was the father of Teresa Benedicta McCarty, the little girl miraculously saved from a lethal overdose of medicine by the intercession of Edith Stein.
In presenting what he termed “this eminent daughter of Israel and faithful daughter of the Church as a saint to the whole world,” John Paul was lifting up the example of a woman whom he described to dinner companions as a “synthesis” of the twentieth century and its troubled quest for a genuine humanism.94 Edith Stein, John Paul said in his homily, knew that “the love of Christ and human freedom are intertwined, because love and truth have an intrinsic relationship. The quest for truth and its expression in love did not seem at odds to her; on the contrary, she realized that they call for one another…St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross says to us all: Do not accept anything as the truth if it lacks love. And do not accept anything as love which lacks truth! One without the other becomes a destructive lie.”95
This daughter of Israel and of Catholicism had died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau after dismissing the suggestion of rescue: “Why should I be spared,” she had asked. “Is it not right that I should gain no advantage from my baptism? If I cannot share the lot of my brothers and sisters, my life, in a certain sense, is destroyed.” Thus, John Paul said, when the Church of the third millennium celebrated the feast day of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Edith Stein, “we must also remember the Shoah, that cruel plan to exterminate a people—a plan to which millions of our Jewish brothers and sisters fell victim. May the Lord let his face shine upon them and give them peace (cf. Numbers, 6.25).”96 With the canonization of Edith Stein, John Paul seemed to be suggesting, a remembrance of all the Jewish martyrs of the Shoah had become part of the annual liturgical rhythm of Catholic life.97
The following Sunday, October 18, John Paul marked his twentieth anniversary as Pope and the fortieth anniversary of his consecration as a bishop at another outdoor Mass in St. Peter’s Square. The celebration was organized by the Diocese of Rome. Some forty cardinals, 100 bishops, and 800 priests, many from Roman parishes, concelebrated the Mass with the Pope. Vested in a magnificent green and gold chasuble, a gift from the churches of Rome, John Paul preached to more than 100,000 congregants on a text from that Sunday’s assigned Gospel reading: “When the Son of man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Luke 18.8).
That, the Pope said, was the question that had challenged every Bishop of Rome for almost 2,000 years. It was a question inextricably intertwined with the question Christ had asked Peter after the resurrection: “Do you love me?” (John 21.17). That was what Christ had asked the archbishop of Kraków on the afternoon of October 16, 1978. The question put to Karol Wojtyła that day had been “Do you accept your election?” The evangelical question embedded in that legal formula was Christ’s: “Do you love me?”—a question at once magnetic and terrifying, for to love Christ meant to walk his way of the cross.
“After twenty years of service in the Chair of Peter,” John Paul said, “I cannot fail to ask myself a few questions today. Have you observed all this? Are you a diligent and watchful teacher of faith in the Church? Have you sought to bring the great work of the Second Vatican Council closer to the people of today? Have you tried to satisfy the expectations of believers within the Church, and that hunger for truth which is felt in the world outside the Church?”98
The very asking of those questions, after twenty years, was a moving testimony to the Pope’s humility and his enduring sense of responsibility. When children from a Roman parish brought him gifts after Mass and he embraced each of them in turn, the emotion of the moment overflowed—the children were crying, the Pope was shedding tears, and so were thousands in the square. The athletic, vigorous John Paul II of twenty years before had passed into history. Those watching saw something even more compelling: a man who had so evidently spent his life out in service to his Lord was still asking, “Have I loved enough?”
Later in the week, in response to a dinner guest’s anniversary congratulations, the Pope said, with a sense of wonderment, “Twenty years the Pope…forty years a bishop….”99
Prophet of the Twenty-first Century
The canonization of Edith Stein and an emotionally rich twentieth-anniversary celebration were the bookends of a week that also saw the publication of John Paul’s thirteenth encyclical, Fides et Ratio [Faith and Reason], which was released at a press conference on October 15. The timing could not have been more appropriate.
It was the first major papal statement on the relationship between faith and reason in almost 120 years. The First Vatican Council had taught in 1869–1870 that human beings could know the existence of God through reason, and Leo XIII’s 1879 encyclical, Aeterni Patris, had proposed the philosophy and theology of Thomas Aquinas as the model for a synthesis of faith and reason. But much had happened in world civilization since the late nineteenth century—not least, philosophy’s drastically diminished confidence in
its capacity to know the truth of things.
What the Pope describes as philosophy’s “false modesty” had precluded its asking the large questions—Why is there something rather than nothing? What is good and what is evil? What is happiness and what is delusion? What awaits me after this life?100 In addition to demeaning philosophy’s true vocation, which was to be a servant of the truth, this “false modesty” had also opened the door to a culture dominated by various kinds of human hubris: an instrumental view of other human beings, a false faith in technology, the triumph of the will-to-power. The lethal effects of those forms of false pride pock-mark the twentieth century.101 It is long past time, John Paul suggests, for philosophy to recover that sense of awe and wonder that directs it to transcendent truth. The alternative is another century of tears.
Philosophy ordered to transcendent truth is also crucial for religion, John Paul argues. Ancient Greek philosophy helped purge religion of superstition. The temptation to superstition is perennial, though, and sometimes takes the form of the claim that faith is not subject to rational analysis. In today’s cultural climate, that has meant stressing faith as solely a matter of feeling and experience.102 Citing St. Augustine, John Paul flatly rejects such “fideism”: “Believing is nothing other than to think with assent…. Believers are also thinkers: in believing, they think and in thinking, they believe…. If faith does not think it is nothing.”103 On the edge of a twenty-first century that seems destined to be heavily influenced by resurgent religious faith, this call to a reasonable faith looms large indeed. If faith and reason do not work together, a revival of religious conviction will not provide a secure foundation for human dignity. For that dignity is ultimately grounded, John Paul is convinced, in the human capacity to know the truth, adhere to it, and live it.
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