Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  To those “postmodern” theorists willing to allow religion a place at the table of intellectual life because religious truth is one possible truth among others, John Paul says, “No, thank you.” Unless thinking is open to what Fides et Ratio terms the “horizon of the ultimate,” it will inevitably turn in on itself and be locked in the prison of solipsism. The marriage of ancient Greek philosophy and Christian theology in the early centuries of the first millennium taught a wiser lesson: human beings can know what is true, what is good, and what is beautiful, even if we can never know them completely. Recovering that sense of confidence, John Paul asserts, is essential to reconstituting a true humanism in the third millennium. The path to a wiser, nobler, more humane twenty-first century runs through the wisdom of the first centuries of encounter between Jerusalem and Athens.

  The tragic separations of reason and faith, science and religion, philosophy and theology have been the fault of both philosophers and theologians, according to the Pope. When theologians demean reason and philosophers deny the possibility of revelation, both are diminished, humanity is impoverished, and the development of a true humanism is frustrated. “Faith and reason,” John Paul writes, “are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.”104 We can be sure, he suggests in Fides et Ratio, that we will need to fly with both wings in the millennium ahead. The quest for truth is an instinct built into us. And the grandeur of the human person, the Pope concludes, is that we can choose “to enter the truth, to make a home under the shade of Wisdom and dwell there.”105

  Twenty years after beginning his pontificate with the clarion call, “Be not afraid!” John Paul II continued to preach a Gospel of courage in Fides et Ratio. “Be not afraid of reason,” the encyclical proposes. Be not afraid of the truth. For the truth, dispelling delusions, will set humanity free in the deepest meaning of liberation. The Pope of freedom, the Pope of a new humanism, had remained faithful to his vision for twenty years. Confounding the expectations of skeptics and enemies alike, he had made the Catholic Church the premier institutional defender of human rights and human reason. In doing so, he had helped create the possibility of a more humane future, and had become the prophet of the new century about to unfold.

  EPILOGUE

  The Third Millennium

  To See the Sun Rise

  On the evening of November 13, 1994, Pope John Paul II and five guests gathered in a small salon in the papal apartment to ponder the mysteries of chosenness.

  The occasion was the premiere of a one-woman play written and performed by Danuta Michałowska, an original member of the Rhapsodic Theater. Miss Michałowska had been struck by the fact that St. Augustine, writing about his fondness for Virgil’s Aeneid, had expressed pity for the woman Aeneas had left at Jupiter’s command. But what about the woman Augustine himself had left behind, the concubine with whom he lived for years, who had borne his son, Adeodatus, and who is never named in Augustine’s Confessions? The imaginative attempt to think herself back into the situation of this woman-without-a-name, caught up in the mystery of God’s providential design for Augustine and trying to understand her place in that design, became Danuta Michałowska’s play—I Without Name.

  Prior to the performance, Miss Michałowska had visited the Roman Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls. Hearing a stir and thinking it might be the beginning of a Mass, which she wanted to attend, Danuta Michałowska found herself on the periphery of a small funeral, with a casket, a priest, and perhaps twenty people. Sitting behind the congregation she thought of the funeral of her woman-without-a-name, whom she had taken to calling “Elissa” (the name of Aeneas’s lover), and imagined that it would have been something like this—a death unnoticed by history, a small group, a slightly shabby ceremony. Remembering the tears she had shed while writing her play, Miss Michałowska began to pray for the woman-without-a-name, her “Elissa”—and then heard the priest officiating at the funeral say, “Let us pray for Elissa…”

  November 13 happened to be Augustine’s 1,640th birthday. After Miss Michałowska had performed I Without Name for the Pope and his guests, John Paul hosted a supper for the playwright-actress and the small audience. His old friend’s play had moved him. He had had, he reminisced, a similar sense of being marked by God—of having the finger of God on his life. It was not the kind of chosenness one would necessarily seek out. In addition to its gifts, there was an awesome, even terrible, quality to chosenness. It involved strange roads, odd circumstances, the unexpected and the tragic. Like Augustine and the woman-without-a-name, he had understood that he was not, in the final analysis, in charge of his own life.

  What had happened to him, and to the lives that had touched and shaped his own, had happened for a reason. As it had to Augustine and to “I without name.”1

  BY THE NUMBERS

  Numbers cannot disclose the truth of a man’s life “from inside.” But numbers can illustrate the scope of a man’s activity. The numbers involved in the pontificate of John Paul II are staggering.

  By October 16, 1998, the twentieth anniversary of his election, Karol Wojtyła had served as Pope for longer than all but ten men in history. In two decades, he had made eighty-four foreign pilgrimages and 134 pastoral visits inside Italy, traveling 670,878 miles, or 2.8 times the distance between the earth and the moon. During 720 days of pilgrimage outside Rome, he had delivered 3,078 addresses and homilies while speaking to hundreds of millions of men, women, and children, in person and through the media. No human being in the history of the world had ever spoken to so many people, in so many different cultural contexts. He had made more than 700 pastoral visits in Rome itself, to prisons, universities, religious institutes, convents, seminaries, nursing homes, hospitals, and 274 of the diocese’s 325 parishes.

  At his twentieth anniversary, his written magisterium included thirteen encyclicals, nine apostolic constitutions, thirty-six apostolic letters, fifteen other formal letters to particular persons or groups (including his ground-breaking letters to women and to children), nine post-synodal apostolic exhortations, 600 ad limina addresses, and thousands of audience discourses. The Insegnamenti di Giovanni Paolo II, the printed record of his teaching, cover ten linear feet of shelf space in libraries. John Paul II was also responsible for promulgating two new codes of canon law and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the first instrument of its kind in more than 400 years. In 144 ceremonies celebrating the universal call to holiness, he had beatified 798 men and women and canonized 280 new saints.

  In two decades, he presided over and actively participated in five Ordinary Synods of Bishops, one Extraordinary Synod, and six Special Synods. In addition, he met constantly and at length with the world’s bishops during their quinquennial ad limina visits to Rome.

  Between October 1978 and October 1998 he held 877 general audiences attended by 13,833,000 people, and received an additional 150,000–180,000 each year in special group audiences. Assuming an average of five private audiences per day, the total of these more intimate personal encounters easily tops 15,000—and this does not include his daily conversations with guests at lunch and dinner, in the papal apartment or during his pilgrimages abroad.

  In seven consistories he had created 159 new cardinals. At his twentieth anniversary, 101 of the 115 members of the College eligible to vote in a conclave were his nominees. During that same period, he also named some 2,650 of the Catholic Church’s approximately 4,200 bishops.

  During the first twenty years of his pontificate, the Holy See established diplomatic relations at the ambassadorial level with sixty-four countries and restored such relations with six others, bringing to 168 the total number of countries with which the Holy See enjoyed full diplomatic exchange.

  John Paul II had reshaped the Church’s institutional face by his 1988 reorganization of the Roman Curia and by creating new entities to meet new needs, including the John Paul II Foundation for the Sahel in 1984, the Populorum Progressio Foundation for Latin America in 1992
, and two Pontifical Academies, for Life and for the Social Sciences, in 1994. The Pope also inspired the creation of the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family at the Pontifical Lateran University. By 1998, the John Paul II Institute had affiliates in Washington, D.C., Mexico City, and Valencia. The influence of these advanced academic centers on Catholic moral theology was already being felt on the Pope’s twentieth anniversary, and it seemed likely that that influence would expand in the twenty-first century to touch dogmatic theology, philosophy, and related fields.2

  These numbers and institutional facts tell a story of remarkable personal energy. Inside the numbers, it can be argued, is an even more impressive story of accomplishment that will shape the life of the Catholic Church—and the innumerable worlds-within-worlds of humanity that the Catholic Church touches—well into the third millennium of Christian history.

  THE IMPACT

  To assess a papacy before its conclusion is a difficult business. The task is slightly less daunting in this instance, because John Paul II’s pontificate has been a series of variations on the one great theme he announced at his installation and in his 1979 inaugural encyclical, Redemptor Hominis: Christian humanism as the Church’s response to the crisis of world civilization at the end of the twentieth century. As he prepared to lead the Church into the celebration of the Great Jubilee of 2000, eight historic accomplishments of the pontificate of John Paul II could be identified.

  John Paul II radically recast the papacy for the twenty-first century and the third millennium by returning the Office of Peter to its evangelical roots. The world and the Church no longer think of the pope as the chief executive officer of the Roman Catholic Church; the world and the Church experience the pope as a pastor, an evangelist, and a witness. John Paul II broke the modern papal mold he inherited, not simply by being the first Slavic pope in history and the first non-Italian pope in centuries, but by living the kind of papal primacy envisioned in the New Testament: Peter as the Church’s first evangelist, the Church’s first witness to the truths revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is very difficult to imagine a twenty-first-century pontificate that deliberately returns to the bureaucratic-managerial papal model that reached its apogee in the pontificate of Pius XII. John Paul II has decisively renovated the papacy for the twenty-first century by retrieving and renewing the evangelical primacy of Peter’s office in the first-century Church. Here, perhaps, is the most telling example of John Paul II, the radical—the man of bold innovation for whom change means returning to the Church’s roots, which he believes are expressions of Christ’s will for his Church.

  This dramatic renovation of the papacy was not accomplished by personal fiat or by reason of a singular personality, but by a Pope who is self-consciously the heir and legatee of the Second Vatican Council. To grasp the pontificate of John Paul II “from inside” means recognizing that John Paul has sought to secure the legacy of Vatican II as an epic spiritual event—the Council at which the Catholic Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, came to grips with modernity by developing a theologically enriched sense of its unique mission in and for the world.

  No two conciliar texts have been so frequently cited in the teaching of John Paul II as sections 22 and 24 of Gaudium et Spes, the Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. The Pope’s debt to Vatican II, his profound conviction that the Council must be understood in religious rather than political or ideological terms, and his understanding of the Council’s proposal to the world are synoptically captured here. In Gaudium et Spes 22, the Council Fathers taught that Jesus Christ reveals the face of God and the true meaning of human existence; in Gaudium et Spes 24, the Council taught that the meaning of human life was to be found in self-giving, not self-assertion. The Law of the Gift written into the human heart is an expression of the self-giving love that constitutes the interior life of God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. To live the Law of the Gift is to enter, by way of anticipation, into the communion with God for which humanity was created from the beginning. Here, Gaudium et Spes told the modern world, is a destiny greater than you can imagine. And it is yours because you are greater than you think you are.3

  In John Paul II’s understanding of the Council, everything else Vatican II did—its exploration of Christian personalism, its definition of the Church as a communio of believers, its renovation of the Church’s worship, its dialogue with science, democracy, and the sexual revolution, its defense of religious freedom as the first of human rights—is a further explication of these two great themes: Christ, the redeemer of the world, reveals the astonishing truth about the human condition and our final destiny; self-giving love is the path along which human freedom finds its fulfillment in human flourishing. In implementing Vatican II in Kraków, and in twenty years of a pontificate inspired by the conviction that God intended the Council to prepare the entire Church for a twenty-first-century springtime of evangelization, Karol Wojtyła has worked to secure the legacy of Vatican II as the Council of freedom—in the conviction that freedom is the great aspiration and the great dilemma of humanity on the edge of a new century and a new millennium. The properly evangelical response to the problem of freedom, he believes, is to be found in service. One great service the Church can do the modern world is to remind it that freedom is ordered to truth and finds its fulfillment in goodness. That was what Christ meant when he said that knowing the truth would set human beings free (see John 8.32). That is what the Church should propose to the late modern world as the means to realize its great aspiration.

  That, he was and is convinced, is what Vatican II was for.

  That conviction inspired John Paul II’s public accomplishments. His crucial role in the collapse of European communism cannot be understood as the accomplishment of a deft statesman. It can only be grasped “from inside” as the achievement of a courageous pastor, determined to speak truth to power and convinced that the word of truth, spoken clearly and forcefully enough, is the most effective tool against the tyranny of totalitarianism. By inspiring the revolution of conscience that made possible the nonviolent Revolution of 1989 against Marxism-Leninism, John Paul helped restore the political freedom of his Slavic brethren behind the iron curtain. At the same time, he challenged broadly accepted understandings of the dynamics of history. History, he helped demonstrate, is driven by culture, and at the heart of culture is cult, or religion. By lifting up the witness of hundreds of thousands of Christian confessors against communist tyranny, the pontificate of John Paul II demonstrated in action that Christian conviction can be the agent of human liberation.

  The “priority of culture” was a lesson the Pope also applied to the quest for freedom in East Asia and Latin America, to considerable effect, and it was the challenge he posed to democracies old and new in the wake of the communist crackup. If culture is the engine of history, then free economies and democratic political communities must be built upon the foundation of a vibrant public moral culture, capable of disciplining and directing the tremendous human energies set loose by freedom. In challenging the freedom of indifference and proposing freedom for excellence in the encyclicals Centesimus Annus, Veritatis Splendor, and Evangelium Vitae, John Paul reconfigured the Church’s social doctrine and scouted the terrain of public life in the twenty-first century, in which science and technology will make certain that questions of what constitutes human life and membership in the human community dominate the world’s social and political agenda. Freedom is always a fragile commodity. Its most secure foundation, John Paul has suggested time and again, is a recognition of the dignity of the human person as the bearer of rights endowed by God.

  The Christian humanism of Vatican II also inspired John Paul’s unprecedented and historic initiatives in search of Christian unity, in quest of a new relationship between the Catholic Church and living Judaism, and in dialogue with other world religions.

  With the pontificate of John Paul II, the Catholic Church entered t
he ecumenical movement for the duration, and in doing so reshaped the contours of the quest for Christian unity. While some veterans of the twentieth-century ecumenical movement were abandoning the search for a unity rooted in a common faith, the Pope urged that the only unity worth pursuing was unity in the truth Christ had bequeathed to his Church. Concurrently, John Paul gave ecumenism a new public thrust, suggesting that Christianity’s defense of the unity of the human race was threatened by the Church’s failure to live fully the unity that was Christ’s gift to his people. Following Vatican II, John Paul argued that the communio, the “communion,” of the Church had never been completely broken and that all Christians were in a true but imperfect communion with each other and with the Catholic Church, whether they acknowledged that or in fact rejected it. The ecumenical task is to express this abiding unity and communion in a fuller way. How to do that, he suggested, required Protestant and Orthodox Christians to think, with their Catholic brothers and sisters, about what it means for the Office of Peter to be a ministry in service to the Church’s unity.

  John Paul II has received numerous accolades for his dramatic initiatives in Catholic-Jewish relations, but perhaps without their full import being generally recognized. In the twenty-first century, Catholics and Jews stand on the edge of a new theological conversation, of a range and depth unimaginable in more than 1,900 years. If the future of freedom depends on a recognition of the dignity of the human person created by God, then the witnesses to that truth—the communities that call Abraham their father in faith and that take the Ten Commandments as their fundamental moral code—must deepen their mutual understanding of what it means to be an elect people, called to live as a light to the nations. If, sometime during the third millennium, faithful Jews and Christians begin to talk with each other again about election, covenant, and their common messianic hope, it will likely be recognized that the seeds of that reconvened conversation were planted by the pontificate of John Paul II, in response to the Second Vatican Council’s teaching in Nostra Aetate.