Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  The World Day of Prayer for Peace at Assisi in 1986 was the most visible expression of John Paul’s conviction that all truth is related to the one Truth, who is God. That conviction also undergirded his initiatives with Islam, which holds a distinctive place within the tradition of Abraham, his dialogue with religious leaders like the Dalai Lama, and his approach to other great world religions. Respect for the religious convictions of others without compromising one’s own convictions seems, to many secular people, an impossibility. Unless that possibility can be created, the world of the twenty-first century, shaped as it will be by resurgent religious forces, is destined for serious conflict. Previews of that conflict were evident throughout the pontificate of John Paul II, in the Balkans, Sudan, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, and southeast Asia. By insisting on religious freedom as the source and safeguard of all human rights, John Paul exemplified an alternative to sectarian violence and state-enforced secularism in situations where the deepest convictions of human beings are in conflict, not conversation.

  Finally, the historic accomplishment of John Paul II must be measured in its impact on hundreds of millions of human lives, considered one by one and “from inside.” For twenty years, the Pope has inspired men and women, young and old alike, to live out the consequences of the challenge he preached at his papal installation: “Be not afraid!” At the end of the eighth decade of a century of fear, some were surely inclined, on October 22, 1978, to dismiss this as the most fragile romanticism. They were mistaken. That summons to live without fear, to live beyond fear, so transparently evident in the life of Karol Wojtyła, changed innumerable individual lives. By doing so, John Paul changed the course of history.

  Taken together, these eight achievements—the renovated papacy, the full implementation of Vatican II, the collapse of communism, the clarification of the moral challenges facing the free society, the insertion of ecumenism into the heart of Catholicism, the new dialogue with Judaism, the redefinition of interreligious dialogue, and the personal inspiration that has changed countless lives—make it plausible to argue that the pontificate of John Paul II has been the most consequential since the sixteenth-century Reformation. As the immediate post-Reformation period and the Council of Trent defined the Church’s relationship to an emerging modern world, it is reasonable to suggest that Vatican II as authoritatively interpreted by the pontificate of John Paul II has defined the Church’s relationship to whatever is coming after “the modern world.”

  No one knows whether, in the long view of history, Vatican II will be judged a reprise of the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1517), a reforming Council that failed in its mission, or by analogy to Trent (1545–1563), a reforming Council that shaped Catholicism and the world for almost half a millennium. There is great and enduring good to be found in the texts of Vatican II. Whether the Council is remembered centuries from now as a great achievement or a disappointing failure will depend on how those texts are transformed into the actual life of the Church.4

  Given the threats to human dignity that human ingenuity and wickedness are certain to create, it must be hoped that John Paul II’s heroic effort to secure the Council’s legacy will make it more likely that historians of the future will look on Vatican II as another Trent, not another Lateran V. The false freedom of indifference and self-assertion that characterizes much of the developed world at the beginning of the twenty-first century may prevail over the freedom for excellence proposed by John Paul. If so, the Church will survive, believers are convinced. But what the Pope characterized at the United Nations in 1995 as “one of the great dynamics of human history”—the human quest for freedom—will be in the gravest jeopardy.5

  THE CRITIQUES

  On his twentieth anniversary in 1998, and despite an outpouring of affection and esteem, it remained an open question whether the Catholic Church itself had grasped the significance of the pontificate of John Paul II.

  Some argued that the Pope’s inclination to “run the Church like a seminar” (as one veteran Curialist put it) was responsible for the sluggish response of the Roman bureaucracy and many of the world’s bishops to John Paul’s initiatives. Others charged that the Pope, whose office was intended to serve the unity of the Church, was in fact the cause of great divisiveness in Catholicism. There was no question that John Paul had become a figure of contempt to many Catholic intellectuals. Well before his papal jubilee, the man who had been the great “progressive” hope in 1978 had become the target of progressive intellectual animosity, even if that animosity was sometimes tempered by respect for his public accomplishments as a defender of human rights. Beyond these critical assessments by intellectuals and activists lay the fact that world Catholicism had barely begun to come to grips with John Paul II’s vision of an evangelically assertive and culture-forming Church of disciples, who lived the universal call to holiness in witness to the world and were supported in that mission by ordained ministers who understood their vocation in terms of service, not of power.

  The Conventional Critique

  Vigorously promoted by the world media and deeply influenced by the political interpretation of Vatican II as a contest for power between good “liberals” and bad “conservatives,” the conventional critique of John Paul II, from inside as well as outside the Church, is well-known. On this reading, John Paul has been an authoritarian, a centralizer of power who has blocked the implementation of Vatican II’s call for a recovery of collegial responsibility in the Church. More often than not, this alleged authoritarianism is attributed to the Pope’s Polish roots. The conventional critique also depicts John Paul II as intellectually repressive, a misogynist unsympathetic to the concerns of contemporary women, and a virtual Manichaean whose “rigid” sexual morality has rendered the Church’s sexual ethic ridiculous in the eyes of its people, especially married couples.

  Ultimately, history, and the Lord of history, will judge whether there is merit to this depiction of John Paul II. History’s judgment will have to consider certain facts, which raise serious questions about this familiar critique.

  That John Paul II understands himself to be a man of the Second Vatican Council is indisputable, on the public record. That he has spent more time in conversation with the Church’s bishops than any Pope in modern history (and perhaps in all of history) is also a matter of record. So is the fact that he has devoted vast personal energy to the Synod of Bishops. The Synod process is surely open to refinement and improvement, as are the processes guiding the selection of bishops and their quinquennial ad limina visits to Rome. But the charge that John Paul II is out of touch with the world’s bishops is highly implausible. Whether the bishops report fully and accurately the concerns and conditions of their local Churches is for them to judge. Others can only note that the Pope has made himself available to his brothers in the episcopate in an unprecedented way, and has done so because he understands this to be a central part of his task.

  A subtler variation on the conventional critique suggests that the pontificate of John Paul II has so identified the Church with the papacy that the net result has been to diminish the initiative of the world’s bishops, priests, and laity. A charismatic Pope in a hierarchical organization like the Catholic Church—and in a media age—certainly raises the bar of expectation for virtually every other person in a position of formal authority in the Church. But there is a deeper, theological question at stake here, an issue posed to the Church by contemporary history.

  The Office of Peter, as Catholicism understands it, is what Hans Urs von Balthasar has called the “external reference point” for the Church’s interior unity. That interior unity is not ethnic, linguistic, or political-philosophical, like the unity of a nation-state. The unity of the Church is founded on the celebration of the Eucharist and the participation of the Church-in-the-world in the communion of saints who are already with the Lord in glory. As Catholicism becomes more manifestly a world Church, embodying the truth it bears in a rich diversity of cultures, it can be
argued that the Church has even greater need of a visible, authoritative, external reference point for its unity than in its first two millennia.6 John Paul II has demonstrated the importance of that “external reference point” for the Church’s vitality and its unity-amid-plurality in venues from Seoul to Rio de Janeiro, from Kinshasa to Kraków, and from New York to Anchorage.

  The charge of intellectual repression must contend with the fact that John Paul II’s has been a pontificate of great theological and philosophical creativity, beginning with Redemptor Hominis and the Theology of the Body and continuing through Dives in Misericordia and Veritatis Splendor to Tertio Millennio Adveniente and Fides et Ratio. Even a cursory reading of John Paul’s texts discloses a far greater openness to modern and contemporary intellectual methods and insights than was evident in previous papacies. That the Pope, a working intellectual, has been critical of certain fashions in post-conciliar Catholic theology and philosophy has undoubtedly made many Catholic intellectuals unhappy. But here, too, history will have its say.

  The twentieth century has, in the main, been a very bad century for intellectuals, and especially for intellectuals attracted by the allure of power. Heidegger and Sartre, two immensely influential philosophers, illustrate the point in their respective attractions to Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. We cannot know how the future will judge John Paul’s critiques of post-conciliar theology’s dalliance with Marxism, and his challenge to the sorry public effects of philosophy’s entrapment in the prison of solipsism. For the moment, those who are not professional academics cannot help wondering why a man should be thought intellectually obtuse for judging Marxism fatally flawed, or for thinking that human beings can know the truth of things, however imperfectly. As for repression in the direct, personal sense, very few Catholic theologians have in fact been disciplined during this pontificate (public action was taken against six in twenty years), and those who have been were treated far more mildly than in the past.7 The same can be said for wayward bishops. Thirty-five years after Vatican II, John Paul II’s intellectual critics, and in some instances his avowed enemies, remain firmly in control of most theological faculties in the Western world. If this is repression, it is repression of a very inefficient sort.

  The generation of theologians who were so influential during and immediately after the Council may feel its intellectual hegemony and ecclesiastical influence threatened by the teaching of John Paul II. If that is the case, an irony should be noted. This fear of losing control of the Church’s intellectual agenda puts these theologians in the same position as the much-maligned guardians of Catholic intellectual orthodoxy in the 1940s and 1950s, whose influence on the pre–Vatican II Church the theologians of the 1960s and 1970s vigorously deplored.

  The charge that John Paul II is a misogynist or, more mildly, is insensitive to women’s concerns is flatly denied by women who have known Karol Wojtyła for decades, many of whom find the suggestion “completely crazy,” as one professional woman put it.8 In terms of the public record, this charge must also contend with the Pope’s extensive discussion of the contemporary status of women in Familiaris Consortio, Mulieris Dignitatem, Christifideles Laici, and the 1995 Letter to Women, and with the Holy See’s positions at the World Conference on Women at Beijing.

  For almost two decades, John Paul II has been developing a distinctive Christian feminism. Such a feminism, he argues, is far more securely anchored in the Bible and in the theology of the “Marian Church” than in the sexual revolution of the 1960s. The Pope’s insistence that, “from the beginning,” women and men were created distinct and yet equal, is, to be sure, a profound challenge to those feminists for whom “gender” is a cultural construct of no real significance. Yet here is another irony: John Paul II takes the female embodiedness of women far more seriously than some schools of contemporary feminism.

  In the Pope’s view, being a woman is not an accident of biology or a construct of culture. It is an icon of a deep truth about the human condition and about the Creator’s intention for the world. Concurrently, John Paul’s theological reflection on how the “Marian Church” of faith—the Church of disciples—precedes and makes possible the Petrine Church of office gives a certain theological priority to what he has called the “feminine genius” in the life of discipleship. Virtually none of these aspects of John Paul’s response to the contemporary women’s movement has been given serious consideration by his critics. If the Pope’s teaching on the unique vocation of women is adequately received by Catholicism, a most interesting and Church-transforming debate will ensue in the twenty-first century.

  The charge of Manichaeanism or a papal deprecation of human sexuality has to contend with John Paul’s innovative theology of the body, in which the Pope argues that our sexuality is greater than the sexual revolution imagines. John Paul’s portrait of sexual love as an icon of the interior life of God has barely begun to shape the Church’s theology, preaching, and religious education. When it does, it will compel a dramatic development of thinking about virtually every major theme in the Creed. For the moment, though, the burden of proof lies with those who argue that John Paul’s exposition of the Church’s sexual ethic demeans sexual love. A careful reading of the Theology of the Body and its exploration of the “nuptial” character of God’s relationship to the world suggests the opposite.

  The conventional critique of John Paul II, which so often misrepresents his thinking, does so because it misses the relationship between tradition and innovation, the stable and the dynamic, in the Church. The stable elements that can seem static in Catholicism either reflect the Church’s inner dynamism, or create an impetus to the unfolding of new, dynamic elements in Christian life. The canon of the Bible is fixed forever, but Scripture is not a dead record of the past. Scripture enables the Word of God to be received freshly by every generation of Christians. The sacraments are not merely traditional rituals, repeated because previous generations of Christians performed them. The sacraments enable contemporary Christians to live the great mysteries of the faith—the life, death, and resurrection of Christ—anew. The purpose of authority in the Church is not to impede creativity, but to ensure that Christians do not settle for mediocrity. Authority is meant to help the individual Christian hold himself or herself accountable to the one supreme criterion of faith, the living Christ. Doctrine is not excess baggage weighing down the Christian journey. Doctrine is the vehicle that enables the journey to take place at all.9

  To understand John Paul’s commitment to preserving the purity of doctrine and the tradition of the Church, one must grasp the distinctive Christian understanding of “tradition.” Tradition, which in its Latin root (traditio) means “handing on,” begins, not with human invention, but inside the very life of God, the Holy Trinity. That “handing on”—the radical self-giving that mysteriously enhances giver and receiver—took flesh in the life of Christ and continues in the Church through the gift of Christ’s Spirit.10 On this understanding, tradition, the living faith of the dead, must always be distinguished from traditionalism, the dead faith of the living.11 That John Paul’s has been a papacy rooted in tradition is certain. That it has been a papacy of traditionalism is belied by the evidence.

  The Restorationist Critique

  There is another critique of the pontificate of John Paul II that bears careful examination, though it rarely receives public attention. It is mounted by those who, in this pontificate, hoped for a “Catholic Restoration” that would return the Church to the style and sureties of the age of Pope Pius XII. This critique should not be confused with the radical rejectionism of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and other anti–Vatican II intransigents. The restorationists affirm the Council, but argue that its implementation has been impeded by a failure to reassert theological, organizational, and pastoral discipline in the Church. That failure, the restorationists charge, jeopardizes the Council’s achievements and leaves the Church vulnerable to the corrosive acids of late modern life. While they a
re reluctant to say it publicly, more than a few Catholic restorationists believe that John Paul II has not reversed the breakdown of Catholic discipline that began in the years after the Council.

  On this critique, and employing the “triple mission” of Christ that Karol Wojtyła used to organize Vatican II’s teaching in Sources of Renewal, John Paul gets high marks for “priest” and “prophet” and low, even failing, grades for “king.” No major religious order, the restorationist critics charge, has been reformed in this pontificate. The quality of the Church’s worship has continued to deteriorate. The Pope has failed to appoint sufficient numbers of bishops capable of defending doctrine and enforcing discipline. Bishops’ conferences and the enormous expansion of local Church bureacracies have sapped religious authority and replaced it with bureaucratic power—which, restorationists argue, was a crucial part of the post–World War II decline of mainline Protestantism in Western Europe and North America. In sum, these critics contend, Karol Wojtyła’s “seminar” style of management is wholly unsuited for the papacy, however well it may have worked in Kraków.

  It is true that Wojtyła, as a manager of large organizations, has never been the kind of man who deliberately and without regrets gets those opposed to his plans out of his way. It is also true that, as archbishop of Kraków and Bishop of Rome, Wojtyła’s has not been a “kingly” exercise of authority. And it is true, further, that there has been a price to be paid for this. But it may not be the price suggested by the restorationists.