Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  Finally, John Paul II had had enough and simply announced that he was going. On June 29, 1999, the Pope published a letter on “pilgrimage to the places linked to the history of salvation.” Reiterating his intention to go to Ur, Sinai, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jerusalem, and Damascus, he now added Athens to the itinerary. St. Paul’s sermon on the “unknown god” at the Areopagus, the “Mars Hill,” of Athens (Acts 17. 16–34), was an apt metaphor for the Church’s encounter with the modern world. So Athens was the appropriate place to conclude the jubilee series of papal biblical pilgrimages.

  The Letter on Pilgrimage was one of the most lyrical documents of John Paul’s pontificate. Although “there is no place where God cannot be found,” the Pope wrote, there were some places that bore the divine imprint most sharply. These were the places where John Paul wanted to pray during the jubilee year, to meet a longing of his own heart and to remind the world about God’s ways with his creation: “To go in a spirit of prayer from one place to another, from one city to another, in the area marked especially by God’s intervention, helps us not only to live our life as a journey, but also gives us a vivid sense of a God who has gone before us and leads us, who Himself set out on man’s path, a God who does not look down on us from on high, but who became our traveling companion.” The Church, John Paul concluded, “cannot forget her roots.” That was why he believed he must go on pilgrimage to “the places where God chose to pitch his ‘tent’ among us.”1 The Pope who wanted the Great Jubilee to revitalize the Church as an evangelical movement in history had to pray in the places where that movement was born.

  Abraham in Rome

  The Letter on Pilgrimage had emphasized the Pope’s determination that his would be “an exclusively religious pilgrimage,” adding that he would be “saddened if anyone were to attach other meanings to this plan of mine.” John Paul’s possible sadness was of no consequence to the president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, who eventually made it impossible for the Pope to come to “Ur of the Chaldees,” Abraham’s home, as the first site on his jubilee pilgrimage.

  From the outset of negotiations, Saddam Hussein looked on a prospective papal visit to Ur as a means to his own political ends. For months, papal spokesman Joaquín Navarro-Valls patiently explained to reporters that “the Pope is not going to visit Saddam Hussein, he is going to visit Abraham.” But when it finally came down to cases, Saddam would not budge on his demand that the Pope openly defy the UN ban on direct flights to Iraq rather than seek a waiver. And John Paul, who had long opposed UN sanctions against Iraq but who would not be a pawn in Saddam’s political games, reluctantly decided that the Iraqi regime had made it impossible for him to make the kind of pilgrimage he wanted. On December 10, 1999, Navarro-Valls issued a statement reporting that Iraqi authorities had informed the Vatican that the “abnormal conditions” of the international embargo and the no-fly zones in Iraq “do not allow for an adequate organization of a visit by the Holy Father.” Navarro did not comment on the obvious Iraqi attempt to spin the story for propaganda purposes.2

  John Paul II, for his part, refused to abandon the idea of beginning his jubilee pilgrimage by honoring Abraham, the great patriarch who was, according to the Roman Canon of the Mass, “our father in faith.” He simply decided to move Ur to Rome. On February 16, 2000, the Pope announced that he would make a “spiritual pilgrimage” to the home of Abraham. A week later, the Paul VI Audience Hall was the site of this unique event.

  The audience hall platform was decorated with oak trees, recalling the biblical story of the terebinths of Mamre, where Abraham had pitched his tent and offered sacrifice to God. Next to a primitive, uncarved stone, representing the sacrifice of Isaac and the many altars Abraham had built during his wanderings, was the visual centerpiece of the display: a reproduction of Andrei Rublov’s great icon of three angels visiting Abraham. John Paul, seated on a small throne, thousands of pilgrims inside the audience hall, and thousands more in St. Peter’s Square watched a video showing the ruins of ancient Ur, the deserts across which Abraham had traveled, and the fields and rivers of Canaan, the land of promise. After readings from Genesis, the Letter to the Hebrews, Paul’s Letter to the Romans, and John’s Gospel, a series of prayers asked that humanity be liberated from the “idols of our own time” and petitioned God for “peace and harmony” among Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

  John Paul preached on the radical acceptance of God’s will that had made Abraham the father of a great nation. Abraham’s life, the Pope taught, “marks the beginning of salvation history” and challenges us to expand our notion of God’s promises: for “the land to which human beings are moving, guided by the voice of God, does not belong exclusively to the geography of this world.” Abraham, archetype of “the believer who accepts God’s invitation,” is in fact “someone heading towards a promised land that is not of this world”—a destination we reach through “the obedience of faith.” At the end of the ceremony, a bowl of incense was lit atop the stone that recalled the worship of the one true God which Abraham had begun.3

  Sinai: The Law That Liberates

  The next day, February 24, 2000, John Paul II flew to Cairo, the first stop on his pilgrimage to Mount Sinai. The Pope was met at the airport by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Patriarch Stéphanos II Gattas of the Coptic Catholic Church, Coptic Orthodox bishops, and Grand Sheik Mohammed Sayyid Tantawi. John Paul’s greetings to President Mubarak were heartfelt: “Thank you, Mr. President, for making it possible for me to come here and to go where God revealed his name to Moses and gave his Law as a sign of his great mercy and kindness toward his creatures.” The liberating quality of divine law was a theme to which the Pope would return, even as he stressed his commitment to interreligious harmony, stating firmly at the airport that “to promote violence and conflict in the name of religion is a terrible contradiction and a great offense against God.”4

  Ecumenical and interreligious activities filled the Pope’s first day in Egypt. That evening, John Paul visited the Coptic Orthodox patriarch, Pope Shenouda III, at the patriarchal residence. After the bearded Shenouda spoke glowingly of ecumenical cooperation, John Paul said that all those coming from Rome felt at home in Egypt, the home of St. Mark, companion of St. Peter. The Pope then went to visit Sheik Tantawi, the chief spiritual authority for almost a billion Sunni Muslims, at the al-Azhar university complex, one of the world’s great centers of Islamic learning. Numerous Muslim religious leaders and scholars crowded around John Paul, eager to greet him.5

  The following day, John Paul celebrated Mass with 15,000 local Catholics at Cairo Sports Stadium. Preaching to a congregation drawn from the local Armenian, Chaldean, Coptic, Greek, Latin-rite, Maronite, Melkite, and Syrian communities, the Pope spoke of the Ten Commandments as a moral code for men and women who had been liberated from slavery and did not wish to fall back into the habits of slaves. Three thousand years after Moses had received the tablets of the law, here was a set of rules for living that “frees us from idols and makes every life infinitely beautiful and infinitely precious.” In extemporaneous remarks at the end of Mass, John Paul saluted the persecuted Christians of Sudan, some of whom had come to Cairo to celebrate the Eucharist with him.6

  On Saturday morning, February 26, John Paul flew by helicopter to St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai. He was greeted warmly by the Greek Orthodox monastic community and its leader, Archbishop Damianos, but the Orthodox declined to join the Pope in a Liturgy of the Word celebrated in the Garden of Olives outside the monastery; Archbishop Damianos said that praying together was inappropriate until the two communities shared full communion, a position with which John Paul manifestly did not agree. During his homily in the garden, John Paul taught that “the encounter of God and Moses on this mountain enshrines at the heart of our religion the mystery of liberating obedience….” The Ten Commandments, he urged, “arenot an arbitrary imposition of a tyrannical Lord. They were written in stone; but before that they were written on the human heart as the univers
al moral law.” “The wind which still blows from Sinai,” the Pope said, reminds us that the Ten Commandments are “the law of freedom: not the freedom to follow our blind passions, but the freedom to love, to choose what is good in every situation, even when to do so is a burden.” And the moral law is intimately linked to human fulfillment, for “in revealing himself on the Mountain and giving his Law, God revealed man to man himself. Sinai stands at the very heart of the truth about man and his destiny.” 7

  When he reached the place on the mountain where tradition says that God spoke to Moses from the burning bush, John Paul II fell to his knees and was lost in prayer.

  To Walk Where Jesus Walked

  John Paul’s jubilee determination to make the world look, hard, at the stuff of its redemption was vindicated in his pilgrimage to the Holy Land. In a pontificate filled with drama, this was arguably the most dramatic episode: a powerful testimony of faith, all the more poignant because it came from an old man witnessing to the truths to which he had given his life; a historic moment that irreversibly altered the tortured relationship between Christianity and its parent, Judaism; a lesson in mature statesmanship for the squabbling tribes of the region. Just before the Pope arrived in the Holy Land, local religious leaders were expressing deep concerns that the visit would be a failure. A week later, it was clear that the pilgrimage had been an unmitigated triumph, spiritually and humanly, for the man who refused to concede the impossibility of a papal pilgrimage to the places where Christ had walked.

  John Paul first flew to Amman, the capital of Jordan, on Monday afternoon, March 20, where he was greeted by young King Abdullah II with full honors. Shortly after his arrival, the Pope went to the Memorial of Moses on Mount Nebo, some fifteen miles outside the Jordanian capital, and gazed across the Jordan Valley at the land he had so often visited in his religious imagination. At Mass in a sports complex the next day, some 2,000 youngsters received their first Holy Communion. The Pope’s homily drove home the connection between Christianity and the great biblical figures of Moses and Elijah during a liturgy in honor of John the Baptist—for Christians, the pivotal personality between the Old and New Testaments.8 After leading a prayer service at one of the traditional sites of Jesus’s baptism, Wadi al-Kharrar, John Paul returned to Amman for the short flight to Ben-Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv.

  For thirty-five years, since the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church had sought a new relationship with living Judaism. That quest had given birth to a lively and productive Jewish-Catholic dialogue. Yet opinion polls in Israel before the papal visit revealed that only a minority of Israelis were aware of these developments. Fifty-six percent of Israelis, according to one survey, had no idea that the Catholic Church condemned anti-Semitism and worked against it throughout the world. What more than three decades of documents, dialogue, and conference papers had failed to communicate was made unmistakably clear at the airport arrival ceremony. The Pope waving a hand in salute at the Israeli flag; the Pope listening attentively as the military band played “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem; the Pope being welcomed to a sovereign Jewish state as an honored guest by that state’s president and prime minister; the Pope reviewing an Israeli Defense Force honor guard—these were icons, communicating what words sometimes could not convey. Something fundamental had changed in the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people.

  John Paul spent the second day of his Holy Land pilgrimage in Bethlehem, now under the control of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Throughout the day, PA authorities indulged in rather clumsy efforts to paint the visit as papal recognition of a Palestinian state (a word the Pope never used, deliberately), and to suggest that the Pope’s call for justice for those living at the Dehaishe refugee camp was a demand for a “right of return” for all those displaced by the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948 (a phrase that John Paul did not use, again deliberately). These propaganda efforts mirrored Chairman Yassir Arafat’s curious effort, the night before, to claim St. Peter as a Palestinian. There was even a minor flap when the Pope kissed a bowl of Palestinian soil on arriving in Bethlehem; did this imply some subtle Vatican move on the Middle East chessboard? Papal spokesman Navarro-Valls got things back on track by saying, simply and accurately, “It would have been very strange of the Pope not to have kissed the earth at the place Christ was born.”

  That, of course, was the primary message of the day, once again conveyed by papal iconography: John Paul II, praying in the basilica of the Nativity, inches from the traditional site of Jesus’s birth. In his homily at Mass in Bethlehem, the Pope spoke of joy to a land too often deprived of joy: “The joy announced by the angel” to the shepherds of Bethlehem “is not a thing of the past,” the Pope insisted. “It is a joy of today—the eternal today of God’s salvation which embraces all time, past, present, and future.” To experience that joy, John Paul continued, was to touch the eternal mystery of the human condition: “At the dawn of the new millennium, we are called to see more clearly that time has meaning because here Eternity entered history and remains with us forever…. Because it is always Christmas in Bethlehem, every day is Christmas in the hearts of Christians.”9

  Thursday, March 23, a day of solemn drama and wrenching emotion, began with a private Mass for the Pope and his closest collaborators in the Cenacle, the “Upper Room” on Mount Zion that is the traditional site of Christ’s Last Supper and the place where the Church was born on Pentecost. Then, after meeting the Ashkenazic and Sephardic chief rabbis, John Paul went to Israeli President Ezer Weizmann’s official residence for a conversation. And from there, John Paul II was driven to the Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem.

  This dramatic moment had been preceded by weeks of speculation and agitation: “How far will the Pope go?” Attempts to explain that this was not a zero-sum game in which one side’s gain was another’s loss were of little avail in the emotionally and politically charged atmosphere. Concerns had even been raised that the entire papal visit to Israel would self-destruct at Yad Vashem. John Paul’s remarks during a simple ceremony of awesome solemnity reduced the chatter about “how far” to ashes.

  Joaquín Navarro-Valls had once asked the Pope whether he ever cried; “not outside,” John Paul replied. No one could doubt that the Pope was crying inside as he walked slowly toward the eternal flame in Yad Vashem’s Hall of Remembrance and bent his head in silent prayer. No one could doubt that he was seeing the boyhood friends from Wadowice who had perished in the death camps. No one who knew how the experience of the Nazi Occupation had shaped Karol Wojtyła’s determination to defend human dignity could doubt that he was hearing the jackboots on the streets of Kraków again.

  The Bishop of Rome, a shared history etched in his face, bent in prayer over the eternal flame at Yad Vashem—here was another icon indelibly imprinted on the consciousness of Jews and Christians. Here was another indication that things could never be the same again.

  John Paul began his brief address with Psalm 131 (“I have become like a broken vessel…But I trust in you, O Lord”) and then said precisely what needed to be said: “In this place of memories, the mind and heart and soul feel an extreme need for silence. Silence in which to remember. Silence in which to try to make some sense of the memories which keep flooding back. Silence because there are no words strong enough to deplore the terrible tragedy of the Shoah.” Then, after reminding everyone that remembrance was “for a purpose, namely, to ensure that never again will evil prevail, as it did for millions of innocent victims of Nazism,” John Paul, who knew that too many Christians had been ensnared in that web of evil, offered an act of repentance from the heart: “As Bishop of Rome and Successor of the Apostle Peter, I assure the Jewish people that the Catholic Church, motivated by the gospel law of love and by no political considerations, is deeply saddened by the hatred, acts of persecution, and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews by Christians at any time and in any place.”10 Prime Minister Ehud Barak responded with a mo
ving statement that neither ignored nor pursued the arguments about relative responsibilities for the Shoah. Like the Pope, Barak understood that this was too solemn a moment for anything other than remembrance and a mutual commitment to a different future.

  The weight of history became almost unsupportable when the Pope walked slowly across the Hall of Remembrance to greet seven Holocaust survivors. Here was another icon: the Pope was not receiving the survivors, he was honoring their experience and their memories by walking, with difficulty, to meet them. His gesture of respect did not go unremarked. A few days later, an Israel soldier-intellectual called a friend, an American who had been in Jerusalem during the papal visit, and said, “I just had to tell you that my wife and I cried throughout the Pope’s visit to Yad Vashem. This was wisdom, humaneness, and integrity personified. Nothing was missing. Nothing more needed to be said.”

  The tone of solemnity was not maintained later in the day at a tripartite interreligious meeting. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem refused to participate; Chairman Arafat delegated Sheik Taysir Tamimi, an Islamic judge from the PA, to be the Muslim spokesman. Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi Meir Lau caused an uproar by claiming that John Paul had recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s “united, eternal capital city” (which the Pope had not done); catcalls followed from Muslims in the audience. Then Sheik Tamimi welcomed the Pope as “the guest of the Palestinian people on the land of Palestine, in the city of holy Jerusalem, eternal capital of Palestine” and went on to insist that there could be no peace in the region until all “Palestine” was united under “President Yassir Arafat.” The meeting dissolved into acrimony, the Pope holding his head in his hands amid the cacophony. After the moderator, Rabbi Alon Goshen-Gottstein, had restored a measure of order, John Paul spoke briefly and pointedly about religion as “the enemy of exclusion and discrimination, of hatred and rivalry, or violence and conflict.” Shortly after the Pope had finished, Sheik Tamimi abruptly got up and left. A Vatican official later explained that the sheik had leaned over to the Pope before departing and explained that he had a “previous engagement.” More than one observer wondered what engagement trumped the Pope in the sheik’s mind.