Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  John Paul’s Mass on the Mount of Beatitudes the following day, attended by 100,000 young people from all over the world, was the largest gathering in the history of the State of Israel. Israeli security officials, worried about an assassination attempt, had asked the Pope to wear a bulletproof vest; John Paul had refused, as he always does such suggestions. As usual with youngsters, the Pope was in fine form and firm voice, urging them in his own sermon on the mount to be “joyful witnesses and convinced apostles,” the evangelists of the twenty-first century. After the Mass, John Paul went to pray at Tabgha, site of the multiplication of loaves and fishes, and then to Peter’s house at Capernaum, which had been excavated in recent years. Those watching could sense the wonder in John Paul’s face: here was Peter’s 263rd successor, praying at Peter’s house.

  On March 25, John Paul celebrated the Solemnity of the Annunciation in Nazareth, at the traditional site of the angel Gabriel’s appearance to Mary. The Pope was almost crushed by the exultant local congregation as he walked into the basilica; his secretary, the ever calm and always prepared Bishop Stanisław Dziwisz, fended off hands trying to touch John Paul from left and right with a judicious distribution of rosaries. The beauty of the liturgy notwithstanding, John Paul seemed most at home in the grotto of the Annunciation, doubtless repeating the Marian Fiat voluntas tua, “Be it done unto me according to your word,” that had characterized his own piety since the dark night of the Nazi occupation of Poland. Later that evening, the Pope was lost in prayer yet again in Jerusalem, this time at the Church of the Nations in the Garden of Gethsemane. Afterward, he visited the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, Diodoros I, at his residence. What could have been another uncomfortable ecumenical episode was transformed when the Pope embraced and kissed the ailing patriarch, who remained seated. Though the patriarch would not pray with the Bishop of Rome, John Paul’s spontaneous suggestion that each one present say the Lord’s Prayer, each in his own language, conveyed what he had said for twenty-one years: that he burns to pray with the Orthodox in a Church healed of the wound of 1054.

  On the final day of his Holy Land pilgrimage, Sunday, March 26, John Paul II walked eighty-six slow steps to the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site and the last remnant of Herod’s Temple, where Jesus had prayed. He stood for a silent moment and then left his own prayer-petition in a crevice in the Wall, as millions of pious Jews had done for centuries. It was another iconographic moment, signaling a different future for Catholic-Jewish relations. The prayer-petition asked God’s forgiveness for Christian offenses against Jews. John Paul had done the same thing on numerous occasions before. But now it was being said here, in this unique place, by a man whose reverence for that place could be read from his whole demeanor.

  From the Pope’s point of view, the Mass at the Holy Sepulcher, which he celebrated after his prayer at the Western Wall, was the climax of the entire pilgrimage. Here, he had written in his 1999 Letter on Pilgrimage, “I intend to immerse myself in prayer, bearing in my heart the whole Church.” John Paul was not satisfied with one immersion in prayer during that Eucharist at the tomb of Christ, however. Later in the day, he asked to be permitted to return privately.

  After the security forces had recovered from the shock, the Pope spent another half hour as a pilgrim, walking up the steep, stone steps to the eleventh and twelfth Stations of the Cross to pray at Calvary. It was another icon, John Paul living out the truth to which he had dedicated his entire pontificate: the proclamation that Jesus Christ is the answer to the question that is every human life.

  And that had indeed been the leitmotif of the entire, stunning week. John Paul II had come to the Holy Land to say, “Look at Jesus Christ.” The transparency of his faith, and the self-evident human decency and respect for others to which that faith gave rise, lifted the Pope’s walk where Jesus had walked into the realm of the epic.11

  THE UNIVERSAL CALL TO HOLINESS

  In Rome during the Great Jubilee of 2000, what sometimes seemed a kaleidoscopic series of events eventually resolved itself into a pattern: a set of variations on the theme of the universal call to holiness.

  Throughout his pontificate, John Paul had stressed every Christian’s baptismal vocation to a life of sanctity. “Universality” in that sense was honored during the Great Jubilee by having special jubilee days in Rome for different vocational groups. There were jubilee celebrations for consecrated religious men and women, the sick and health-care workers, artists, permanent deacons, the Roman Curia, craftsmen, priests, scientists, migrants and itinerant people, journalists, prisoners, young people, university teachers and intellectuals, the elderly, bishops, families, athletes, parliamentarians and government workers, the agricultural world, the armed forces and police, laity, the disabled, and the entertainment world.12 These particular jubilee “days” were sometimes held in the context of larger international meetings; the jubilee of families in October was held on the second day of the Third World-wide Meeting of the Holy Father with Families, and the jubilee for young people was celebrated during the Eighth International World Youth Day in August. The forty-seventh International Eucharistic Congress was also held in Rome in June, to remind the Church throughout the world that Christian holiness grew from the Church’s being constantly fed at the Lord’s table.

  The “universal call to holiness” was also lifted up in four events that embodied distinctive emphases of John Paul II’s papacy and gave the Great Jubilee of 2000 some of its most memorable moments.

  Remembrance and Forgiveness

  One controversial aspect of John Paul II’s plan for the Great Jubilee of 2000 had been his determination that the Church should cleanse its conscience by “recalling all those times in history” when the people of the Church had “departed from the spirit of Christ and his Gospel.” The men and women of the Church, the Pope insisted, had to “purify themselves, through repentance, of past errors and instances of infidelity, inconsistency, and slowness to act.” Such a reckoning would be an “act of honesty and courage” that would “strengthen our faith” and help the Church prepare for a springtime of evangelization in the twenty-first century.13

  Like the papal pilgrimage to the Holy Land, the dramatic “Day of Pardon” celebrated in St. Peter’s Basilica on the First Sunday of Lent, March 12, 2000, demonstrated the power of icons to communicate what scholarly historical analyses cannot convey. The Mass began with the Pope, vested in solemn Lenten purple, praying at Michelangelo’s Pietà; there, the Pope said, the Church, like Mary, embraces her crucified Lord and asks the Father’s forgiveness and pardon. The Litany of the Saints was sung as the penitential procession walked slowly up the nave to the papal high altar over Peter’s tomb, where a fifteenth-century crucifix from the Church of St. Marcellus, perhaps seven feet tall, had been erected, along with seven candles. In his homily, John Paul asked the entire Church to put itself “before Christ, who out of love, took our guilt upon himself” and make a “profound examination of conscience,” to “forgive and ask forgiveness!” That examination of conscience, the Pope continued, involved the present as well as the distant past. Christians must ask themselves “what our responsibilities are regarding atheism, religious indifference, secularism, ethical relativism, the violations of the right to life, disregard for the poor in many countries.”14 The world was not solely responsible for its apostasy; Christian failures had contributed to a modernity that seemed to have forgotten God.

  After the homily, a confession of sins and request for pardon took place during the general intercessions, or “prayer of the faithful.” Cardinal Bernardin Gantin, dean of the College of Cardinals, made a general confession of Christian sinfulness in history and lit one of the seven candles near the St. Marcellus crucifix (which had been specially venerated in Rome during holy years for centuries); the Pope prayed God’s forgiveness for these sins, and the entire congregation chanted Kyrie eleison [“Lord, have mercy”] three times. The same pattern was followed as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger asked God’s pardon for t
he times when Christians have “used methods not in keeping with the Gospel in the solemn duty of defending the truth.” Cardinal Roger Etchegaray confessed the sins of the people of the Church that had fractured Christian unity, and Cardinal Edward Cassidy asked God’s forgiveness for the sins of Christians against the Jewish people. Archbishop Stephen Fumio Hamao confessed Christians’ sins “against love, peace, the rights of peoples, and respect for cultures and religions,” while Cardinal Francis Arinze remembered Christian sins against the dignity of women and the unity of humanity. Archbishop Francis Xavier Nguyên Van Thuân (a former political prisoner in Vietnam) concluded the confession by asking God’s pardon for sins Christians had committed against human rights, including a deafness to the dignity of those John Paul called, in his prayer, “the little ones.” The Pope then walked slowly to the crucifix and, as a sign of penance and a request for God’s pardon, embraced and venerated it.15

  In a world of cloying requests for forgiveness from publicity-conscious politicians, some found the religious core of John Paul II’s “Day of Pardon” difficult to grasp. A New York Times editorial summed up the confusions by suggesting that the “Pope’s apology,” as it styled the day, hadn’t gone quite far enough; John Paul, according to the Times’ editors, didn’t understand that it was “difficult to square” an “apology for discrimination against women” with his “opposition to abortion and birth control, and to women in the priesthood.” Though the very notion of the New York Times reading the Pope a theology lesson seemed strange, the deeper confusion lay in identifying the “Day of Pardon” with Prime Minister Tony Blair’s “apology” for colonialism and President Bill Clinton’s “apology” for slavery. Ever since he first proposed a jubilee cleansing of conscience in 1994, John Paul had tried to explain that the Church was asking God’s pardon for the past sins and failings of the Church’s children. This was not pandering to interest groups; it was a solemn act of repentance, addressed to the Church’s Lord. It was not an “apology” it was far more serious than that. This was confession: a solemn acknowledgment of sin and a plea for divine forgiveness. As such, it strengthened the Church’s witness and authority.16

  A Century of Martyrdom

  Bishop Michel Hrynchyshyn, president of the Commission on New Martyrs of the Vatican’s central jubilee committee, estimates that two-thirds of the Christians who gave their lives for their faith in the first two millennia of Christian history did so in the twentieth century: some 27 million contemporary martyrs. Yet the overwhelming majority of the world’s Catholics were unaware that they had lived in the greatest century of martyrdom ever. To rectify this, John Paul II had commissioned a new “martyrology,” or catalogue of martyrs, so that the memory of these witnesses-unto-death would not be forgotten.17 He was also determined to recognize the new martyrs publicly during the Great Jubilee of 2000.

  Fittingly, the “Commemoration of the Witnesses to the Faith of the Twentieth Century” was an ecumenical service, held in the Roman Colosseum on the afternoon of May 7. The Pope began with an introductory prayer in Latin; Orthodox Metropolitan Gennadios, representing the Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I, offered a prayer in Greek; the Rev. Dr. Ishmael Noko of the Lutheran World Federation prayed in English. A Liturgy of the Word was then celebrated, after which the Pope preached. As a light rain began to fall, there were public readings from the writings of modern witnesses: Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow, a victim of communism; an Anglican bishop, martyred in Papua New Guinea in 1942; a Canadian Baptist doctor who had given his life treating victims of a meningitis epidemic in Nigeria; a seminarian from Burundi, fatally wounded in a 1997 massacre, whose testimony read, “Writing in our own blood, we pray for, and beg the pardon of, those who have killed us.” In all, some 12,692 people were remembered under several categories: victims within the Soviet Union; victims of communism elsewhere in Europe; Nazi victims; victims of other persecutions. After each reading, a candle was lit in front of the enthroned Book of Gospels. Darkness was falling as the three-hour ceremony drew to a close, and John Paul II prayed that God might remember all those who had given their lives for their faith “and, in your infinite mercy, their persecutors as well.”18

  The Largest Pilgrimage in European History

  Seven previous international celebrations of World Youth Day had turned this innovation into one of the signature features of John Paul’s pontificate. World Youth Day [WYD] 2000, which was held from August 14 to 20, was beyond even the Pope’s expectations. It was the largest pilgrimage in the history of Europe, as more than 2 million youngsters came to Rome for a week that stunned the city.19

  Over fifteen years, these World Youth Days had taken on a complex of meanings, none of them very well captured in the stock media phrase, a “Catholic Woodstock.” They were certainly an occasion for intense religious education of young Catholics, with and by their peers. World Youth Days also built a global network of young Catholics; in the age of the Internet, youngsters who had met in Compostela, Częstochowa, Denver, Manila, or Paris could stay in contact far more easily than pilgrims of previous generations. World Youth Days had also become occasions to evangelize the Church’s leadership; bishops who had believed the evangelization of the young impossible under modern conditions were converted to that possibility by the youngsters they accompanied to these events. As for WYD 2000, it surely meant something, at the end of a century of violence, that hundreds of thousands of young people were marching across Europe, not as warriors but as Christian pilgrims.

  WYD 2000 also helped re-evangelize Rome, a city that sometimes wears its Catholicism lightly. The sight of thousands of young people from all over the world, waiting patiently to walk as pilgrims through the holy doors of the major basilicas; the lines of youngsters waiting to go to confession in a vast, open-air “church” that had been set up in the Circus Maximus; the closing Mass in a field in the suburban area of Tor Vergata, where blazing heat and cramped conditions dampened neither enthusiasm nor the intensity of prayer—these unconscious acts of witness had the power to move even Roman cab drivers, one of whom observed, in a voice of wonder, that the crowds certainly didn’t behave like this for soccer matches or rock concerts. Or as the left-leaning Italian daily La Repubblica observed, “the wall between agnostics and Catholics fell at Tor Vergata.”20

  John Paul II did his part as a host: fifteen youngsters stayed at the papal summer residence at Castel Gandolfo and one afternoon the Pope invited them to a lunch of tomato fettuccine, pork, and zucchini while exchanging jokes and stories in English, French, Italian, Polish, and Portuguese. Roger Gudino, a Canadian university student, gave John Paul a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey and got the Pope reminiscing about his hockey-playing days in Poland.21 Three days later, however, those who continued to imagine that WYD was another form of celebrity infatuation were reminded that John Paul II’s magnetic attraction for the young involves his willingness to challenge them.

  In his homily at WYD 2000’s closing Mass, John Paul preached on Jesus’ question to his closest disciples after many others had abandoned him— “Will you also go away?”—and Peter’s response: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6.67–68). That question, “Will you also go away?” rings “across the centuries and comes down to us,” the Pope insisted. “It challenges us personally and calls for a decision.” That decision, amid all the other choices of youth, is the most important decision to be made, for it is Christ who is “capable of satisfying the deepest aspirations of the human heart.” Why? Because of Christ’s overwhelming, unconditional, and personal love: “Christ loves us and he loves us forever! He loves us even when we disappoint him, when we fail to meet his expectations for us. He never fails to embrace us in his mercy. How can we not be grateful to this God who has redeemed us…To God who has come to be at our side and stayed with us to the end?”

  These were not easy pieties. At a candlelight vigil the previous night, the Pope had asked, bluntly, “Is it hard to believe in the
third millennium? Yes! It is hard. There is no need to hide it.” But the Christ who had transformed the whole human condition, including fear and doubt, was waiting for them:

  It is Jesus in fact that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is he who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle. It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity….

  “If you are what you should be,” John Paul told more than 2 million young Catholics at the end, “you will set the whole world ablaze!”22