Saints for This Season
John Paul II’s long-held conviction that God is profligate in making saints had led him to beatify and canonize more men and women than any previous Pope. The Great Jubilee of 2000 pushed the number of men and women beatified by John Paul close to a thousand, and the number of canonizations well over four hundred.
The first beatifications of the jubilee year, in March, honored forty-four martyrs from Brazil, the Philippines, Poland, Thailand, and Vietnam. On April 9, three sisters who had founded religious communities and two priests were beatified; one of the priests, Francis Xavier Seelos, was a Bavarian Redemptorist who spent his entire ministry in the United States, dying in New Orleans in 1867 while caring for victims of a yellow fever epidemic.
On the Second Sunday of Easter, April 30, John Paul II canonized Sister Mary Faustina Kowalska (1905–1938), the Polish mystic of divine mercy whose convent was a few hundred yards from the chemical factory where young Karol Wojtyła had carried buckets of lime during World War II. St. Faustina’s message of God’s infinite mercy seemed to John Paul a particularly important one for a world leaving a century of man-made horrors:
It is not easy to love with a deep love, which lies in the authentic gift of self. This love can only be learned by penetrating the mystery of God’s love. Looking at him, being one with his fatherly heart, we are able to look with new eyes at our brothers and sisters, with an attitude of unselfishness and solidarity, of generosity and forgiveness. All this is mercy!…
It is this love which must inspire humanity today, if it is to face the crisis of the meaning of life, the challenges of the most diverse needs and, especially, the duty to defend the dignity of every human person. Thus the message of divine mercy is also implicitly a message about the value of every human being… 23
On May 13, in Fátima, Portugal, John Paul beatified Francisco and Jacinta Marto, two of the child visionaries who had experienced apparitions of the Virgin Mary in 1917. At the same time, the Pope decided to make public the so-called “third secret of Fátima,” which had been the source of apocalyptic speculation among some Catholics for decades. The “secret” was in fact a vision of a vast number of twentieth-century martyrdoms, including the shooting of a “bishop clothed in white.” That John Paul would have associated the assassination attempt of May 13, 1981, with this vision seems self-explanatory; but the release of the so-called “secret” was intended, in part, to dampen apocalyptic expectations during the millennial year. In a theological commentary on the Fátima apparitions, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger stressed that the visions were not a kind of cinematic preview of coming events, a “glimpse into a future which cannot be changed.” Rather, they were a call to conversion that was meant “to bring freedom onto the scene and to steer freedom in a positive direction.” Fittingly enough for the twentieth century, the Fátima apparitions were about freedom’s need for redemption.24
Twenty-seven Mexicans, including twenty-five martyrs of the 1920s, were beatified on May 21. The most controversial beatification of the jubilee took place on September 3, when John Paul beatified Pope Pius IX along with Pope John XXIII and three other clergymen. Some protagonists of John XXIII resented what they perceived as an attempt to “link” the pope of Vatican II to the pope of Vatican I. Yet John XXIII himself had written that he hoped to be able to canonize Pius IX, whom he considered a man of heroic sanctity and pastoral courage, whatever he may have thought about his predecessor’s relationship to the turbulent politics of mid-nineteenth-century Italy.25 John Paul II picked up that Johannine theme in his beatification homily, explaining that “holiness lives in history and no saint can escape the limits and conditioning that are part of our human nature. In beatifying one of her sons, the Church does not celebrate the specific historical decisions he may have made, but rather points to him as someone to be imitated and venerated because of his virtues, in praise of the divine grace that shines resplendently in him.”26
The final canonizations of the Great Jubilee of 2000 took place on October 1, when John Paul canonized two religious foundresses, including Katherine Drexel, the Philadelphia heiress who established a religious community to educate Native Americans and African-Americans; one hundred twenty martyrs of China, who died over a period of more than three hundred years; and Josephine Bakhita, a former Sudanese slave.27
REMAINING HIMSELF
John Paul II marked his eightieth birthday on May 18, 2000, by leading the largest concelebrated Mass in history. Six thousand priests joined seventy-four cardinals and patriarchs, two hundred fifty bishops, and the Pope in St. Peter’s Square and heard John Paul describe the ministerial priesthood as a gift given to “so many frail men,” a “gift that never ceases to amaze those who receive it.” The priest’s leadership in the Church was to be exercised, the Pope concluded, “not [by] domineering over those in our charge, but by setting them an example” of pastoral charity.28
Throughout the year, the Pope was determined to remain himself, despite the constraints of illness and age, and the criticism that continued from some of the traditional managers of popes. He happily baptized eighteen infants, several of them squalling, in the Sistine Chapel on January 9; three days before, on the Solemnity of the Epiphany, he had ordained twelve new bishops in St. Peter’s. That same month, John Paul hosted Polish film director Andrzej Wajda and the cast of Pan Tadeusz, the film Wajda had just made from the Polish Romantic epic, for Mass and a screening in the Vatican. The Pope, who had acted in Pan Tadeusz as a teenager, wept at certain moments in the film and recited passages of the six-hundred page poem to cast members when he greeted them afterward.29 In March, John Paul II invited the exiled Vietnamese Archbishop Francis Xavier Nguyên Van Thuân to preach to the Pope and the senior officials of the Roman Curia during their annual Lenten retreat. The archbishop, who organized his meditations around the theme “Witnesses to Hope,” made a deep impression by reflecting on what fourteen years in prison had taught him about fidelity, forgiveness, integrity, and faith. Later in Lent, John Paul II personally wrote the meditations read during the traditional Good Friday Stations of the Cross at the Colosseum.30
John Paul did agree to put some limits on his relentless schedule, trying to reserve Tuesday each week for recreation: a private day in the hills, for example, when weather permitted. The Pope returned to Les Combes in the Italian Alps of the Val d’Aosta for twelve days of summer vacation, from July 10 until July 22. The elements were not always cooperative but the two-story chalet the Pope used has a large picture window from which John Paul could watch his favorite scenery, the mountains, even when he couldn’t take daily hikes. As the weather finally cleared toward the end of the planned holiday, some members of the papal staff urged the Pope to stay for a few days longer; he insisted on getting back to Rome to prepare for World Youth Day 2000. A few weeks before going to Les Combes, the Pope had hosted a lunch for two hundred poor and homeless people in the lobby of the Paul VI audience hall; the meal was served by students from the Roman seminaries. It was, he said, a necessary and important way to prepare for the International Eucharistic Congress, which would begin in Rome a few days later and was “the heart of the Jubilee Year.”31
In June, the government of Italy gave a pardon to Mehmet Ali Agca, the would-be papal assassin of 1981, who was taken to Turkey to serve the remaining years of his sentence for a 1979 murder. The Pope had written Italian president Carlo Azeglio Ciampi in May; it was not, papal spokesman Navarro-Valls said, an explicit request for clemency (which the Holy See had always said was a decision for Italy alone), but rather an “explanation of how [the Pope] would feel if Italy granted a gesture of clemency.” While the diplomatic proprieties had to be observed, it seemed to some a distinction without a significant difference, and one that did not address the question of the public character of Agca’s action, which was not simply an offense against John Paul II personally but also against society. That the Pope had long before forgiven Agca was one thing; that this personal gesture of f
orgiveness could be readily translated into a public, state action was not entirely clear. Agca, for his part, described the Vatican as the “greatest of criminals” and said that the Church had offered him a huge sum of money and a cardinal’s red hat if he converted to Catholicism. All of which confirmed the judgment that, if the full truth of the assassination attempt of May 1981 were ever forthcoming, it would not be from Agca.32
THE UNITY OF THE CHURCH, THE DIGNITY OF HUMANITY
The opening days of the Great Jubilee of 2000 underscored the Pope’s determination to stress the urgency of the quest for Christian unity. Breaking with centuries of tradition, John Paul invited the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury and a representative of Orthodoxy’s Ecumenical Patriarchate to join him in opening the Holy Door of the Basilica of St. Paul Outside-the-Walls on January 18, the first day of the annual Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. The ecumenical service inside the great basilica included readings from the Russian Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky and the German Lutheran theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer. More than twenty representatives of various Christian communions joined John Paul in exchanging the kiss of peace while the choir sang “Ubi caritas” [“Where charity and love are, there is God”]. The ecumenical congregation then recited the Apostles’ Creed together in German, Greek, and Latin before singing the Lord’s prayer and receiving the Pope’s blessing.
Such powerful symbolic acts were easier to arrange than genuine theological progress in closing the eleventh-century breach between Christian East and Christian West, and the sixteenth-century fractures within western Christianity. After seven years of delay, the eighth plenary session of the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church met in Emmitsburg, Maryland, from July 9 to 19. Ten days of consultation and debate failed to produce a common document, however. Orthodox representatives continued to insist that the “problem” of the eastern-rite churches in communion with Rome—the so-called “Uniates” in Ukraine and elsewhere—had to be “solved” before the dialogue returned to its proper theological agenda. But the Orthodox themselves had no common position on these issues, and one Catholic participant thought that the Orthodox had hurled as many epithets at each other in Emmitsburg as at the Catholics. The aggressive posture of the Greek Orthodox, who argued that, with religious freedom now established in the formerly communist world, the “Uniates” should either become Orthodox or Latin-rite Catholics, did not bode well for the Pope’s desire to visit Athens at the conclusion of his jubilee biblical pilgrimage.33
Continuing tensions with Orthodoxy also bore on the Pope’s long-frustrated desire to go to Russia on pilgrimage. Russian president Vladimir Putin had cordial conversations with John Paul in the Vatican in June, but did not, like Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, extend an invitation to Russia. For his part, Patriarch Aleksy II of Moscow continued to insist that the “persecution” of the Orthodox by Greek Catholics in Ukraine and Catholic “proselytism” in Russia had to end before a papal visit could be more than “simply a protocol gesture.”34 Both complaints seemed exaggerated to many Catholic and Orthodox Christians in Ukraine and Russia, where on-the-ground ecumenical cooperation had made significant progress during the 1990s. A June 2001 papal pilgrimage to Ukraine was announced in October 2000; it remained to be seen what effect this would have on a possible papal pilgrimage to Russia.
The most controversial ecumenical and interreligious moment of the jubilee year came in September, when the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a declaration entitled Dominus Iesus [The Lord Jesus], on the unique role of Christ and the distinctive place of the Church in God’s saving plan for history. The declaration was widely reported as a reversal, even a repudiation, of decades of progress in ecumenical and interreligious dialogue. But many of those who read the document (which was written in response to theological speculations, primarily in Asia, that seemed to deny core Christian beliefs) found it a compelling, even humble, confession of Catholic faith: that there is one God, and thus only one “economy” of salvation; that if Jesus is Lord, true God and true man, he is Lord of all; that God, who wishes all to be saved, does not deny anyone the grace necessary for salvation; that all who are saved are saved through God’s action in Christ, whether or not they have ever heard of Jesus Christ; that the Church has a continuing missionary mandate to proclaim Christ. This was precisely what John Paul II had affirmed in the 1990 encyclical Redemptoris Missio [The Mission of the Redeemer]. Similarly, the document’s teaching on ecumenism reiterated the teaching of Vatican II, down to the Council’s language that the one Church of Jesus Christ “subsists” in the Catholic Church, even as elements of sanctification are present in communities that are not in communion with the Bishop of Rome. Misleading reporting and gaudy headlines (“We’re Number One,” over a photo of John Paul II with arms raised; “Vatican Declares Catholicism Sole Path to Salvation”) caused weeks of controversy. Yet the controversy was a helpful reminder that ecumenism and interreligious dialogue are more than exercises in political correctness. Truths are at stake here, and the dialogue, in charity and respect, should reflect that fact. That is what Dominus Iesus tried to remind the Church and the world—if, on occasion, more bluntly than the contemporary proprieties usually permit. That prominent evangelical Protestants found Dominus Iesus a bracing reaffirmation of Christian conviction was another interesting straw in the ecumenical wind.35
For John Paul II, the quest for Christian unity and the mutual exploration of truths that lead to the one Truth, who is God, are essential elements in the quest for a more humane world. Throughout the jubilee year, the Pope continued his campaign for a universal abolition of the death penalty, without notable success in the United States. John Paul also pressed for a cancellation of Third World debt coupled to economic and political reforms in the developing world; in August, the Pope appointed Michel Camdessus, the recently retired head of the International Monetary Fund, as a member of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.36 That same month, John Paul spoke to the Eighteenth International Congress of the Transplant Society. In a carefully calibrated address, the Pope welcomed the new genetic knowledge driving the biotechnology revolution. He also taught that the creation or use of clones or human embryos for research purposes, such as obtaining “stem cells” from which new organs or tissues could be developed, was a breach of the integrity and sanctity of life. Science itself had recently determined that stem cells could be obtained from adults, the Pope noted; the creation-for-destruction of research embryos was both immoral and unnecessary. The “fundamental criterion” of all truly humane medicine, John Paul said, “must be the defense and promotion of the integral good of the human person, in keeping with that unique dignity which is ours by virtue of our humanity.” That dignity is not ascribed to us by those who claim the right to determine which lives are useful and which expendable; it is built into us. In concluding, the Pope said he was “confident that social, political, and educational leaders will renew their commitment to fostering a genuine culture of generosity and solidarity.”37 It was a confidence that observers of the American debate on embryonic stem-cell research, which was almost entirely utilitarian in character, found bracing, if hard to share.
THE WATCHMAN
In a sermon written in 593, Pope Gregory the Great took a familiar biblical text (“Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel”) and sketched a portrait of the prophet Ezekiel that seemed to apply to John Paul II as the eighty-year-old Pope led the Church and the world through the Great Jubilee of 2000: “Note that a man whom the Lord sends forth as a preacher is called a watchman. A watchman always stands on a height so that he can see from afar what is coming. Anyone appointed to be a watchman for the people must stand on a height for all his life to help them by his foresight.”38
Or by his insight. From the beginning of his pontificate, Pope John Paul II had been convinced that the turn into a new millennium of Christian hi
story was a providential opportunity, not a quirk of the calendar. That some 27 million pilgrims flooded to Rome during the Great Jubilee of 2000 was one measure of the truth of the Pope’s insight; his prescience could also be felt in the innumerable local jubilee celebrations that took place throughout the Catholic Church and in ecumenical settings. To some Catholic leaders, the jubilee was another example of John Paul’s penchant for keeping the Church in a “constant state of agitation,” as one cardinal had put it. To many Catholics, living in an agitated world, the jubilee provided the occasion to reflect on the relationship between the busyness of modernity and the transcendent meaning and destiny of life. That is why, throughout the world, Catholics of all ages and social conditions responded fervently to the Pope’s invitation to experience a special year of reconciliation and grace.
Two weeks after New Year’s Day 2000, no one remembered the Y2K computer bug that had generated months of doomsday warnings. Few thought that London’s celebrated “millennium dome” was a fitting symbol of humanity’s crossing the threshold of a more hopeful future. John Paul II—the watchman who remained on duty despite disease and age—became the universal reference point for the year 2000 on December 24, 1999, and remained precisely that throughout the jubilee year. By his faith, his witness, and his courage, he had made the world consider the possibility of its need for redemption—and the further, astonishing possibility that that need had been met in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
That, John Paul had insisted all along, was what the Great Jubilee of 2000 was about.
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