66.Ibid., 20.
67.Cited in Time, October 15, 1979, p. 24.
68.John Paul II, The Pope Speaks to the American Church (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), pp. 35, 31.
69.Ibid., pp. 38–39.
70.Ibid., p. 46–47.
71.Ibid., p. 56.
72.Ibid., p. 64.
73.Cited in Time, October 15, 1979, p. 22.
74.Cited in ibid., p. 23.
75.John Paul II, The Pope Speaks to the American Church, pp. 71–80.
76.See James M. Rentschler, “Hooking Up the Vatican Hot Line,” International Herald Tribune, October 30, 1998, p. 9.
77.“The Pope in America,” Time, October 15, 1979, p. 28.
78.Author’s interview with Zbigniew Brzeziński, February 7, 1997.
79.On the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, see Ann Carey, Sisters in Crisis (Huntingdon, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor Press, 1997).
80.John Paul II, The Pope Speaks to the American Church, pp. 102–103.
I was present in the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception during the papal meeting with American nuns, and remember being struck by two things: first, how John Paul defused the emotional tension within the basilica with his address (not all of the sisters agreed with Sister Teresa Kane by any means); and second, by how many of the nuns who had been standing in silent protest during the papal address stood up on the pews during the Pope’s recessional from the basilica to get photographs of him. He was the Pope, after all.
The assertion of former National Catholic Reporter editor Thomas Fox that John Paul loathes Sister Teresa Kane, whom he has “never forgiven,” is a journalistic speculation based on a sad misreading of John Paul II’s character. The Pope who forgave the man who tried to assassinate him and who helped initiate the Polish-German reconciliation statement of 1965 is not given to holding grudges. [See Kwitny, Man of the Century, p. 340.]
81.See OR [EWE], November 5, 1979, p. 6.
82.John Paul II, The Pope Speaks to the American Church, pp. 113–117.
83.“The Pope in America,” Time, October 15, 1979, p. 28.
84.See John Paul II, “Address to the Sacred College of Cardinals,” OR [EWE], November 12, 1979, pp. 16–18.
85.“John Paul II at the Commemoration of Albert Einstein,” OR [EWE], November 26, 1979, p. 9.
86.“John Paul II’s Address at the Angelicum University,” OR [EWE], December 17, 1979, p. 8.
87.Ibid., p. 7.
88.See Hans Küng, Konzil und Wiedervereinigung, 3rd edition (Freiburg im Bresgau: Verlag Herder, 1961); English translation, The Council: Reform and Reunion (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Image Books, 1965). See also Hans Küng, Justification: The Doctrine of Karl Barth and a Catholic Reflection (New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1964).
89.For a critique of Küng’s teaching on infallibility from well within the orbit of progressive Catholic theology, see Peter Chirico, Infallibility: The Crossroads of Doctrine (Kansas City: Sheed, Andrews and McMeel,1977).
90.Author’s interview with Archbishop Jorge Mejía, November 13, 1996.
91.The official Vatican documentation on the Küng case made by found in OR [EWE], January 14, 1980, pp. 17–19; the German bishops’ statements may be found in OR [EWE], February 25, 1980, pp. 4–5.
92.In 1993, to mark Hans Küng’s sixty-fifth birthday, a Festschrift of essays was published in his honor. The editors concluded their preface with an appeal for Küng’s “rehabilitation” as a Catholic theologian. See Hans Küng: New Horizons for Faith and Thought, eds. Karl-Josef Kuscher and Herman Häring (New York: Continuum, 1993), especially the preface, “The Aim of This Book,” pp. 7–10. This volume also includes useful documentation on the theologians’ response to the CDF declaration.
93.Ignatius’s foundation was known as the Roman College. After being generously endowed by Pope Gregory XIII in 1572, it became known as the Gregorian University. “The Greg,” as it is universally called, was alma mater to sixteen popes and a vast numbers of cardinals, bishops, and priests; since the Council, nuns and laypeople had also taken advanced degrees there. As of 1979, nineteen of its alumni had been declared saints, twenty-four had been beatified, and many more had been martyred. A bastion of theological conservatism prior to Vatican II (several of its faculty had been among the prominent opponents of John XXIII’s plans for the Council), “the Greg,” like the Society of Jesus which ran it, had become known for theological adventurousness in the post-conciliar period.
94.John Paul II, “Address to the Pontifical Gregorian University,” OR [EWE], January 21, 1980, pp. 3–5.
95.Author’s interview with Cardinal Edward Cassidy, December 7, 1996.
The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople is first among equals among the leaders of the various self-governing Orthodox Churches. His situation is, politically and theologically, quite different from a pope’s. The Turkish government, which requires that he be a native-born Turkish citizen, also claims a role in, and has sometimes interfered with, the selection of the Patriarch of Constantinople, not by vetoing an election but by making known its dissatisfaction with certain potential candidates before voting begins. As for his ecclesiastical role, the governing traditions of Orthodoxy dictate that he can act only with the consensus of his own Synod and at least the tacit agreement of the heads of other self-governing Orthodox Churches. The Ecumenical Patriarch’s scope for initiative is thus far more limited than a pope’s, because of the peculiar political situation of the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the traditions of authority within Orthodoxy itself.
For an overview of the complex world of Orthodoxy, see Ronald G. Roberson, CSP, The Eastern Christian Churches: A Brief Survey, 6th ed. (Rome: Edizioni “Orientalia Christiana,” 1999).
96.John Paul II, Turkey: Ecumenical Pilgrimage (Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1980), p. 27.
97.Ibid.
98.Ibid., pp. 39–48.
99.Ibid., p. 57.
100.Ibid., p. 62.
101.Ibid., p. 86.
102.The document is cited in Szulc, Pope John Paul II, p. 312.
103.These points are detailed in ibid., p. 311.
104.Cited in ibid., p. 359.
CHAPTER 11
Peter Among Us: The Universal Pastor as Apostolic Witness
1.Jerzy Turowicz, “John Paul II in West Germany,” in Wierzbianski, ed., The Shepherd for All People, pp. 240–259, and Tadeusz Nowakowski, “The Holy Father in Germany,” in ibid., pp. 260–268. Turowicz’s dispatch was originally written for Tygodnik Powszechny, and Nowakowski’s for the London-based Tydzien Polski.
2.See Lumen Gentium [Dogmatic Constitution on the Church], 18–27.
3.Author’s interviews with Cardinal Jan Schotte, CICM, March 14, 1997, and Cardinal Jozef Tomko, November 14, 1996.
4.Author’s interview with Cardinal Jan Schotte, CICM, March 14, 1997.
5.Ibid.
6.See Bohdan R. Bociurkiw, “The Ukrainian Catholic Church in Gorbachev’s USSR,” Problems of Communism 39, November-December 1990, pp. 6–7.
7.Like Orthodoxy, the Ukrainian Church’s canon law permitted the ordination of married men to the priesthood, but not to the episcopate. There were curial concerns about transferring to the diaspora—and thus to North America and Australia—a practice that had a long tradition in its land of origin but might create difficulties abroad. The Ukrainians, for their part, believed this an essential part of their heritage and resented efforts to limit their historic practice simply because they had been forced into exile.
8.John Paul II, “Address to the Seventeenth General Assembly of the Italian Bishops’ Conferences,” OR [EWE], July 7, 1980, pp. 10–12.
9.See OR [EWE], July 14, 1980.
10.OR [EWE], December 1, 1980, p. 18.
11.See ibid., p. 17.
12.Broun, Conscience and Captivity, pp. 133–136.
13.John Paul II, “Letter to the Church in Hungary,” OR [EWE], June 23, 1980, pp. 16–17.
14.A variant of this is cit
ed in Broun, Conscience and Captivity, p. 145.
15.Author’s interview with Cardinal Francis Arinze, November 9, 1996.
16.Christopher Sliwinski, “Prologue to the Holy Father’s Visit,” in Wierzbianski, The Shepherd for All People, p. 158; Sliwiniski wrote originally for Krakow’s Tygodnik Powszechny.
17.Cited in Greeley, The Making of the Popes 1978, p. 210.
18.Christopher Sliwinski, “John Paul II in Africa,” in Wierzbianski, ed., The Shepherd for All People, p. 166.
19.Ibid., pp. 168–169.
20.Ibid., pp. 169–171.
21.Ibid., pp. 171–172.
22.Ibid., p. 173.
23.Ibid., p. 174. The president, Colonel Denis Sassou Nguesso, told reporters in the papal party that the weather had improved in his country since he had begun employing former medicine men, expert in causing rain, in the state weather service. [Ibid.]
24.Ibid.
25.Ibid., pp. 174–176.
26.Ibid., p. 179.
27.See ibid., p. 182.
28.Cited in Michael Walsh, John Paul II: A Biography (London: Fount, 1995), p. 80.
29.Sliwinski, “John Paul II in Africa,” p. 183.
30.Author’s interview with Cardinal William Baum, November 5, 1996.
31.Sliwinski, “John Paul II in Africa,” p. 183.
32.John Paul II, France: Message of Peace, Trust, Love and Faith (Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1980), p. 15.
33.Ibid., p. 22.
34.Ibid., pp. 136–137.
35.Ibid., p. 119. John Paul concluded: “Forgive me this question. I asked it as the minister does at the moment of baptism. I asked it out of solicitude for the Church whose first priest and first servant I am, and out of love for man, whose definitive greatness is in God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” [Ibid.]
36.The citations above are from ibid., pp. 184–210.
37.Cited in Kwitny, Man of the Century, pp. 361–362.
38.A “nuncio” is the Holy See’s ambassador to a country with which it enjoys full diplomatic relations. Absent diplomatic relations (as was the case with the United States at this time), the Holy See’s representative, who is accredited to the hierarchy of the country rather than to its government, is an “apostolic delegate.”
39.Author’s interview with Cardinal Pio Laghi, November 5, 1996.
40.A battle of memoranda was one leitmotif of the pilgrimage. A group of Brazilian industrialists had sent the Vatican a memorandum prior to the visit, arguing that São Paulo’s Cardinal Paolo Evaristo Arns, a Franciscan sympathetic to liberation theology, should be transferred from his huge archdiocese, to resolve the conflict between the government and the bishops. Another memorandum was waiting for the Pope when he got to São Paolo: it was a petition containing 400,000 signatures, gathered in local parishes, in support of Cardinal Arns.
41.Author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, October 23, 1998.
42.John Paul II left the Brazilian Bishops’ Conference the text of an address on “base communities” which he had not had time to deliver. The thrust of the address was to urge that these new forms of local Church community, often formed in the favelas, always remain conscious of themselves as Church communities, linked to the Church’s sacramental system and its hierarchical leadership. This, too was dismissed by some as “conservative,” although one has to wonder why a Pope’s urging local communities to remain united with the Church and to think with the Church is considered a reproof. If the Office of Peter is an office of fostering unity, this is certainly at least part of what popes are supposed to do. [See Walsh, John Paul II, pp. 84–85.]
The details of the Pope’s first pastoral pilgrimage to Brazil, and the citations from his addresses, are taken from Maciej Feldhuzen, “John Paul II in Brazil,” in Wierzbianski, ed., The Shepherd for All People, pp. 212–235; Feldhuzen wrote originally for Nowy Dziennik in New York and for the London Daily Telegraph.
43.Author’s interviews with Archbishop Paul Cordes, March 27, 1997; Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, September 20, 1997; and Archbishop Christoph Schönborn, OP, December 11, 1997. For an account of the German influence on Vatican II, see Ralph M. Wiltgen, SVD, The Rhine Flows into the Tiber: The Hidden Council (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1967).
44.John Paul II, Germany: Pilgrimage of Unity and Peace (Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1981), p. 20.
45.Ibid., p. 29.
46.See ibid., pp. 37–52.
47.Ibid., pp. 155–156.
48.Turowicz, “John Paul II in West Germany,” in Wierzbianski, ed., The Shepherd for All People, p. 259.
49.It was a task magnified by the fact that the USSR had begun a brutal invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in December 1979.
50.See Jan Cardinal Schotte, CICM, “The Synod of Bishops: History, Work, and Recent Synod Experience,” a presentation to the Seminar for English-speaking Bishops in Mission Countries, Rome, 16 September–5 October 1996; copy furnished to the author by Cardinal Schotte.
51.Synod of Bishops, Justice in the World, “Introduction.” Catholic social doctrine had long taught that Catholic social action was an imperative, not an option, for the Church. The difficulty with this particular Synod statement was twofold: it seemed to suggest that the “liberation from every oppressive situation” could be accomplished by “action on behalf of justice,” whereas the Church’s constant teaching was that this complete liberation would only happen in the Kingdom of God come in its fullness; and the statement also seemed to suggest that those who did not undertake “action on behalf of justice,” either by reason of vocation (like cloistered contemplative nuns) or repression (like the underground Church in situations of persecution), were, somehow, not living the reality of the Church fully.
52.Author’s interview with Cardinal Jozef Tomko, November 14, 1996.
53.In addition to general sessions, in which the members of the Synod—bishops chosen by their national conferences, curial officials, heads of men’s religious orders, and bishops and priests appointed as members by the Pope—give addresses (or, in Synod jargon, “make interventions”) to the entire assembly, the Synod also breaks down into language-based discussion groups (circules minores), in which the Pope did not participate.
54.In an intervention that drew considerable media attention, San Francisco Archbishop John Quinn cited survey research showing widespread opposition to the teaching of Humanae Vitae on the morally acceptable means of family planning and argued that “unless one is willing to dismiss the attitude of all these people as obduracy, ignorance, or bad will, this widespread opposition must give rise to serious concern.” That the situation was cause for serious concern was certainly true. But Archbishop Quinn’s intervention did not explore the question of whether the Church’s ethic of marital chastity had been adequately proposed to Catholics in the United States by bishops, priests, and theologians. The intervention stressed that too many people did not understand that the Church taught the moral obligation of family planning; if ignorance was widespread on this crucial point, might there not be similar ignorance about the rationale for the teaching of Humanae Vitae on artificial contraception? The Quinn intervention also seemed to accept at face value the threat of a “population bomb” and the more draconian analyses of certain population-control theorists, while failing to acknowledge the challenges to those analyses that were being mounted by responsible demographers.
But the core of Quinn’s proposal was the call for a theological dialogue between the teaching authority of the Church and dissident moral theologians, for the purpose of creating a “new context” for the Church’s ethic of marital chastity. This seemed to assume equal status for authoritative teaching and dissent from authoritative teaching, although even that was not entirely clear: the first step in the proposed conversation would be a “listening phase including both theologians who support the Church’s teaching and those who do not.” How the participation of the latter (whose views were hardly unknown, in any case) squared with one of the ground rules Archbishop Quin
n proposed for the dialogue—“recognition that the teaching on contraception is a serious and authentic doctrine of the ordinary magisterium”—was not clarified: unless openness to the “development and amplification of this teaching” that was another Quinn ground rule included openness to a fundamental change in the moral judgment on contraception, which was what the dissidents frankly called for. This second ground rule undercut the first, a further confusion in the proposal. [See Origins 10:17 (October 9, 1980), pp. 263–267.]
The Quinn intervention was widely interpreted as a call for a revision of the moral teaching of Humanae Vitae. In a later intervention, the archbishop denied that this was his intention.
55.John Paul’s sermon on the closing of the Synod is described by one biographer as containing “stinging remarks” about some of the proposals bishops had made during the Synod. [See Walsh, John Paul II, p. 87.] The text of the sermon does not sustain the charge. John Paul did address the difficulties spouses experienced in living the ethic of marital chastity contained in Humanae Vitae, but distinguished between growth into chastity (which is always difficult, given the high standard set by the Gospel) and a “gradualness of the law” by which the moral bar is set progressively higher as a couple matures. As John Paul noted, a “gradualness of the law” demeans men and women by suggesting that there are different levels of moral law appropriate “for various persons and conditions,” a suggestion that dissolves the notion of human equality. [See Origins 10:21 (November 6, 1980), pp. 325–329.]
56.Author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, March 20, 1997.
57.John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio 6.2, in The Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortations of John Paul II, edited and with introductions by J. Michael Miller, CSB (Huntington, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division, 1998); hereinafter Miller, Exhortations.
58.Ibid., 6.3.
59.Ibid., 11.1, 11.2.
60.Ibid., 21.3.
61.Ibid., 22.3, 23.2.
62.Ibid., 25.5.
63.Ibid., 32.4.
64.Ibid., 36.2, 40.4.
65.Ibid., 46.1–4. The Charter of Rights of the Family was issued in 1983.
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