Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  99.John Paul II, “Opening Address to the Fourth General Conference of the Latin American Episcopate,” Origins 22:19 (October 22, 1992), pp. 321, 323–332.

  100.The Special Assembly of the Synod of Bishops for America would meet in November and December 1997, and was completed by the post-synodal apostolic exhortation, Ecclesia in America, which John Paul II signed in Mexico City on January 22, 1999 [see OR (EWE), January 27, 1999]. For an account of the Synod, see Richard John Neuhaus, Appointment in Rome: The Church in America Awakening (New York: Crossroad, 1999).

  101.See “Catechism Is Truly a Gift to the Church,” OR [EWE], December 9, 1992, pp. 1–2. See also Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s presentation of the book at a press conference on December 9 [OR (EWE), December 16, 1992, pp. 4, 6]. The presentation of the Catechism was also celebrated at a papal Mass at the Basilica of St. Mary Major on December 8, the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception; John Paul’s homily linked the occasion to the solemn closing of Vatican II, twenty-seven years before. [See OR (EWE), December 16, 1992, p. 3.]

  102.Author’s interview with Archbishop Christoph Schönborn, OP, December 11, 1997.

  103.Ibid. Christoph Schönborn was ordained bishop in September 1991. He was appointed coadjutor archbishop of Vienna in April 1995 and became archbishop the following September.

  104.John Paul II, Depositum Fidei, 3.

  105.See Catechism of the Catholic Church, 173–175.

  106.Author’s interview with Archbishop Christoph Schönborn, OP, December 11, 1997. See also Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Gospel, Catechesis, Catechism: Sidelights on the “Catechism of the Catholic Church” (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), which includes Ratzinger’s response to the Catechism’s German critics, and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger and Christoph Schönborn, OP, Introduction to the “Catechism of the Catholic Church” (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994).

  107.A definitive Latin text of the Catechism was published in 1997. Translation of the Catechism where the Church lived in poverty became the occasion for exercises in collegial charity; Cardinal John O’Connor of New York, for example, financed the translation of the Catechism into Russian, supporting the commission set up by Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz. [“Presentation of Catechism of the Catholic Church in Russian,” Vatican Information Service, January 28, 1997: VIS 970128 (780).]

  108.See John Bolton, “Somalia and the Problems of Doing Good: A Perspective for the State Department,” and Alberto Coll, “Somalia and the Problems of Doing Good: A Perspective from the Defense Department,” in Close Calls, ed. Abrams, pp. 145–160 and 161–182.

  109.John Paul II, “The World’s Hunger and Humanity’s Conscience,” Origins 22:28 (December 24,1992), p. 475.

  110.For a discussion of the moral and policy issues involved in the “humanitarian intervention” debate, see John Langan, SJ, “Humanitarian Intervention: From Concept to Reality,” Andrew Natsios, “Complex Humanitarian Emergencies and Moral Choice,” and Drew Christiansen, SJ, and Gerard F. Powers, “The Duty to Intervene: Ethics and the Variety of Humanitarian Interventions,” in Close Calls, ed. Abrams, pp. 109–124, 124–144, and 183–208.

  111.John Paul II, “Polish Episcopal Conference—I,” OR [EWE], February 3, 1993, p. 5.

  112.See Origins 19:15 (September 14, 1989), p. 250.

  113.See ibid., pp. 249–250.

  114.For further documentation on the 1987 agreement and the 1989 controversy, see ibid., pp. 249–250.

  115.The details above are taken from Władysław T. Bartoszewski, The Convent at Auschwitz (New York: George Braziller, 1991).

  116.John Paul II, “Letter to the Carmelite Nuns at Auschwitz,” in Spiritual Journey, pp. 167–168.

  117.Bartoszewski, The Convent at Auschwitz, p. 137.

  118.Author’s interview with Monsignor Vincenzo Paglia, December 7, 1997.

  119.One of the heroes of the vital Lithuanian Catholic resistance movement that had emerged in the 1970s, the clandestinely ordained Jesuit Sigitas Tamkevičius, had been appointed an auxiliary bishop in 1991. He was named archbishop of Kaunas in 1996.

  120.“The Pope in Latvia: Address to the Cultural Leaders,” OR [EWE], September 15, 1993, pp. 11, 15.

  121.On the history of the Union of Brest, see Borys A. Gudziak, Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metropolitanate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople. and the Genesis of the Union of Brest (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998).

  122.The Balamand Document also cautioned against using recent martyrdoms and sufferings as a weapon against fellow Christians, urged both Orthodox and Eastern Catholics to seek out practical means of cooperation in charitable service to society, and warned against the resort to violence and the civil courts to resolve current grievances (such as the possession or repossession of properties lost during the communist period); these questions should be settled by dialogue. Ecumenism should be part of seminary training; attacks in the mass media should be rigorously avoided; all who had suffered persecution for the sake of Christian faith should be honored by all.

  123.Cited in Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity Information Service 84 (1993/III-IV), p.145.

  124.Cited in Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity Information Service 85 (1994/I), pp. 38–39.

  125.On the reception of the Balamand Document by Orthodoxy and the Eastern Catholic churches, see Appendix I in Roberson, The Eastern Christian Churches, 5th edition, from which the analysis above is drawn.

  Eight months later, in April 1994, Cardinal Lubachivsky sent a pastoral letter, On Christian Unity, to all Ukrainian Greek Catholics around the world. In it, the Ukrainian Catholic leader underlined his, and Catholicism’s, recognition of Orthodox sacraments and holy orders, and stated that, while Balamand “has its imperfections,” it ought to be implemented fully by the Greek Catholics of Ukraine. Lubachivsky’s letter was a courageous attempt to bridge an enormous gap, and reflected John Paul II’s view that Catholicism should bend every effort to strengthen its dialogue with Orthodoxy, and without expecting immediate reciprocation. [Ibid.]

  126.Author’s interview with Cardinal Edward Cassidy, September 5, 1996.

  127.Author’s interview with Cardinal Francis Arinze, November 9, 1996.

  128.Ibid.

  129.“The Pope in the Sudan: Ceremonies upon Arrival,” OR [EWE], February 17, 1993, p. 11 [emphasis in original].

  130.The government even censored a reference to Blessed Josephine Bakhita, a Sudanese Christian beatified in 1992, in the booklet prepared for the Pope’s Mass. Like Sudanese Christians of the 1990s, Blessed Josephine had been kidnaped and sold into slavery.

  131.It also gave John Paul the opportunity to publicly honor the memory of his friend Jerzy Ciesielski (who had drowned near Khartoum in 1970) as a “man of authentic faith” who had “made holiness the goal of his life as husband, father, and university teacher.” [“Pope’s Homily at Mass in Khartoum,” in ibid., p. 16.]

  132.Turabi, a Sorbonne-trained attorney and former dean of the University of Khartoum Law School, met the Pope briefly at the end of a general audience in the fall of 1993; during the same visit to Rome he also met with the staff of the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue and with Cardinal Arinze. The meetings were criticized, but Arinze argues that his dicastery has an obligation to receive leaders of other religions. The meeting with Arinze and the brief greeting from the Pope after the audience were requested by the Sudanese ambassador to the Holy See (who actually lived in Paris). During their meeting in Rome, Cardinal Arinze told Turabi that if he wanted to have a “dialogue with the Vatican,” that conversation had to have roots, which meant “Muslims and Christians in Sudan meeting each other. And then Muslims meeting us in the Vatican would help. But without the first, the second doesn’t work.” Turabi, Arinze recalled, was “not enthusiastic,” and the mild-mannered Arinze was charged by some reporters of speaking “like General Schwartzkopf.” “But in this case, some clear talk was necessary,” the Nigerian responded. As for
John Paul’s three-minute encounter with Turabi after the general audience, it may be suggested that the Pope said things about religious freedom that Turabi did not necessarily want to hear. Turabi later said that he had proposed to John Paul a “front against materialism,” and that the Pope had received the idea well. It seems unlikely that such a “front” would have been thoroughly discussed in three minutes. [Author’s interview with Cardinal Francis Arinze, November 9, 1996.]

  133.John Paul II, homily at Agrigento, in OR [EWE], May 12, 1993, p. 2 [emphases in original].

  134.Ibid.

  135.See OR [EWE], June 2, 1993, p. 7, and OR [EWE], May 19, 1993, pp. 5–6.

  136.“Papal Telegram to Florence,” OR [EWE], June 2, 1993, p. 5.

  CHAPTER 18

  The Threshold of Hope: Appealing to Our Better Angels

  1.Information on the background of the Denver World Youth Day and the opening ceremony: author’s interview with Archbishop J. Francis Stafford, February 17, 1997; letter to the author from Dennis M. Garcia, September 25, 1997; memorandum to the author from James Farnan, December 1996; Virginia Culver, “Papal Mass At Park a Bad Precedent?,” Denver Post, November 21, 1992; Gary Massaro and Bill Scanlon, “Sierra Club Contests Papal Mass,” Rocky Mountain News, January 27, 1993; John Paul II Speaks to Youth at World Youth Day, edited and illustrated by Catholic News Service (San Francisco and Washington, D.C.: Ignatius Press and Catholic News Service, 1993).

  2.Addresses in John Paul II Speaks to Youth at World Youth Day, pp. 112–115; see p. 78 for John Paul’s unscripted dialogue with the crowd at Stapleton International Airport.

  3.On the way of the cross at World Youth Day ’93, see ibid., pp. 83–89, 116–117.

  4.Author’s interview with Archbishop J. Francis Stafford, February 17, 1997.

  5.On the Cherry Creek Park vigil, see John Paul II Speaks to Youth at World Youth Day, pp. 90–101, 120–124.

  6.The full text of the homily is in ibid., pp. 124–125.

  7.See ibid., p. 127.

  8.Memorandum to the author from Archbishop J. Francis Stafford and Monsignor Edward L. Buelt, February 10, 1997.

  9.Letter to the author from Dennis M. Garcia, September 25, 1997.

  10.Ibid.

  11.Author’s interview with David Michaud, former Denver chief of police, January 8, 1999.

  12.Author’s interview with Archbishop J. Francis Stafford, February 17, 1997.

  13.Ibid.

  14.E. J. Dionne, Jr., “A Church Misrepresented,” Washington Post, August 17, 1993, p. A21.

  15.Peter Steinfels, “Beliefs,” New York Times, August 21, 1993, p. A7.

  16.Author’s interview with Archbishop J. Francis Stafford, February 17, 1997.

  17.Author’s interview with Cardinal John J. O’Connor, November 8, 1996.

  18.John Paul II’s address to the Roman Curia: OR [EWE], January 5, 1994, pp. 6–7 [emphasis in original].

  19.Veritatis Splendor was dated August 6, 1993, the Feast of the Transfiguration, and publicly released at a press conference led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger on October 5. The Latin original of the subtitle just cited is De Fundamentis Doctrinae Moralis Ecclesiae.

  20.A few sentences in its Decree on Priestly Formation [Optatam Totius] urged “special attention… to the development of moral theology,” which was to include deepening the discipline’s biblical roots and lifting up the nobility of the lay vocation in the world. [See Optatam Totius, 16.]

  21.On the situation of pre-conciliar Catholic moral theology, see Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics, pp. 254–279. Pinckaers makes the seminal distinction between a “freedom of indifference” and “freedom for excellence” in ibid., pp. 327–378.

  22.See John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, 96, in Miller, Encyclicals.

  23.See ibid., 97.

  24.On this point, see Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics, pp. 278–279.

  25.This analysis of the content of Veritatis Splendor is indebted to that of Richard John Neuhaus in First Things 39 (January 1994), pp. 14–16.

  26.John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, 5.3, in Miller, Encyclicals.

  27.Author’s interview with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, September 20, 1997. This charge may be found, inter alia, in Morris, American Catholic, p. 333.

  28.See, for example, Richard K. Ostling, “A Refinement of Evil,” Time, October 4, 1993, p. 71.

  29.Vivian Hewitt, “Encyclical Seen As Declaration of War on Liberals,” Catholic Herald, August 6, 1993,p. 1.

  30.Ann Knowles, “Leaked Draft ‘Completely Revised,’ ” The Universe, August 15, 1993, p. 6.

  31.Author’s interview with Tadeusz Styczeń, SDS, April 14, 1997.

  Veritatis Splendor generated a small library of commentaries, among which may be mentioned the following books of essays: The Splendor of Accuracy: An Examination of the Assertions Made by “ Veritatis Splendor,” Joseph A. Selling and Jan Jans, eds. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995); “ Veritatis Splendor”: American Responses, Michael E. Allsopp and John J. O’Keefe (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1995); Understanding “ Veritatis Splendor,” ed. John Wilkins (London: SPCK, 1994) and Moraltheologie im Abseits? Antwort auf die Enzyklika “ Veritatis Splendor,” ed. Dietmar Mieth (Freiburg/Basel/Vienna: Herder, 1994). L’Osservatore Romano ran an extensive series of commentaries on the encyclical in the winter and spring of 1993–1994; these may be found in the English Weekly Edition of OR during that period. Several important commentaries appeared in The Thomist: see Martin Rhonheimer, “Intrinsically Evil Acts and the Moral Viewpoint: Clarifying a Central Teaching of Veritatis Splendor [The Thomist, 58 (1994), pp. 1–39]; Alasdair MacIntyre, “How Can We Learn What Veritatis Splendor Has To Teach?” [The Thomist, 58 (1994), pp. 171–195]; and Servais Pinckaers, “The Use of Scripture and the Renewal of Moral Theology: The Catechism and Veritatis Splendor ” [The Thomist, 59 (1995), pp. 1–19].

  Richard A. McCormick, SJ, comments on the first wave of commentaries and provides a useful international bibliography in “Some Early Reactions in Veritatis Splendor,” Theological Studies 55 (September 1994), pp. 491–506; for a response to McCormick’s own criticisms of the encyclical and its defenders, see Richard John Neuhaus, “Moral Theology at its Pique,” First Things 49 (January 1995), pp. 88–92. For another extensive bibliography of commentaries in Veritatis Splendor see Miller, Encyclicals, pp. 667–671.

  32.On this point, see Josef Fuch’s essay in Wilkins’s Understanding “Veritatis Splendor,” pp. 21–26. The main themes of the German theological criticism of the encyclical are found in Mieth’s Moraltheologie im Abseits?

  33.Cited in McCormick, “Some Early Reactions… ,” p. 486.

  34.Cited in ibid.

  35.Cited in ibid., p. 491.

  36.This was particularly true of the response of one of post-conciliar Catholicism’s most influential moral theologians, Father Bernhard Häring, whose essay may be found in Wilkins’s Understanding “ Veritatis Splendor,” pp. 9–13. Father Richard McCormick also thought that the “issue behind the issue” was ecclesiology, and specifically “the attempt to suppress any dissent.” [McCormick, “Some Early Reactions… ,”p. 505.]

  37.Gilbert Meilaender, “Grace, Justification Through Faith, and Sin,” in Ecumenical Ventures in Ethics: Protestants Engage Pope John Paul II’s Moral Encyclicals, ed. Reinhard Hütter and Theodore Dieter (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), p. 83.

  38.Hadley Arkes, in “The Splendor of Truth,: A Symposium,” First Things 39 (January 1994), pp. 25–26.

  39.The problem was acutely described by Ulysses in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, some 390 years before Veritatis Splendor:

  Take but degree away, untune that string,

  And, hark, what discord follows….

  Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong,

  Between whose endless jar justice resides,

  Should lose their names, and so should justice too.

  Then every thing includes

  itself in power,

&nbs
p; Power into will, will into appetite;

  And appetite, a universal wolf,

  So doubly seconded with will and power,

  Must make perforce an universal prey

  And last eat up himself…

  [William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, I.iii.109ff.]

  40.On the nominalist corruption of the idea of freedom see Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics, pp. 327–351.

  41.This conviction was translated into detailed pastoral guidelines four years later, on February 12, 1997, when the Pontifical Council for the Family published its Vademecum for Confessors Concerning Some Aspects of the Morality of Conjugal Life. These suggestions for how priests should lead penitents to a discernment of the truth of the Church’s moral teaching as the framework for making decisions about, inter alia, the morally appropriate methods of family planning was John Paul II’s initiative, and reiterates the teaching of Familiaris Consortio: “it is part of the Church’s pedagogy that husbands and wives would first recognize clearly the teaching of Humanae Vitae as indicating the norm for the exercise of their sexuality, and that they should endeavor to establish the conditions necessary for observing that norm.” [Familiaris Consortio, 34.] In this vision of the moral life and its relationship to the Sacrament of Penance, the confessor is a spiritual and moral guide, not an inquisitor. [See Vademecum for Confessors, 1–11.]

  42.The Letter to Families was another innovation in papal teaching: a more personal reflection, addressed to a specific audience for a specific occasion (in this instance, the 1994 “International Year of the Family”), and not styled an apostolic constitution, encyclical, apostolic letter, or apostolic exhortation.

  43.Author’s interview with Bishop Stanisław Ryłko, November 12, 1996. Monsignor Ryłko was ordained a bishop by John Paul II on January 6, 1996 and appointed Secretary of the Pontifical Council on the Laity.

  44.John Paul II, address to the diplomatic corps, OR [EWE], January 19, 1994, pp. 1–2, 8 [emphasis in original].