Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  45.The account that follows is based on the author’s interviews with two of the principal negotiators of the Fundamental Agreement, David-Maria A. Jaeger, OFM (interviews of May 10–11, 1997) and Shlomo Gur (interview of June 17, 1997), and with three other officials of the Holy See: Archbishop Andrea Cordero Lanza di Montezemolo (interview of November 28, 1997), Archbishop Claudio Celli (interviews of January 20 and September 24, 1997), and Monsignor Luigi Gatti (interview of November 25, 1997). At the time of the negotiation leading to the fundamental agreement, Archbishop Montezemolo was apostolic delegate in Jerusalem and Palestine; then-Monsignor Celli was Undersecretary of the Section for Relations with States, or “deputy-foreign minister” of the Holy See); and Monsignor Gatti was the veteran minutante, or desk officer, responsible for Middle East affairs in the Secretariat of State.

  Additional historical details are taken from Jaeger, The Roman Pontiffs in Defence of Christian Rights in the Holy Land. See also George E. Irani, The Papacy and the Middle East: The Role of the Holy See in the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1962–1984 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986); Andrej Kreutz, Vatican Policy on the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: The Struggle for the Holy Land (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990); and Minerbi, The Vatican and Zionism.

  Robert L. Wilken’s The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), a richly drawn historical and theological reflection on Christianity and the land of Christ from the first century A.D. to the seventh, provides a perspective essential for grasping crucial aspects of contemporary debates.

  46.On Israel, see John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, p. 100.

  47.John Paul II, “Homily in Otranto,” OR [EWE], pp. 1–2, 8.

  48.Author’s interview with Monsignor Luigi Gatti, November 25, 1997.

  49.John Paul II, “Homily in Otranto,” OR [EWE], October 13, 1980, p. 8.

  50.See O’Brien, The Hidden Pope, pp. 284ff.

  51.See “Joint Press Communiqué of September 1, 1987,” in John Paul II, Spiritual Pilgrimage, p. 103.

  52.For limited technical purposes (for example, participation in the International Telecommunications Union), Vatican City State is a subject of international law. But in virtually all other instances. it is the Holy See that participates in international organizations (for example, the International Atomic Energy Agency, where the Church’s interest is the moral dimension of nuclear power, not the involvement of Vatican City State in nuclear energy research or production).

  53.Montezemolo learned about the back channel and the agreements it had produced in a letter from Cardinal Sodano, who told him that “Father Jaeger will explain it to you.” The patrician archbishop didn’t flinch (according to Jaeger, who was present when the apostolic delegate opened the letter) and immediately grasped the necessity of doing things this way. Jaeger, he understood, had protected him from being in an impossible position, as the archbishop had no authority to authorize a member of his delegation to engage in such an enterprise without prior clearance through ordinary Vatican channels—which would have tied everything up in knots and jeopardized a process that was producing results.

  54.Sabbah, a Palestinian Arab born in Nazareth in 1933, was appointed by John Paul II in 1987 and was the first native Catholic Latin-rite patriarch of Jerusalem in modern times.

  55.This language was the subject of lengthy negotiations. The Holy See’s position was that it was “upholding” the universal right to religious freedom by, inter alia, urging Israel to “observe” it.

  56.Ambassador Shmuel Hadas presented his credentials as the first Ambassador of the State of Israel to the Holy See to Pope John Paul II on September 29, 1994. The Pope’s welcoming address and the ambassador’s remarks may be found in Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity Information Service #88 (1995/I), pp. 38–41.

  Archbishop Montezemolo was nominated the first papal nuncio to Israel on June 28, 1994. John Paul took to calling him il nuncio storico [“the historic nuncio”], perhaps in part to help take the sting of disappointment out of Monsignor Celli having been the actual signatory of the Fundamental Agreement. In 1998, Montezemolo was named nuncio to Italy.

  57.Two years later, at the 1996 Special Assembly for Lebanon of the Synod of Bishops, Latin-rite Patriarch Michel Sabbah made an intervention in which he said that the Middle East, “being in search of stability, needs the resources of all its people and religions, Christianity and Islam.” Judaism was noticeably absent. The patriarch went on to describe “the Jewish fact” as a “new reality… in the Holy Land,” and suggested that the Syrian presence in Lebanon was Israel’s fault. [Cited in “One Small Step Backward,” National Catholic Register February 4, 1996.] See also Michel Sabbah, “The Church of Jerusalem: Living with Conflict, Working for Peace,” Commonweal, January 14, 1996, pp. 14–17.

  58.Father Jaeger summed up the legal implications of the Fundamental Agreement in “The Fundamental Agreement Between the Holy See and the State of Israel: A New Legal Régime of Church-State Relations,” Catholic University Law Review 47:2 (Winter 1998), pp. 427–440.

  59.Arafat’s comment was cited in the New York Times of December 25, 1995, in a story datelined December 24 and reprinted in the Winter 1995–1996 issue of Christians in Israel, a quarterly publication of the Israeli Foreign Ministry. “Official relations” (the diplomats’ technical term) were established between the Holy See and the PLO by a joint communiqué of October 25, 1994. The offices of the PLO representative to the Holy See are in London. There is no counterpart representation of the Holy See to the PLO. Unofficial contacts are maintained with the Palestinian Authority through the apostolic delegate in Palestine/Jerusalem.

  60.See “Jerusalem: Considerations of the Secretariat of State,” in Origins 26:16 (October 3, 1996), pp. 250–253. This text also includes a useful historical overview of the Holy See’s position on Jerusalem since 1947–1948.

  61.See Melady, The Ambassador’s Story, pp. 124–136, for an account by the Bush administration’s ambassador to the Holy See of his discussions on this issue. Given the impression, widespread in the Vatican, that senior officials of the Bush administration took far less cognizance of the Holy See’s concerns than had its predecessor, it seems unlikely that there was a significant causal relationship between the administration’s wish for full diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Israel (which Secretary of State James A. Baker, III had written into Ambassador Melady’s instructions as a goal to be sought) and the achievement of the Fundamental Agreement.

  62.The serious part of the restoration controversy involved questions about the effects of the cleansing agent on some of Michelangelo’s late corrections to the ceiling. The less serious part involved complaints from academics and critics whose lengthy speculations about transferences from the dark crevices of Michelangelo’s imagination to the ceiling were rendered null and void by the revelation that what had been thought to be artistic shadows were in fact the products of wax, Roman air pollution, and aviary digestive tracts. For technical and scholarly articles on the restoration and its techniques, see La Capella Sistina: I Primi Restauri—La Scoperta del Colore (Instituto Geografico de Agostini, 1986), La Capella Sistina: La Volta Restaurata—Il Trionfo del Colore (Instituto Geografico de Agostino, 1992), and La Capella Sistina: Il Giudizio Restaurato (Instituto Geografico de Agostino, 1997). For the story of the drapings and their removal during the restoration, see Meg Nottingham Walsh, “Out of the Darkness: Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgment,’” National Geographic 185:5 (May 1994), pp. 102–123.

  63.The citations above are from John Paul II, homily at Mass marking the completion of the restoration of the Sistine Chapel, OR [EWE], April 13, 1994, pp. 7, 9 [emphasis in original].

  64.John Tagliabue, “Cleaned ‘Last Judgment’ Unveiled,” New York Times, April 9, 1994, p. 13.

  65.The January 24, 1993 editorial was reprinted in OR [EWE], January 27, 1993, p. 1.

  66.Author’s interview
with Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, March 18, 1997.

  67.Reputable demographers believe that there is no such thing as “overpopulation,” which has never been scientifically defined. These scholars argue that what we are accustomed to think of as the symptoms of “overpopulation”—disease, hunger overcrowding, high infant mortality—are more accurately described as the results of poverty and material deprivation. On this point, see Amartya Sen, “Population: Delusion and Reality,” and Nicholas Eberstadt, “The Premises of Population Policy: A Reexamination,” in The Nine Lives of Population Control, ed. Michael Cromartie (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995).

  Within three years of the Cairo conference, the UN’s own demographic projections were forecasting zero world population growth by 2040 and depopulation thereafter. [See Nicholas Eberstadt, “World Population Implosion?” The Public Interest 129 (Fall 1997), pp. 3–22.]

  68.See, for example, Peter Singer, Rethinking Life & Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995).

  69.John Paul II, “Letter to Heads of State,” in OR [EWE], April 20, 1994, p. 1 [emphasis in original].

  70.Author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, December 13, 1997.

  71.This pattern of misrepresentation—more plainly, lying—had characterized previous interactions between UNFPA representatives and officials of the Holy See. [Author’s interview with Monsignor Peter Elliott, September 22, 1997.]

  72.In his memorandum to Mrs. Sadik, John Paul emphasized that “what the Church calls responsible parenthood is not a question of unlimited procreation,” nor was it based on a “lack of awareness of what is involved in raising children.” Rather, what the Church sought was “the empowerment of couples to use their inviolable liberty wisely and responsibly, taking into account social and demographic realities as well as moral criteria.” The Pope’s memorandum to Mrs. Sadik is in Origins 23:31 (March 31, 1994), pp. 716–719.

  For Nafis Sadik’s reconstruction of this meeting, see Bernstein and Politi, His Holiness, pp. 517–524. Their narrative strongly suggests that neither author had read the Cairo draft document thoroughly, much less carefully. Mrs. Sadik’s recollections of the meeting may also have been influenced by the fact that her agenda was frustrated at Cairo by, among others, John Paul II.

  73.Unclassified memorandum to the U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See, March 21, 1994.

  74.See Dennis Proust, “Hostile U.N. Prep Session,” Catholic New York, April 21, 1994. This reconstruction of Prep-Com III is also based on the author’s interviews with two members of the Holy See delegation, Monsignor Diarmuid Martin and Ms. Gail Quinn, shortly after the Cairo conference.

  75.The citations above are taken from the “Draft Final Document of the Conference,” produced by Prep-Com III as the working text for the final report of the Cairo conference. The mainstream press seemed uninterested in the strong-arm tactics used at Prep-Com III, which were nevertheless reported extensively in a form of underground journalism: cheaply produced pro-life newspapers and magazines. Attempts to clarify the Orwellian Newspeak of the Cairo draft document were dismissed in one major U.S. news weekly as “Jesuitical obfuscation”—a minor but telling example of the anti-Catholicism that too often tainted coverage of the Cairo conference and the process leading up to it. [Emily MacFarquhar, “Population Wars,” U.S. News and World Report, September 12, 1994, p. 55.]

  76.See Accattoli, Karol Wojtyła, p. 272.

  77.Author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, January 22, 1997.

  78.John Paul II, “Angelus for Trinity Sunday,” OR [EWE], June 1, 1994, p. 8.

  79.Author’s interview with Tadeusz Styczeń, SDS, October 23, 1998.

  80.The bishops’ statement is in Origins 24:9 (July 21, 1994), pp. 170–171. The religious opposition to the Clinton administration’s Cairo policy was by no means Catholic alone. On April 22, eleven leading evangelical Protestant leaders faxed a letter of protest to the White House, describing a State Department cable instructing U.S. posts abroad to pressure foreign governments to broaden abortion access in UNFPA programs as “an unprecedented misuse of our diplomatic corps for political ends.” The Protestant leaders asked the President how he could reconcile the third part of his campaign promise to make abortion “safe, legal, and rare” with his administration’s Cairo policies, which were aimed at promoting precisely the opposite.

  81.“Declaration of the Pontifical Academy for Life,” OR [EWE], June 29, 1994, p. 1 [emphasis in original].

  82.“Cairo Population Conference,” OR [EWE], June 22, 1994, p. 7.

  83.See OR [EWE], June 15, 1994, pp. 1–2.

  84.See OR [EWE], June 22, 1994, p. 1.

  85.See OR [EWE], June 29, 1994, p. 11.

  86.See ibid., pp. 1–2.

  87.See OR [EWE], July 6, 1994, p. 1.

  88.See OR [EWE], July 13, 1994, p. 1.

  89.See OR [EWE], July 20, 1994, p. 1.

  90.See OR [EWE], July 27, 1994, pp. 1–2.

  91.See OR [EWE], August 3, 1994, p. 1.

  92.See OR [EWE], August 10–17, 1994, p. 2.

  93.See OR [EWE], August 24, 1994, p. 2.

  94.See OR [EWE], August 31, 1994, p. 1.

  95.Author’s interview with Joaquín Navarro-Valls, December 18, 1997.

  96.“Remarks Prepared for Delivery by Vice President Al Gore, National Press Club, Washington, D.C., Thursday, August 25, 1994” (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Vice President), p. 8.

  97.Quoted in Christine Gorman, “Clash of Wills in Cairo,” Time, September 12, 1994, p. 56.

  98.Author’s interview with Joaquín Navarro-Valls, December 18, 1997.

  The Gore/Navarro confrontation came shortly after the U.S. State Department’s population coordinator, Faith Mitchell, blamed Vatican disagreement with the Cairo document on sexism and the Church’s determination to deny women an education. According to Ms. Mitchell, the Holy See was upset with “the fact that the conference is calling for a new role for women, calling for girls’ education and improving the status of women.” [Deborah Zabarenko, “U.S. Works to ‘Lower Volume’ on Population Debate,” Reuters World Service, August 19, 1994.]

  99.Boyce Rosenberger, “Explosive Abortion Issues Refueled at Forum,” Washington Post, September 6, 1994, pp. 1, 13.

  100.International conferences like the Cairo population conference work on the principle of consensus, with all participants having to agree (or at least having to agree not to formally disagree) with everything in a document before it can be adopted by the conference as a whole. Participants who do not wish to block a final document by “withholding consensus,” as the diplomatic vocabulary has it, can add “reservations” to the final document. This was the strategy employed by the Holy See at Cairo after it had achieved its principal objectives at the conference. As the head of the Holy See delegation began his remarks at the closing of the conference on September 13, “the Holy See wishes in some way to associate itself with the consensus, even if in an incomplete or partial manner.” The Holy See then affixed an “annexed note” of reservations to the Cairo final report. [See Origins 24:15 (September 22, 1994), pp. 257, 259–264 for Archbishop Renato Martino’s two interventions at the conference, the “annexed note,” and a series of observations by members of the Holy See delegation to the conference.]

  101.Barbara Crossette, “Vatican Holds Up Abortion Debate at Talks in Cairo,” New York Times, September 8, 1994, p. A8.

  102.The last major sticking point during the nine-day-long conference involved the “safety” of abortions. It was an important question for the Holy See, which believes that no abortion is “safe,” as it results in the death of an innocent human being. The disputed language in the draft final report stated that “in circumstances where abortion is legal, such abortion should be safe.” This was unacceptable to the Holy See and the issue was moral principle: to Holy See delegates, the draft language was the equivalent of saying that in circumstances where female circumcision is legal, it should be performed with novocain
e. After considerable wrangling, the language was finally changed to read, “in circumstances where abortion is not against the law, such abortion should be safe.” On the surface it was a minor change, but from the Holy See’s point of view the new language held out the prospect of legal reform and did not concede the moral rectitude of existing permissive abortion laws.

  103.The Holy See was criticized by the United States and others for negotiating with Islamic regimes during the conference. Before the Cairo conference, for example, State Department spokesman Mike McCurry publicly warned the Holy See against negotiating with Iran. A week later, in Cairo, U.S. delegates were seen openly negotiating compromise language on abortion and “reproductive rights” with Iranian delegates.

  104.The Holy See’s last formal statement at Cairo identified those parts of the final report with which it agreed and those parts it still found objectionable. Arguing that the Holy See’s views were shared by “many, believers and nonbelievers alike, in every country of the world,” Archbishop Renato Martino, the head of the Vatican delegation, welcomed the final report’s “affirmations against all forms of coercion in population policies,” its recognition of the family as “the basic unit of society,” and its stress on “women’s advancement and the improvement of women’s status through education and better health care services.” The archbishop then deplored the fact that the final report “recognizes abortion as a dimension of population policy and indeed of primary health care, even though it does stress that abortion should not be promoted as a means of family planning and urges nations to find alternatives to abortion.” The final report’s preamble, Martino continued, “implies that the document does not contain the affirmation of a new internationally recognized right to abortion.” [The full text of Martino’s statement may be found in Origins 24:15 (September 22, 1994, pp. 257–260).]

  105.See “Accanto a Pietro una preghiera incessante,” L’Osservatore Romano, May 11, 1994, p. 4.

  106.Ibid.