The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  The following day, February 24, John Paul flew to Cairo on the first leg of his pilgrimage to Mount Sinai, where Moses had met “the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Exodus 3.6). At the airport exchange of greetings with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and local religious leaders, the Pope set the theme of this phase of his jubilee pilgrimage, thanking the Egyptian leader for making it possible “for me to go where God … gave his Law as a sign of his great mercy and kindness toward his creatures.” John Paul then went to visit the residence of the Coptic Orthodox patriarch, Pope Shenouda III, noting that the successor of Peter felt at home in the house of the successor of Mark, traditional founder of the Church of Alexandria and Peter’s longtime companion. Later that same day John Paul went to the intellectual center of Sunni Islam, Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, where he met the Sunni spiritual leader Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi and was greeted enthusiastically by other Muslim scholars and religious leaders, who seemed eager to get as near the Pope as possible.37

  At Mass in a Cairo stadium on February 25, John Paul returned to the theme of the law that liberates in a homily before some 15,000 worshipers from the local Armenian, Chaldean, Coptic, Greek, Latin-rite, Maronite, Melkite, and Syrian communities. The Ten Commandments, the Pope said, were a gift from God, given to a recently enslaved people so that they would not revert to the habits of slaves. The same gift was available to those who did not wish to be slaves to the various false gods on offer in the twenty-first century; here, in the Ten Commandments, the men and women of the new millennium would find a moral code that “frees us from idols and makes every life infinitely beautiful and infinitely precious.” Speaking extemporaneously at the end of the Mass, John Paul praised the persecuted Sudanese Christians who had made the trek to Cairo to be with him and sent his greetings to their hard-pressed brethren at home.38

  The Christian unity for which the Pope had pleaded at St. Paul Outside the Walls on January 18 was dealt a few new blows on February 26, when John Paul went by helicopter to the monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai. The Greek Orthodox monastic community there offered him a warm welcome, as did its leader, Archbishop Damianos; but the Orthodox declined to pray with the Pope in a Liturgy of the Word celebrated outside the monastic enclosure in a garden. To do so, Damianos suggested, would be inappropriate while Rome and Orthodoxy were not in full communion. It was a position John Paul II did not share, but there was nothing he could do about such principled recalcitrance.

  The Orthodox monks thus missed being present at one of the great homilies of the Great Jubilee, and indeed of the pontificate. In it, John Paul preached on the mystery of “liberating obedience,” which, he said, had been enshrined “at the heart of our religion” by God’s encounter with Moses in this very place. The Ten Commandments, he insisted, “are not the arbitrary imposition of a tyrannical Lord.” Rather, the Ten Commandments reflect the fact that the God who created us is also our redeemer, who inscribes an instinct for moral truth inside every man and woman. The Ten Commandments “were written in stone; but before that they were written on the human heart as the universal moral law.” There was still a wind blowing from Sinai, John Paul continued, a wind that reminded the men and women of the twenty-first century that the Ten Commandments are “the law of freedom: not the freedom to follow our blind passions, but the freedom to love, to choose what is good in every situation, even when to do so is a burden.” The law liberates; the law reveals, and unveils, and clarifies: for “in revealing himself on the Mountain and giving his Law, God revealed man to himself. Sinai stands at the very heart of the truth about man and his destiny.”39

  Tradition marks a spot on the mountain where God spoke to Moses from the burning bush. On coming to that spot, John Paul II went down on his knees and was lost in prayer.

  MEMORY, CONFESSION, PARDON, RECONCILIATION

  Of all John Paul II’s plans for the Great Jubilee of 2000, the most controversial was his insistence that the Church cleanse its historical conscience at the end of the second millennium, in preparation for a new springtime of evangelization in the third.40 He had put the case succinctly, and sharply, in Tertio Millennio Adveniente:

  [I]t is appropriate that, as the second millennium of Christianity draws to a close, the Church should become ever more fully conscious of the sinfulness of her children, recalling all those times in history when they departed from the spirit of Christ and his Gospel and, instead of offering to the world the witness of a life inspired by the values of faith, indulged in ways of thinking and acting that were truly forms of counter-witness and scandal. Although she is holy because of her incorporation into Christ, the Church does not tire of doing penance. Before God and man, she always acknowledges as her own her sinful sons and daughters.41

  The Pope’s proposal raised many questions. From a communications standpoint, how could the Church’s confession of the sins of her children be done in such a way that these acts of confession did not become confused with various exercises in political correctness in which politicians groveled before groups claiming victim status? From a historical point of view, was it even possible to pass a serious historical judgment on events that had taken place centuries before, events shaped by many unknown facts, motivations, and pressures? Then there was the problem of the Church’s long entanglement with coercive state power: where was the Church responsible for certain injustices, and where was injustice to be tallied to the account of the state? The gravest questions were theological. As Tertio Millennio Adveniente indicated, there were two facets of the Church’s life to be reconciled: the Church’s belief that she was preserved in truth and holiness by the power of the Holy Spirit, and the Church’s constant practice of (and need for) purification, confession, and penance.

  All of these questions were examined by the International Theological Commission [ITC] at the request of its president, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and himself a distinguished theologian. In December 1999, the Commission issued “Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past,” a thirty-five-page study that examined several key aspects of the relationship between the holiness of the Church and the sinfulness of Christians: the biblical approach to the problem; the theological foundations of a solution; the relationship of historical judgment to theological judgment; the question of ethical discernment, both in the present and over time; and the importance of the issue for pastoral and missionary work, ecumenical relations, and interreligious dialogue.42 The ITC study did not take up particular cases, but rather sought to establish a coherent intellectual framework for the Church’s reckoning with the shadow side of its past. The conclusion of “Memory and Reconciliation,” which cited both Irenaeus of Lyons and John Paul II, took the entire discussion far beyond the shallows of political correctness and offered a moving testimony to the conviction that truth, however painful, is in the final analysis liberating:

  [I]n every form of repentance for the wrongs of the past, and in each specific gesture connected with it, the Church addresses herself in the first place to God and seeks to give glory to him and to his mercy. Precisely in this way she is able to celebrate the dignity of the human person called to the fullness of life in faithful covenant with the living God: “The glory of God is man fully alive; but the life of Man is the vision of God.” By such actions, the Church also gives witness to her trust in the power of the truth that makes us free [cf. John 8.32]. Her “request for pardon must not be understood as an expression of false humility or a denial of her 2,000-year history, which is certainly rich in merit in the areas of charity, culture, and holiness. Instead, she responds to a necessary requirement of the truth, which, in addition to the positive aspects, recognizes the human limitations and weaknesses of the various generations of Christ’s disciples.” Recognition of the Truth is a source of reconciliation and peace because, as the Holy Father also states, “Love of the truth, sought with humility, is one o
f the great values capable of reuniting the men of today through the various cultures.” Because of her responsibility to Truth, the Church “cannot cross the threshold of the new millennium without encouraging her children to purify themselves, through repentance, of past errors and instances of infidelity, inconsistency, and slowness to act. Acknowledging the weaknesses of the past is an act of honesty and courage.…” It opens a new tomorrow for everyone.43

  In the course of eighty-nine pastoral pilgrimages outside Italy over the two decades between his election and the opening of the Great Jubilee, John Paul II had discussed the Church’s need for forgiveness for the failures of its sons and daughters in a variety of settings; many of the papal requests for God’s forgiveness touched on sins against the unity of the Church, although others involved what the world media insisted were the more salient issues, such as the Inquisition, the Galileo case, and the European wars of religion. This entire, unprecedented process of a corporate, ecclesiastical examination of conscience reached its apogee in St. Peter’s on March 12, 2000, the First Sunday of Lent in the Great Jubilee, which had been designated the Day of Pardon.

  It began with John Paul, vested in Lenten penitential purple, kneeling in prayer before Michelangelo’s statue of the Pietà: just as the Mother of the Church had embraced the crucified Lord of the Church, so the Church, John Paul said, must embrace the one who had died for the sins of the world and ask the merciful Father’s forgiveness. As the procession moved slowly up the basilica’s center aisle, the choir sang the Litany of the Saints, asking the Church in glory to intercede with the Father for both the Church in the world and the Church being purified in Purgatory. Next to Bernini’s great bronze baldachino and the basilica’s high altar, a giant seven-foot fifteenth-century crucifix, taken from the Church of St. Marcellus, had been erected, along with seven candles, which remained unlit; the St. Marcellus cross had been venerated during holy years in Rome for centuries. John Paul’s homily asked the entire Church to place itself “before Christ, who out of love, took our guilt upon himself,” to make a “profound examination of conscience,” and to “forgive and ask forgiveness!” Throughout the years of preparation for the Great Jubilee, the Church had examined its conscience about the past; now it must examine its conscience about the present, asking itself “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.”44 There was, no doubt, apostasy and infidelity in the world; what had Christian apostasies and failures done to create a modernity that seemed to have forgotten God?

  The general intercessions of the Mass then took the form of seven confessions of sin and requests for God’s pardon, after each of which the senior churchman making the petition lit one of the seven candles beside the St. Marcellus crucifix. Cardinal Bernardin Gantin, the dean of the College of Cardinals, made a general confession of Christian sinfulness in history; the Pope prayed God’s forgiveness for these sins; the entire congregation chanted Kyrie eleison [Lord, have mercy] three times. The same pattern was replicated as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger asked God’s pardon for the 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 that had broken Christian unity. Cardinal Edward Cassidy asked God’s forgiveness for Christian sins against the Jewish people. Archbishop Stephen Fumio Hamao invoked Christian sins “against love, peace, the rights of peoples, and respect for cultures and religions,” and Cardinal Francis Arinze remembered those sins that had been committed against the dignity of women and the unity of humanity. Archbishop Francis Xavier Nguyên Van Thuân concluded the confession by asking God’s pardon for the sins Christians had committed against human rights, including a disregard for the dignity of those unborn. With all seven candles now lit, John Paul II walked slowly to the St. Marcellus crucifix and, as a sign of penance and a request for God’s pardon, embraced and venerated it.

  It was, perhaps, not surprising that the New York Times missed the point, suggesting editorially that the “Pope’s apology” (as it mistakenly described the Day of Pardon) had not gone far enough, for John Paul had not retracted the Church’s discriminatory teaching on artificial means of family planning, on abortion, and on the inadmissability of women to holy orders.45 More surprising was the continuing skepticism that was exhibited by senior churchmen. Cardinal Giacomo Biffi of Bologna (usually a supporter of John Paul) had once challenged the formulation in the Pope’s 1994 letter to the cardinals on the impending jubilee year, which had stated that “the Church acknowledges as her own the sins of her children.” Biffi thought that statement theologically ambiguous, at best; the Pope, during a lunch with the cardinal in July 1997, asked whether Biffi had noticed that the formulation of this in Tertio Millennio Adveniente was different so that it now read, “The Church always acknowledges as her own her sinful children.” Biffi was gratified that the Pope had taken his counsel and told John Paul that the new formulation was unexceptionable. But he then said that “the unheard-of initiative of asking pardon for the errors and inconsistencies of past centuries would … scandalize the ‘little ones’ … because the faithful, who do not know how to make theological distinctions, would see these self-accusations as a threat against their serene adhesion to the ecclesial mystery, which … is essentially a mystery of sanctity.” John Paul agreed that “that will require some thought.” In 2007, in his memoirs, Cardinal Biffi said that “unfortunately, he did not reflect on it sufficiently.”46

  But he had. He had been reflecting on such matters for a long time, beginning with the Polish bishops’ letter to their German colleagues in 1965, and he was convinced that the iconography of confession and repentance carried the Gospel message forward in ways that scholarly historical analysis of the past could not. It would be difficult to find examples of those “faithful” whose “serene adhesion” to the Church was threatened by the Great Jubilee’s Day of Pardon. On the contrary, John Paul II’s humility before the fact of Christian failure reinforced the themes he was determined to emphasize throughout the jubilee year: that all are called to holiness, and that, as he had long put it to those who came to him for confession, a man’s dignity is increased by the very act of his getting down on his knees to acknowledge before God that he has failed.

  The holiness of the Church had been celebrated the week before, on March 5, 2000, when John Paul II beatified forty-four martyrs—lay catechists, priests, religious women—who had given their lives for the truth in venues ranging from seventeenth-century Vietnam and Brazil to twentieth-century Thailand and Belarus. Now, on the Day of Pardon, the Church had confessed before God the times when her sons and daughters had not lived up to the universal call to holiness. The dialectic of penitence and grace, the rhythm of all genuine pilgrimages, had been embodied in two ceremonies at St. Peter’s on succeeding Sundays: a fitting preparation for the papal pilgrim who, eight days after the Day of Pardon, left for the holy lands of biblical tradition and his own vivid religious imagination.

  The Pope’s preparation continued immediately after the Day of Pardon, when John Paul began the annual papal and curial Lenten retreat. The retreat master for the jubilee year, by the Pope’s invitation, was the Vietnamese archbishop, Francis Xavier Nguyên Van Thuân, who wore a pectoral cross made from barbed wire and electrical wire, souvenirs of his fourteen years of imprisonment in a communist prison camp. Choosing as his theme “Witnesses to Hope,” the diminutive archbishop made a deep impression on the retreatants by meditating aloud on what his time behind bars had taught him about faith and fidelity, forgiveness and integrity.

  TO TOUCH THE HISTORY OF SALVATION

  “Be not afraid!” was John Paul II’s signature antiphon in the world. With respect to the Holy Land, “Quando me permetterete di andare?” [When will you let me go?] was the papal antiphon within the Roman Curia. Weeks after his election in October 1978, John Paul had floated the
idea of spending his first Christmas as pope in Bethlehem. His curial diplomats were aghast: the Holy See had no diplomatic relations with any of the states involved; there was no time to arrange things properly; the security would be a nightmare; popes simply didn’t pack up and go places, especially places that were political minefields. For once, John Paul II conceded to the ingrained caution of the traditional managers of popes and didn’t follow his own pastoral and spiritual instincts; the pattern was thus set for more than twenty years of frustration, during which the Pope asked, time and again, “Quando me permetterete di andare?”47

  He was a patient man but his patience had limits. Moreover, the diplomatic situation had been clarified by the Holy See’s 1993 Fundamental Agreement with Israel, the 1994 establishment of diplomatic relations with the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and the ongoing exchange of diplomatic contacts with the Palestinian Authority.48 Enough was enough. So John Paul finally announced that he was going, period, in the June 1999 Letter Concerning Pilgrimage to the Places Linked to the History of Salvation. In addition to the places of pilgrimage identified in Tertio Millennio Adveniente (Ur, Sinai, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jerusalem, and Damascus), the pilgrimage letter added Athens to the jubilee itinerary, in honor of St. Paul’s famous sermon on the Areopagus about the “unknown God” (Acts 17.16–34)—a New Testament vignette John Paul frequently cited as a metaphor for the Church’s situation in the modern world. The spiritual and emotional centerpiece of the journey, however, would be the Holy Land.