For all the passion of his personal determination to walk where Jesus had walked, John Paul’s March 2000 pilgrimage to the Holy Land had a decidedly pastoral and evangelical purpose: to make the world look, intently, at the stuff of its redemption, thereby underscoring that Christianity rested on what English novelist Evelyn Waugh once described, in Brideshead Revisited, as “intransigent historical claims.” The Great Jubilee of 2000 was not the two thousandth anniversary of a pious fiction; biblical religion had to do with real people, in real places, making real decisions with real consequences in a drama that was embedded in real history. One might accept or reject the Church’s claims for the Church’s Lord. But one could not dismiss them as rooted in myth. The successor of Peter ought to pray at the places where Peter confessed, and betrayed, and was forgiven by Christ—and was transformed into the man who ended his life in Nero’s Circus in Rome. In praying where Peter had prayed, the successor of Peter was reminding the world that the truth of its salvation was revealed, not in anyone’s imagination, but in real lives.
On March 20, John Paul II flew to Amman, Jordan, where he was cordially received by King Abdullah. After the arrival ceremonies, the Pope went quickly to Mount Nebo, the site where biblical tradition holds that Moses gazed into the Promised Land he would never enter; how often, in his poet’s imagination, had John Paul imagined himself a latter-day Moses as he asked “Quando me peremetterete di andare?” Two thousand youngsters received their first holy communions the next day as the Pope celebrated an outdoor Mass in an Amman sports complex. John Paul’s homily linked Christian faith to the great Old Testament figures of Moses and Elijah, during a liturgy in honor of St. John the Baptist—the prophetic hinge between the Old Testament and the New, in Christian theology. After the Mass, the Pope led a brief prayer service at one of the traditional Jordan River sites of Jesus’s baptism by John, before returning to the Jordanian capital for the short flight to Ben-Gurion International Airport outside Tel Aviv.
Public opinion polls taken shortly before the Pope’s arrival in Israel suggested that the majority of Israelis were unaware of the sea change in Catholic-Jewish relations that had followed the Second Vatican Council; one poll revealed that 56 percent of Israelis were unaware that the Church condemned anti-Semitism and worked against it across the globe. John Paul II knew at least some of this, and probably intuited more of it. He also had a unique appreciation of the Jewish pain of the twentieth century, having lived it with the friends of his youth in Wadowice and Kraków. Moreover, he was a man fully persuaded of the power of symbols and symbolic action. Within an hour of his arrival in the first sovereign Jewish state in more than 1,900 years, he made manifestly clear that, for all the tortured history of the previous two millennia, something had changed, and changed for the good of both parties. A pope waving a hand in salute to the Israeli flag; a pope listening as the military band at the airport played “Hatikvah” the Zionist anthem; a pope being welcomed as an honored guest by Israel’s president and prime minister; a pope reviewing an honor guard composed of the young men and women of the Israel Defense Forces—thirty-five years of interreligious dialogue, reports from official commissions, even John Paul’s historic 1986 visit to the Great Synagogue of Rome did not communicate what an hour of ceremony at Ben-Gurion airport communicated. Something fundamental had changed in the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people—something historic, and good.
On March 22, the Pope went to Bethlehem, controlled by the Palestinian Authority, for a Mass in Manger Square, outside the basilica housing the traditional site of Jesus’s birth. In his homily, John Paul spoke of joy to a people who, for more than half a century, had found joy difficult to come by: “The joy announced by the angel” to the shepherds of Bethlehem “is not a thing of the past. It is a joy of today—the eternal today of God’s salvation which embraces all time, past, present, and future.” To be embraced by that joy, to open one’s life to it, was to enter into the depths of the human mystery: “At the dawn of the new millennium, we are called to see more clearly that time has meaning because here Eternity entered history and remains with us forever.… Because it is always Christmas in Bethlehem, every day is Christmas in the hearts of Christians.”49 Arrangements had been made for John Paul to spend a private moment in the Grotto of the Nativity, inside the basilica; characteristically, he used his time there to pray the appropriate portion of the Liturgy of the Hours. Clumsy attempts by Palestinian Authority officials to turn the Mass and the Pope’s subsequent visit to the Deheisheh refugee camp into political rallies failed to dull the edge of the Pope’s evangelical message. Neither did media incomprehension, as when papal spokesman Navarro-Valls was asked the political significance of the Pope kissing a bowl of soil on arriving in Bethlehem. “It would have been very strange of the Pope not to have kissed the earth at the place Christ was born,” Navarro-Valls replied.
No one knows precisely where the “Cenacle”—the room in which Jesus instituted the Eucharist and the priesthood at the Last Supper, and the room in which the Holy Spirit descended on the apostles at Pentecost—actually was, but tradition has long identified a large space on Mount Zion near the Cenotaph of King David as the biblical “upper room.” In it, on the morning of March 23, John Paul II celebrated Mass with his closest collaborators. Then after meeting the Ashkenazic and Sephardic chief rabbis and talking with Israeli president Ezer Weizman at his official residence, John Paul II was driven to the Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem—the emotional, and in some respects spiritual, center of the State of Israel.
Weeks of speculation about “how far would the Pope go?” in his remarks at Yad Vashem had preceded this riveting moment, and risked cheapening what the Pope intended to be a moment of solemn remembrance at a place memorializing what was, for most of the world, a universal icon of evil—the murder of the Jews of Europe during World War II. In the intense emotional, psychological, and political atmosphere surrounding the papal pilgrimage, attempts to explain that this was not a game in which someone’s loss was someone else’s gain were of little avail. In the event, the demeanor and the words of the Pope, at an occasion of the most heart-wrenching solemnity, reduced all talk of “how far” to dust and ashes.
The man who had once told Joaquín Navarro-Valls that he only cried “inside” must have been awash in unseen tears as he walked slowly toward the eternal flame in the Hall of Remembrance and there bent his head in silent prayer: unseen tears in memory of the childhood friends murdered in the gas chambers; unseen tears at the memories of humiliation under the Nazi jackboot in Kraków; tears for the wounds of the survivors; tears at the resistance of those who had treated his own attempts at reconciliation with incomprehension or contempt. Within, and because of, the personal drama of Karol Wojtyła, however, another drama was being played out at Yad Vashem: the dramatic relationship of Christians and Jews over two millennia, which could now never be the same, in light of the iconography of a Bishop of Rome, who shared the memory of the Holocaust, bent in prayer over the eternal flame commemorating the Holocaust’s victims.
What could he possibly say? He could speak of silence:
In this place of memories, the mind and heart and soul feel an extreme need for silence. Silence in which to remember. Silence in which to try to make some sense of the memories which come flooding back. Silence because there are no words strong enough to deplore the terrible tragedy of the Shoah.…
I have come to Yad Vashem to pay homage to the millions of Jewish people who, stripped of everything, especially of their human dignity, were murdered in the Holocaust.… We wish to remember. But we wish to remember for a purpose, namely, to ensure that never again will evil prevail, as it did for the millions of innocent victims of Nazism.…
How could man have such utter contempt for man? Because he had reached the point of contempt for God. Only a Godless ideology could plan and carry out the extermination of a whole people.…
As Bishop of Rome and Successor of the Apostle
Peter, I assure the Jewish people that the Catholic Church, motivated by the Gospel law of truth and love and by no political considerations, is deeply saddened by the hatred, acts of persecution, and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews by Christians at any time and in any place.50
Those present, and those watching on television, felt the weight of history bear down in an almost crushing way as the Pope then walked slowly and in pain across the Hall of Remembrance to meet seven Holocaust survivors. He was not receiving them; he was going to them, honoring their experience by walking with difficulty to take each one by the hand. That simple, human gesture of respect was another papal icon that, combined with the Pope’s heartrending words, lifted the entire event into the realm of the epic. Shortly afterward, an Israeli soldier-scholar who had seen a lot in his life called an American friend and said, “I just had to tell you that my wife and I cried throughout the Pope’s visit to Yad Vashem. This was wisdom, humaneness, and integrity personified. Nothing was missing. Nothing more needed to be said.”
The profound sense of human solidarity that the Pope had evoked for an hour at Yad Vashem was not maintained that evening, at what was supposed to have been a tripartite interreligious meeting at the Notre Dame Center. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem refused to attend; Yassir Arafat then sent a Palestinian judge, Sheikh Taysir Tamimi. After Ashkenazic chief rabbi Meir Lau created a fracas by asserting that the Pope had recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s “united, eternal capital city” (which the Pope had not done), Sheikh Tamimi shot back by welcoming John Paul “as the guest of the Palestinian people on the land of Palestine, in the city of holy Jerusalem, eternal capital of Palestine”; Tamimi then insisted that there would be no peace until all of “Palestine” was united in one country under “President Yassir Arafat.” The meeting dissolved into cacophony; the Pope sat silently, stunned and saddened, holding his hands to his ears against the uproar. After the meeting’s chairman, Rabbi Alon Goshen-Gottstein, had achieved something resembling order, John Paul spoke briefly, and with clear intent, about religious conviction as “the enemy of exclusion and discrimination, of hatred and rivalry, of violence and conflict.” Sheikh Tamimi then got up and left, explaining in an aside to the Pope that he had a “previous engagement.” Hours after John Paul had eloquently mourned the lethal effects of hatred in his address at Yad Vashem, the haters had come out in force to wreck a meeting intended to foster genuine interreligious dialogue.
It was different, happily, the next day, as the Pope went north to Galilee on March 24 and celebrated Mass on the Mount of Beatitudes for 100,000 young people from all over the world. Israeli security was particularly worried about the safety of OLD FRIEND at a site that was impossible to secure, and asked the Pope to wear a bulletproof vest; John Paul declined, as he always did such suggestions. The solemn, tragic memories evoked by Yad Vashem, and the wreckage of the previous evening’s interreligious meeting, did not weigh down the Pope, who as always was energized by the young, charging them to be the “joyful witnesses and convinced apostles” in the new century. John Paul then went to pray at Tabgha, the traditional site of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, before going to Capernaum and the excavations at what was said to be Peter’s house—a moment of wonder was etched on John Paul’s face as the 263rd successor of Peter prayed at the house of Peter.
On March 25, John Paul was able to celebrate the Solemnity of the Annunciation in the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth, where the savvy and skills of his faithful secretary, Bishop Stanisław Dziwisz, were on display. As the Pope tried to enter the basilica through roiling and boisterous crowds that might have overwhelmed him, Dziwisz fended them off left and right with a rapid distribution of papal rosaries he had had the foresight to bring along. Throughout the pontificate, Mary’s fiat—“Be it done unto me according to your word” (Luke 1.38)—had been the Pope’s favorite example of the essence of Christian discipleship. Now, as he knelt in prayer at the grotto of the Annunciation beneath the modern basilica, it was not difficult to imagine John Paul repeating that fiat again, as well as recommitting himself to the Virgin with the phrase he had adopted as his episcopal and papal motto, Totus Tuus [Entirely Yours].
John Paul then returned to Jerusalem, where he spent time in prayer at the Garden of Gethsemane before visiting with the Greek Orthodox patriarch, Diodoros I, at the patriarchal residence. Like his brethren at Sinai, the patriarch declined to pray with the Pope. John Paul spontaneously suggested that everyone present say the Lord’s Prayer in his or her own language, thereby underscoring the ecumenical commitment that had once led him to think it possible that the breach between Rome and the Christian East could be healed before the Church crossed the threshold of the third millennium. That was not to be. But John Paul’s example of charity in Diodoros’s residence was another icon of decency in a land riven by historic animosities, where monks from rival Christian communities could and did engage in fistfights at the Holy Sepulcher itself.
The Holy Sepulcher was one of the two focal points of John Paul II’s last day in Jerusalem—Sunday, March 26. He had begun the day by creating another visual icon as he walked eighty-six slow steps down the sloping esplanade to the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site. There, he stood silently for a moment, leaning on his cane, before doing what millions of pious Jews had done for centuries: leaving a prayer-petition in one of the wall’s crevices. Written on cream-colored papal note paper, the prayer was constructed as a form of English blank verse by the poet who had become pope, and was signed in Latin:
God of our fathers,
you chose Abraham and his descendants
to bring your Name to the nations;
we are deeply saddened by the behavior of those
who in the course of history
have caused these children of yours to suffer,
and asking your forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves
to genuine brotherhood
with the people of the Covenant.
Amen.
—Joannes Paulus PP. II
The sentiments had been expressed by others before, including at the Day of Pardon at St. Peter’s. But these things were now being expressed here, in this singular place, by a man whose entire demeanor gave depth to his words. Prior to the event, there had been a minor flap over whether the Pope should wear his gold pectoral cross when he came to the Western Wall. Wiser Jewish veterans of the interreligious dialogue explained that genuine dialogue meant taking the dialogue partner as he was. Afterward, no such carping was heard: John Paul had come to the Western Wall and prayed as the Bishop of Rome—and that had left an indelible impression.
After having prayed where Jesus had prayed, John Paul celebrated Mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in what was, for him, the climax of the entire pilgrimage. Kneeling at the marble slab over the traditional site of Christ’s tomb, he fulfilled the promise he had made in his Letter Concerning Pilgrimage, where he had written that, at this holiest of sites, he intended to “immerse myself in prayer, bearing in my heart the whole Church.”
He had, in a sense, borne the whole Church and the history of two millennia on his bent back as he walked for seven days where Jesus had walked. The pilgrimage he had longed to make as a younger, more vigorous man took on a richer texture because he had finally come to the Holy Land in his old age—as an old man witnessing to the truths on which he had staked his life, the truths he had deployed to bend the course of history in a more humane direction. John Paul’s Holy Land pilgrimage was many things: an irreversible moment in the long and often painful history of Christianity and Judaism, promising a brighter future; a lesson in statesmanship and maturity to the contentious tribes whose ancient animosities had more than once threatened to wreck his visit; an exercise in solidarity and brotherhood. Shortly before the Pope arrived in Jerusalem, senior religious leaders who wished otherwise were worrying aloud that the visit would be a failure. As the Pope’s plane took off for Rome on the night of March 26, it w
as clear to all, except perhaps the haters, that it had been a complete and unmitigated triumph. It was a triumph for the Pope who refused to believe that a pope could not walk where Christ had walked, to be sure. But above all, John Paul would insist, it was a triumph for the truth and love that had been definitively revealed in Jerusalem, the city of “great … mystery” where “the fullness of time became … the ‘fullness of space.’”51
CHAPTER SIX
The Great Jubilee of 2000
Into the Deep
April 30, 2000 Canonization of Sister Mary Faustyna Kowalska, apostle of divine mercy and the first saint of the new millennium.
May 1, 2000 Jubilee of Workers.
May 7, 2000 Ecumenical commemoration of twentieth-century martyrs held in the Roman Colosseum.
May 12–13, 2000 John Paul II in Fátima, Portugal.
May 18, 2000 John Paul II’s eightieth birthday; Jubilee of Priests.
May 25, 2000 Jubilee of Scientists.
May 28, 2000 Jubilee of the Diocese of Rome.
June 2, 2000 Jubilee of Migrants and Itinerants.
June 4, 2000 Jubilee of Journalists.
June 15, 2000 John Paul II hosts lunch in the Vatican for the homeless and the poor.
June 18–25, 2000 Forty-seventh International Eucharistic Congress is held in Rome.
July 9, 2000 Jubilee in Prisons celebrated by John Paul II at Regina Coeli prison in Rome.
August 15, 2000 Jubilee of Youth opens World Youth Day in Rome.
August 29, 2000 John Paul II declares cloning “morally unacceptable” in address to the Transplantation Society.
September 5, 2000 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issues Dominus Iesus.
September 9, 2000 Jubilee of University Professors.
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