The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  Gather in the public square, shoulder to shoulder,

  Waiting for the news from two thousand years ago

  And throw themselves at the feet of the Vicar

  Who embraced with his love the whole human tribe.

  You are with us and will be with us henceforth.

  When the forces of chaos raise their voice

  And the owners of truth lock themselves in churches

  And only the doubters remain faithful,

  Your portrait in our homes every day reminds us

  How much one man can accomplish and how sainthood works.20

  A week after the pope’s birthday, on May 25, the heroic witness of which Miłosz wrote was back at the center of the Great Jubilee, as John Paul II canonized St. Cristóbal Magallanes and his twenty-four companions, martyrs of modern Mexico during the Cristero revolt against Mexican anticlericalism in the late 1920s. Father Magallanes had a special devotion to the evangelization of the indigenous Huichol people, and before being shot without a trial, forgave his executioners, gave them his few possessions, and offered them sacramental absolution. He died on May 21, 1927, praying for the unity of Mexico and the reconciliation of its people.

  FAITH AND REASON, THE EUCHARIST, AND THE YOUNG

  At the Jubilee of Scientists on May 25, John Paul returned to another theme that had provided a connecting thread throughout his pontificate: the relationship of faith and reason. Citing his 1998 encyclical on that subject, Fides et Ratio, the Pope reminded the men and women “of the world of learning and research” that “faith is not afraid of reason,” for the two “are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.” And to seek the truth was to seek that which bore the imprint of God in man: for God had “placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.” That was why Christianity was at the foundation of the “scientific culture” of the West: Christian faith in the “knowability” of the world reflected the Christian conviction that the world had been created through the Logos, the Word, the very “reason,” of God, which had left an imprint of rationality “in every part of the universe.”21

  To be sure, there had been shadows in the Church’s relationship with science, shadows into which John Paul had tried to shed the light of historical research—as in his 1992 recognition that some churchmen of the time had erred in judging Galileo’s defense of the Copernican view of the universe incompatible with biblical revelation. Science and theology, John Paul had said then, were “two realms of knowledge” that ought not regard each other as locked in an inevitable confrontation.22 The Church understood that; the new question was whether science did. Thus the Pope raised a caution flag about a scientific method that, generalized throughout society, accustomed the men and women of late modernity to “a culture of suspicion and doubt.” A science that “refused to consider the existence of God or to view man in the mystery of his origin and his end, as if this perspective might call science itself into question,” was a science that was, finally, antihumanistic, in that it inevitably “estranged science from man and from the service it is called to offer him.” Therefore, he asked those “in the trenches of research and progress” to “let your minds be open to the horizons that faith discloses to you” so that “in constantly exploring the world’s mysteries” scientists might be “builders of hope for all humanity.”23

  Late May, June, and early July of the holy year continued the now familiar rhythm of special jubilee celebrations: the Jubilee of the Diocese of Rome on May 28, the Jubilee of Migrants and Itinerants on June 2, the Jubilee of Journalists on June 4. On June 13, the Italian government announced an amnesty for the would-be papal assassin, Mehmet Áli Agca, who was immediately taken to prison in Turkey for crimes committed there. John Paul thanked the Italian government for this jubilee gesture, shortly before sending a jubilee message to prisoners throughout the world on June 24; he then embodied that message of hope by celebrating Mass in Rome’s Regina Coeli prison on July 9.24 On June 15, the Pope hosted a lunch for 200 poor people in the Paul VI Audience Hall and exchanged gifts with them; the guests were chosen by the Sant’Egidio Community, the Caritas organization of the Diocese of Rome, and the “Gift of Mary” guesthouse for the homeless that John Paul II had built in the Vatican and staffed with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. The lunch, John Paul believed, was a necessary act of hospitality in preparation for the forty-seventh International Eucharistic Congress, which was held in Rome from June 18 through June 25; as usual, the Pope’s favorites were the children who scampered throughout the pranzo, playing in front of the Pope’s table.

  The International Eucharistic Congress was intended to underscore the truth that the Church celebrated in each Mass as “the mystery of faith.” As John Paul put it succinctly, “Christ—one Lord yesterday, today, and forever—willed to leave his salvific presence in the world and in history to the sacrament of the Eucharist. He willed to make himself the bread that is broken so that every man might be nourished in his own life by his participation in the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood.”25 And in this sacrament, he preached in his homily for the closing Statio Orbis Mass in St. Peter’s Square on June 25, all the people of the Church would find new vigor in their unique apostolic and missionary vocations: the sick would find patience amidst trials; spouses would be strengthened in fidelity to their love; those in consecrated life would find the courage to live their vows; children would learn to be strong and generous; and the young, in whom he reposed such hope, would find the way to take responsibility for the future.

  That closing challenge to the young was the bridge to the next epic event of the Great Jubilee, the fifteenth World Youth Day, held in Rome from August 15 through August 20. In a year of spectacular displays of Catholic faith, this was perhaps the most stunning. For by bringing more than two million young people to Rome from every corner of the globe, World Youth Day-2000 became the largest pilgrimage in European history.

  The previous seven international celebrations of World Youth Day over which John Paul II had presided had made this dramatic innovation a regular part of the rhythm of global Catholic life. John Paul’s own experience as a university chaplain had convinced him that young people would respond to a challenge to lead lives of spiritual and moral heroism. And while it would be naive to suggest that everyone who attended a World Youth Day event became a thoroughly converted Christian, it would also be foolish to ignore just how much these events had already begun to contribute to the new evangelization of which the Pope had spoken so urgently for a decade and a half.

  In the first instance, the very experience of a World Youth Day told young people who may have been shaky or nervous in their faith that they were not alone: they had companions “on the way,” and those companions were much like them. Intense catechesis of the participants in World Youth Days certainly made a contribution to filling the catechetical gap that had too often followed Vatican II—even as it convinced bishops (who were always the catechists at World Youth Days) that they could in fact speak meaningfully to young people. In the age of the Internet and cell phones, World Youth Days also made it possible for self-organizing networks of young Catholics to form and sustain themselves across geographic barriers that might once have seemed insurmountable. As for the specific genius of World Youth Day-2000, the historically minded had to be impressed by the fact that, after a century of violence, hundreds of thousands of young men and women were marching through Europe as Christian pilgrims rather than as armies.

  World Youth Day-2000 was also an integral part of the re-evangelization of Rome, which, for all its self-consciousness as the center of the Catholic world, has also tended over the centuries to wear its Catholicism somewhat lightly, and at times even cynically. That had begun to turn around with John Paul’s relentless efforts to recatechize Rome, which he had undertaken from the beginning o
f the pontificate; by 2000, the Pope had personally visited almost 300 Roman parishes, celebrating Mass on Sunday and preaching. His vicar for Rome, Cardinal Camillo Ruini, a man with a cast of mind very similar to John Paul’s, had launched in the late 1990s a “Mission to the City,” which, among other things, distributed innumerable copies of the Gospel of St. Mark throughout Rome’s neighborhoods.

  Still, it was the witness of the young themselves, in August 2000, that made the biggest difference to Romans who prided themselves on a certain skepticism about public protestations of piety. No one, however jaded, could be cynical at the sight of tens of thousands of young people queuing up politely to pass through the Holy Door of St. Peter’s; or standing in lines at the outdoor confessionals set up in the Circus Maximus (which had been transformed into a great, open-air church); or coming in the millions on a stiflingly hot Sunday to the World Youth Day’s closing Mass in the suburbs at Tor Vergata. Even the Roman cabdrivers, usually inured to pilgrims, were impressed; as one veteran of the madness that is cab driving in the Eternal City remarked, with a voice full of wonder, the crowds certainly didn’t behave like this at rock concerts or soccer games. Even Italy’s premier newspaper of the Left, La Repubblica, which had not been overly gracious to John Paul II over the years, conceded that “the wall between agnostics and Catholics fell at Tor Vergata.”26

  Housing these vast crowds was, to put it gently, a challenge; the Pope did his bit by hosting fifteen youngsters at the papal summer villa at Castel Gandolfo. One afternoon during their stay, they found themselves at lunch with John Paul, eating tomato fettuccine, roast pork, and zucchini while swapping jokes, stories, and prayers in English, French, Italian, Polish, and Portuguese. The Pope was given a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey by a Canadian youngster, Roger Gudino, which got the pontiff to reminiscing about his own hockey-playing days in Wadowice—a subject unlikely to have come up at any previous papal lunch in the history of the Western world’s oldest continuous institution.

  Yet those who thought John Paul’s magnetism for the young was a form of celebrity worship were brought up short once again when, at the closing Mass at Tor Vergata on August 20, the Pope laid down a demanding challenge to his young followers, who had come from 159 countries. He took his sermon text from Jesus’s question to his disciples—“Will you also go away?”—and from Peter’s response: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6.67–68). That was not just a question for an itinerant band of Jews 2,000 years ago, John Paul said. It was a question for today: “it challenges us personally and it demands a decision.” And the decision was the most important that anyone could make, for Christ alone was “capable of satisfying the deepest aspirations of the human heart.” Why was that the case? Because of the unconditional, radical love of Christ for every human being: “Christ loves us and he loves us forever! He loves us even when we disappoint him, when we fail to meet his expectations for us. He never fails to embrace us in his mercy.” And that, too, posed a challenge: “How can we not be grateful to this God who has redeemed us? … To God who has come to be at our side and who stayed with us to the end?”

  From someone else, these might have been dismissed as easy pieties. But those two million young people at Tor Vergata knew, or at least intuited, that here was a man who was not asking them to do anything he had not done himself, to bear any burden he had not borne, to take any chance that he had not taken. Indeed, he had admitted the difficulty of modern belief the night before, in the candlelight vigil that always precedes the closing Mass of World Youth Day: “Is it hard to believe in the third millennium? Yes! It is hard. There is no need to hide it.” But they were not alone. The Christ who, at Calvary, had taken all the world’s fear, confusion, and doubt on himself, was waiting for them, whether they knew it or not:

  It is Jesus in fact you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is he who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle. It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity.

  Let Christ take over your lives, John Paul concluded, and the world will never be the same: “If you are what you should be, you will set the whole world ablaze!”27

  THE UNIQUENESS OF CHRIST

  The Great Jubilee of 2000, and Pope John Paul II, paused for a break in July of the millennium year. The Pope returned to the two-story chalet he had used previously in Les Combes, in the Italian Alps of the Val d’Aosta, for a summer vacation that lasted from July 10 until July 22. The weather was trying, but mountains had always fired Karol Wojtyła’s poetic and spiritual imagination, and the Pope enjoyed looking out a large picture window at the striking scenery. On his last day in Les Combes, the Pope celebrated Mass with the bishop and priests of the Diocese of Aosta, on the liturgical memorial of St. Mary Magdalene. The day’s first reading, from 2 Corinthians, spoke of the minister of Christ being compelled by the love of Christ to proclaim that Christ’s saving death had been “for all.” That same compulsion had inspired Mary Magdalene, in what the Pope called “a race of the heart and the spirit,” to travel the long path from sin to conversion to Calvary, and ultimately to the empty tomb—a journey that was paradigmatic for all of Christ’s disciples. Thus every Christian believer, but especially those ordained to the apostolate, must find in their personal encounter with the Risen Christ “a new way of living no longer for ourselves, but for him who died and rose for us.”28

  On August 29, John Paul addressed an international congress of the Transplantation Society, then being held in Rome. Describing organ transplants as “a great step forward in science’s service to man,” so long as organs were donated with “informed consent,” the Pope nonetheless proposed that “certain critical issues” required clarification. Foremost among these was the proposal, being bruited in some quarters, to clone human beings as a source of transplantable organs. That, John Paul said, was “morally unacceptable, even when [its] proposed goal is good in itself.” The Pope also condemned international organ trafficking, while reiterating the Church’s acceptance of xenotransplantation, or the transfer of animal organs to human beings, as long as the recipient was not harmed physically nor psychologically.29

  Christianity’s founding conviction about the unique saving work of Christ was the source of the most controversial episode of the jubilee year: the publication on September 5, 2000, of a Declaration from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, entitled Dominus Iesus [The Lord Jesus], which addressed “The Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church.” The language of the subtitle may not have been the most elegant English, but the meaning was plain enough: the Congregation often described in the world media as the Catholic Church’s “doctrinal watchdog” (and not infrequently as “the successor to the Inquisition”) was underscoring two points that belonged to the deposit of faith and were not subject to change: that Jesus Christ is the one, unique, and universal savior, and that the one Church founded by Christ exists in its fullest and most complete form in the Catholic Church.

  Dominus Iesus was written in response to theological speculations that seemed to challenge both of these points. Asian theologians, and Western theologians working in Asia, were trying to develop a theory of salvation that acknowledged some supernatural value in the great Asian religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism, not just natural spiritual or moral value. Ecumenical theologians, by no means confined to Asia, were interpreting two of the Second Vatican Council’s statements—that the one Church of Christ “subsists in” the Catholic Church, and that “elements of sanctification and truth” exist in Christian communities not in full communion with the Catholic Church—to assert a kind of
ecclesiological equivalence among Christian communities.30 The Asian speculations were of interest to Christian communities beyond the boundaries of the Catholic Church, especially those evangelical Protestant communities that insisted on the uniqueness of the salvation wrought by Christ. As for the ecumenical dialogue, at least some of the Catholic Church’s bilateral ecumenical dialogue partners took offense at the declaration’s statement that “ecclesial communities that have not preserved the valid Episcopate and the integral substance of the Eucharistic mystery”—meaning all Protestants—are not Churches in the proper sense (as the Orthodox Churches, despite their denial of the primacy of the pope, are).

  In the general atmosphere of ecumenical and interreligious good feeling surrounding the Great Jubilee of 2000, it was perhaps inevitable that Dominus Iesus would be interpreted by some as spoiling the party—perhaps deliberately. The Reverend Ellen Wondra, an Anglican involved in the Catholic-Anglican dialogue, dismissed Dominus Iesus as “part of the era of mutual polemics among churches rather than an era of reconciliation and greater communion.” A Lutheran ecumenist, Michael Root, took a similar view, suggesting that the declaration put the Catholic-Lutheran dialogue “back where we were thirty years ago.”31 The mainstream media, never given to theological nuance, was even more critical: the Los Angeles Times fundamentally misrepresented the teaching of Dominus Iesus in a page-one headline, “Vatican Declares Catholicism Sole Path to Salvation,” while another newspaper ran a cartoon of John Paul II, with arms raised, under the caption “We’re Number One!”

  Anyone who took the trouble to read Dominus Iesus found in it, not arrogance or aggression, but rather a humble confession of Catholic faith: that there is only one true God, and thus there is only one “economy” of salvation; that if Jesus is Lord—true God and true man—he is Lord of all, not only of those who recognize his lordship; that the God who wishes all to come to the truth and be saved does not deny the grace necessary for salvation to anyone; that all who are saved are saved through the redemption effected by Jesus Christ, whether they have heard of Christ or not; that there is only one Church of Christ (for the Church is the Body of Christ and Christ does not have multiple bodies); that the Catholic Church, which readily recognizes the grace of God at work outside its boundaries, nonetheless understands itself to be the fullest expression in history of the one Church of Christ; and that the Church has an ongoing, never to be abandoned mandate to proclaim Christ through its missionary activity.