The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  That celebration marked the end of John Paul II’s jubilee biblical pilgrimage. He had overcome an enormous number of political, emotional, and psychological obstacles—as well as his own infirmities—to walk in the footsteps of the great figures of salvation history whose lives had been touched by the God of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. He had done it to fulfill a desire of his heart. Above all, though, he had done it to remind the Church that Providence worked through, not around, the turbulence of history—and that fidelity to the Church’s apostolic mission always meant taking the risk of putting out “into the deep.”

  BEFORE THE STORM

  Polish-Ukrainian relations had long exemplified the drama of ethnic and religious history in the borderlands between central and eastern Europe. Latin-rite and deeply patriotic Poles tended to look on Ukrainians as their religious and political inferiors; Ukrainians tended to look on Poles as members of an overbearing landlord class. Karol Wojtyła was a rarity among the Polish clergy of his generation: a Polish patriot who had deep sympathies with Ukrainian national aspirations and who esteemed the Greek Catholic Church of Ukraine (which was Byzantine in liturgy and polity but in full communion with Rome after the 1596 Union of Brest).19 From the end of the Second World War through the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church—or, as the Ukrainians often preferred, the Catholic Church of Kyïv—was the largest illegal religious body in the world and the repository of Ukrainian national identity. Wojtyła’s well-known affinity for Ukraine and its struggles explained in no small part the fear in which he was held by Moscow Center and by the Ukrainian KGB, which had close working relations with the Polish SB.20

  In the aftermath of the Soviet collapse and the rebirth of an independent Ukraine, in which the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church had emerged from underground and had become a potent religious and cultural force, the Moscow Patriarchate tried to assert its authority over Ukrainian Orthodoxy while assailing the Greek Catholic Church as a usurper in its “canonical territory.” The result was that Ukrainian Orthodoxy was split three ways, thus vastly complicating the post-1991 ecumenical efforts of John Paul II and the Holy See. So it was no surprise that, when it was announced that John Paul would make a pastoral pilgrimage to Ukraine in June 2001, elements of Ukrainian Orthodoxy protested bitterly, aided and abetted by the Moscow Patriarchate, whose external affairs department had been trained by the KGB in the old Soviet days. Stories were planted in newspapers and magazines warning that a papal visit to Ukraine could be the ugliest of John Paul’s pontificate—and this, despite the invitations the Pope had received from the Ukrainian government and from the country’s Greek Catholic and Latin-rite bishops. Patriarch Aleksy II of Moscow—DROZDOV to his erstwhile KGB associates—told an Italian Catholic magazine in April 2001 that John Paul II’s visit should be “postponed.”21 Anti-papal demonstrations were organized: not so large as in Greece, but with incense, bearded clergy, and icons, wonderfully apt for television. The demonstrations, in which a group processed daily to the Vatican nunciature in Kyïv and ended their march with a prayer that the Pope would not come, were organized by the faction of Ukrainian Orthodoxy that was loyal to Moscow, by a local political movement that wanted to stitch back together Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, and by what was left of the Communist Party in Ukraine.

  All of this agitation was for naught. One-half of one percent of the population declared itself “adamantly opposed” to the Pope’s visit. (When the visit was over, 65 percent of Russians surveyed said that they’d like to have a papal visit, too.)22 On his arrival at Boryspil International Airport in Kyïv on June 23, John Paul saluted Ukraine as a “brave and determined witness to … faith” and marveled at “how much you suffered in order to vindicate, in difficult times, the freedom to profess this faith!” Ever hopeful about warming hearts frozen by centuries-old animosities, the Pope then said that he was sure he would be welcomed “with friendship … by those who, although they are not Catholics, have hearts open to dialogue and cooperation.” He had come to Ukraine, he said, not to proselytize or sow discord, “but to bear witness to Christ together with all Christians of every Church and Ecclesial Community, and to invite all the sons and daughters of this noble Land to turn their eyes to him who gave his life for the salvation of the world.” It was also time, he suggested, to look to the future rather than to the past, so as “not to disappoint the expectations which now fill the hearts of so many, especially the young.” The task before them all, he said, was to fulfill the dream of the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko and to see “in the cities and villages of Ukraine the blossoming of a new, authentic humanism,” built by men and women who were, in Shevchenko’s words, “enemies … no more,” but rather fellow citizens of a country with a “clearly European vocation.”23

  There were to be more moving words and great public spectacles during the five days of John Paul’s visit to Ukraine; the address at the Kyïv airport, however, set the tone for a remarkably successful visit. The first thing that Ukrainians noticed was that the Pope spoke far more fluent Ukrainian than their president, Leonid Kuchma, who had once been a Soviet missile engineer and was clearly more comfortable speaking in Russian. The historically minded were also struck by the fact that, while the alleged usurper, the Bishop of Rome, spoke to the people of Ukraine in their own tongue, no Patriarch of Moscow, asserting his jurisdiction over their religious lives, had ever done so. As for the politically sensitive, the clear statement that Ukraine was an integral part of Europe was an important marker: the man who had come to embody a vision of Europe reintegrated across the Cold War divide did not consider Ukraine to be marginal to the Europe of the twenty-first century, a place on “the border” (as the very name “Ukraine” implied etymologically). Ukraine, for John Paul II, was a participant in a common European culture with deep Christian roots.

  The Pope stayed in Kyïv for two days, meeting with representatives of the country’s cultural, political, intellectual, and business communities, celebrating Mass in both the Latin and Byzantine rites (whose complex rubrics he had carefully studied and rehearsed), and meeting with the Catholic bishops of Ukraine and with representatives of the Pan-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations. On June 25, the Pope shifted his pilgrimage to the heart of the Greek Catholic world in western Ukraine, the city of L’viv, which had long been a part of Poland and known as Lwów. (When, that is, it was not known as Lemberg, the German name it had acquired when Galicia, like Kraków, was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Interestingly, in private conversation John Paul II habitually referred to L’viv/Lwów as “Lemberg,” and laughed when guests jokingly cautioned against using that terminology in the city itself.) At the Hippodrome racecourse in L’viv, John Paul celebrated a Latin-rite Mass on June 26 and beatified Ukrainian martyrs killed during the Nazi and communist persecutions of the twentieth century; the group included the Pope’s episcopal great-grandfather, Archbishop Józef Bilczewski (Bilczewksi had ordained as bishop Archbishop Boleslaw Twardowski, who had ordained Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak a bishop, who had ordained Karol Wojtyła a bishop). John Paul, the Pole with deep Ukrainian sympathies, then made a poignant plea for an end to the mutual suspicions of the past between Latin-rite Ukrainians, often of Polish descent, and Greek Catholic Ukrainians:

  Today, in praising God for the indomitable fidelity to the Gospel of these his Servants, let us feel ourselves gently nudged to recognize the infidelities to the Gospel of not a few Christians of both Polish and Ukrainian origin living in these parts. It is time to leave behind the sorrowful past. The Christians of the two nations must walk together in the name of the one Christ, towards the one Father, guided by the same Holy Spirit, the source and principle of unity. May pardon given and received spread like a healing balm in every heart.24

  After his homily, which he preached in Ukrainian, John Paul greeted the foreign pilgrims to the beatification Mass in their own languages—Russian, Belarussian, Slovak, Hungarian, and Romanian.

 
The next day, June 27, another Mass was celebrated at the Hippodrome, this time in the Byzantine-rite, and more twentieth-century martyrs were beatified, bringing the total over two days to thirty. Cardinal Lubomyr Husar reciprocated the Pope’s gestures of reconciliation and forgiveness at the beginning of the Divine Liturgy, asking forgiveness for the sins committed against the Latins by his Ukrainian flock over the centuries. An unexpected participant in the second beatification was Father Ioan Sviridov, an archpriest of the Moscow Patriarchate, who had been so impressed by the Pope’s remarks in Kyïv that he felt he had to be present at a moment that would “help [everyone] toward a better mutual understanding.”25 The following day, his last in Ukraine, John Paul II blessed the cornerstone of a new building for the Ukrainian Catholic University, a dream of the great mid-twentieth-century Ukrainian Metropolitan Andrei Sheptyts’kyi, which was being realized under the leadership of a young Ukrainian-American priest with a Harvard doctorate, Father Borys Gudziak.

  Four months after the visit, Cardinal Husar was still amazed at John Paul’s success. Despite the recalcitrance of the Moscow Patriarchate and the nervousness of local security officials in Kyïv, the Pope’s remarkable speech at the airport had led to far more interest in his visit than could have been anticipated; 95 percent of those who had come to see and greet the Pope along the packed streets of the Ukrainian capital were “Orthodox or nothing,” Husar said. As for L’viv, the crowds had been ten deep along the motorcade route, and people had begun gathering at Husar’s residence at 4 A.M. in order to see the Pope leave the building at 9 A.M. At one point, as they were driving through L’viv in the Popemobile, John Paul turned to Husar and said, “I never expected anything like this. This is a Catholic city.” That John Paul had deliberately deployed a profoundly Slavic set of images in his homilies and speeches in order to preach peace and reconciliation had had “a very strong impact,” Husar thought; months after the Pope left, people were still talking about his visit. Moreover, John Paul had made a “very positive impression” on the Orthodox faithful. Those Orthodox monks who later went to the sites in Kyïv that the Pope had visited in order to “reconsecrate holy ground” were, Husar observed, “fanatics on the fringes.” Contrary to what Patriarch Aleksy II of Moscow had said, there was, in Husar’s view, “no trace whatsoever” of the Pope having “aggravated” Catholic/Orthodox relations in Ukraine, except among the fanatics, who were already aggravated.26

  John Paul II had come to Ukraine “very humbly, with a walking-stick,” and as a “close neighbor … who had himself been through the communist era and [knew] what touched our people,” Cardinal Husar remarked some time later. “He was one with us and we were one with him.” That experience of solidarity and unity, Husar concluded, had allowed John Paul to show how a long-persecuted Church could free itself of the “mentality of the persecuted” and be a force for spiritual and cultural renewal in a deeply wounded society.27

  After giving the pallium, the symbol of a metropolitan archbishop’s jurisdiction, to prelates from twenty-one countries on five continents at the annual Mass in St. Peter’s Square for the Solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul on June 29, John Paul received the bishops of Cuba on their ad limina visit before going back to the Italian Alps and the Val d’Aosta for a twelve-day summer vacation that ran from July 9 until July 20. Returning to Castel Gandolfo, he received U.S. president George W. Bush on July 23, showing the American the view of Lake Albano from the papal villa. In his formal remarks, John Paul noted that “America continues to measure herself by the nobility of her founding vision in building a society of liberty, equality, and justice under the law,” and recalled that “these same ideals inspired the American people to resist two totalitarian systems based on an atheistic vision of man and society.” The “revolution of freedom of which I spoke at the United Nations in 1995,” John Paul continued, “must now be completed by a revolution of opportunity, in which all the world’s peoples actively contribute to economic prosperity and share in its fruits.” After thanking President Bush for America’s “commitment” to “the promotion of religious freedom … in the international community,” the Pope challenged the American people and the president (who would soon make a historic decision on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research) to build a “vibrant culture of life,” noting that “a free and virtuous society, which America aspires to be, must reject practices that devalue and violate human life at any stage from conception until natural death.” By doing so, John Paul concluded, “America can show the world the path to a truly humane future, in which man is the master, not the product, of his technology.”28

  Nine days later, on August 1, the Pope held the thousandth general audience of his pontificate; a large part of the crowd consisted of youngsters who had come on pilgrimage to Rome, and the Pope asked those among them who were altar servers to consider the possibility that the friendship they were nurturing with Jesus in the liturgy might lead to vocations to the priesthood or the consecrated religious life. On August 30, John Paul hosted the world premiere of a new film adaptation of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel Quo Vadis at the Vatican. He would leave the film criticism to the film critics, he said. What he wanted everyone to remember was the human drama embodied in the Polish Nobel laureate’s tale and Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s film, set in the turbulence of early Christian life in Rome: “We cannot understand the way the film presents the Church and Christian spirituality if we do not return to the religious events that involved the men and women who, in their enthusiasm for the ‘Good News’ of Jesus Christ, became his witnesses (martyrs). We must return to the drama which they experienced in their souls, in which they confronted, face to face, human fear and superhuman courage, the desire to live and the willingness to be faithful until death, the sense of solitude before unfeeling hatred and the experience of power that flows from the close, invisible presence of God.”29

  Twelve days later, unfeeling hatred would make its presence felt in lower Manhattan, Washington, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, as would human fear and superhuman courage.

  NEW WORLD DISORDER

  In an accident of timing thick with irony and poignancy, the Pope was due to receive the credentials of the new U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, R. James Nicholson, on September 13, 2001—two days after the Twin Towers fell and the Pentagon was attacked by suicidal jihadists bent on mass homicide. The two men met for twenty minutes at Castel Gandolfo, prayed together, and discussed the immediate post-9/11 responsibilities of the U.S. government. Ambassador Nicholson said that the United States had to respond militarily to al-Qaeda and those who supported it, both for its own defense and for that of its allies; the Pope responded that the 9/11 attacks were an assault on “all mankind,” and added that the United States was “justified in undertaking defensive action,” asking that America also retain its sense of justice as it pursued security in the new world disorder.30

  John Paul’s formal remarks at the credentials ceremony began with a reiteration of his sympathy for the American people “at a moment of immense tragedy for your country,” stressing his “participation in the grief of the American people” and his prayers for everyone touched by this act of irrational violence. After expressing his continued admiration for “the rich patrimony of human, religious, and moral values which have historically shaped the American character,” he challenged the U.S. government to take the lead in addressing the myriad questions of justice involved in the globalization of the world economy, in trying to find a path to peace in the Middle East, and in defending the right to life of all innocent human beings. At the same time, he challenged the Church in the United States to be “actively present in … discerning the shape of your country’s future course.”31

  The Pope’s strategy in the wake of what quickly became known as “9/11” was driven by several concerns. He understood immediately that the attacks had created a new and very dangerous situation. He was concerned that the West had been culturally weakened since the eruptions of the sixties: pos
tmodernist skepticism, indeed insouciance, about the human capacity to know the truth of anything had left the West unprepared spiritually for a challenge that would test its moral convictions about human rights and the rule of law, he feared.32 He was determined to condemn irrational violence, especially when committed in the name of God; he was also determined to do nothing that would bolster the jihadists’ claim that this was a religious war. He hoped, perhaps against hope, that this might be an occasion for “the international community” to become a concrete political reality rather than an ephemeral ideal. He wanted the Church to be a voice for reason and dialogue in a season of irrationality and cacophony. He wanted Europe to take seriously its commitments to religious freedom for its new Muslim immigrants; yet, as he sometimes put it, the world was “still waiting” for greater reciprocity in questions of religious freedom from Islamic states such as Saudi Arabia. (The Saudis had helped fund the building of a new mosque in Rome—which the Pope had welcomed—but the Kingdom forbade public Christian worship within its national borders.)33 John Paul was also determined that this new world disorder not disrupt his pastoral priorities, such as his forthcoming visit to a majority-Muslim country, Kazakhstan, and the 2002 World Youth Day, which was scheduled for Toronto. Now, however, his attempts to forge ahead on missions of reconciliation and cultural bridge building ran new risks of being misinterpreted, especially by a European press that quickly recovered from its immediate, post-9/11 spasm of pro-American sentiment and began trying to recruit the Pope to the causes of appeasement and pacifism.