John Paul was quite capable of turning his humor upon himself, too. In 1994, a lunch guest at Castel Gandolfo, Father Richard John Neuhaus, told the Pope that he was “ahead of history.” “So that is why I broke my leg?” John Paul replied. Another New Yorker, Cardinal John O’Connor, remembered being amazed that he, a man who grew up in a Philadelphia row house, could find himself talking quite naturally with a pope. Once, at the end of a conversation, the cardinal archbishop of New York (who could be very wry) said to the Bishop of Rome, “You know, I’ll never get anywhere in this Church because I was never a bishop’s secretary.” “Neither was I,” said John Paul II.39 Late one evening at Castel Gandolfo, after dining with guests, an obviously tired John Paul was presented with the day’s official documents, which required his signature. He sighed, took up his Mont Blanc pen, and began to sign vellum sheets to heads of state, ambassadors, and so forth, looking up to say at one point, “Povero Papa!” [Poor Pope!]. He then laughed and went back to work.40
He was also comfortable with his own fallibility. On September 27, 1997, John Paul was scheduled to give the closing address at an Italian National Eucharistic Congress in Bologna—and Bob Dylan was slated to perform before the Pope spoke. Dylan came on stage, sang several popular songs, concluded with “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and left. John Paul scrapped his prepared text, picked up where Dylan had left off, and began speaking about the wind of the Holy Spirit blowing through the Church today. Three days later, after a rapid-fire Latin grace-before-meals, the Pope fixed a lunch guest with a sharp stare and asked, “Who ees Bob DEE-lahn?”41
PRUDENCE, JUSTICE, COURAGE, MODERATION
Freedom, John Paul II taught for decades, is not a matter of doing what we like, but of freely choosing what is truly good. Thus growth in the interior life and in the practice of Christian faith is a growth into a deeper, nobler freedom that seeks “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious” (Philippians 4.8). Freedom, rightly understood, is exercised through what the Catholic Church calls the “cardinal virtues”: prudence, or right judgment; justice; courage (often called “fortitude”); and moderation, or “temperance.” The cardinal virtues were known to pagan antiquity and analyzed by Plato in The Republic, but in the Christian understanding of them, they have a goal that pre-Christian Greek philosophers could not conceive: as St. Gregory of Nyssa put it in his treatise on the beatitudes, “The goal of a virtuous life is to become like God.” Progress toward this goal comes about through a deepening, not an abandonment, of our humanity, even as growth in the practice of the cardinal virtues takes both human effort and (the Church would insist) the aid of God’s grace.42 The story of Karol Wojtyła’s Christian journey can thus be read “from the inside” through the prism of the cardinal virtues as well as through the matrix of the theological virtues.
Prudence
Thomas Aquinas followed Aristotle in defining the virtue of prudence as “right reason in action”; the Hebrew Bible puts it more graphically—“The prudent man looks where he is going” (Proverbs 14.15). The medievals called prudence auriga virtutum, the charioteer of the virtues, for it is this capacity for right judgment—for applying principle and moral judgment to particular cases and actions—that guides the practice of the other virtues in true measure, without either timidity or fanaticism.
Prudence in true ecclesiastical leadership (and indeed in any form of human leadership) includes several other notable characteristics, including the ability to see around corners (i.e., to see possibilities where others see only obstacles) and to see into hearts (i.e., to discern character). No priest, bishop, or pope, no matter how much he has given himself over to the will of God or how much he has been trained in the demanding school of the virtues, ever exercises the virtue of prudence with complete success. Pope Paul VI, for example, made the prudential judgments that the Cold War would last for the foreseeable future and that the Ostpolitik devised by Agostino Casaroli was necessary for the survival of the Catholic Church in communist-dominated east central Europe; both of those exercises of prudence turned out to be mistaken, as history subsequently demonstrated.
Similarly, it would be fatuous, or hagiographical, to suggest that every prudential judgment Karol Wojtyła made as archbishop of Kraków or Bishop of Rome was infallibly “prudent,” in the sense of being accurate in its reading of circumstances and personalities and effective in achieving the desired ends. He appointed bishops who, in retrospect, should not have been appointed (although this was at least as much a failure of some of his nuncios and of the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops as it was a personal failure). During his papacy, he seemed to think that certain political situations (e.g., the Middle East) and certain ecclesiastical situations (e.g., the deterioration of the Society of Jesus) were more pliable and open to change than they turned out to be. John Paul II could be deceived, as in the case of the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, Marcial Maciel, whom the Pope supported for decades; it was revealed after the Pope’s death that Maciel had long led a double life of moral dissolution.
Karol Wojtyła’s profound disinclination to humiliate, or make a spectacle of, someone else; his intense dislike of gossip; his occasional tendency to project his own virtues onto others; and his determination to find something good in another’s actions or words—these characteristics of his personality (which were shaped by his experience of “humiliation at the hands of evil” during World War II and were clearly evident to both students and faculty colleagues during his early teaching days at the Catholic University of Lublin) could and did lead him, as bishop and pope, to misjudgments about personalities, including clergy and senior members of the hierarchy who ought to have been disciplined or compelled to retire.43 He was aware of these psychological and spiritual predispositions, and confessed aloud in Alzatevi, andiamo! that he had likely been too lax, in Kraków, in his exercise of the episcopal munus regendi: the responsibilities of ecclesiastical governance that include the responsibility to admonish and, if necessary, discipline wayward clergymen.44 Those same predispositions shaped his response to the crisis of clergy sexual abuse and episcopal misgovernance in the United States that came to light during the Long Lent of 2002, as they did his response to other demonstrations of episcopal irresponsibility in other countries.
Thus the life of John Paul II, for all its accomplishment and despite the richness of his spiritual life, demonstrates the ancient truth that no pope exercises infallible prudential judgment about men and circumstances. The question in judging Karol Wojtyła as a man of prudence must not be whether he got everything right, which was clearly not the case, or even whether he got the majority of his prudential judgments right, which is a question incapable of being given an answer. The question is whether his failures in prudential judgment were a function of deeper personal faults (weakness, negligence, culpable gullibility, willful ignorance) or whether the faults that were manifest in his failures of judgment were, in fact, expressions of John Paul II’s virtues—and particularly (in terms of the munus regendi and his mode of governance) the expression of his caritas. The latter seems far more likely the case. Historians centuries from now will recognize, as the observant did in the years immediately following his death, that not all his judgments and actions were correct. Yet throughout his life, it was clearly his intention to act prudently, that is, to bring his best judgment to bear on a personality or a situation without fear and without seeking favor.
Moreover, if the exercise of prudence by senior churchmen involves the ability to read what Vatican II called “the signs of the times,” and in doing so to discern possibilities and opportunities for evangelical action, then Karol Wojtyła exercised the virtue of prudence in a truly heroic way for decades.
To the intense aggravation of Poland’s communist masters, he proved a wily, disciplined, and determined foe. The Ark Church was finally built. The Corpus Christi procession was allowed off Wawel hill and became the occasion
to defend the human rights of all Poles. The restive Catholic intelligentsia maintained (sometimes grudging) support for the church-state policies of the Primate, Cardinal Wyszyński. And Wojtyła resolutely refused to let a millimeter of distance show between himself and Wyszyński in the Church’s ongoing chess match with Polish communism. This was prudence in action.
The same virtue—prudence as discernment of the “signs of the times”—was evident in some of his signature accomplishments as pope. He saw, and pursued, possibilities in central and eastern Europe that were invisible to the Vatican diplomats of the Ostpolitik. He refused to believe that Latin America could only be governed by authoritarians (of either the Left or the Right), and he patiently sowed the seeds of democratization on the world’s most Catholic continent. He brushed aside the skepticism of senior churchmen who believed it impossible to reach the modern and postmodern young, created World Youth Day, and drew tens of millions of young people into an encounter with the “more excellent way.” Similarly, he took no heed of the counsels of despair or skepticism coming from bishops who thought catechisms either impossible to write or hopelessly passé, and saw to the production of the Catechism of the Catholic Church—which revitalized catechetics in some parts of the Church while providing ordinary Catholics with a ready reference point with which to challenge teaching and preaching that misrepresented the truth of Catholic faith. He took the risk of supporting renewal movements and new Catholic communities, his prudential judgment being informed by his confidence in the ongoing role of the Holy Spirit in the Church. He was open to new insights about how twenty-first-century economies were likely to function, and thus redirected the Church’s social doctrine in Centesimus Annus. He saw nothing imprudent in a pope writing in his own voice for a world audience, and thereby produced an international bestseller, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, that brought the Catholic Church into conversation with men and women who would never consider reading an encyclical, a catechism, or the Bible. Perhaps most dramatically, he insisted that there was nothing imprudent, but in fact something evangelically imperative, in the Church confessing to God the sins and errors of the sons and daughters of the Church over two millennia so that the message of the Church might be heard more clearly in the third millennium. He was criticized for all these decisions; his critics turned out to have been less well formed in the cardinal virtue of prudence.
Justice
The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines the cardinal virtue of justice as “the moral virtue that consists in the constant and firm will to give their due to God and neighbor.”45 Karol Wojtyła’s determination to give God his due was evident very early in his life: the drama of his vocational discernment was the drama of a just man who, despite his own prior plans and preferences, sought to render under God what was God’s in his life—which turned out to be his entire life. Put another way, Karol Józef Wojtyła emulated one of his heavenly patrons, St. Joseph, by living from his early twenties on as if God, not he, were in charge of his life. He was not falsely humble and knew himself to be a man of considerable talent. But he wore that knowledge very lightly indeed, and over the course of his life stripped himself of ego so that he might be even more just in rendering to God what was God’s.
As to giving his neighbor his or her due, Wojtyła’s great capacity for friendship, and the time and energy he invested in others, testified to his determination to live justly in his relationships with others. Everyone who ever worked for, or with, him remarked on his probity, his fairness, and his seemingly inexhaustible capacity to let others have their say. He was a man of his word who kept his promises to the end, even when doing so cost him aggravation, even personal pain. In this respect, he was a true son of his father, whose granitelike integrity and manly piety were a great paternal lesson in justice.
As with prudence, Karol Wojtyła’s faults in this sphere were the defects of his virtues. He could be too trusting of those in whom he had reposed confidence, or to whom he had entrusted positions of responsibility. His determination to be fair sometimes led him to misread the urgency of situations requiring immediate discipline. His loathing for communist injustice (displayed, for example, in the use of sexual innuendo to destroy a man’s reputation), his determination never to behave like that, and his difficulty in comprehending how men could so betray the grace and gift of the priesthood and the episcopate were factors in what seemed to some to be his slow reaction to the Long Lent of 2002 in the United States, and to charges of clerical sexual misconduct elsewhere; yet it should also be noted that, when presented with clear evidence of priestly or episcopal malfeasance, he acted.
Karol Wojtyła was also a man committed to the cause of justice in society. Unlike others who had endured lethal injustice in their youth, he did not become a cynic about politics, but held firmly to the belief that the exercise of political power could be bent to the norms of social justice. His approach to questions of the right ordering of society was informed by the social doctrine of the Church, but it was just as profoundly shaped by his pastoral experience. When discussing postcommunist Poland with prime minister Hanna Suchocka in the years immediately following the “shock therapy” that had been applied to the moribund Polish economy, his first concerns were not about systems, but about people: “How are people handling the transition [to a market economy]?” he asked. “How do you find the social element in the free market system? What happens to the people who can’t fit in?” Thus, for John Paul II, “solidarity was a value,” a manifestation of justice, “not just a movement.”46
Courage
Yugoslavian dissident Milovan Djilas, who remained committed to the idea of communism but broke with Tito over the latter’s brutal authoritarianism, was much impressed by John Paul II; and what most impressed him, he once said, was Karol Wojtyła’s utter fearlessness.
Yet Karol Wojtyła did not live without fear; still less did he deny fear. Rather, he lived beyond fear, and his courage was an expression (in his human virtues) of his faith. Because he believed that all the world’s fear had been taken by the Son to the cross and offered to the Father in an act of perfect obedience, and because he also believed that the Father had given his answer to that radical act of self-giving love by raising the Son from the dead, he believed that the disciples of the Son could face fear and then live courageously beyond its stifling grasp. That was how he lived under Nazi occupation. That was how he lived under communism. That was the courage with which he faced down his own fears of the burdens of the papacy, when the call came to him on October 16, 1978. And those convictions about the cross and resurrection were the source of the fearlessness with which he faced down both a Sandinista mob and General Wojciech Jaruzelski in the space of four dramatic months in 1983.
Wojtyła’s courage was the source of several of his other notable personal characteristics, including his remarkable patience with people and with situations: if God were truly in charge of history, as he believed, then he ought to prudently and courageously wait in patience for a person or a situation to mature. His courage also informed the serenity with which he accepted physical suffering, which was increasingly his lot in the last decade of his life. Those who were with him at the Policlinico Gemelli in February and March 2005 uniformly commented on his remarkable patience with his wrecked body; that patience was not stoic, but Christian, and it was the fruit of the kind of fearlessness that led him to embrace, mutely, the crucifix on the last Good Friday of his life.
His courage also expressed itself in his willingness to bear spiritual and mental suffering as an inescapable part of his vocation. He lived through dark nights, including the hard summer and fall of 2003. Months like that, however, were the most dramatic manifestations of the spiritual suffering that is part and parcel of being the successor of Peter who, like Peter himself, is inevitably bound and led where he does not want to go (as the Risen Christ warned Peter in John 21.18). That forbidding land where a pope may not want to go, but must, includes a terrain marked by quotidian
human suffering, of which John Paul was daily aware from the prayer petitions the household sisters put into the prie-dieu where he spent his solitary hour or ninety minutes with the Lord, every morning; but it also includes the even harsher terrain of evil writ large—knowledge of the world’s wickedness, news of which floods the Vatican daily; knowledge of the Evil One at work in the Church, news of which also inexorably finds its way to the papal apartment. No one who has not borne the burden of knowledge the papacy brings a man can fully understand how crushing that burden must be; novelist Morris West once wrote that “the man who wore the Fisherman’s ring … carried … the sins of the world like a leaden cope on his shoulders.”47 West might just as well have added the sins of the Church’s sons and daughters. The grace with which John Paul wore that invisible, leaden cope is perhaps the greatest testimony to his courage—and to the source of that courage in his embrace of the drama of Calvary as it replayed itself in his own life.
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